JANUARY TO JUNE 2023
My past is a foreign country
Zeba Talkhani
The title is a variation on the famous quote by L.J. Heartley discussing how each one of us needs to come to terms with our past. And that’s exactly what this memoir does. Zeba Talkhani explores her upbringing and circumstances, and how she grew to be a Muslim Feminist.
Talkhani grew up in Saudi Arabia as part of the Indian diaspora. Although living in an enclave, attending an Indian school and having very little contact with the Saudi population, the norms and laws of that country permeate the daily lives of the diaspora. Talkhani is careful not to blame the host country for the restrictions imposed on her and all other females. She investigates the causes and does not discount the pressure put on girls and women by their own community and their families.
Some would argue that the words ‘feminist’ and ‘Muslim’ are mutually exclusive. Talkhani tackles that issue head-on and uses her own experiences and her own life to prove the opposite. She argues that it is many of the Muslim institutions and Muslim societies that impose the restrictions and blatant misogyny rather than the religion itself.
Talkhani is a practising Muslim who argues strongly for equality and feminism, and lives and writes in line with that.
It is a refreshing read that made me re-evaluate some of my own stances and beliefs. While it is easy to read, it tackles hard issues thoughtfully and comprehensively. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the nexus between Islam and Feminism.
woman at point zero
Nawal El Saadawi
The author Nawal El Saadawi interviewed a woman, Firdaus, hours before she was going to be hanged for killing a pimp.
Firdaus’s story is told in first person, from growing up in a small village to working as a prostitute to falling in love with a man who only uses her pretending to have feelings for her. It describes her harrowing life of abuse by family members and by men.
But Firdaus refuses to settle for a safe life. Safe meaning being allowed to live. She chooses to do what she wants, even if it is not acceptable to or respected by society.
And eventually it leads to a murder. She is not repentant or sorry but is awaiting her execution as a way out of this world.
It can be read as an allegory of the path of women or womanhood, the path we have trodden to free ourselves from the yoke of male tyranny.
I’ve never done any women’s studies, but can’t imagine that this book would not be included in them. Unfortunately, I did a bit of digging around, and found out that her book is being left out of the literary canon because it is written by a non-white, non-western woman; and it’s left out of the postcolonial literature canon because it is not written by a man.
"Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does on earth” is the full title, as the narrator, Birahima, tells us.
The title is a metaphor. There is nothing fair about Birahima’s life, that of his family, friends and the African countries he crisscrosses, Guinea, Liberia and the Ivory Coast.
At the age of ten, Birahima’s mother dies and he goes searching for his aunt, with the help of an uncle, who is equal parts sorcerer, criminal, priest, war time profiteer. Very soon they are arrested by a fighting faction who they swear allegiance to. The uncle becomes the gang’s Muslim Sorcerer (the gang has one for each religion, including animist) while Birahima becomes a child-soldier, used for the worst work, indiscriminate killing, kept happy with drugs and new guns. When the gang leader is killed, they switch sides and swear allegiance to a new leader. This is repeated several times. The main aim of all clashes is to have the most guns to be able to fight, plunder towns and humanitarian convoys. The most coveted is the power over diamond mines, guaranteeing money from the foreign Western masters. Throughout all of it, never giving up hope that they will find the aunt, they witness vile tortures, rapes and massacres.
Birahima uses three dictionaries to help him tell the story. The dictionary entries are somewhat indiscriminate and occasionally explain well-known words. I believe that Kourouma is mocking the reader. Just as Allah seems to be mocking the people who believe in him. This is further supported by providing a very superficial description of some actions while focussing on others in-depth. The same applies to interweaving the history of Western Africa into the narrative. He includes it when it suits him.
I found that approach initially jarring until I read it as a cynical depiction of recent events dividing parts of Africa into countries without any obvious rhyme or reason. Kourouma seems to be asking: why should I be the only one who needs to be lucid and coherent? Despite the seemingly arbitrary choice of scenes, the book is fully realised in its approach to depicting the lunacy of war and power struggles in Western Africa.
