Nigel Dennis | Cards of Identity / 2002

transformations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nigel Dennis Cards of Identity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955; New York: Vanguard, 1955).  Republished in the US (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002)

 

Someone new has moved into the manor house, and the Paradises—brother and sister who reside in the lodge—argue as to the best course of approaching him in the hopes of obtaining money. Henry goes out for a visit to the house, but when he does not return by the next morning, Miss Paradise is beside herself with worry. Indeed, one might say, each of the characters in this hilarious book is "beside himself”; in a Britain where the old unquestioned identities have been lost, no one, it appears, is certain who they are or even who they might be.

     The Captain, Mrs. Mallet, and Beaufort, now living in the house, are themselves imposters, and in actuality are programmers for the Identity Club, sent out to secure the house and staff it before the Club's annual meeting. In a wink of an eye—and a little psychological reconditioning—the Paradises are ensconced in the house as butler and head cook, and are soon joined by a former doctor and nurse (who are transformed into gardeners) and a confused patient, Mrs. Finch, who in their waiting room displayed her uncertainty of self by answering to Mrs. Chirk.

     Enter the club members themselves, a motley crew who have all taken on completely absurd identities recounted in fictional case histories presented as ideal facts. Three of these histories—that of H. M. Bitterling (who has discovered himself in the role of Co-Warden of the Badgeries), Alexander Shubunkin (who is determined to remain sexually undetermined as man and woman both), and Father Golden Orfe (once a secret agent but is now a brother living in a monastery)—make up the largest part of this fiction, and represent the spirited lunacy of Dennis's attack on national, sexual, and religious values.

     The final downfall of the Club's president, commencing with a play summarizing the novel's confusions of identity (ridiculously attributed to Shakespeare) performed by the servants, and continuing with the appearance of a policeman to check out the happenings, brings this incredible satire to its satisfying end, as the servants—uncovering their old selves—are carted off to jail. Anyone who still believes the fifties to be merely of time of unquestioning conformity might well read this book.

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2002

Mary Beard | The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found / 2008

city of the living

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mary Beard The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008)

 

What I described as a dead city, Mary Beard, in her transformative study of Pompeii, The Fires of Vesuvius, reveals as a living—one might almost raucous—city of anywhere from 30,000 to 64,000 people. Beginning with the day of the eruption, August 25 79 CE, Beard takes us back to its earliest known roots, which may have been Etruscan, through various sieges and political developments which ultimately brought it into the Roman Empire.

      Early in the book Beard warns us of easy assumptions, forcing us to question even what visitors appear to witness on their pilgrimages to the city, reminding us that although the city was destroyed in 79 CE, there had long been warnings and smaller eruptions of the impending volcano, most of the citizens consequently escaping, often with possessions in hand, long before August 25th. To date only around 1,100 bodies have been unearthed, and speculation is that, at most, 2000 people died in the August eruption. So what we see at Pompeii is not precisely a city with everything remaining frozen in time and space. In 62 CE, moreover, the city had been badly damaged in an earthquake, and as late as the Vesuvius eruption a great deal of repair work was still underway.

     Although the world did not discover the wonders of Pompeii until the late 1700s, locals had known of the ruins for hundreds of years, over which time numerous digging looters had raided and destroyed several buildings. The original archeologists, moreover, were in some cases untrained and careless in their handling of artifacts. Even since its slow uncovering, the city has crumbled and faded in the Italian weather and sunlight. Bombings during World War II also damaged the city extensively. Five larger regions of the city remain unexcavated even today. In a sense, accordingly, what one witnesses in the vast array of buildings in Pompeii is a city often very different in appearance and quality from the Pompeii of 79 CE.

     Step by step Beard takes us through the city through a series of lenses: general living, street life, house and home, painting and decoration, making a living, government, pleasure of the body, fun and games, and religion, all in a brilliant recreation of what it meant to be a Pompeiian citizen. The route, however, is not a easy one. Hundreds of standard assumptions are questioned, pet critical theories of scholars are challenged, and conflicting interpretations vetted. If there is one theme that the reader comes away with at the end of reading The Fires of Vesuvius it is that we know less about these subjects than we might presume.

     Fascinating issues such as the filth of the streets (mixes of urine and dung [human and animal], garbage, and water)—which help explain several large stepping stones rising from the pavement— combined with night time dangers of near complete darkness, make for a clear sense of danger for the average citizen. The small size of rooms for the average houseowner, combined with cohabitation of slaves and extended family, further add to a modern reader's sense of discomfort. The noise, night and day, would seem to have been nearly unbearable, not to mention the proliferation of smells. Some of the most beautiful houses had to endure neighbors serving as fulleries (with its smells of hide and urine) or garum (fish oil) manufacturers. Homes and public buildings, inside and out, were apparently marked with graffiti.       

     Further, the myths we have of Roman dining, three to a couch while consuming a vast quantity of fish, fruit, and meats seems to have had little reality in Pompeii. While some houses, such as The House of the Golden Bracelet, show evidence of elegant dining (in this case, surrounding a small pool within a garden) Beard argues that most individuals were forced to eat out and even in wealthier homes eating shared more in common with fast food dining in contemporary American households, food consumed in various places throughout the house.

