“Eternal Questions of Our Eternal Debates”: Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter (1980, 1981)

This book’s brevity belies its thematic scope, sweep, and significance. Ba (1929-1981), a Senegalese author, teacher, feminist, and activist, set as her focus the experience of postcolonial women, drawing in no small part on the events and circumstances of her own life. She had a reasonably privileged upbringing, and she was married to (but subsequently divorced) a Senegal MP, ultimately raising nine children. Just as importantly, she lived through the last years of colonial rule, the transition to liberation, and the forging of independent national trajectories. She embodied the very socio-cultural tensions she analyzed and critiqued. Her unique position thus allowed her to make fundamental contributions to the “eternal questions of our eternal debates” (p. 18) – debates about contemporary issues directly confronting modern African women. Her most poignant observations and insights relate to the sexual and gender inequalities resulting from indigenous African cultural customs, influenced along the way by both Islamic religious and Western colonial traditions. That makes for quite a mix. But while her work may have been specific to Francophone West Africa, her voice and vision were truly continental.

Very telling in its wording, one can see exactly where Ba is heading by going no further than the dedication page: “To all women and to men of good will.” More than anything else, this novel is a critique of patriarchy – a socio-cultural power structure that reflects and perpetuates male domination. And patriarchy manifests and institutionalizes itself in complex, multifaceted ways:

· Through indigenous social and cultural rituals and practices [“…the bog of tradition, superstition, and custom…” (p. 15); “…we suffered the social constraints and heavy burden of custom” (p. 19)].
· Through religious traditions (in this case, Islam).
· Through sex, gender, and marriage/family/kinship obligations and expectations (in this case, polygamy is the focus of attention).
· Through colonialism, decolonization, liberation, and independence projects and processes.
· Through economic and educational institutions and opportunities (or lack thereof) [“We have a right, just as you have, to education, which we ought to be able to pursue to the furthest limits of our intellectual capabilities. We have a right to equal well-paid employment, to equal opportunities” (p. 61).].
· Through political governance [“The right to vote is an important weapon” (p. 61).].

That Ba is able to address all of these in some way in So Long a Letter makes it a rich and powerful book. This is a long, thoughtful, reflective letter from Ramatoulaye to her childhood friend Aissatou, after her husband, Modou Fall, dies. Before his death, Modou had taken on a second wife, Binetou, who was much younger (indeed, she was a daughter’s friend) than Ramatoulaye. Sorrow and resignation mark the letter, as she goes through the motions of burying the husband she once loved so much, while the simultaneous indignities in the face of her husband’s polygamous betrayal are difficult to bear [“He mapped out his future without taking our existence into account” (p. 9)]. Ramatoulaye acts duty-bound to religious and cultural tradition, but she begins to question and challenge the pillars of patriarchy. In her laments, reflections, and advice, she emphasizes the worth of women in and of themselves – traditions and customs relegated to secondary status. While women are clearly important to African society, this letter argues, their actions and destinies are shaped, restricted, or entirely determined by men. Their position must be shifted from the margins, their voice heard and given greater prominence. Women must be given the power, authority, and autonomy afforded men to control the circumstances and trajectory of their lives. The contributions of women have been (and are) immense, their efforts constant [“…first up in the morning, last to go to bed, always working” (p. 20)], and they should be give commensurate recognition:

“Women should no longer be decorative accessories, objects to be moved about, companions to be flattered or calmed with promises. Women are the nation’s primary, fundamental root, from which all else grows and blossoms” (pgs. 61-62).

“I am not indifferent to the irreversible currents of women’s liberation that are lashing the world. This commotion that is shaking up every aspect of our lives reveals and illustrates our abilities. My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows. I know that the field of our gains is unstable, the retention of conquests difficult: social constraints are ever-present, and male egoism resists... [But] I remain persuaded of the inevitable and necessary complementarity of man and woman” (p. 88).

For So Long a Letter, Mariama Ba was the first winner of the Noma Award for publishing in Africa.

If alive today, Ba would appreciate the centrality of women embodied in the Millennium Development Goals, and thus contemporary development projects. She would simultaneously recognize, however, how much work remains to be done.

For an even more contemporary perspective by an accomplished Nigerian author, see the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow.

