Wetlands, Charlotte Roche

I'm not sure why I wanted to read Wetlands - I'm a very squeamish and repressed person when it comes down to it, so it might not seem like the most sensible choice of reading matter for my daily commute. The Mail described it as 'profoundly unsettling'(but to be fair the Mail sees most things this way) while the Guardian reviewer wrote 'if you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you.' That's a slightly crude description of what I think is a clever text, but it does give you a good frame of reference if you haven't read it.

The protagonist and anti-hero Helen Memel is completely without the sense of shame with which most women inhabit their bodies. We often talk about people who dare to say what we're all thinking, but Helen takes it further and says and does things that most women don't even dare think, because of the attitudes we have about our bodies, what it is to be female and about cleanliness and purity. Helen has none of these taboos. No bodily function or discharge is strange or unpleasant to her. (I shuddered just writing the word 'discharge' by the way.)

Roche says that in Wetlands, she wanted to 'write about the ugly parts of the human body. The smelly bits...in order to tell that story, I created a heroine that has a totally creative attitude to her body'. To me, it seems like in Helen, Roche has created a character to play with the biblical archetype of Eve. Helen is simultaneously both without sin and full of sin; she breaks every female taboo in the European-Christian tradition. Her lack of shame seems like something from before the Fall - she has the kind of understanding of and appreciation for her body and sexuality that women might have were it not for so many years of society shaping how we all imagine what it is to be female, based on the idea of Eve as the mother of all sin.

There's something distinctly rabble rousing about Wetlands it gets you angry and fired up at how we've become strangers to ourselves. It's seductive even as it repels you. At times you can't believe what Helen is doing/thinking/ saying and you screw up your face in disgust, but you simultaneously wish that you could be even a fraction as at ease with her body as she is.
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A culture of fear | Books | The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/15/eurabia-islamophobia-europe-colonised-muslims - "Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations, argue a number of bestselling new books, acclaimed across the political spectrum. How has such hysteria gone unchallenged? Pankaj Mishra on the 'Eurabia-mongers'."

A number of new books are promoting the idea that Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

This article in the Guardian this weekend got me thinking - I try not to condem books I've never read, but its hard when you hear about something like Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the 'Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It?' which apparently states that Muslims are "conquering Europe's cities, street by street", despit statistics clearly showing that that's far from the truth. Mishra picks out one line in particular of Caldwell's that made me feel deeply, deeply uneasy - about how he thinks that "advanced" cultures (ie the 'West') "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones". It reminded me of the same outrageous bigotry being promoted about 400 or 500 years ago about the Muslim 'infidel' and all the fears and anxities about ethnicity, race and religion that bubbled under the surface of colonization.

Should I read books like those by Caldwell, Mark Steyn or Bruce Bawer, in order to 'know the enemy' and be able to rip them apart with the benefit of first-hand knowledege? On the other hand, I don't want to buy these books and give the people who wrote them my money...

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Rutu Modan 'Exit Wounds' Interview

via youtube.com

I've just finished Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds. I felt that it ended really abruptly - I had that weird feeling where you turn the page for more and experience the shock of the blank space of the inside of the back cover.
As a reader you come into the story long after it began and you leave before it ends - as you might expect from a comic, this is just a slice of the story, except in this case there's no preceding or following editions.
It wasn't a cliffhanger by any means though - the plot is ordinary, but in a good way (if that makes sense!). It narrates one episode from Koby's (the central character) life - and it seems that there will be great mystery and tragedy, with a soldier secretively revealing that she thinks his father may have been killed in a bombing. The truth as it unfolds, is less dramatic, but full of the emotion of a difficult father-son relationship and all the sadness and secrets there are in every family's history.
I also admired the way Modan deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Exit Wounds. The conflict shapes the text, it is never explicitly discussed. In this BBC interview, she says 'It's in the background, but it's my life' and explains that this is 'a very narrow view of life in Israel'. I found an interesting tension between the political and the everyday in this. I think Joe Sacco, one of my favourite graphic novelists and the author of Palestine, says it better than I can, describing Exit Wounds in Drawn and Quarterly as "a profound, richly textured, humane, and unsentimental look at societal malaise and human relationships and that uneasy place where they sometimes intersect."

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Twitter 'should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize'

via brandrepublic.com

According to Mark Pfeifle, a former aide to George W Bush, Twitter should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize (former winners include Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama) for it's recent role during civil unrest in Iran.
And I thought it was dubious when Al Gore won it...

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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.

Something topical...the G20

I spent most of the day not working and watching the protests on Sky and BBC news today, and remembering a time when I would have been there myself, before the Stop the War marches in 2003, when I saw that despite millions of people turning up to protest peacefully about something that was so obviously wrong nothing changed and nothing ever would.

Rowena Mason, blogging for the Telegraph put together a reading list for G20 leaders - books that she thought could have 'helped to prevent this crisis - exposing greed, financial carelessness, complacent over-consumption and others qualities that went towards creating economic busts of the past'.

• Money: a Suicide Note, by Martin Amis
• Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe
• Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach
• American Pscyho, by Brett Easton Ellis (love, love, love Christian Bale in the film of this as it goes)
• The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
• Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
• L'Argent, by Emile Zola

It's not a bad list, as I'm so taken with The White Tiger at the moment I'd throw that in for good measure, maybe JM Coetzee's Disgrace and no such list is complete without 1984 (natch) - but I don't think reading any of these book would make the blindest bit of difference. Books are powerful things, but I don't think they aren't powerful enough to make a real difference anymore - but I'd love someone to contradict me on this!