      It was also a society very much controlled by a few wealthy men. Women had little power (an exception may have been the wealthy benefactor and priestess Eumachia) and wives spent most of their life raising the children and weaving. Men ruled the city, through aediles and duoviri, the latter of which were expected to pay for entertainments (public pantomimes or gladiator bouts) in return for their clout. The wealthy Pompeiian males found sexual pleasure in the bosom of his slaves (both male and female), while the poor sought sexual release in bars, some baths, or in the one likely brothel unearthed. Bathing, Beard explains, was a necessary social activity, but the pollution of the water was recognized to be a dangerous thing that could sometimes lead to infection, gangrene, even death.

     Besides this more sordid information, the author also takes the reader on spellbinding trips through many of the homes, public buildings, and temples, pointing out their beautiful paintings and tiles, the arrangement of rooms, views, and other information, much of which is no longer visible. Beard explains to the lay reader the centrality, yet cultural mix of Roman religion. We begin to comprehend Pompeii's relationship to Rome itself. In short, by the time Beard completes these intellectual spins through the bustling, active city, we feel rather electrified by the exhausting trip. When the author returns us to the cities of the dead, the cemeteries just outside city gates, we realize that Pompeii is something we might never before have imagined. Too bad I had not been able to read Beard's remarkable book before my own stumble through the ruins of that city in 2007.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

Jess Row | Your Face in Mine / 2014

becoming the other

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jess Row Your Face in Mine (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2014)

 

Jess Row’s fiction Your Face in Mine is a work about many things—perhaps far too many things! On one hand, it is the story of growing up and moving away from childhood connections, while still being pulled back into those adolescent roots. It’s the tale of a great dying American city, in this case Baltimore—a city in with my companion Howard and I also have deep roots. It’s a tale of love found, lost, and possibly rediscovered. And, most importantly, Row’s work, as Richard Price describes it, “is a Swiftian fantasy of racial reassignment surgery.”

      Having so many things on his mind—the fiction is also a kind of encyclopedic cataloging of various musical songs, a compilation of international languages, in some instances a menu of world cooking, as well as, at times, a somewhat academic recounting of Chinese poetry—Row also creates characters who are variously attracted to other cultures and people of other races, most of them also having dark secrets which they are attempting to hide. On top of this, the author employs various genres of writing, including satire, the critical essay, quasi-scientific disquisitions, taped interviews, dialogues with the dead, computer chats, travelogues, cultural op-eds, and foreign intrigue. Incredible coincidence is attributed to the Buddhist notion of the inevitability of meeting everyone at least twice in your life. In short, this literary stew ought be a kind of unholy mess, and, at moments in its ambitious reach, it almost plunges into narrative chaos, particularly when we are expected to be engaged with long passages concerning characters (a teenage friend, Alan and the narrator’s wife, Wendy) who are dead even before the work begins. Yet Row has somehow managed to create a work that feels torn from the pages of today’s headlines, which makes this fantasy, in turn, nearly impossible to put down.

     The author certainly could not have imagined when he set out to write Your Face in Mine (a book published in late 2014) that the very problems he details about Baltimore would be magnified and carefully explicated only a few months later in the daily news with the death in police custody of Freddie Gray and the following nights of rioting; nor might he have known that many of the same Baltimore locations that he describes in detail in his fiction would soon flash out across television screens while news commentators mouthed many of the same sentences about the city that his characters express.

     Even more startling, Row could never have entertained the idea that a seemingly black woman working for the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, would be discovered to be of only white ancestry, expressing that she identified as a black woman in much the same way as a central character in Row’s book, Martin Lipkin (later known as Martin Wilkinson) describes his condition: “Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome.” His Johns Hopkins doctor denies that such a condition might even exist.

     Could Row have guessed that his fictional Bangkok doctor, Silpa, who had previously operated on transgender individuals, might be a symbolic topic of national discussion after the less radical transformation of super-athlete Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn? Might Wilkinson’s gay father been saved from his death by the marriage this year made legally possible for all gays and lesbians? If nothing else, one has to admit that Row had his finger on the pulse of issues of identity that would surface in the American consciousness in 2015.

        I won’t even begin to attempt to relate the fiction’s various intertwined threads of plot. Let us just state that, years after growing up in Baltimore, and after living in New England, China, and elsewhere, the work’s narrator Kelly Thorndike returns to work in his home town of Baltimore at a dying radio station. Soon after he accidentally (?) reencounters a former school mate, Martin, with whom he had once played in an amateur band. The shocking thing about their encounter is that Martin, once a white man, is now thoroughly black, a man well ensconced in city politics with a beautiful doctor wife (also black), lovely children, and an obviously wealthy lifestyle.

      Martin, it appears, is determined to now reveal to the world that he has undergone months of surgery, dialect study, and cultural assimilation to attain his new identity, and chooses his former high school friend Kelly to write up the narrative. Gradually, Kelly and the reader together discover that behind Martin’s personal messianic-like zeal for the possibilities of a new life, his real goal is not only to offer a service to wealthy customers throughout the world that would allow them their personal decisions regarding race, but to make millions of dollars in the process. Accordingly, although we may first hope that Martin sees his own transformation as a kind of moral position which might ultimately change everyone’s notion about race by offering nearly anyone who might afford it the possibility of racial transformation, we soon grow to perceive that behind any socially beneficial pretensions, he is simply a voracious entrepreneur.