Three Cairenes in the “Kingdom of the Corrupt”: Naguib Mahfouz, The Day the Leader Was Killed (1985, 1997)

Egyptian novelist and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) wrote some of the most important, significant, and controversial contributions to contemporary Arabic literature, and is most well known for his Cairo Trilogy [Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), Sugar Street (1957)]. In his The Day the Leader Was Killed, I was impressed by what Mahfouz was able to achieve in only 100 pages.

Two things in particular drew me to this novel: historical context and Mahfouz’s commentary on economic development (in Egypt specifically, but also relevant to the Arab world and the developing world more broadly).

Historical Context:
Set in the earliest years of the 1980s, Anwar El Sadat (1918-1981) had been in power as president of Egypt for more than a decade. Internationally, he had made his mark in the October War of 1973 (which made him a hero for retaking the Sinai Peninsula) and as a signatory to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979 (which made him reviled, and ultimately resulted in Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League from 1979-1989). Domestically, he had departed markedly from his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), reviving a multiparty political system and launching a series of economic reforms to open and diversify Egypt’s economy (the infitah). Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981. While the domestic context is far more important to Mahfouz, it cannot be completely disaggregated from the international context.

Economic Development:
While in power, Sadat instituted a series of economic liberalization policies, collectively known and popularly labeled as the infitah (the Arabic word rendered as “open door”). Long a centralized, statist command economy, Sadat’s reforms for Egypt sought to shift emphasis from the public to the private sector, “opening the door” to foreign investment and free-market capitalist forces. Economic dislocation, disparity, and often extreme hardship ensued. For ordinary Egyptians, disillusionment only occasionally found an outlet in mass public protests and riots.

Egypt’s economic reform and liberalization policies of the 1970s – infitah – should prompt some consideration of and comparison to that phenomenon elsewhere, particularly in China during the late-1970s and early-1980s under Deng Xiaoping, in the Soviet Union during the mid-to-late 1980s under Mikhail S. Gorbachev (perestroika), and in India during the early-to-mid 1990s under P. V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.

The Day the Leader Was Killed is narrated in three alternating voices, expressing three distinct perspectives, ultimately delivering rich insight into these and other important issues.

First, there is Muhtashimi Zayed, who, as the family patriarch and elderly grandfather, represents tradition and a direct link to the past, and as such a symbolic yawning generation gap. He is religious, regularly invoking God and the Qur’an. Interestingly, he speaks first, last, and most often (8 chapters – the others have 7 each), even though the novel focuses more directly on the experiences of Egyptian youth.

Next, there is Elwan Fawwaz Muhtashimi, a hapless, sarcastic civil servant who lives with his parents and grandfather. He has been engaged to the woman of his dreams for 10-plus years, never quite able to earn enough money to furnish an apartment, move out, and provide for his bride-to-be. More than anyone else, he is trapped and eventually crushed by infitah policies. He embodies the disillusionment, despair, and disconnectedness that seem to characterize young, modern Egyptian men of that time. Indeed, one of the best, most insightful passages in the book is a meandering diatribe by Elwan, lamenting the economic, political, and socio-culture conditions that stifle and limit his life (pgs. 53-55).

Lastly, there is Randa Sulayman Mubarak, Elwan’s co-worker (they even share the same boss, Anwar Allam), neighbor, and fiancée. While she eventually marries their boss after Elwan breaks off their long engagement, she quickly divorces him. In the end, and emboldened by the news of Sadat’s assassination, Elwan beats their boss to death. Throughout, Randa brings to bear a prominent and important female voice and perspective – often a stark contrast to her male counterpart characters. She, more than the men, embodies the tension between the traditional and the modern playing out in Egypt: “The fact is I want to assert myself but not at the expense of my dignity” (pg. 59). She is also more subtly subversive than they.

Mahfouz makes clear that traditions, values, material well-being – perhaps even an entire way of life – are threatened and in flux. And the stakes are incredibly high. Corrupt politics, limited economic opportunities (certainly no prospects for achieving financial independence), and the inability to meet individual, familial, and religious expectations, all conspire against the characters, and boldly reveal a society teetering on the brink.

And now I wonder… How might this story be different had Mahfouz written it today, 20-plus years later?

The World of Dreams…Both Denied and In Progress: Brendan Short, Dream City (2008)

I highly recommend Brendan Short’s debut novel, Dream City. Not because I know him personally – I do. Not because I went to both high school and college with him – I did. Not even because the cover art is cool – it is (kudos to Dorothy Carico Smith). But while all of these constitute a sufficient rationale, at least as far as I am concerned, such bias sinks the ship of credibility. More directly and to the point, Short is a good writer who tells a good story – and that story sticks with you and makes you think, reflect, and assess, even long after you have put the book on your shelf.

