Book joy

On opening my email this morning I gave an embarrassing little squeal of excitement, because of a notification from Amazon that my pre-ordered copy of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies has been magically delivered to my Kindle. (Of course it actually hasn’t, given that I am in South Sudan which doesn’t have any 3G provision whatsoever, BUT STILL.) It’s been a long time since I geeked out this much about a new book’s publication; for the record, the only other books about which I am anywhere near as excited are:

- Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Girl, jump sequel to A Suitable Boy, allegedly slated for publication in 2013. Anyone who knows me will be aware that A Suitable Boy is probably my favourite book in all the world; as a result, my anticipation of A Suitable Girl is tinged with a degree of anxiety: is it really going to happen? And am I going to like it? This is a real concern; despite my love for ASB, and my strong liking for Seth’s The Golden Gate and Two Lives, I really did not like An Equal Music at all, mostly owing to my desire to punch more or less all the characters in the face.
- The third book in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy. Admittedly I want to punch quite a lot of Grossman’s characters in the face too, but it bothers me far less than in An Equal Music, and interferes much less with my enjoyment of the book. Possibly because I don’t think they’re necessarily intended to be sympathetic.
- The long-awaited Ivan book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga. To this day the only science fiction series that I have read, I have a lot of complicated Thoughts and Feelings about these book, which I may well blog about at some point; it took me quite a while to come down on the side of unequivocally loving them, but following a rereading binge while in Guinea-Bissau earlier this year I did so.

IN ANY CASE: Hilary Mantel! New book! Somehow I will get it onto my Kindle today, and I will somehow make time over the next few weeks to read it. (I suspect sleep may suffer.) It will be awesome.

Edited to add a link to this awesome review of Bring Up the Bodies. I particularly liked this: “Mantel has understood how many of those qualities which made Cromwell a villain in his own day can be made to appeal to the 21st-century reader. Unlike the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, we like a mushroom man. What looked to the 16th century like a ‘blacksmith’s cur’ can be shown to us as an egalitarian, semi-secular, urban, cosmopolitan rationalist with coal dust in his veins.” – which I think is absolutely spot-on.

Got talent?

South Sudan’s been independent for nearly a year. It has UN recognition, an anthem, a flag, even a national beer (White Bull. It is not very nice), but surely everyone knows that you can never be a real country until you have some sort of national televised elimination talent show?

With that in mind, I found myself at a recording of episode four of South Sudan’s Talent Search this evening – a cavalcade of singers and rappers performing on stage at the Nyakuron cultural centre. Two get voted out each week by the public, of the three that are put on probation. The talent is…variable, but the suspense is high.

The highlight was definitely Moses Chol, above, a slightly deranged Dinka version of Shaggy. He seemed to be the crowd favourite but doesn’t seem to be much liked by the judges and so ended up in the bottom three. WHAT WILL HAPPEN? I shall definitely be voting.

Books read, January – April 2012

As part of an ongoing attempt to keep better (and more public) track of my reading:

Adventures of a Shopaholic, Sophie Kinsella

An opportunistic read, as this book happened to be hanging around the Marrakech riad where I spent new year, and I wanted an easy read for new year’s day. I had actually read it before, years ago, and remember quite liking it – Kinsela is one of the better chicklit writers, and I generally find her pretty funny; however, in the intervening years the character of Becky seems to have become infinitely more enraging, and I can’t quite see why I ever liked her in the first place.

Sudan’s Wars and Peace Agreements, edited by Jay Spaulding et al.

Fancy academic review available in The Kelvingrove Review.

The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I thought I’d read this as a teenager, and vaguely remember misguided adolescent adulation for the dissolute Anthony Patch (akin to my yearning for Sebastian Flyte). Eh. As a jaded adult, the story of Anthony and Gloria has lost enormous parts of its appeal, and Fitzgerald’s writing, which can be absolutely breathtaking, verges here on the overblown. In my head, the couple in Revolutionary Road are the same couple as in The Sheltering Sky, and Anthony and Gloria are another (albeit not quite exact) iteration of them; and I have to say I find them pretty unappealing every time. I’ve lost any tolerance I once had for self-destruction.

Quotes:

“The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read.”

“The room was full of morning.” (Now, that’s the sort of Fitzgerald imagery that I’m looking for.)

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ – and once he was an organ-grinder!” (I suppose I am a simple soul indeed, then.)