     Gradually Kelly discovers that his “friend” not only has no moral compunctions, but is subtly bribing him through Martin’s knowledge that on the day their mutual friend, Alan, overdosed with drugs, that Kelly himself was with his friend, and, therefore, might be subject to possible imprisonment as an accessory to the death. Shockingly, even when Kelly discovers that he himself may be part of a larger plot in which Martin will encourage the Chinese-speaking Kelly’s own transformation into a Chinese exemplar of Dr. Silpa’s surgical skills, he, nonetheless, maintains his relationship with the now clearly evil entrepreneur, the novel ending with Kelly’s joyful entry into a new world of his own choosing.

     In other words, Row clearly realizes the moral and ethical arguments that are sure to be raised (and in Dozeal’s case already have been raised), but suggests that when desire is involved, even these barriers will ultimately be overcome. There is, accordingly, a kind of strange cynicism in this work, mixed with an even odder sense of hope and possibility. And although some of the issues Row raises seem nearly absurd, they also appear to be almost prophetic. One can surely see a time, in a world in which gender has already become a choice, and in which numerous countries have come to accept same-sex marriage and other gay and lesbian equalities, that the final issue, perhaps, will be race, and that, ultimately, the possibility of transformation may be a reality.

     How will our culture react to that? And with that possibility, what might our culture be like? Might it even break down the barriers more thoroughly than interracial marriage already has? In Row’s fiction, wherein nearly all of the characters have already been involved in interracial marriage, the next step, perhaps, can only be their attempt to become that “other” they have already embraced.

     I find Row’s work funny at times, outrageous at moments, troubling, even disgusting, but yet—utterly fascinating and oddly appealing. What might it mean to us if race were a choice instead of simply a fact of birth? While Row’s work might remind one of other dystopian works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, and Len Jenkin’s New Jerusalem, Your Face in Mine ends, instead, on an entirely positive note, with the reconfigured Kelly, now a Chinese man, arriving on Chinese soil.

 

                      You’re here now, right? You’re home.

                      I’m home.   

 

Even the idea of home, we are reminded in this brave new world, is a human construct.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2015

Reprinted from Rain Taxi [on-line edition] (November 2015)

Gustaw Herling | The Noonday Cemetery / 2003

against common sense

by Douglas Messerli

Gustaw Herling The Noonday Cemetery, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (New York: New Directions, 2003)

 

The collection of tales, The Noonday Cemetery, selected from Polish writer Gustaw Herling’s Collected Stories (Opowiadania zebrine) of 1999, presents us with situations not unlike some of my own personal memories in these cultural memoirs. Working for years in Italy as a journalist, Herling mixes all his tales with history and current events—or perhaps I might more correctly say, he interfuses his historical readings, his personal memories, and what most people describe as fiction. Whether we can truly believe in the reality of his stories or not, the author would have the reader accept them as truth, to make a creative leap of faith. As he expresses the issue in one of the best “tales” of this volume, “The Silver Coffer”:

                    For a long time now I have taken every opportunity

                    to speak out against the opposition of strangeness and

                    naturalness (or verisimilitude). Whoever closely

                    observes reality, whoever trains themselves to notice

                    the apparent “strangeness” of many of its manifestations,

                    knows that we allow ourselves to be limited and bound in our

                    way of looking at “natural” or “plausible” events, seeking in them

                    exclusively that which appears to our sense of realistic level-

                    headedness. There is no division into “strange” and “natural”

                    things. There is—if one absolutely insists—a division into

                    “common” and “uncommon” things, things that are “ordinary”

                    and those that are “difficult to grasp.”

 

Perhaps what I have been describing throughout these memoirs as incidents of strange coincidence—incidents which may lead the reader to question my truthfulness, but in fact represent truth as I know it—may be related to the marvelous uncommonness mixed with the common of Herling’s stories. In short, these works often read more like realistically-portrayed nightmares than what we usually describe as fiction.

     Although Herling also argues against strictly psychological interpretations of experience as against the spiritual or miraculous, we quickly recognize in these short works that he is nearly fixated upon death. Almost every tale in this volume concerns an inexplicably violent ending. The title story relates the tale of a quiet caretaker of an isolated cemetery of Albino—that is until during World War II, when it becomes a battleground of and ultimate resting place for a German officer, Manfred Weinert. The caretaker, Fasano, treats the officer’s grave almost as a shrine until one day the Nazi’s wife appears to grieve her husband. Without comprehending one another’s languages, the officer’s wife, Inge, moves in with Fasano. Every day they appear together at the cemetery until one day in August 1949, when they do not show up. Several days later their corpses are found in the closed-up house, with a revolver lying in a “dried pool of blood in the wide space between the bodies.” The “story” concerns the author’s attempt—despite the near-absolute silence of the nearby villagers—to unravel the suicide-murder. Who killed whom, and why? There are no answers to this tragedy, only speculations, and the more one pursues the “truth,” the more difficult it is to comprehend.

