Month: December 2006

A Review Of “Beasts of No Nation” by Uzodinma Iweala

by Nathaniel Jonet 

Beasts of No Nation is the first book by Uzodinma Iweala, a 23 year-old Nigerian born in America and raised in Washington, DC, England, and Nigeria. Iweala is a sub-Saharan Upton Sinclair, whose Jungle is not about dead rats and poison in your meat, but about dead families and poisoned dreams in your world. The beauty of this piece is that it takes a story we would glance past as it scrolled along the bottom of CNN news or change the channel when it broke in a short bulletin on the BBC and brings it up close and personal. Far too personal to be safe.

Civil disobedience a must in class

Following Convictions

by Craig Crosby 

(also see Five Who Remade American Culture, by Victoria A. Brownworth)

“The most I had ever done was very conventional actions toward change, like writing letters,” said McGarvey, a senior environmental policy major. “I had not done any kind of social protest. I was a little dubious about what would happen. It was a lot more than I had hoped for. I was very surprised.”

EFFECTING CHANGE

McGarvey’s experience is exactly what Unity College associate professor Kathryn Miles had in mind when she first developed the focus for the fall semester’s American literature class. From Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau through speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the students read the best-known literature of social protest and civil disobedience ever written in this country.

More than just reading, however, the 18 students in Miles’ class had to identify an issue, develop plans to effect change through an act of protest and then carry it out. Some chose well-traveled roads, such as the war in Iraq, while others were moved by the more obscure, such as a Maine law that prohibits owning exotic reptiles.

The project was designed to let the students put into practice the philosophies they read in the books, Miles said. McGarvey, for example, based much of her protest on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which King writes, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust law.”

“Now, more than ever, we can’t have higher education in a high tower,” Miles said. “I really wanted them to do something to make a difference. I feel like we don’t have the luxury of keeping academia abstract. I feel like we have to apply it and do something. I think that, by and large, we as a culture, and this age group, tends to be fairly politically apathetic. Sitting back and complaining is just not an option.”

The Appeal of Star Trek

Where No One’s Gone Since
by John O’Brien 

“But my point is, what is it about Star Trek that generates its appeal?”

There are two main factors, Gerrold says, and they both concern the original series which Boarding the Enterprise focuses on.

“First, we had such a remarkable cast in (William) Shatner and (Leonard) Nimoy and DeForest Kelly. You couldn’t design a better cast, it was an accident of casting. In this case (Star Trek creator) Gene Roddenberry picked three very, very good actors and they fit together so beautifully,” he says.

“And then the second thing is, the context of Star Trek is that here’s a world where everybody is respected and everybody has a place in this world and people are all big enough to handle their problems, and so they focus on problems of a much larger scale and challenges of a much larger scale.”

He says this is a formula the spin-off series have failed to replicate.

“The original series is about ‘let’s boldly go out and seek out new worlds, let’s explore new planets, let’s meet new civilisations’ and so on.

“And they would come up against new people and new planets that would challenge their definition of themselves, it would make them ask the question ‘what does it mean to be a human being? What are we up to here?’ And I think that was part of the appeal of the show: we’re discovering not only what’s out there but what’s inside ourselves, and that the final frontier is really the human soul, not space – space is just where we’re gonna meet the challenge,” Gerrold says.

Juan Santos on Apocalypto

 On Apocalypto

Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it’s “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

Interview with Tom Engelhardt

by Julian Brookes at Mother Jones

This past year the site spawned two books—one, “Mission Unaccomplished”, a collection of interviews Engelhardt did with an assortment of writers (and not only lefties) whose thought he admired, the other, written by former federal prosecutor and Tomdispatch star Elizabeth de la Vega, building a legal case that Bush & co. engaged in a conspiracy to “deceive the American public and Congress into supporting the war.” In his introduction to the collected interviews, “Mission Unaccomplished,” Engelhardt writes, “I saw my mission, modestly accomplished, as connecting some of the “dots” not being connected by our largely demobilized media, while recording as best I could the “mission unaccomplished” moments I felt certain would come,” and this statement stands as a pretty good summary of what Tomdispatch has achieved over these past five years.

Recent Review of Oliver Stone’s Salvador

Review by Howard Dratch: 

What if Oliver Stone directed a movie about the El Salvador war (which some called “civil”) back in the ’80s? What if it was a terrific movie that was lost in the blockbuster successes of some of his other films? What if, more than twenty years later, that same film can still both entertain and describe a time and a war that was important to Latin America and to the United States back 25 years — one that could happen around here again and can be compared to the Iraq conflict?