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

What a lovely book this is! I think this is one of those novels that Americans grow up reading (though the American with whom I was travelling at the time I read it claimed not to have done so), and the rest of us miss out. I admit I am an easy audience for dog-related things, due to my parents’ fantastic dog, Fido, but I can’t imagine that anyone could come out of this book without thinking that dogs are amazing. (Also, the scene in which Buck pulls the thousand pound sled for Thornton is one of the most gripping and moving I can remember reading of late.)

Quotes:

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”

“He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells”.

The Horse Stealers and Other Stories, Anton Chekhov

I am gradually working my way through Chekhov’s short stories, most of which seem to be available (in the Constance Garnett translations) at Project Gutenberg; having read Lady with a Lapdog in hardcopy back in 2009, I read The Schoolmaster, The Chorus Girl and The Witch collections on my Kindle last year. This collection, I think, moved me a little less than some of the others that I’ve read, but my general view still stands: even though I’m not generally much of a short-story reader, I have never read any better examples of the form than those of Chekhov. His understanding of human nature is unflinchingly acute, and the themes he deals with feel timeless. I don’t understand why he’s primarily known as a playwright when his stories are so brilliant. EVERYONE SHOULD READ HIM, the end.

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Now, this is more like it. It’s still no Gatsby, but it’s infinitely preferable to The Beautiful and Damned, largely due to it having a protagonist whom I only rarely wanted to punch in the face. Despite Amory’s many faults, he’s far more of a life-affirming character than pretty much anyone in The Beautiful and Damned – plus, the book ends in a sort of socialist polemic, which is the sort of thing that is bound to win me over.

“Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.” (This is almost precisely how I remember feeling after my own first kiss. Sorry, BP, wherever you are.)

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“’Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do.’”

“’I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s biased.’”

“’Rotten, rotten old world,’ broke out Eleanor suddenly, ‘and the wretchedest thing of all is me – oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not stupid – ? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified – and here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me – I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. […]

‘Listen,’ she leaned close again, ‘I like clever men and good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.’” (If I ever need convincing about why it’s better to be born a woman now than at any point in history – which mostly I don’t – I just need to read this over.)

“The wet salt breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.”

“Q – Can you live?
A – I can’t imagine not being able to. People make money in books and I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.”

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood – she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

And now for the socialism:

“’Next I’d have a fair trial of government ownership of all industries.’
‘That’s been proven a failure.’
‘No – it merely failed. If we had government ownership we’d have the best analytical business minds in the government working for something besides themselves. We’d have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we’d have Morgans in the Treasury Department; we’d have Hills running interstate commerce. We’d have the best lawyers in the Senate.’
‘They wouldn’t give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo –‘
‘No,’ said Amory, shaking his head. ‘Money isn’t the only stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in America.’
‘You said a while ago that it was.’
‘It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward which attracts humanity – honor.’ […]
‘The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell you’ – Amory became emphatic – ‘if there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours’ work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they’ll sweat their heads off for that. If it’s only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they’ll work just as hard. They have in other ages.’ […]
‘The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist. If he can’t, then I don’t think it matters much what happens to man or his systems, now or hereafter.’ […]
‘A laissez-faire policy is like spoiling a child by saying he’ll turn out all right in the end. He will – if he’s made to.’”

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

C., with whom I was travelling through West Africa earlier this year, lent me this and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Bryson is such an engaging writer (albeit occasionally slipping into self-parody) that he could make almost anything appealing, and he’s able to bring out the fundamental interest in aspects of science that would otherwise seem dry. Probably the most interesting aspect of the book to me is the scientists and explorers Bryson writes about, rather than the science itself, but either way, it’s both readable and erudite.

Reading the Ceiling, Dayo Forster

I picked this up in a bookshop in Bakau, The Gambia, as I’m always keen to read local authors that I might not encounter elsewhere. While I enjoyed the book and its central theme (three parallel stories based on the protagonist Ayodele’s decision about who to lose her virginity to), it’s quite a flawed novel, and feels, in parts, over-workshopped, particularly regarding Gambian-specific imagery; much as I enjoy local colour, this felt overdone, as if some editor somewhere had insisted Forster Gambia it up as much as possible. I was also struck by the fact that all of Ayodele’s parallel futures are, to a greater or lesser degree, sad and unsatisfying, which reads a little like Woman Being Punished for Sex (interestingly subverted by the character of Kainde, one of Ayodele’s sisters, who is portrayed as the most empowered and satisfied female character, and who remains single throughout much of the book, finding love later in life).

Quotes:

“He’s not yet safe in his own body.”

“Whatever [emotion] I manage to fob off during the day slinks back [at night], semi-crouching with tail down and belly skirting the ground.”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

Short but excellent book with an endearing unreliable narrator and a pleasingly ambiguous ending. Everyone has read this book already, so I shan’t go on.