     “A Hot Breath from the Desert” concerns another murder. This time involving a loving British couple, Derek and Violet Porter, who begin work on an archeological dig, but later move into a small house in Agropoli, where they paint and sculpt. During World War II they are forced to retreat to England, but in the mid-1950s they return to Agropoli. But now Violet is pale and gaunt, distracted in her behavior, later described as a virulent form of amnesia. By 1958 Violet has completely withdrawn. Her husband gently cares for her until one night, watching her sleep with a smile upon her lips, Derek becomes violently angry and smothers her with his pillow. Once again, there are no easy answers as to what has made the husband snap, what has turned him from a loving caretaker to a murderer. Herling fills his story with details from the doctors, police reports, and the later trial, without coming upon a definitive answer.

      Truth is, in fact, a major issue in Herling’s work. What is history or even myth? Erudite, a reader of great literature (his tales are peppered with mentions of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Hoffman, Bulgakov, and others), the author perceives that any definitive solution to the various events and crimes he recounts is clearly impossible. “The Eyetooth of Barabbas” concerns the holy relics of Price Sicard buried in a Cathedral of Benevento, bombed and destroyed in 1943. Of particular interest to the narrator is the “eyetooth” of the criminal released in exchange for Christ. Recounting the Barabbas tales of Giovanni Papini and Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist, Herling reconsiders the role of Barabbas in the crucifixion story. Was Barabbas truly “saved,” ultimately so absorbed in knowing that Christ “died in his place” that he is transformed into a believer, or is he to be demonized, to be eternally represented as a sinful outcast for his passive role in history. What the author comprehends, leading him on his impossible search, is that if such a tooth were to be discovered it might explain Barabbas’s metaphysical position; for in the beliefs of Prince Sicard’s day, a large eyetooth “was the identifying mark of the Devil, just as today it is the insignia of a Vampire.” As in most of his other tales, Herling does not find an answer to his question: the Germans have stolen the relic.

     “The Height of Summer” is a horrifyingly eerie story concerning the rise in suicides throughout Rome during the Ferragosto, at the height of summer, August 15th. In particular, the tale relates the deaths of nine Romans on the night of August 15th to the 16th in 1995. Although a committee investigating these deaths uncovers numerous details about each of the victims, there is no conclusion to be made—simply the reiteration through the author’s own experience that there is something mysteriously terrifying about such nights.

     “Ashes” concerns an affluent family with whom the author stays on the island of Panarea, one of the Aeolian Islands, the Seven Pearls. Through a series of unfortunate situations, the happy Bernardi couple’s daughter, and later Loris’s wife die, the beautiful home in Panarea is left to ruin, and like Poe’s House of Usher, crumbles away into the ocean during a particularly violent storm, leaving nothing but the ashes of a once happy family.

     “The Notebook of William Moulding, Pensioner” concerns a discovered manuscript of a retired British Chief Hangman—the last of his species—and the uncanny events that force him to remember the faces of his victims whom he previously discounted as human beings. Moulding, as an old man, is destroyed by young boys in a meaninglessly vicious attack.

     “The Silver Coffer” is a tale of a beautiful coffer cherished by the narrator-owner only to see it blacken in a few days’ time, forcing him to discover a secret message within its walls, revealing, through its fragments, the terrible murder by Abas Petras—head of a religious order at the time of his death—of his sister, poet Teresa Demagno, in the 16th century.

     Perhaps my favorite of Herling’s tales is the long, most definitely “uncommon” story of the surgeon Don Fausto, who, fascinated with the Neopolitan belief in the iettatura, the evil eye, discovers that he is relative to one of the most noted of the possessed, Don Francesco Ildes Brandes, a converted Jew tortured by the Spanish Inquisition before he turned his eye upon the judges, all of whom were destroyed. Don Fausto, himself, is in turn tortured and ultimately killed by the portrait of Don Ildebrando he keeps in his castle near the small village of Montenero, a village which itself is soon after destroyed in a horrible storm of lightning and thunder. Herling’s telling of this terrible story has all the markings of Poe and Hawthorne as he attests to its utter strangeness:

 

                  What I will say next will lead many of my readers to laugh and shrug their

                  shoulders. Yet I will say it anyway, because the present age has been

                  excessive in inculcating in us the cult of “common sense.” We observe 

                  inexplicable phenomena out of the corner of our eye and pretend that

                  we have not seen them; we read in bolder authors about ghosts of the

                  dead, and regard them as phantasms, productions of sick imagination—

                  anything so as not to jeopardize our “common sense” or to be propelled

                  into the ambit of another dimension, beyond the threshold of “verifiable,

                  tangible reality.” We pass through life with one eye all too sharp, yet the

                  other blind, as if covered with a film. Is it enough just to see? No, it is

                  not enough.

 

     The joy of reading these thirteen tales is that Herling returns us to a world where mystery and revelation, terror and belief, evil and good have been restored, common sense replaced by an open wonderment of life.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2003

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2008). 

Martin Nakell | Settlement / 2007

everything but life itself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Nakell Settlement (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2007)

The settlement of Martin Nakell’s 2007 novel  is, at the moment the first word of this fiction is written—(“So.")—already an abandoned outpost, an empty city that once served as a resettlement camp for the citizens of an unnamed country whose villages have been destroyed—most of their friends and relatives slaughtered—by enemy troops or, perhaps, as the narrator of this apocalyptic work suspects, rogue combatants from the country itself, possibly even soldiers inexplicably sent by the government to kill its own citizens.  As in the numerous brutal battles between native Serb and Albanian citizens in Kosovo, the mass murder of warring tribes in Darfur, and the daily bombings of Sunni and Shiite citizens in Iraq, there is no logic to the struggles of this unnamed country, just similar circumstances: a large population of suffering refugees with no place left to go.