Midnight’s borders
Suchitra Vijayan
‘People fight, struggle, survive and sometimes die for the freedom and dignity denied to them. Amid all this, they also live, eat, laugh, cry, play with their children, share meals with friends and fall in love. Above all, they fight for their homes, histories, languages.’
Suchitra Vijayan travelled 9,000 miles along the borders of India with Pakistan, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh over seven years. She recorded stories of the communities living on the edge of two societies, individual ones and histories of the communities, individual encounters and small vignettes and anecdotes of those encounters.
The book is filled with stories of humiliation, torture, rape and death. Vijayan provides a historical and geographical background for each section but does not let it burden the main theme.
The main theme is the misery of the people living in the cracks of two societies, cracks ferociously fought over and protected, but the people who live there are either completely disregarded or, more often, suspected of disloyalty and severely punished for imagined transgressions.
Torture is not only physical. It so emotional: loved ones disappear without a trace, girls are kidnapped and raped, then married to the rapist; others are kept in prison for years (some for 10, 20 years) without a conviction or any due legal process.
In one section, Vijayan provides a record of all people in one region who died in ‘detention.’
Torture is also mental, often in the form of being denied legal status as citizens or residents of India. Some of them are refugees, some simply belong to the ‘wrong’ religion or sect.
She explains how this has its roots in the very haphazard way in which the colonisers partitioned British India but was then infinitesimally worsened by corrupt governments both in Pakistan and India.
But it seems that the current Modi government is reaching previously unknown depths of deprivation.
‘ When the judiciary is the midwife of tyranny, the law becomes the most lethal weapon of a fascist state.’
The book is relentless in depicting all the different, but also frequent and commonplace, indignities (to say the least) the Indian state puts these people through. She can’t help but conclude, every time she visits a new area, in one way or another:
‘When a state treats its citizens as an existential threat then that state ceases to be a democracy.’
It was a very difficult read as the descriptions of terror and misery are seemingly never ending. And every time you think you’ve seen the bottom, the darkest of humanity, there is a new indignity, a new form of torture or humiliation waiting in the next chapter.
It is thanks to Vijayan’s flawless prose, though, that you keep reading and feeling obligated to witness, at least by reading, the never-ending misery that is life for so many.
Vijayan manages to inject a humanity and humility in her descriptions that you can’t help but wonder what reserves she draws on to be able to expose herself to these traumas, yet manages to stay positive.
It only becomes clear towards the end when she talks to a friend in New York, a Muslim Pakistani, with deep roots in India, who is viewed as an outsider by both India and Pakistan.
Both women have small children, and it becomes clear that they don’t have a choice but to be hopeful, for the sake of their children:
‘If not for us, we owe it to our children, to purge this hate that has separated families and histories over seventy years.’
The vegetarian
Han Kang
‘Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.’
A three-part novella like no other I’ve read. On the surface, it is about the physical and mental decline of a woman who, after a recurring dream, turns vegetarian.
Becoming vegetarian is a metaphor for the eternal conflict between the material and the spiritual, the animalistic in us versus the etherial. We see the main protagonist, Yeong-Hye, mostly through the eyes of others who, in turn, symbolise aspects of every human being.
First we see her through the eyes of her husband, a man who is completely of this world, a man of animal instincts and material hunger.
In the second part, we see her through the eyes of her brother-in-law, an artist who is seeking perfection and holy union through artistic expression, treating her not only as a muse but a product of his art (making her and himself into an art project).
The third viewpoint is that of her sister, the only one who sees her as a person, or a reflection of her own desires.
Yeong-Hye seems to be more in touch with her inner desires of being one with vegetation and abhoring the animal in her, to the point of completely disappearing as a person.
Her sister at first doesn’t understand, then envies her and is frightened at the same time as she can fathom the same underlying desires in herself.
To say this is an unusual but brilliant book sounds somewhat trite but I lack adequate words to express how I feel about it.
You may or may not like it but you cannot escape thinking about it.
Side note: I love the cover (and understand the choice) but I keep imagining the two bodies with the flowers on their bodies, intertwined. I hope there is an artist out there who will paint this.