Saving Francesca, Melina Marchetta

My friend C. (different C. to the one above – I need to get creative with my pseudonyms) lent this to me when I was staying at hers and needed something quick and absorbing to read. This was absolutely perfect. Growing up in Sydney, I read Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi when I was in high school (it may have been part of our syllabus), and I don’t remember having as strong feelings about it as many people seem to, but that may have been because the setting was just to quotidian for me at the time; seventeen years (bloody hell) after leaving Sydney, I found Saving Francesca extremely nostalgic and very moving. (I am very keen to read the sequel.) There’s not much that re-evokes my Australian side these days, as I’ve been out of the country for so long (and since my parents moved back to the UK in 2007, I no longer have much of an excuse to visit), so it’s always a very pleasant surprise when something does.

Pure, Andrew Miller

I picked this up at my parents’ house at a time that I was finding it difficult to settle to reading anything, and the first part pulled me in straight away, though I found the second half of the book unsatisfying – it was as if it had been set up to be a much, much longer book and had then been rather brutally edited; numerous characters who had been introduced in significant detail early on in the book remained un-fleshed out or even forgotten. I would have preferred it to be half as long again as it was.

The Hunger Games / Catching Fire / Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

My friends A. and P. pushed these books on me when I was staying with them in London, and I absolutely devoured the first one; the second and third I also found compelling but I read them mostly for the sake of completion and to find out how the plot was tied up; by the second book and certainly the third I found the character of Katniss much less engaging (obviously she was suffering from extreme PTSD, but I would venture that characters suffering from severe PTSD don’t necessarily make compelling protagonists), and the whole series seemed to have descended into violence and trauma porn. Plus, post-Twilight, the whole love triangle theme feels played out, though I did rather like Katniss’s indifference to it.

The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay

Following The Hunger Games trilogy and my tearing through the Vorkosigan saga last year, I was keen to read more fantasy and sci-fi, which are not normally genres I seek out (partly due to snobbishness, I confess; partly also due to the fact that I don’t really read much in the way of genre fiction full stop – no mysteries, no detective stories, only horror and historical fiction from specific authors I know I enjoy – because I feel that too often it rests on the assumption that people will buy it for the genre alone, and therefore it doesn’t need as much by way of appealing characterisation, elegant writing and a convincing and engaging plot). I’d had Lions hanging around for ages, legacy (I think) of a book-swap, and also the ardent recommendation of Best Friend from High School J., years and years ago; she also recommended the Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry series to me, back when I was 15 or 16, and I loved it (and was devastated by it) in a very teenage way. Anyhow. In my opinion the strength of Kay’s writing is in his characters, and that’s also true in Lions (I was predictably taken by Ammar ibn-Khairan); he also has a deft touch with a love story. However, I find his exploration of real history through a very thin veneer of fantasy baffling and ultimately disengaging; it kept throwing me out of the story and I wound up just wanting to read a historical analysis of the Reconquista. I’d understand it more if he was going to play around with historical facts, or introduce genuine elements of fantasy or magic, but no: the Jaddites (=Christians) reconquer the Peninsula, the Asharites (=Muslims) are driven to the margins, and the Kindath (=Jews) are persecuted into exile; meanwhile, the only fantastic element of the story seems to be the existence of two moons (and, I suppose, the psychic ability of one of the characters). As a result, while I generally enjoyed the book while I was reading it, I found it surprisingly put-downable.

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

I actually started reading this in Nairobi airport in December, and I’m not sure why I took so long to finish, as it’s an enjoyable story and the first third, in particular, is very funny. I did note, of course, that reading the book requires not so much a suspension of disbelief as a suspension of morality, as the Musketeers + d’Artagnan go round murdering people to right and left for very little reason; this is never more noticeable than when Athos is telling d’Artagnan the story of his wife, how he found the fleur-de-lys brand on her shoulder: “and so I hanged her,” he says, all matter-of-fact, and d’Artagnan’s like, well, what else are you going to do?

The Magicians / The Magician King, Lev Grossman

While I was on my fantasy/sci-fi kick, various friends recommended these to me, while various others told me they’d disliked them; however someone described them as a cross between Harry Potter and The Secret History, which is the sort of descriptor that’s bound to catch my attention. Ultimately I bloody loved these books, although I was a little uncertain as I was reading the first one, at least; I’m not particularly keen on the main character, Quentin (though I’m not sure the extent to which he’s intended to be likeable), and the first half or so of The Magicians, the Brakebills section, reads a little like a strung together series of Things That Happened to Quentin at Brakebills, rather than having a robust plot. However, I think the central theme of the books – what happens to members of the jaded millennial generation when they’re thrust into a Narnia-esque magical world – is rather genius, and as much as I sometimes rolled my eyes at the central characters’ anhedonic worldviews, to some extent I find them very relatable. Plus, the fact that Grossman has a very engaging blog does help.