This is not the space to summarize Dream City. I would much rather pinpoint what I found interesting and compelling in order to substantiate my claim in the last sentence of the first paragraph.

Short develops characters – the primary ones as well as the more tangential ones – of complexity and depth. At times, relationships and experiences are intertwined in expected, quite ordinary ways, ways that make the reader comfortable in familiarity. But the more satisfying lines and trajectories are ones that are unexpected and disquieting; and these, of course, are the ones that matter most. Confronted by a variety of moral dilemmas, and following a life-path characterized more by inertia bordering on anomie than by stability and good luck, the novel’s central character, Michael Halligan, struggles not-so-valiantly to forge ordinariness into greatness, as his heroes often do in the Big Little Books he obsessively covets and collects. Michael’s boundless childhood optimism, imagination, creativity, and idealism hurtle with full force into the harsh realities of adulthood.

Ah, but those Big Littles…they offer continuity, solace, an anchor of sorts. For Michael, a mass-culture product provides what all the various human beings that populate his life cannot – a fulfilling, focused sense of purpose. Then again, most of those human beings lead exhausted, even ruined lives. So his obsessive pursuit of every Big Little Book in existence, that very project of collecting, gives Michael some resilience, some traction, some hope as he treads the waters of his chaotic, often cruel life. Michael certainly is not the first, nor will he be the last, to find an escape in the products of American popular commercial culture. Incidentally, Michael collects other things as well, including prostitutes and sexual experiences, and the consequences are just as varied and colorful.

Many readers can relate on some level to obsessive collecting. When I was a kid, while others went off to collect baseball cards, I went off in search of business cards. Yes, business cards. I certainly found them interesting at the time (and still do), but now, as we gallop into the digital age, they are not merely quaint relics, but, I would argue, historically significant artifacts. Perhaps more about that another time…

And speaking of history, as a lifespan story, the historical sweep that Short manages – the 70-plus years from 1932 to 2004 – is noteworthy. He attempts to faithfully capture both the historical and socio-cultural milieu as the story winds its way through these seven decades. This is no easy task, and while the overall effort produced mixed results, Short is probably best when immersed in Depression-era Chicago. Indeed, the crucial context for the first third of the book, and setting the stage for the rest, is the 1933-34 World’s Fair in Chicago. The “Century of Progress” fair becomes the cauldron in which the very meaning of American progress and the American Dream are contested, complicated, challenged, and questioned. They are, perhaps, entirely myths, with social mobility, justice, and equality always just out of reach. The fair may have provided Americans, even in the midst of the Great Depression, with a platform for their vision of prosperity and power, but that vision was far from monolithic or cohesive, its foundations grounded in long-established inequalities. This couldn’t be more evident than in the lives of the Halligans and other characters throughout the novel.

[NOTE: The best books about international expositions and world fairs are by historian Robert W. Rydell. See especially, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Good websites include: The University of Chicago Library's Century of Progress 1933-34 World's Fair Collection and The Chicago Historical Society Collection.]

There are other historical themes and issues of consequence that Short grasps and incorporates into the novel. The charismatic proselytizer, Eddie Kowal, through his fiery attacks on creeping materialism and his in-your-face cries for social justice, prompt us to think about the role of religious movements – fringe, populist, or otherwise – in American society, then and now. Additionally, one can extract insights about fluctuating gender roles, demographic changes and urban-suburban postwar migration, and the search for order in the wake of economic depression, hot war, cold war, and political upheaval.

Ultimately, Short has done well with this first novel, and I very much look forward to his next offering.

Click here (Amazon) or here (MacAdam/Cage) to order Short’s book.

Misunderestimated and Misunderstood: Umberto Eco, Misreadings (1963, 1993)

In this book of 15 short essays, all of which were originally published between 1959 and 1972, Umberto Eco deploys playful parodies and artful critiques that skewer his usual targets: the oversophisticated, overinterpreted, overacademic, and overintellectual cultural products and ideas formed in the wake of the postmodern turn, especially in the fields of literary theory, cultural criticism, and anthropology. As a whole, these experimental think-pieces can, and should, make your head spin. Some are outlandishly, laugh-out-loud funny, while others are virtually incomprehensible. Thankfully, there are more of the former than the latter.