     The narrator of this tale, the former Governor of the Emergency Settlement for the Western Quadrant, has obediently taken up his post at the resettlement community only to be himself  betrayed by his government; his wife and daughter, he is told, have been put under “protection”—in reality, he quickly perceives, imprisoned; at the time he writes this story he has heard of their deaths, his daughter having committed suicide.

      Much of Nakell’s narrative—his third major work of fiction to date—recounts the Governor’s friendships with various figures who reach the outpost, including Tassiossu, Lucinda, Meleq, Grammatico, Klaus, Guillemette, Abanno, Rivka, and, in particular, Alina, a woman with whom he has fallen in love. The actions of these figures provide Nakell’s text with a series of rich and profound tales told in a manner somewhat similar to that of the great American fabulists John Hawkes and Robert Steiner.

     Tassiossu is a student of art, particularly of the art of the Madonna on which he has become a quasi-authority, lecturing to his friends and the settlement citizens about the various Madonna’s painted throughout history and how their depiction relates to the period in which they were created.

     Meleq is a writer who has ceased to write, quoting only from one page of his previous manuscript—a page, he is convinced, that, when he has completely comprehended it, will restore his desire to write again.

     Lucinda presents violin concerts that may remind one of pieces by John Cage and other contemporary composers in which one or two plucks of the strings reverberate in a silence wherein listeners are forced to perceive the “music” in the context of the sounds of the surrounding world.

     Grammatico, Klaus, and Guillemette constitute the Gruppo delle Macchine Terribli, a group of performers who seem straight out of a Marinetti manifesto, creating magnificent machines that perform, somewhat like gigantic puppets, in vast expanses of air and earth.

     Abanno, a man with endless energy, helps plan and operate various activities in the settlement to save its citizens—as the government becomes more and more disinterested in their survival—from certain death, helping to create and maintain a water-producing facility.

    Alina tells the narrator of the soldiers who came to kill her and her family and how she was saved by one young soldier (a story that changes in each of its various tellings); by her allowing the boy to kiss her, by her seducing the young man, or willingly abandoning herself to lust and rape. Each time the tale is told, the narrator caresses Alina’s body as if to assimilate her new and deeper revelations.

     When the citizens of the settlement abandon it in hopes of survival elsewhere, the remaining narrator attempts to describe his own daily activities, from his frugal culinary attempts to his studies of various subjects, including the natural world around him, and his daily journal entries, which we are now apparently reading.

      All this activity, past and present, is overwhelmed in Nakell’s story by his hero’s isolation and his seemingly endless speculations on why he continues to write down the story of a world that no longer exists. I created just such a figure in my own Letters from Hanusse, a man writing a series of letters to a woman who possibly no longer exists and will certainly never receive them; so I am sympathetic with the dilemma with which Nakell’s narrator is faced. Yet upon my first reading I found this narrator’s repetition of these concerns somewhat overbearing as time and again he ponders the question only to discover new reasons for his act. Gradually, however, I came to perceive this less as a repeated trope than as the actual focus of the novel. And in this sense, Settlement develops into a work less about an exotic world, a presentation of a strange amalgam of human types, than a tale about art itself. By work’s end, we hardly wonder any more if the marvelous character types with which we have been entertained are “real” or figments of the narrator’s imagination. Mimesis becomes unimportant. What increasingly matters is why the narrator even bothers to write. What leads human beings to pick up pen or pencil, to type or key in, day after day, a story or net of stories when we all know that even if the work finds a small audience it will eventually come to nothing, will have no audience, that the earth itself will some day collapse or explode! What lies behind our mania not just to write, but to create!

      Is Alina lying each time she tells the story of her young soldier/lover and her brush with death? Is Meleq deluded in his belief that one page of his work will reveal why he should write? Are the members of the Gruppo delle Macchine Terribli mad in their grandly conceived and theatrical contrivances? Is Lucinda a fraud in her demand that the listener discover the world in the two or three notes issuing from her instrument? The settlement’s former Governor must himself ask these questions day after day as he sits alone in what seems to be a world of his own making. Neither author nor narrator can answer the question why even the ancient caveman created the hand-painting in a cave near the settlement; was it “an object of beauty? awe? tragedy? comedy? ecstasy? fate?”  “…Did he say to himself: Look what you’ve done.” When does the act of creating become an object of art?