Quotes (The Magicians):

“But despite his odd appearance Eliot had an air of effortless self-possession that made Quentin urgently want to be his friend, or maybe just be him period. He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world – he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.” (I love Eliot, utterly predictably.)

“’Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.’” (I don’t believe this in the slightest, but I do believe that a lot of people believe this.)

“’That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.’”

“’This isn’t a story! It’s just one fucking thing after another!’” (I absolutely love this as an illustration of the fiction / real life divide.)

“But he kept on with it [drinking], and soon a deep, pure, luxurious sadness came over him, as heady and decadent as a drug.” (I really enjoy the way Grossman writes.)

And from The Magician King:

“’Out there’ – she pointed out to sea, past the Muntjac’s cozy hurricane lamps, past the faint black-on-blue outlines of the palm trees on the rim of the bay, where the hushing of distant breakers came from – ‘That’s not Fillory. Your kingdom ends here. Here you’re a king, you’re all powerful. You’re not king of any of that. Out there you’re just Quentin. Are you sure that’s going to be enough?’ […]
‘Of course I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘That’s why you go. To find out if it’s enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out.’”
“Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.”

“The pain was amazing, like a pulsing flare hanging there in the softening early evening, an evening star. Not looking, he couldn’t have said with absolute confidence if the pain was even located inside his body.” (Possibly the best description of extreme pain I have ever read. Reminds me a little of a line from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, in which Seth describes Lata as experiencing “a misery so complete she could not believe it was she who was feeling it” – paraphrase, as sadly I do not have a copy of the book with me. MAKE IT AVAILABLE ON KINDLE, PEOPLE. It’s far too big to carry around.)

“’You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.’
‘The power to make mistakes,’ Penny said. ‘Only we have that. Mortals.’”

The Street Sweeper, Eliot Perlman

Way back when I was living in Azerbaijan, I picked up a copy of Perlman’s novel Three Dollars from an Australian who was leaving the country, and I remember finding it enjoyable but a little forgettable. (I wonder if I would react differently to it now.) Then in March I saw Perlman read from The Street Sweeper at Glasgow’s Aye Write festival, at a session I was mostly attending to see Caroline Moorehead (whose book on refugees, Human Cargo, I read back in 2010 and is absolutely brilliant). However I really enjoyed Perlman’s reading (and, I confess, may have developed a tiny crush on him), and so picked up The Street Sweeper, a novel that intertwines the Holocaust with the US Civil Rights movement, and which I found largely excellent – perhaps a little too neatly life-affirming, given the context, but who am I to comment? There was one element in the central story of Adam Zigelnik that I found slightly disappointing (which I won’t go into, to avoid spoilers), largely because I thought Perlman was going to take the slightly braver route – but I can see why he wrote it the way he did. Recommended.

The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver

Like Reading the Ceiling, another parallel-lives story. I have a lot of respect for Shriver, as I loved We Need to Talk about Kevin (another book that I reread recently, and found it to be just as good as I’d remembered). However, I’m not sure about her female characters. Eva Khachadourian in Kevin is clearly meant to be ambiguous and difficult to like, so it works within the context of the book, but I had the impression that Irina, the protagonist of The Post-Birthday World, was supposed to be much more sympathetic, whereas to me she replicated a lot of what I’d disliked in Eva – in particular, the fact that all her decisions are driven by the need for a man in her life. I get the impression that Shriver believes this to be an essentially female trait (though almost certainly I’m being unfair; after all, I’ve only read two of her books), whereas I strongly disagree. Ultimately it made Irina much less relatable to me, and I had a hard time caring much about what happened to her. (Now that I come to think about it, I felt that to a certain extent she was a cipher – I have a far clearer picture in my mind of both primary male characters, even Lawrence, the supposedly boring one.)

Un Lun Dun, China Miėville

A number of my friends swear by Miėville, and I’d tried a Kindle sample of The City and the City but not been gripped by it at all. This, however, I thoroughly enjoyed, and I particularly liked its subversion of the Chosen One trope, as well as its London setting. I’m not sure if I’m sufficiently compelled to pick up more Miėville, but you never know.

