What I'm reading now...

I've just started reading Suspended Sentences by Mark McWatt, a collection of short stories which a group of sixth-formers in Guyana were 'sentenced' to write as a punishment for trashing a club at the end of their exams.

Not all of the stories were written in the 1960s when the punishment was issued - but after the death of one of the group years later, McWatt reminded them of the punishment, called in the stories and created this collection.
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Mau Mau veterans to sue UK & A Grain of Wheat

I read today that Kenya's Mau Mau veterans are to sue the UK for their treatment during the insurgency in the 1950s - and was instantly reminded of reading Ngugi Wa Thiong’o's A Grain of Wheat at university and all the compelling contextual material that we read alongside the novel.

The case is being brought by five now elderly Mau Mau veterans - their lawyers have documented 40 incidents of torture, and a spokesman has said they are confident of success. Meanwhile the UK government says their claim is invalid because it has been so long since the alleged abuses took place.

I can't tell the story of the Kenyan conflict or Mau Mau here - I don't want to trivialise this shameful chapter in British history or do injustice to those who died or suffered. However, as an illustration of what happened, the Kenya Human Rights Commission relates that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed and 160,000 were detained in concentration camp-like conditions. Noted texts on the subject include Histories of the Hanged: Testimonies from the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya and Britain's" Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya - I haven't read either.

It is against this backdrop that A Grain of Wheat is set. Originally published in 1967, it is centered around Mugo and the other inhabitant of his village, whose live are transformed by the conflict in the run-up to Uhuru or independence. The text weaves together myth and history - Ngugi is an uncompromising and deeply political author and reading the novel for me was like an explosion - I had no idea about this chapter of history and this ambitious and passionate text was such a stirring depiction. When I first read it, I looked at newspaper articles and Mau Mau sings from the period that really enriched the experience for me.

This is not the first time that Kenya's former independence fighters have brought a claim against the British government, and if this new claim is successful, thousands of other people could come forward to build a huge class action suit. I don't think compensation equals justice, but it would be an expression of remorse and a significant admission of culpability.

Should I laugh, or cry?

I'm laughing at myself, but it's sad really.

I'm meant to be an intelligent, enlightened, no-nonsense woman, who sees beyond the myths of femininity constructed by society, but today, I bought two books:

1. A low-fat, low-calorie, low-GI, low-protein, low-sugar cook book
2. Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.

What a perfect encapsulation of the dilemma of 'womanhood'....

I buy one book to help me lose weight because I feel insecure and that I need to be thin to to be worthy, which also puts me in the kitchen and firmly in the traditional female domain. this book will leave me ultimately disappointed, because it will not make me emaciated in all the right places, but abnormally voluptuous in others, more confident & secure, younger, taller, immortal...

But I also buy a second - perhaps to comfort me when the first one doesn't achieve what I was promised it would - a neat slice of accessible feminist theory that tells me that I don't have to be beautiful & that beauty is a conspiracy against women, but ultimately won't make me feel any better about the fact that my face and body don't fit with the accepted ideal of 'beauty', that won't stop me wanting to buy new clothes and make up and half-believing that they will be the end of my insecurity, yet simultaneously hating myself for even half-believing such a pack of bullshit...

Is it laughable, or lamentable? Again, I'm stuck in the middle between laughing at the situation, and being sad, because it's my own life and attitudes that I'm mocking - I can see how ridiculous it is, but I don't know how to do anything about it...

We Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production

I started trying to read We Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production by Charles Leadbetter this weekend - it looks at the culture of mass-participation and sharing that is developing online, & as such is loosely related to what I do for a living and my blog obviously too! I don't often pick up work-related books, but I thought it'd be interesting...I didn't get too far with it but I will persevere. It's also very topical, with so much talk around at the moment about the possibility of some newspapers making their online content available only to paying subscribers, in a climate where we expect just bout everything online to be free....

Aids Sutra: Untold Stores from India. Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth et al

I loved this book, but then it was always going to appeal to me - the list of contributing authors is a 'who's who' of Indian literature, including authors I love, like Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, & William Dalrymple, looking at different aspects of the Aids epidemic in India. Plus, all the proceeds from Aids Sutra go to the charity Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - satisfying my liberal sensibilities and some of my middle class guilt.



I did have some misgivings about reading a book that claimed to be giving readers a picture of the real, untold India - I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea that we can all buy this book, read it, and feel smug and self-satisfied for having done something 'good' and like we understand the reality of living with HIV/Aids in India. I'm not into so-called 'poverty porn' literature and the idea that reading is a path to somehow understanding or knowing another culture - it isn't.



The reason why I enjoyed reading Aids Sutra so much is that it manages something that a lot of poverty porn does not - it doesn't generalise or claim to tell the 'truth'. So many different stories and lives are presented that the reader could never come away thinking that they know all there is to know about the plight of people living with HIV/Aids in India. Because so many stories are told, in so many different voices, the only thing that you can be sure of by the end of the text is the plurality and the undiscerning brutality of the disease.