A Modest Construct | Middle East

Posts tagged `Middle East`

¶ What is the What

What is the What by Dave Eggers: Publisher: McSweeney's; Year: 2006; Pages: 475

My introduction to Dave Eggers was his startling semiautobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a stupendous and rather abstruse bit of metafiction. I must say that I was a little surprised to see Eggers tackle a subject like the Sudanese civil war–not that I doubt his multiculturalism or his sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate, but I was always under the impression that Eggers’ forte was firmly in the school of Euro-American esotery.

It is difficult enough to raise awareness about the conflict in Sudan (Darfur, specifically) today, but even fewer people know that today’s problems actually follow the violent, protracted civil war that raged in the late 80s and early 90s in Sudan. I won’t bore you with the specifics: look it up if you’re curious–better yet, read this book. Eggers’ What is the What is based on the real-life struggles of Valentino Achak Deng, an honest-to-goodness Sudanese refugee who is friends with the author. I should stress, as the author does, that What is the What is fiction: a novel built upon a framework of stories told to Eggers by the real Deng over a period of years. this makes the book straddle an odd sort of state between fiction and nonfiction—Eggers exploits this to weave a tale that is patently not postmodernism or metafiction, but a sort of plaintive mourning for the sorry state of Sudan and the plight of Sudanese refugees in America. The frame narrative—Valentino in present-day Atlanta–acts as a sort of ironic foil for the main character’s flashbacks that detail everything from the burning of his village to the mass exodus of Dinka children, to his time in a refugee camp, to his resettlement in America. I say ironic because Eggers insists on drawing parallels between the sort of injustices a Sudanese refugee faces in an unforgiving American city: he has a job, attends school, and has experienced much generosity, but the book opens with his being held hostage in an apartment while two African Americans loot his belongings. Later, at the hospital, he waits for aid, feeling overlooked and abused. The paralles are subtle, but Eggers is too careful a writer for it to be coincidence.

What I think is most impressive about this book is the difficulty in writing—as a hyperliterate white author—in the voice of a Sudanese refugee over a number of years, and moreover doing it with a fealty to the personality and understanding of the character. Having thought a lot lately about narrative voice and the assumptions of authorial narration, I noticed this in particular, because Eggers’ narration isn’t overly complex (ok, he slips sometimes, but not severely), as it shouldn’t be from the perspective of a young, uneducated Sudanese boy or an older and wiser but still naïe Sudanese man, yet he wields the relatively simple syntax and language that flexes its inherent power to move and affect the reader. It’s an impressive feat, truly.

I’m glad to see issues like this being brought up in “hip” fiction like this. It’s not an authority on the history of the Sudan, but it’s a powerful glimpse into the personal horrors of genocide and the opportunity for regrowth and regeneration.

§1821 · April 16, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, Middle East, reviews

¶ The Lemon Tree

The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan: Publisher: Bloomsbury; Year: 2003; Pages: 304

The Lemon Tree is a brave book: it seeks to distill the essence of almost a century of Palestinian conflict into a 300-page of novelized nonfiction. In this, I think, it succeeds rather admirably, which is perhaps all I need to say about it.

Tolan centers this mix of history and narrative around two characters: Bashir, the son of a displaced Palestinian family, and Dalia, the daughter of Bulgarian Jews who inhabited Bashir’s former house in al-Ramla when the Arabs were driven out under the orders of Yitzhak Rabin. To be quite honest, I could do without this “personal touch,” because at time it approaches the maudlin–the last chapter, particular, is somewhat groan-worthy.

But Tolan’s history is quite good, and I commend him on what appears to me to be a balanced and straightforward look at the long conflict. I won’t summarize it here for you: either you know it already, or you should be reading the book. However, the depth of information, and the scope of Tolan’s history, is wonderful: it begins with Theodor Herzl’s original 19th-century Zionist movement, moves forward into the Balfour Declaration and the relatively peaceful influx of European Jews into Palestine, focuses especially on the post-Holocaust diaspora of European Jews which underscored the apparent necessity of a Jewish state, and then gets into the nitty-gritty of the grievous missteps that have seemed to plague the region ever since.

If nothing else, The Lemon Tree is an excellent primer on the vagaries of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I recommend it to any and all.

