We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must ask yourself, Whose story am I miss
We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing?
A literary DNA test of Homegoing would reveal it to be a direct descendant of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; but whilst the latter is a pioneering attempt at a coherent English-language novel that explores the sociopolitical impact of British colonialism on the Nigerian native, Ms Gyasi’s book suffers under the weight of its own scope and, as the interconnected stories accumulate, loses all claim to characterisation, coherence, effect, and that initial flurry of intimate and ominous writing that held my interest for the first few stories, before it fizzles out like a candle that is only half burned but cannot shine any more light. Let me explain why.
It’s an ambitious project. Ms Gyasi has positioned the needle point of the compass on Ghana and, starting from mid-18th century onward, gone round and round and round and round the map, to encircle and record all major events in the history of the Black people - from the earliest slave ships bound out of Cape Coast to inopportune mixed marriages, and from being whipped to death at the hands of settlers at American cotton plantations to finding their lost voice in the Civil Rights movement two centuries later.
Each episode is led by an eponymous character whose story is hastily and perfunctorily told in 20 to 30 pages, using the device of plentiful flashbacks to connect the dots, and just when you feel you’re getting to know your man (or woman), the story ends and a new character comes in to take the marathon stick and runs you through yet another gory episode in the universal history of the Black people.
Now, this is enough criticism already. This is a debut novel and I must cut her some slack. So whence come the high rating? Clearly it’s the content, the material weaved into the stories: misfortune, war, tragedy, slavery, inhumanity, and oppression suffered by the weak at the hands of the powerful, by the barbaric races at the hands of the civilised people (irony, anyone?). The overall effect created by these stories rents your heart asunder. But still, it would serve to stress that it does not read like self-conscious pity-me misery porn, the appeal to raw sentimentalism, which I do not like in my literature.
Although the writing is quite basic and the focus is entirely on narrating the events in the lives of each of the characters, I appreciated the three-four opening stories set in Cape Coast’s Fanteland (which is the most Achebe part of the book) where warring tribes eager for supremacy against their rivals had been helping the British to capture and enslave their own people. This shows that both British and the black natives were guilty participants in the original sin to start up the transatlantic slave trade but whilst Western countries gained a huge economy on the back of slave labour, what little the natives got paid for it did not benefit their local economies in any substantial way.
I liked how a local Fante myth (superstition?) was used to imagine the story of the two half-sisters who did not know about each other's existence and whose mother at first suffered the fate of the captured slave, beaten and raped, from which a girl was born, but later found happiness with a man who had taken her after her fiery escape. For generations to come, both her daughters and their descendants would share in the fate of their ancestor.
One half-sister is taken by a British officer as his “wife” – wife in inverted commas because:
She’d heard the Englishmen call them “wenches,” not wives. “Wife” was a word reserved for the white women across the Atlantic. “Wench” was something else entirely, a word the soldiers used to keep their hands clean so that they would not get in trouble with their god, a being who himself was made up of three but who allowed men to marry only one.
The other half-sister is captured and sold to the British colonists. She is enchained and put in a dungeon of shit and blood not far from where the other one lives a comfortable if lonely life. One gives birth to a half-caste boy who is eventually educated in Britain; to the other is born a girl who would end up a slave at a Mississippi plantation. One is water, the other is fire.
And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.
George Galloway's heroics in his speech in the US senate (to be found here) is stuff of legend. It catapulted him into a fame he would have not imaginGeorge Galloway's heroics in his speech in the US senate (to be found here) is stuff of legend. It catapulted him into a fame he would have not imagined had serious allegations not been made against him and for which he had not gone to the US Senate (on invitation) to clear his name. And what a performance it was! It is clear that the horrified senators were not expecting the front foot attack Galloway managed to pull.
Call him far left, call him lunatic, call him a lone wolf, or call him the most honest and principled politician recent British politics has produced, (made "controversial" for his unequivocal denunciation and absolute rejection of interventionist and imperialistic policies of a parliament that is essentially imperialistic in its nature, and where, therefore, he is a misfit, an odd ball), call him what you like, but one thing can't be gainsaid: not many people in his position have claim to the facility of words to say what he says and the courage with which to say it - things the millions others had been saying in Britain and the world over.
In that respect, and among his colleagues and contemporaries, he indeed is the only one....more
In 1873, Naseer-ud-Din Shah Qajar, the King of Persia, published an account of his travels in Europe. During his stay in London he wrote:
Today before
In 1873, Naseer-ud-Din Shah Qajar, the King of Persia, published an account of his travels in Europe. During his stay in London he wrote:
Today before seeing the ministers and others, the English fire brigade came and in the garden at the back of our palace went through their exercise. They planted ladders with the supposition that the upper floor was on fire, they mounted these ladders with perfect celerity and agility and brought down people who were burnt, half-burnt or unharmed, some taken up on their shoulders and others let down by ropes made fast round their waists. They have invented a beautiful means of saving men. But the wonder is in this: that on one hand they take such trouble and originate such appliances for the salvation of man from death, where on the other hand, in the armories arsenals and workshops of Woolwich and of Krupp in Germany they contrive fresh engines such as cannons, muskets, projectiles and similar things for the quicker and more multitudinous slaughter of mankind.
Since innumerable Western accounts of the "exotic East" continue to live on in contemporary memory, it is eminently important to resurrect the narratives of the conquered if "decolonisation of the mind" is to be achieved. Here is a survey of literature (travelogues, correspondence, fiction) produced by writers of Muslim background attempting to understand the Imperial behemoth by visiting its home. Since British were nowhere as entrenched as in the Indian subcontinent, most of the older accounts have come from Indian writers such as:
If journalistic chronicle is first draft of history, here's a clarion call of a book that distills more than thirty years of reporting into a veritablIf journalistic chronicle is first draft of history, here's a clarion call of a book that distills more than thirty years of reporting into a veritable micro history of the contemporary Middle East which, despite standing at 1300+ pages, feels too short for the staggering war saga in a state of flux.
This one book taught me more about the forces that shaped - rather misshaped - the Middle East post World War Two than the cacophony of "security experts" keeping publishing industry in business for their shallow analyses designed to hide more than reveal.
Robert Fisk warns in this book about the descent into chaos sitting just round the corner as a consequence of illegal Western wars of the previous decade, whether fought directly or by proxy, and West's propping up of the most illiberal forces in the region.
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