While more cutting-edge within the context in which they were originally written, most of the essays still retain substantive resonance even decades after the fact. I have never been an Eco fan, mostly because he often writes in the exact ways he criticizes and supposedly deplores. Nevertheless, he rarely fails to be a good read, and I appreciate his parody of the ordinary, mundane, and even the grotesque. Indeed, Eco’s best pieces are exercises in alternative anthropology – “not the world of others as seen by us, but our world as seen by others” (p. 4). Thus, Eco’s intentionally misappropriated twists and turns swirl around familiar subjects creating, in the end, a seductive and entertaining pastiche.

Here are a few things that caught my attention:

“Granita” (1959), an inverted Lolita, and thus a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, is a stroke of twisted genius in which the protagonist is in obsessive hot pursuit of a granny.

“Fragments” (1959) is a post-apocalyptic [yes, the nuclear Big One, friends – “the catastrophe of the year then known as 1980” (p. 15) – remember the Cold War, y’all?] conference paper delivered at the IV Intergalactic Congress of Archaeological Studies. Scholars, the archaeology professor reports, are trying to shed light on “the darkest mystery [that] has always enshrouded Italian pre-Explosion culture” (p. 19) by piecing together and interpreting fragmentary evidence from that obliterated civilization. And here’s the one I liked best:

“And we must remember how Italian science in that period had clearly made great progress in genetics, even though this knowledge was employed in racial eugenics, as we can infer from the lid of a box that must have contained a medicine for the improvement of the race, bearing only the words WHITER THAN WHITE accompanied by the letters AJAX (a reference to the first Aryan warrior)” (pgs. 19-20).

I would recommend that all academics find a way to cite “The Socratic Strip” (1960) in their work, especially since we all have fun with and thoroughly understand Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc…

In the hilarious “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…: Readers’ Reports” (1972), manuscripts written by the likes of Cervantes, Dante, Diderot, Homer, Joyce, Kafka, Kant, and Proust are rejected by their publisher. Even The Bible is returned with the following critique: “But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many – too many – stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense” (p. 33). Best, and briefest, however, is the return of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake manuscript: “Please, tell the office manager to be more careful when he sends books out to be read. I’m the English-language reader, and you’ve sent me a book written in some other, godforsaken language. I am returning it under separate cover” (pgs. 45-46).

“The Thing” (1961) is yet another fine manifestation of various facets of Cold War culture – highly destructive weapons, a blind faith in and overreliance on scientific/technological expertise, pervasive militarism, and palpable anxiety and paranoia. It carries many of the same themes as would be seen only a few years later in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

It is commonplace for critics to review and critique books, works of art, and architecture, right? Well how about Italian money? As a cultural product it is certainly most deserving, and in the first of “Three Eccentric Reviews” (1967, 1968, and 1971), Eco casts a critical eye on the 1967-version of the Fifty Thousand Lire and One Hundred Thousand Lire notes, and it is superb.

Not to digress, but money is worth a closer look. Take, for example, the Indian rupee. There are 7 primary banknote denominations, each of a different color, and while the obverse of each has Gandhi’s image, the reverse of each has images of great significance to Indian culture (a tractor, a rhino/elephant/tiger, palm trees, the Indian Parliament, the Himalaya Mountains, etc.). Most strikingly, the language panel (reverse, left) includes the denomination in 15 languages, the most of any paper money in circulation. There is plenty of material here to “unpack” and “deconstruct.”

While television coverage of the Apollo spaceflights during the late-1960s originally inspired Eco’s version of “The Discovery of America” (1968), one can’t help but think of today’s 24/7/365 newscycle, and the constant coverage of events, especially the hyper-acceleration of that phenomenon during the last 20 years – from the Marines landing on the beaches of Mogadishu, Somalia, in December 1992 to the Iranian elections of June 2009.