Continue reading Recent Review of Oliver Stone’s Salvador

Literature Emerging Out of Conflict

Interview with Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi

World Literature Today

July/August 2006 issue

 by Michael Toler

Though it sounds almost obscene to say that the violence tearing Algeria apart in the 1990s could be a source of inspiration or trigger for creative writing, in a certain sense it was. Once again, a generation of great writers would emerge out of conflict to create a powerful, evocative body of literature that alternately served as a primal screen denouncing terror and barbarism, a means of grappling and coming to terms with the situation, and a vehicle for imagining a better world. This was not only the case with literature but with other forms of art as well. For example, it was during this period that raï and other forms of Algerian popular music exploded onto the world stage. Perhaps one of the most productive incubators of this new literary talent was a tiny publishing house (an apartment, really) in Paris called Marsa Éditions and the cultural review it publishes: Algérie Littérature/Action. Two people, with a modest budget and a passionate commitment to the task, marked out a space to which writers and artists flocked to raise their voices in favor of a free and pluralistic Algeria. The efforts quickly attracted positive attention, and the publication has since become a journal of record for Algerian literature and art. Many of the artists they were first to publish have seen their work find its way into major publishing houses, and AL /A’s founders are now working to revitalize the Algerian literary scene back in Algeria. In this interview, the editor and director of the journal, Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi, tell the story in their own words.

Where is the Iraqi War Literature?

Where is the Iraqi War Literature?

By Nazim Muhanna


Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it. Some attribute this absence to the obscurity of the events taking place, while others fear that their expression might be misconstrued as advocating or commemorating the dictator’s bygone era [by writing against the occupation]. So many different reasons all converge into one question: Where is the Iraqi war literature? What is the cause behind this indifference and when will the pens start to actively recount all that is taking place? How is it that the 33-day war in Lebanon acted as a catalyst that inspired artists to express themselves staging plays, setting up exhibitions and publishing books, whereas Iraq has endured three years of seemingly endless suffering and yet has nothing to show for it? Throughout the centuries, writers, artists and intellectuals have played a major role during times of war. Some glorify heroes and leaders, some express their suffering and outrage while others try to make sense of the events taking place.

Crichton and Crowley — Fiction in the Public Arena

by Felicia R. Lee 

In a “Washington Diarist” feature that was to be posted last night on The New Republic’s Web site, tnr.com, and published in the magazine’s Dec. 25 issue, Mr. Crowley says he is the victim of “a literary hit-and-run” because of a 3,700-word article in The New Republic in March.

In that article he accused Mr. Crichton of being “a menacing figure” because he uses his “potboiler prose” to advance causes now dear to Republicans. Mr. Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic and writes primarily about politics.

Witness: the inward testimony

Witness: the inward testimony

by Nadine Gordimer

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was part of the unspeakable horrors of a past war. It is now 2006: the world has come to coexist in, witness the horrors of Twin Towers New York, Madrid bombings, London underground train explosions, the dead in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka…the list does not close.

What place, task, meaning will literature have in witness to disasters without precedence in the manner in which these destroy deliberately and pitilessly; the entire world become the front line of any and every conflict?

On Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Film

Film Gives New Meaning to “Watch What You Eat” 

by Trevor Owens Hornet:

Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is now 100 years old. Published in 1906, the novel upset so many in Washington, that President Roosevelt helped enact the Food and Drugs Act that year.

“Fast Food Nation” stands a chance of creating a similar fervor, but America is a lot bigger than it was in 1906, and corporations much more powerful; the battle is definitely uphill.

Homeland and Partisan Fiction

 This is a condensed version of the longer article here.

 

 

Homeland and Partisan Fiction 

 

Homeland, the second novel of Wales born Canadian Paul William Roberts, has the truncated curious feel of being written for a deadline – the 2006 US elections, perhaps. In any event, Homeland is a governmental novel that transcends the strictures of the genre as often as not – until the very end when government matters obliterate the life of the novel. This defect can be partly corrected for, by returning to the brief fictional preface and reading it as the novel’s conclusion – which it is – chronologically and emotionally, intellectually, morally.          

In this preface/conclusion, and over the course of the novel, Roberts extends the present partially dystopian reality of US power politics into totalitarian apocalypse. He does so by way of a year 2050 confessional memoir from a former high ranking, wealthy US State Department official who resigns in protest half a century earlier – at which point the novel details the horrible subsequent fate of the next half century.              

Homeland should be a novel many are talking about. It has flaws – not every sentence stands up to scrutiny, the ending is weak, some of the musings and theorizings are vague and otherwise suspect – and one seventh of the novel consists of two clunky, however instructive, foreign policy lectures. However, the novel contains pinpoint character profiles of top government officials, and even flawed sentences are weighty and interesting. Primarily published as a journalist and nonfiction author – his 2005 book on the Iraq invasion  (A War Against Truth) was praised by Noam Chomsky – Roberts says he “would really like to be a bit more entertaining” – a goal he has reached in Homeland.