As Meat Loves Salt, Maria McCann

This was recommended in an interview with Lionel Shriver in the back of The Post-Birthday World, and so I picked it up for my Kindle. It’s a fascinating and very disturbing read that I keep going back to – very well-researched historical fiction, with a couple of intriguing characters at its heart, particularly Jacob, through whose eyes the story is told; I do love a good unreliable narrator.

I am pretty rubbish at being into music. I currently have over 29,000 songs on iTunes (yes, I know), and yet I tend to get totally obsessed with a specific album or song and listen to nothing but that for weeks on end. However! All of that is (perhaps) about to change (a bit). As one of the new year’s resolutions I largely failed to make and which have been pushed back to March in any case, I intend to listen to ALL MY MUSIC in 2012, deleting the things I don’t particularly like (which have ended up in my music collection largely through merging music with boyfriends in the past), and generally diversifying my listening. We’ll see how this goes.

For posterity, my soundtrack for 2012 has sounded rather like this, so far:

Latest obsession song, thanks to Radio 3′s Late Junction a few days ago. I cannot stop listening to this.

I went to the rather marvellous Balkanarama in Glasgow on Saturday night, and Tako Lako were playing. My hearing has still not quite returned to normal, but they were fabulous, particularly the incredibly charismatic vocalist and frontman, Ognjen Curcic, and the delightful interplay between clarinetist/saxophonist Malene Brask, violinist Søren Stensby Hansen and accordionist Andreas Broby Jensen – as you can probably tell from the video above.

A few weekends ago I performed at the fabulous Words Per Minute in Glasgow (it was terrifying – I’m very glad I did it, but it did underline why I am a writer rather than a performer); also performing was Glasgow band Two Wings, who performed an absolutely stunning acoustic set. Sadly I haven’t been able been able to find any of their acoustic stuff online but Eikon, above, is the single off their new (upcoming) album, and is rather marvellous.

And, in a dramatic change of pace, the above is what everyone was listening to on their phones when I was in Guinea-Bissau last month. In my imaginary middle-class-white-girl ‘world music’ club night (Well Meaning, as named by T. my ex – he actually made me a poster for it and everything, which I may scan one day), this would be one of my ‘get everyone on the dancefloor’ tracks. If, y’know, they were into music from Guinea-Bissau. I think it’s awesome, anyway.

Shakespeare in South Sudan

The South Sudan Theatre Company (I know!) have been invited to perform Cymbeline at the Globe in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival (I know!!!). If this is not one of the most exciting things you can think of, I’m not entirely sure why you’re reading this blog.

Shakespeare in South Sudan

I cannot stop watching the video on the website. It could be argued that South Sudan has more important priorities at this time in its history, and that’s probably correct. But: the arts are important, culture is important, stories are important, expression is important. Getting a whole load of patrons of the World Shakespeare Festival who know next to nothing about South Sudan to learn more is important. If you have £25 and you’re either going to give it to this or to a grass-roots education or health project in South Sudan, then I’d always say to do the latter. BUT if you have £25 burning a hole in your pocket, then there are a lot worse things you could do with it than support this.

Kony2012

Knowing the sorts of people that I know (people involved in international development and humanitarian aid, anthropologists, and actual, y’know, Africans) it’s understandable that I encountered the Kony2012 backlash before the film itself, it took me until the weekend to actually get round to seeing it. I was both frustrated and delighted to find that the film was just as bizarre as I had been led to expect.

I have so many issues with the whole malarkey that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s the fact that the current situation is broadly misrepresented (Kony is not in Uganda, and hasn’t been for several years), and what Invisible Children appear to be advocating is (wristbands aside) a military solution that would effectively mean cross-border incursions into extremely fragile states. There’s also the fact the issue is gigantically oversimplified and distilled into a somewhat dubious good guys vs. bad guys narrative, whereas (shocker!) some of the people on the ‘good guys’ side of this aren’t actually so good. (The thing I keep coming back to with regard to this is the amazing photo on this blog post of the Invisible Children team posing with guns and some of the SPLA. Lord knows I have been in some dubious photographs in my time, and I dread the thought of some of them coming back to haunt me when I am being publicly earnest on the internet. However, I am just saying, if you are vociferously campaigning against an organisation based on its usage of kidnapped child soldiers, you may not wish to associate yourself particularly closely with the SPLA.) There have been a number of excellent deconstructions of the issue, notably here, here and here, all of which offer a far more nuanced understanding of the situation than that which is offered by the Invisible Children video.