     There is, happily, no one answer—art is many things, perhaps everything but life itself. And so our artist is inevitably left in a world emptied of everything and everyone save what he can (re)create.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

David Van Reybrouck | Congo: The Epic History of a People / 2014

the dead are not in the ground

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Van Reybrouck Congo: The Epic History of a People (2010), trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (New York: Ecco,  2014) 

It wasn’t until page 500 of David Van Reybrouck’s astonishingly moving history, Congo: The Epic History of a People, that I finally broke down in tears. Not that there weren’t dozens of emotional passages previously in this very personal book, but after having traveled through pages and pages recounting the lies and violence the Congo natives had suffered from nearly every major (and many minor) countries as well as from their own kind; after years of having suffered internal wars, sometimes more related to the tribal battles of the hutus and tutsis of nearby Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda than to issues directly linked with their fellow countrymen; after finally having been able to free themselves from the madness of the long-time despot Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga; and, finally, for only the second time in the more than century-old history recounted in the pages in this book, having obtained the opportunity to vote, the fact that their major choices were the mostly brutal former rebels Joseph Kabila, Jean-Pierre Bemba (whose soldiers had practiced cannibalism in rebel attacks), Azarias Ruberwa, Antoine Gizenga (who had once served as deputy prime minister under Patrice Lumumba) and even Mobutu’s son Nzanga Mobutu, overwhelmed me. Despite those seemingly abysmal choices, however, nearly everyone who could in that far-flung country—larger at 900,000 square miles than any European country except Russia, and the 11th largest country in the world—came together in the hundreds of outlaying polling places to vote without incident. In isolated jungle areas, Van Reybrouck reports, the votes were counted by “candlelight in a hut, often after [the poll-keepers] having eaten nothing all day.” When the lights failed, the fatigued men and women counters fell to sleep, “their arms around a sealed ballot box, as though it were a shrine or a child,” to protect the ballots. Even the author seemed astounded by the facts!

    The choice, ultimately, was Kabila—in part because he bought the votes of the Gizenga and Mobutu parties by promising the candidates important government posts—despite the fact that the capital city of Kinahasa had voted for Bemba. The important thing, in hindsight, seems to have been less a matter of who was chosen than the fact that the elections occurred with basic calm and lack of fraud. “Where things really going to change?” the author himself poses the question to us. How could they, we perceive, in country in which its citizens were never given a chance to learn about or even experience any truly democratic government. For more than a century the generations of intelligent Congolese had been isolated, imprisoned, enslaved, maimed, tortured, and killed always in the name of others’ definition of progress, of others’ determination of what was best for the people. Even, in those brief moments, when the citizens of this vast land were tolerated, cared for, educated, nursed, and healed, the values imbued were always imported from somewhere else.*

     Van Reybrouck quotes the cleric-activist Abbé José Mpundu in connection with his question about hope: “From 1990 to 1995 I fought for elections that would not be like the charade we got this time. It was a parody, orchestrated by the international politico-financial Mafia! I wanted to vote for Tshisekedi, but he had relegated himself to the sidelines, so I just voted for Bemba. They let us play a bit part. It was one big, worthless Mafia gambit. For a lot of money, the international community bought itself the president it preferred; we would have been better off passing the hat around to finance the elections and building our own ballot boxes. At least then they would have been our own” (p. 503). 

     Even if Kabila had been a brilliant leader, a financial wizard, and a liberal political voice—none of which he was—he would have found it nearly impossible to live up to the dreams of his fellow countrymen or even his own dreams for his country which he parroted in his acceptance speech: “There will be punctuality, and discipline. I will take up matters again with determination and regain 100 percent control of the situation.” Without a real military, without a stable and educated community to man governmental positions, and, most importantly, without any money—in debt, in fact, for billions of dollars from loans siphoned off into Mobutu’s own pockets and which the IMF (International Monetary Fund) still refused to forgive—how could even the most enlightened of leaders have been able to give its people the things they had been shown by the formerly ruling Whites leaders that had for so long refused them? Just as Joseph Kasavubu had turned to Belgium, as Lumumba had reached out to the United Nations and, when that failed, to the Soviet Union, as Mobutu had turned to the United States, so Kabila reached out to China for help. And like all of the leaders before him, once again sold out, so many argue, the rich resources of the African nation—its ivory, coffee and other foodstuffs, palm oil, copper, diamonds, cold, uranium, and coltan—for practically nothing in return: a few promised highways, a railroad, a few new buildings. It’s enough to make even a cold cynic cry.

     If history alone reveals the epic battles that time and again the Congolese citizens lost—and Van Reybrouck’s Congo details this history with an almost encyclopedic thrust (as his 22 small-print listings of source materials and another 22 pages of references representing a virtual library of Congo materials reveals)—the author gives us something that no other work about the Congo, to my knowledge, has done, a feat perhaps impossible to repeat: Van Reybrouck tells his story not only from the eyes of a sympathetic ex-conqueror (he is, after all a Belgian himself, his own father having been one of the ruling class who helped to create the original railroad lines), but through numerous astute and intelligent voices of the Congo citizens and storytellers from the earliest days of King Leopold’s mad creation (the King not only haphazardly created the borders of the country, but was originally the sole owner and emperor) to the book’s last reports of young Congolese entrepreneurial efforts in China, but from dozens and dozens of interviews with the individuals directly involved with these historical events. Leave it to Van Reybrouck not only to seek out a person whose own history begins with the Belgian involvement in redefining of the area now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, but to actually discover such a being in the figure of Étienne Nkiasi, born sometime around 1882, three years before Leopold created the country we now call Congo, who lived until the book was finally published in 2010 to the age of 128—and this in a country where the life-expectancy is currently a little less than 56 years of age. The tales this elder relates make the history of the early Congo—including his first encounter with the early missionaries, among them the American Baptist active from 1893 on, Mister Ben (Alexander L. Bain), and, perhaps, British American Methodist Bishop, William Taylor, and who personally knew Simon Kimbangu, the founder of one of the largest of African religions, Kimbanguism—come eerily alive, bringing early Congo history a living voice. Along with figures who wrote books, such as Disai Makulo, who, after being captured and taken prisoner by slave traders, actually met up with Henry Morton Stanley joining up with Stanley’s entourage before being left with Stanley’s friend Anthony Swinburne in the new station Stanley had created in Kinshasa, where the boy learned how to read and write.  