Finally, in “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno” (1961), Eco falls prostrate at the altar of human mediocrity. Bongiorno, a still very much alive American-born Italian game-show host, embodies and epitomizes the finest characteristics of mediocrity:

A cross between Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan, and Guy Smiley, Bongiorno is:
· “…not particularly good-looking, not athletic, courageous, or intelligent. Biologically speaking, he represents a modest level of adaptation to the environment” (p. 159).
· “…not ashamed of being ignorant and feels no need to educate himself” (p. 159).
· “…accepts all the myths of the society in which he lives” (p.160).
· “…rejects the idea that a question can have more than one answer. He regards all variants with suspicion” (p. 161).
· “… respects the opinion of others, not for any ideological reason but out of lack of interest” (p. 162).
· “…drives clichés to their extreme” (p. 162).
· “…a consolation to the mediocre” (p. 163).
· “…unaware of the tragic dimension of life” (p. 163).
· “…an ideal that nobody has to strive for, because everyone is already at its level” (p. 163).

I suppose I don’t mind such traits in a game-show host (…well, yes, I actually do mind…), but sadly I have studied presidents who have similar characteristics; some have carefully cultivated them, and even taken pride in them. Now that’s just dangerous.

Fine Grotesquery: Chaim Soutine at The Barnes Foundation

About six months ago, I had the opportunity to explore one of the finest, most unique art galleries in existence, The Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania. Established in 1922, and reflecting the quirky vision of its founder, Albert Coombs Barnes (1872-1951), the gallery houses one of the most extraordinary collections of Modern Art, including works by well-known masters Cezanne (69 works), Degas (11 works), Manet (4 works), Matisse (59 works), Modigliani (16 works), Monet (4 works), Picasso (46 works), Renoir (181 works, the most in any one collection), Seurat (6 works), and Van Gogh (7 works). Interspersed throughout the gallery are also fine examples of African, Asian, and Native American art. The collection and the experience of the gallery itself are unparalleled.

Most memorable and most striking, to me, were the works of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), especially as placed in the context of the masterpieces by the artists listed above. From what I could gather, the Foundation has about 20 Soutine works on display, but owns many more in total. I had heard of Soutine, but hadn’t recalled seeing any of his work firsthand. I was most impressed and intrigued by what I was now able to observe up close. I was fascinated by his use of thick, intense brush strokes, and the resulting contorted and distorted images he created. His landscapes and portraits certainly embody these characteristics (see, for example, The Pastry Chef, 1919), and they are often haunting, even disturbing; but his various carcass (beef, fowl, hare, fish) series are particularly savage and grotesque. The entire perspective and approach are captivating. Apparently Soutine regularly horrified his colleagues, friends, and neighbors by keeping a variety of animal carcasses strewn about his studio in order to paint them. He would even splash blood on them (the carcasses, that is…) to keep them fresh (or at least fresh looking). Nevertheless, Barnes himself, perhaps in part because he was the son of a butcher, was drawn to Soutine’s work. It is even fair to say that Barnes virtually single-handedly catapulted Soutine to prominence when, on a 1922-23 tour of Europe to collect art for his gallery, he visited Soutine’s studio and bought 50+ paintings. “The main reason I bought so many of the paintings,” I was told Barnes wrote, “was that they were a surprise, if not a shock, and I wanted to find out how he got that way.” I wonder if Barnes ever figured out how he got that way. I’m still working on it myself. Provocative work indeed, and a thrill to view. Go see it!

The Barnes Foundation will eventually move from its current location in Merion to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. While no specific date (as of this writing) has been set for the Foundation’s move, try to see the gallery at its original location in Merion. Not only the art gallery, but the surrounding gardens and arboretum are truly exceptional and well worth a visit.

Click here for a brief video overview of The Barnes Foundation collection and mission.

To investigate Soutine’s technique, approach, and perspective more directly, check out some of the examples housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These images can be manipulated and enlarged for closer examination.

For additional examples of Soutine’s work, click here.

In Pursuit of Dead Shot Dan: The Goat (1921)

Why not start with a classic – Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton’s short silent comedy, The Goat, released on 18 May 1921. I just can’t get enough of this film. Keaton (wearing his omnipresent porkpie hat) is mistaken for the escaped murderer Dead Shot Dan, and his ensuing antics barely keep him ahead of the bumbling police.

While the most famous scene is of Steam Engine 1229 speeding toward the camera from the distance, stopping just in time to reveal Keaton seated at the front of the locomotive, my personal favorite remains the scene of Keaton aboard the buckling Man O’War statue.

And by the way, the $5,000 reward for the capture of Dead Shot Dan would be worth about $60,000 today.

Check it out at:
http://www.archive.org/details/TheGoat
or
http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/goat.php