There’s also the fact that Jason Russell is so gloriously, astoundingly mockable that it’s almost too easy. It’s hard to pick out my favourite ludicrous statement. Is it Russell’s description of himself as the putative baby of Spielberg, Bono and Oprah? (Really? Really?!) His statement that he is ‘waiting for Jay-Z’ to make the Kony2012 campaign truly famous? His explanation of Invisible Children as “the Pixar of human rights documentaries” (which I will come back to)? Of course, deluded, megalomaniac people sometimes do fantastic things, and the fact that Russell is clearly a bit of a lunatic doesn’t, in itself, invalidate his message. (As an aside, however, I would point out that the fact that his son’s middle name is ‘Danger’ while his daughter’s is ‘Darling’ tells me all I need to know about Russell’s gender understanding.)

There are also some critiques that I’ve seen of Invisible Children that I don’t agree with. Some people seem to be saying that the focus on Kony, a relatively small-scale war criminal in terms of his current operations, detracts attention from more egregious human rights abuses; however I don’t believe that the existence of worse human rights abuses means that people shouldn’t pay attention to the LRA. There’s also been a great deal of discussion of Invisible Children’s finances. While I am not saying that I think it’s necessarily a good thing that only 37% of their budget goes directly to African programmes, it’s also true that Invisible Children are not, and do not claim to be a programme-based organisation – plus discussions of this type often seem to devolve into organisations being lambasted for how much they pay out in salaries, with the implicit assumption that if you’re working for any sort of social justice-related objective, of course you should be prepared to work for free. So I am steering clear of that line of critique.

The thing I keep coming back to, however, is Kony2012′s depiction of Uganda – or, actually, ‘Africa’, as a kind of undifferentiated mass – as a site of passive suffering and victimhood, waiting for white Westerners to swoop in and ‘save’ it. Of course, as a white Westerner who spends much of her time working in Africa, I am the last person to say that the West (or the global North, or whatever we choose to call it) shouldn’t be involved in Africa – but I do believe, very strongly, that any form of Western intervention in Africa should be closely aligned with African institutions, and should be led by Africans. Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist, posted a fantastic critique of Kony2012 here; the salient quote, to me, is as follows: “If you’re showing me as voiceless, as hopeless, you have no space telling my story. You shouldn’t be telling my story if you don’t believe I also have the power to change what is going on.” Sing it. BoingBoing as compiled a list of African voices responding to Kony2012 here. Of course, the fact that this list includes people from Benin, Nigeria and Ethiopia in relation to a Ugandan issue is a somewhat ironic reflection of the whole ‘Africa = undifferentiated mass of suffering’ point I mentioned above; however, a lot of the articles linked are commenting on Western views of Africa as a whole, rather than the Kony issue in particular, so I think it’s relevant.

What I object to perhaps the most, however, is the whole “Pixar of human rights documentaries” thing, the idea that Invisible Children are making films for the “MTV generation” (wait, I thought I was the MTV generation?), and, as Russell has claimed, no one wants a boring documentary on Africa. Quite aside from the fact that actually, yes, some of us do want more ‘boring’ documentaries about Africa, I find this a profoundly depressing and dangerous statement. Yes, I think it’s probably true that the majority of young people are more inclined towards flashy, special effects-laden documentaries narrated by people who look like the sort of people they relate to, rather than intellectually-challenging, complex documentaries that encourage and require critical thinking – but I don’t think this sort of intellectual laziness should be encouraged. In my experience, people generally meet your expectations. Kony2012 expects so little of its audience, by way of critical engagement, that it’s actually rather insulting. Fundamentally, I refuse to believe that the majority of Kony2012 viewers are incapable of research and analysis, and it concerns me that the easy acceptance of this broad-brush level of discourse as a way of becoming more informed about the world is open to manipulation and misuse. I can very, very easily imagine, ten years ago, the exact same type of video being made about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, complete with moving footage of Kurds affected by gas attacks, to justify military intervention. Lord knows I sympathise and empathise with the desire to see the world in comforting black and white, with the satisfaction of feeling that you’d Doing Something by watching a video or buying a wristband – but it’s illusory and ultimately useless.

Oh hey, that’s right, I have a blog

Yeah, I didn’t intend to let this long go by before posting again, and yet nearly a year later, here we are. Obviously I did not die of malaria medication side-effects, and indeed the ensuing eleven months since I last posted have been far more cheerful than my last update. Let’s see:

- I stayed in Wales until the end of September 2010, hanging out with my parents, reading lots, working some, and seeing friends. Went on a brief holiday to West Wales where I visited the National Coracle Centre (who knew there was so much to know about coracles?) and a house MADE OF (ok covered in) SHELLS!

I also went to the lovely wedding of my friends P. and D., where I read “He wishes for the cloths of heaven” by WB Yeats and managed not to blub.