    But Van Reybrouck does not merely employ the memories and texts of these ancient figures living and dead, but interviews hundreds of others, including politicians, musicians, both male and female aid workers, religious figures and spiritualists, students, soccer players, boy soldiers and even local terrorists who help create a skein of incidents that lend his work a startling sense of coincidence that, in turn, helps the reader to feel as if he or she were really living at the heart of this vast and somewhat mysterious world—convincing us that “the dead are not in the ground,” as Nkaisi’s son quotes Senegalese poet Birago Diop.

      By book’s end, in fact, if we still feel in awe of the enormous diversity we also come away with an intense sense of knowledge, as we gradually discover that despite Belgium being overrun in World I, for example, the Force Publique, the Black internal police force of Congo, suddenly transformed into soldiers, won the War in Africa, conquering even German held territories such as Rwanda and Burandi. In World War II Congo troops, trained in Liberia and Ghana, helped as soldiers and doctors to liberate Eritrea and Ethiopia and worked in makeshift hospitals as far away as India and Burma.

      Amazing facts begin to pile up. Without Congo uranium the US would not have been able to drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan: fearing capture of their mines, Belgian mine owners had dug up their uranium deposits and shipped them, unknown to American authorities, to a warehouse in Brooklyn, so that when the Americans began the Manhattan Project they suddenly discovered what they most needed at their own back door. A large part of the Cold War was fought out by the US and the Soviet Union over the politics and geologically created products of Congo.

     How many of us recall that noted statesman, United Nations head Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on his way to meet with Moïse Tshombe in an attempt settle to the violence in Congo? Sports fans surely remember the historical boxing battle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the “rumble in the jungle,” played out in the grand stadium in Kinhasha; Van Reybrouck interviews a Congo news photographer, Zizi Kabongo, to get a new perspective on that memorable event. 

     Just this past Sunday (October 7, 2014) The New York Times’ Science Times reminded us that the dread Ebola virus was first uncovered by Dr. Peter Piot, a Belgium virologist, in Zaire (Mobutu’s self-declared moniker for the country he ruled).

     Who could have known that the strange black metallic ore named coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are extracted), plentiful in Congo, would be necessary to produce electronic products such as cell phones and computer chips? If to Americans the history of Congo seems somewhat shadowy, gradually we discover how interlinked the country has been with our own and world history.

     As I was reading the last chapter of this intense literary work, I suddenly overhead an advertisement in the middle of my morning CNN report, prodding Americans to invest in Congo, a country, so the pitchman declared, with a large rising middle class, a land of the future; the map of Congo which I had been surveying every night during my readings was suddenly cast as an image upon my television set with an inset of a beautiful new apartment complex. I was startled by this coincidence (or was it a coincidence, even if it was the first time I had ever heard this ad, and I’ve not heard it since?). I doubt whether things have changed that radically in the four years since Van Reybrouck completed his book, but, who knows, perhaps the Chinese have come through with some of their promised commitments to the long-abused country by building some colorful new housing units.

     Van Reybrouck has convinced me that, although by mid-century Kinhasha will be a city larger than New York and Los Angeles combined, it is not a beautiful place, that despite the shining skyscrapers just across the river in Congo-Brazzaville, Kinhasha is without color, a land, as the author puts it, in a world of “dream and shadow.”  For me that ad simply stood out as yet another pitch, like the thousands of previous worldwide attempts, to suck up the resources of this vitally alive world still in the dark about its own future.

     Congo, it turns out, is a kind of “heart” of “darkness,” an excitingly beating world in which its inhabitants are still struggling just for the necessities, let alone the riches they so palpably desire. It says something about Van Reybrouck’s study that he mentions Conrad’s great novel only once, and the author just another time in passing. You don’t need fiction to show just how dark that great nation’s history has truly been.

      Yet, somehow, despite it all, the citizens of this hurt land keep singing and dancing, reaching out to another for help and to help, laughing and endlessly talking, dreaming and imagining—hoping somehow through it all that the land they inhabit might someday reward them for their enduring attachments to it. That Congo’s author can convey all this reveals he is not just an historian but a significant ethnographer who deeply cares about the people whose history is he narrating.

  

*For just one example, the author points to the moment when the Belgian country took over the vast territory from their King, Leopold. Well intentioned, they immediately imposed a travel ban on numerous isolated Congo natives in order to prevent the spread of numerous diseases, while simultaneously studying the native traditions (which the Bureau International d’Ethnographie published in compendious volumes) and teaching those values back to children attending the French Catholic schools. The result was that the Belgians helped solidify tribal differences and hegemonic values that, in reality, had never completely existed in pre-European days. Often dependent on commerce and trade for various different elements of their diets and daily survival, the Congo tribes had for centuries before been highly interlinked and intermixed. The results of such proselytizing ultimately revealed themselves in some of the horrific tribal battles (including those of Rwanda, which fell into Belgian hands indirectly after World War I) of the later 20th century.  

