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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Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre

I picked up Jean Ryhs's Wide Sargasso Sea again reaently (I'm going through a rereading phase at the moment) and I got think about how although each time I've read it, I've thought about Jane Eyre, I've never read them in succession.
So I'm going to do it now. It's going to be an odd experience, and a bit like a weird kind of time travel - Rhys wrote her book long after Bronte, but chronologically, it pre-empts Jane Eyre as it writes back in time to it. Also, like most people, I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an adult, long after I first read Jane Eyre - which my grandmother bought it for me and I loved when I was younger. Rhys's novel was also one of the first texts to bring home the concept of the postcolonial to me - perhaps because it made me completely rethink a text that I thought I knew so well. Why had I never thought about 'the madwoman in the attic' before? It's unsettling to have your literary map upset like that, and I suppose I'm wondering if rereading the two texts in succession will do it again.

Things Fall Apart reading - Fabrica gallery

Last Friday I went to a reading of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart by Rounke Williams at Fabrica in Brighton.

If you haven't read Things Fall Apart I'd definitely recommend it - it's one of the seminal texts in the postcolonial canon (if there can really be said to be such a thing) and an unassuming, but very powerful, look at colonial relations.

Rounke Williams' bio on the Fabrica site says - 'Born of mixed parentage (Nigerian/British), Rounke grew up in Lagos and studied Achebe's novels at school. As her father was one of the newly educated classes that took over after independence in 1960, these books held more than an objective fascination for her. The fact that her mother was from the country of the colonisers, provided extra depth to her reading of these classics. Rounke came to the UK in 1978 to finish her formal education. From 2000, she facilitated the development of resources for Brighton and Hove local authority on cultural diversity for school children.' She is also a writer, and has stories published in African Love Stories: An Anthology and The Map of Me: True Tales of Mixed Heritage Experience. Rounke's passion for Nigerian literature as a whole, not just Achebe, was really energising - she prepared a brilliant reading list (which I'll repeat in brief below) which has provided me with a load more books to look out for and also reminded me of how many authors go out of print or fail to make it to print in this country.

Being fairly familiar with the text already, it was was great to discuss it and share ideas - something I hadn't realised that I'd missed since I finished university last year. However, what I enjoyed most was listening to it being read aloud. Rounke proved to be a great storyteller, which is a rare thing - I think I could have listened to her read the whole novel. Some texts seem to just blossom when you hear them - I always read poetry out loud (or mutter it under my breath, depending on where I am!) and I'm wondering now why I don't do it with novels more often. Someone at the reading also alerted me to a great resource called LibriVox - which provides free audiobooks to download, as read by enthusiastic volunteers. I haven't given it try yet, but I'll report back when I have.

Anyway, here's Rounke's (non-exhaustive) Nigerian literature reading list - I've tried to include relevant links where possible.

• Chris Abani, Masters of the Board
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus & Half of a Yellow Sun
• TM Aluko, One Man, One Wife & One Man, One Matchet
• Malum Amadu, Amadu's Bundle: Fulani tales of Love and Djins
• John Pepper Clark
• Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City & Jagua Nana
• Buchi Emecheta, In the Ditch & Second Class Citizen
• Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, The Potter's Wheel
• Festus Iyayi, Heroes
• Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
• Nkem Nwankwo, My Mercedes is Bigger Than Yours
• Flora Nwapa, Efuru & Idu
• Christopher Okigbo, The Lament of the Masks
• Kole Omotosho, Just Before Dawn
• Wole Soyinka
• Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard & The Village Witch Doctor.

(I'll try and add to and improve these links when I've got a bit more time)

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.

New Indian writers

As you might have noticed, I read quite a lot of Indian literature, so I was interested to see Amit Chaudari discussing new Indian authors in the Guardian.

I'm not start on the issue of nationality and whether it is birth, ethnicity, language or experience that attaches an author to a particular nation (not now anyway) but it would seem from the article that India is continuing to produce (in one way or another) an incredible wealth of talent and creativity.

'Ones to watch' from other Indian author and publishers etc are also listed - and I don't think any name is repeated, and it's certainly added a lot more names to my book list...in particular I'm on the look out for poetry by Anita Roy's recommendation, a poet called Rokkaiah or Salma, from the Tiruchy district of Tamil Nadu, which I visited a few years ago. She dropped out of school in the 9th grade, and married young, but started writing poetry at the age of 13, and, under a pseudonym (Salma) published two collections of poetry against the wishes of her conservative family.

Incidentally, I finished Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva today - I was disappointed by it to be honest. It's well written, but I struggled with the central character so much that I couldn't enjoy it - it wasn't that I disliked her, it was more that I felt nothing for her, which stopped me from really appreciating the book. I might try and explain myself better later....

Derek Walcott vs VS Naipaul

I'd forgotten about this - but I saw Omeros by Derek Walcott sitting (unfinished) on my shelf, and I remembered reading this poetic assault on Naipaul by Walcott

From 'The Mongoose'

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction
Read his last novels, you'll see just
what I mean
A lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than Dickens
The essays have more bite
They scatter chickens like critics, but
each stabbing phrase is poison
Since he has made that snaring style
a prison
The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator's
self-abhorrence

These two have a long-lasting, well-documented feud (I'm on Walcott's side) that I'm not going to recount, but I love the idea of two seventy-something Nobel prize winners engaging in a literary smackdown...this poem is a fantastic example of using your intelligence to fight your fight. Walcott definitely gets his point across...I seem to remember being left speechless by the fact that it ended with the line 'He doesn't like black men but he loves black cunt.' I wish I could find the full version of this poem to post - the rest is just as brilliant, but I'm not going to transcribe it - you can listen to it here http://www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-first-the-fireworks/

Amitav Ghosh - The Calcutta Chromosome

This book is unique. I've never read anything quite like it before and can't really define it. I first encountered it on a postcolonial literature course - I think it was there in part to confound the idea of a neat category called 'the postcolonial'. The Calcutta Chromosome is, at it's heart, a science fiction fantasy historical medical thriller - and there is an element of the postcolonial to it too, for the not-very-subtle reason that its written by an author from India, and part of it is set during the British colonisation of India. It is interesting that the postcolonial discipline almost cannibalises the work of the authors and writing it seeks to promote, by pigeonholing them as 'postcolonial' and denying the diversity and uniqueness of a text like The Calcutta Chromosome.

But I digress. This is a fast paced thriller, using a few shameless Dan Brown-esque tactics, (cliff-hanger chapter endings and moving between different story lines) that leave you excited and dying to read on as the pace picks up. The novel is centered on a mysterious conspiracy theory surrounding malaria - I don't want to give too much away, in case you go on to read it, but I will say that Ghosh has an incredible imagination and is a fantastic storyteller. Chaos theory (in the simplest terms - the idea that small, inconsequential events can have unforeseen and powerful consequences) seems to be a theme in the novel. Tiny events, that you almost ignore as you read, move along the plot and really left me wondering at Ghosh's capacity to think out such an intricate and involved plot. It's worth reading The Calcutta Chromosome, and then reading it again, to really soak up all the detail that Ghosh has put into it.