- At the start of October I went back to Juba for work, staying there until mid-December. It was generally awesome to be there in the run-up to the Referendum (and I am gutted that I missed the Referendum itself). Non-work highlights included a boat trip down the Nile, a trip back to Yei for the YTTC graduation, and a(nother) wedding.

- In mid-November I took a week off and went to Ethiopia for the first time. It was an utterly amazing trip from start to finish; I spent a couple of days in Addis at the start and end, and visited Lalibela, Gonder and Bahir Dar in between.

- On the way back from Juba on December 19th, I got stranded in Nairobi for a couple of days due to the snowpocalypse in the UK. This was only a minor inconvenience: I was with friends, staying in a fancy hotel, the weather was lovely and I got to meet up with my Sudanese friend M. who had moved there. And I was only about 36 hours late getting home for xmas.

- After xmas in Wales and New Year in another part of Wales, I moved back to Glasgow at the start of January and started a PhD at Glasgow University.

- I also bought a flat, with which I am passionately in love. It needs A Lot Of Work; there are ongoing photos of the process here.

- Other than a brief, emergency trip to Juba at the end of January, I remained largely in the UK until the end of March, when I headed back to South Sudan again, but this time to work on a new project (albeit still with my former employers) based in Kuajok, Warrap State. I was there through all of April, most of May and most of June, and will be heading back on Friday for another month. The new project is fascinating, I love Kuajok (especially my colleagues there), I get to spend a lot of time in Wau, which is a genuinely rather fabulous city, and it’s all been excellent experience, and very, very different from Juba. I got malaria again at the end of June but this time I was prepared, took my Coartem and other than a couple of rather unpleasant days, everything was fine.

- I was declared the 14th most Eligible woman in Scotland at the end of June, which is patently ridiculous, but did at least mean that my friend C. and I got to attend a swank party in Edinburgh with free cocktails.

…and that’ll do to be going on with.

What happened next.

So, remember how when I last updated I was pleased because the malaria medication was working so quickly and so well? Indeed, it knocked the malaria out within 72 hours, and as predicted I was back to work on Monday, albeit feeling a bit odd. Tuesday continued with the oddness; Tuesday night was spent having absolutely terrifying panic attacks and wondering if I was having a stroke, and when I finally sought medical advice on Wednesday (in the shape of my boss’s wife, S., who is a doctor, it transcribed that what I had taken to treat the malaria was in fact a massive dose of mefloquine, which is widely known for sending people mental. One of my relatives had a very intense reaction to it a few years ago, and so I’d always avoided it, but because I am an idiot it didn’t occur to me that it would be used for treating malaria (it is most commonly used as a preventative – at much lower doses) and in my malarial haze I didn’t link the name Artequin (the medication I was taking) with Lariam (the most common name for mefloquine when used as a prophylactic).

Long story short, intense and ongoing anxiety led me to come back to the UK a couple of weeks ago, and here I am staying until the start of October, when I am due to go back to Sudan for two more months for work. Presently ensconsed at my parents’ place in rural south Wales, which is an excellent place to convalesce and regain mental equilibrium. I am still battling residual anxiety, which is extremely unpleasant, but am hoping that I will be absolutely back to normal in four weeks, by which time I will be on a plane heading to Nairobi and then onwards to Juba. In the meantime, I am doing some remote support for my job, I have plenty of freelance work, and of course there is a novel to finish (aiieee!), so I am keeping busy.

Regarding the Mental, I am self-medicating by:

- spending time with family, including my parents’ new dog, Fido, who is a delight (I would post pictures but I seem to have lost the memory card for my camera. Sigh);

- revelling in the Beauty Of Nature, especially nice, green, cool nature, as opposed to steamy, humid, sweaty nature as is commonly found in South Sudan;

- shopping, mostly online. I have bought EIGHT NINE DRESSES since I have been back (though one is going back to the shop). And three cardigans. And a pair of boots (though those were actually a late birthday present from my parents). This is particularly welcome as in my last couple of weeks in Juba I came to hate all the clothes I had with me with such a fiery passion that I would have gladly set fire to them, had I been able to source decent replacements. My Sudan Capsule Wardrobe has been in circulation since 2006, and it’s doing well, all things considered, but vigorous handwashing and having things hung out to dry on razor wire is not particularly good for one’s clothes. It is glorious to wake up in the morning and actually be able to choose things that are pretty rather than practical (and tattered). This leads to things like me walking the dog wearing posh frocks and wellies, but it is worth it.

- reading. Which is THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD. I ploughed through a novel a day my first week back, and while my pace has slowed (because I have had much more work to do) I am still in the midst of a proper fiction binge. It is lovely.