Roberts has noted that the wealthy official policy writer David Derkin Leverett, the narrator of Homeland, is loosely based on US statesman George Kennan, “one of the chief engineers of post-WWII American foreign policy.” And one of the key characters in the book is Caleb Luposki, an official policy planner and scholar, whom Roberts remarks is “quite clearly [Paul] Wolfowitz – the name is only changed because I didn’t want real people doing fictional things, and it does go into the future.” Meanwhile handfuls of other officials who make appearances in the novel are handled even more directly in cameo as historical figures. For instance, here’s Homeland on Vice President George H.W. Bush:

He seemed weak, somewhat effeminate, and lacking in authority . . . Bush appeared content to make small talk and gossip. He seemed to lack some kind of essential component. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at the time. I came to see during the years ahead that it was a conscience.

On President George W. Bush (George the Second):

I doubt if there has ever been a convocation of dunces quite as imbecilic as the administration of George W. Bush…. Bush, son of a Bush, began with the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York, and ended with the collapse of the entire country. By the halfway point of his scarcely believable two terms, there was no endeavor he had embarked upon that had not blown up in stupendous chaos or festered into ignominy. It had nothing to do with him, of course. He was a rat told he was king of the hyenas by the warthogs.
      The predators and bottom-feeders had chosen him because they had so enjoyed the experience of working with Ronald Reagan, whose mind had simply walked off one day and not returned. The younger Bush looked promising because he seemed not to have possessed much of a mind from the very beginning.     

Roberts shows the moral and social bankruptcy of great swaths of the ruling system and the rulers while demonstrating how aesthetic engagement and partisan agency and insight may readily go hand-in-hand. The novel captures the deadly atmosphere of US State authoritarianism and aggression over time by way of bureaucratic insider conversations, by an extended discussion of the influence of ostensible neo-conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, by reviewing instances of State aggression, and by brief capsules of the roles filled by prominent State bureaucrats and leaders. 

Homeland is no Les Misérables, it is mostly a genre novel, but both Homeland and Les Misérables are partisan – a feature with which much of the literary establishment in North America, and elsewhere, is often not comfortable. Didactic literature can be great art. Victor Hugo put politics direct in art and rendered it great, making art with impact out of fiction and public issues, as did Jonathan Swift, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Upton Sinclair. 

Homeland’s publisher, the Canadian Key Porter Books, “says the book has received more advance attention from media and booksellers than any recent Key Porter fiction title.” Still, for a variety of reasons, including the increasingly narrow commercial market noted in Tom Engelhardt’s novel, The Last Days of Publishing, and as with Andre Vltchek’s accomplished geo-political novel Point of No Return, Homeland may never find the wide audience it should. The novel engages some of the foremost issues of our time that are too often slighted in US and Canadian fiction – seen any anti Iraq War novels? Now at last, along with fiction from Mainstay Press (of which I’m cofounder) there is Elizabeth de la Vega’s fictional United States v. George W. Bush et al, from Seven Stories Press. 

This month in England’s major newspaper The Guardian, American poet Adrienne Rich reminds us that great art need not be politically demoralized, complicit, or disengaged. She returns to the famous line from “The Defence of Poetry” (1821), in which Percy Shelley states that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Rich corrects the view that Shelley was speaking of change in some “vague unthreatening way”: “Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time.” In his art “there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority.” His “art bore an integral relationship to the ‘struggle between Revolution and Oppression’.”   

This revolutionary understanding of art is not entirely absent today. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has distributed one million copies of Cervantes’ great novel Don Quixote to promote literacy, is currently distributing one and a half million copies of Les Misérables, some of the first copies going to “workers of the Negra Hipolita Mission,” a social program aimed at helping Venezuelans in situations of extreme poverty.” “Books Liberate” was the theme of the Second Venezuela International Book Fair, held this month in Caracas, at which Hugo spoke, distributed books, and otherwise promoted classic literary works, much of it partisan.

The recent 1,500 page novel by Russian artist, Maxim Kantor, is generating critical praise (“the new Tolstoy”) and record sales (in Moscow the novel sold out in four weeks). Like Homeland, Kantor’s novel, The Drawing Textbook, explores “big questions…about freedom and civilization,” intersperses “political chronicles,” and “pulls no punches with its exposé of corruption and biting portraits of those in power.”

The books in libraries and shops full of fiction ignorant or innocent of the realities and possibilities of power both private and public or that knowingly or not render seductive elite corruption – or that create satisfaction with, or engender resignation to the status quo that crushes so many – have their effect in the world. As do books that transcend such fetters. Homeland is one of the latter.