§1816 · April 10, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, Middle East, politics, religion, reviews

¶ Naked in Baghdad

Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels: Publisher: Picador; Year: 2003/2004; Pages: 264

Mere days ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associating maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Baghdad from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and its message seems congruent with the cries that we’ve been hearing ever since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. I believe that most important “string”—if I may borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in Naked in Baghdad is the occasional reference to the author’s time in the Soviet Union during its declining years. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20^th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

¶ The Road to Oxiana

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron: Publisher: Oxford University Press; Year: 1982; Pages: 292

In all the years I’ve been reading Bill Bryson, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard or read anyone compare him to Robert Byron, the famed travel writers in the 1930s who died during the war. He takes a similarly anecdotal approach to his writing, and with an acerbity that puts Bryson to shame.

The Road to Oxiana documents British journalist Robert Byron’s trip through the Middle East, hitting all of the major places—Tehran, Beirut, Palestine, &c.. Importantly, Byron is there only because of his fascination with Middle Eastern architecture—the only parts of the book, in fact, where his tone is anything but contemptuous is when he’s covering just such a topic—and in fact has little patience for either the native inhabitants or the European rulers (this book takes place after the post-war division of the region among various European powers: in fact, since a lot of Byron’s interactions are with the foreign inhabitants, the Middle East hardly seems as though it’s Middle Eastern. It’s like a great big block party for the English and French.

What really grabs me about The Road to Oxiana is what a smörgåsbord of styles Byron uses, and his sheer love of rhetorical invention. The book veers from terse journal-style recordkeeping, to long play-style passages which use musical notation to show volume changes, to winding descriptions of edifices where Byron gets downright wondrous.

The book is, essentially, travel writing. Thus, it may appeal to fans of the genre: my love of Bill Bryson might be part of the reason why The Road of Oxiana resonated with me, although Byron is significantly more acerbic than Bryson ever gets, and this constant disparagement of everything and everyone ceases to be amusing and becomes trying very early on. It is no wonder that Byron had very few friends to mourn him when he was killed during WWII. It is only through the efforts of modern travel writers that this book is available at all: Paul Fussell, who provides the introduction to the book, was instrumental in its rerelease in the early 1980s. One can see how the appeal of a book about the Middle East—especially the Middle East circa 1933—would wane somewhat in modern America, but the book really is a jewel of writing, filled with language both hilarious and beautiful.

§1758 · March 18, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Bill Bryson, Book Reviews, books, Middle East, reviews, travel

¶ Darfur Diaries

Darfur Diaries by Jen Marlowe: Publisher: Nation Books; Year: 2006; Pages: 256

Darfur Diaries is actually more famous as a documentary film than as a book. Three twenty-somethings venture into Sudan at the height of the violence there to interview refugees and get a clear, non-governmental picture as to what’s going on there. This book was written after the success of the movie, and while some of the material overlaps, it’s much more of a personal narrative than the movie’s interview format.

The book paints a very different picture than most Westerners get from the news. All of those interviewed unequivocally blame Omar Bashir (the current president of Sudan, who took power in a 1989 coup d’état) for everything, claiming that he cynically uses religion as a wedge in order to drive tribal peoples from the land and populate it with loyal Arabs.

Sudan is in many ways an extremely odd country. It’s one of very few African states that are predominantly Muslim (the rest is tribal animism and perhaps 5% Christianity), and it is so despite having an almost entirely black population. It has over 40 million people, lots of different tribes, and people speak either Arabic or a tribal language. From 1983 until just relatively recently, it was mired in the longest civil war in African history, so it’s no stranger to conflict, but the last violence is a different beast entirely.

One would think, after the disaster than Rwanda became in 1994, that the United States would be quicker to act in what is a clear case of genocide, but there are two problems: China and Russia. The former does a lot of business buying oil from the Sudanese government, and are happy as long as it keeps flowing, regardless of Bashir’s other actions. The latter continues to make money by selling crappy Soviet-era military equipment to the Sudanese government, which then arms the Janjaweed militia and uses planes called Antonovs to bomb Darfurian villages.

It’s a real shame. I’m not sure that this book really offers much that the film can’t, but if you’re the certain who prefers a bit more backstory (the film gives virtually none), the book might be a better choice. On general principle, I think it’s about as close as we’re going to get to an in-depth look at what life is really like among the repressed population of Darfur.

§1750 · March 3, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: Book Reviews, books, Middle East, politics, reviews