Why my body hates me.

I am on holiday! In Uganda! Which should be totally awesome, except for the fact that I have malaria.

Yeah, I know. I have been in perfect health (bar a couple of colds) over the past several months of ceaseless toil. My last day of work was Wednesday, and was generally a very successful and pleasing day; I came back to the office/house, had a very large mug of coffee, and almost immediately began to feel absolutely epically, cannot-keep-my-eyes-open exhausted. And when that passed I started to feel very peculiar, kind of feverish and feeble. However my temperature was only 37.something (although I normally run cooler than average), so I thought of COURSE it’s not malaria, I’m just worn out and in need of a holiday and should go to bed. Felt a bit better in the morning, got on a flight to Entebbe, got to my hotel around 2pm and promptly passed out for four hours. And then slept for eleven hours that night, and when I got up the next morning to have a shower, I had to go back to bed for a mid-morning nap to recover. All this time I was thinking but I can’t have malaria, I barely have a fever, and aren’t you supposed to get an upset stomach, too, and I definitely don’t have that until around 7pm, by which time I had been slumped apathetically on my bed for several hours, whereupon I had the bright idea to look up the symptoms of malaria. “The early stages include headaches, fevers, generalised aches and pains, and malaise,” I discovered. Also abdominal pain and a cough. Bingo. However such was my malaise that it took me a good half hour of thinking, yeah, I’ve almost certainly had malaria for 48 hours, and I should maybe go and get tested and treated so that I don’t actually LAPSE INTO A COMA AND DIE before I managed to prise myself out of bed and ask my hotel to take me to a clinic.

That was yesterday evening; today, two doses into my three-dose treatment I am feeling a bit better – as long as I don’t try and do anything more strenuous than, say, move from one side of the bed to the other. Expending any energy at all, however, results in crushing exhaustion, plus I have residual headache and mysterious lower back pain and this morning when I got up and looked at myself in the mirror I genuinely looked as if I had two black eyes. MALARIA IS RUBBISH, PEOPLE.

So as a result, my first visit to Uganda and I have barely left my hotel room (I did manage to go and have lunch by Lake Victoria yesterday, before I knew I had malaria, but it wiped me out for the rest of the day); I had all sorts of exciting plans for going to Kampala and Jinja and doing loads of writing but these have all been put on hold in favour of sleeping and feebly watching CNN. I am too ill even to be properly annoyed; a half-hearted meh is about all I can muster. And I’m willing to bet that I will be well enough to work – if not quite 100% – by the time I get back to Juba on Monday.

It’s somewhat disconcerting, incidentally, being Properly Ill (I never normally get Properly Ill!) in a country where you literally know no one. Especially if you have read The Sheltering Sky in the not-so-distant-past - in the dark watches of the night I admit that I have had one or two delirious fantasies wherein I am totally going to die in a hotel room and no one is going to notice for days and meanwhile my wife is going to have a breakdown and disguise herself as a Tuareg man and vanish into the desert. Well, probably not that last part. And if I did die, the hotel would figure it out fairly quickly, as they do clean my room on a daily basis, and actually I am probably not going to die because I don’t have cerebral malaria and I am in pretty robust health the rest of the time. But yeah, it’s the sort of thing you think about while dealing with the too-hot-too-cold-NO-TOO-HOT 3am angst-fest.

All change

Yes, it’s been a bit quiet around here, hasn’t it? Which would be due to two weeks of upheaval. In short, I got a new job and moved to Juba.

1. The job: I’m two days in and it looks likely to be extremely challenging and extremely interesting. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, because that’s my real actual name right up there in the url and I have no wish to jeopardise my newfound employed status through indiscretion. Shame, though. (Incidentally, I have been thinking a lot about the fact that I have one professional identity that lends itself to, if not absolutely requires, a degree of publicity, and another that requires discretion: awkward. And it’s too late for a pseudonym, isn’t it? Damn.)

2. Juba. OK, firstly, I miss Yei enormously, particularly the people, but also the greenery, the cooler weather, the laid-back pace of life. Juba is hectic and chaotic and, usually, so hot and steamy it causes my hair to swell to twice its normal size. BUT it is also tremendously exciting and stimulating, and (let’s not f9rget) furnished with a variety of eating establishments that are a real treat after two months of ugali, bean and greens in Yei; over the past few days I have eaten pizza, Indian food, Mexican, barbecue and a burger. It has been excellent, but I need to keep a tight rein on myself else I will end up the size of a small house. Or tukul.

More anon, I hope.