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi IXX (Winter 2014).

A prelude to this review, I believe, is necessary, given the circumstances. 

On the afternoon of June 3, 2010, the group of publishers with whom I was exploring Flemish literature were taken by bus to the small, but lovely town of Mechlin, where at the bookshop De Zondvloed we were fed wine, cheeses, sliced meats, and good bread. The bookstore was a large, two-storied place, with a reading occurring even as we dined, in another part of the building. One cannot imagine such a well-stocked busy bookstore in small town America, but Mechlin is midway between Antwerp and Brussels, and perhaps can depend on travelers scurrying between the two cities. It was certainly a perfect stop along our route.

     We left Mechlin around 3:00 p.m. and continued to Brussels, where at the beautiful Grand Place we were given about an hour to simply tour alone or together. I chose the former, and quickly walked through the tourist-filled streets near the great square, indulging in some famed Belgium fries along the way, after clearly disappointing the chef by refusing any of the dozens of sauces provided in which to dip them. I've never liked fries with sauces, but in Belgium it is almost a requirement, and clearly, etiquette demands it.

     After finishing as many of the fries as I could I sought out a bar, in this case a gay one, to get a drink and wash my hands. Although I personally liked all of the publishers, the fact that we had been compelled to be with each other for so many days, and that I was now completely surrounded by tourists who milled around the streets in large, laterally sliding gangs, made me seek out a place of silence where I might catch up on my daily diary and even, possibly, write. A gay bar at 3:30 in the afternoon would be as still as a tomb, I thought to myself. And, yes, it was quiet, perfectly delightful with only the bartender who might speak.

     When I rejoined the group at a large restaurant nearby for coffee, Brussels waffles, and ice-cream, they asked me where I had been, and I told them. Some were confounded. How did you find a gay-bar? "Well," I paused, "it was called L'homo erectus! But I would have sniffed it out even if it had had a less ridiculous moniker. Gays know how to do that by habit." In truth, I hadn't been to a gay bar in decades and probably would never have discovered an appropriate place for such delicious silence in most cities, where gays and straights now drink together in what had formerly been exclusionary places.

     Our guest at this high-caloric gala was the author David Van Reybrouck, whose Congo. Een geschiedenis (Congo: A History) some of us had perused at our publisher meetings a few days before. It was a hefty-looking, beautifully produced tome that had received raves in the Flemish press. David was a quite-charming and brilliant man, a philosopher and archeologist by training. He'd gone to the Congo to research this book, living there for a long period of time and befriending an ancient, but clearly entertaining man who had lived there as a child under Belgium rule. Van Reybrouck's history, beginning from a time before Stanley's arrival, brought his readers up-to-date with the country's current economic crises.

     Van Reybrouck read a chapter, and discussed the book as a whole. But immediately after, I interrupted. "You know, David, this is clearly a marvelously brilliant work, but—and I say this with some hesitation—perhaps with the exception of Ascheoug and Luchterhand—you are trying to sell this book to the wrong people. I would love to publish such a book, but it would be a huge and very expensive undertaking, and we are all primarily literary publishers!"

     Barbara Epler, from New Directions, agreed. "I was very honored, in fact, that the book was offered to us, but we are not your kind of publishers, and we could never do it properly. You need some university press, like Chicago or the University of California Press," she concluded.

     "Or even a large commercial publisher," I added. "I don't see why a larger commercial publisher would not want to publish this book. It's looks to be wonderful!"

     Both of us and others suggested some publisher names and agents. And he seemed appreciative, if a little taken aback by our inabilities to consider his work.

     But the interchange made for a kind of momentarily intense relationship, and I couldn't help but to tell him about my childhood experiences at writing musicals in my family's basement. "When I was...I must  been 12 or 13...after I'd fallen in love with Broadway musicals, I attempted to write my own musicals in the basement of our house. We had a small piano there, and, although I couldn't really play it, I'd tap out tunes, and sing them and dance. Yes, it had to have been when I was 13 because it was 1960, the year of the Congo's independence from Belgium. I wrote a work entitled "Rain on a Lonely Street," about a Midwestern family that had gone to the Congo as missionaries (I was big on missionaries as a child), and got caught up in the battles of February 1959. The father, a minister, was killed, and the mother and son had a difficult time in leaving Brazzaville, in part because they had no way to travel and also because they were committed to the people with whom they had so long lived. I still remember the major song, sung by the stranded son:

 

                                Rain on a lonely, lonely street

                                Will it never stop, this sleet.

                                The mud up to our knees, please

                                God, let it ease.

 

     For me then, it was a great, romantic symphony. I now perceive it as a really ghastly piece. Why rain, and why was he so lonely? Perhaps because of the death of his father. But at the time, in my imagination, it represented a significant inter-cultural relationship.

     Everybody laughed heartily. But Van Reybrouck was astounded. Had some young American Iowa boy really been so moved by the Congo and the events there that he had written of it way back then? "Yes, it seemed startlingly real to me, the news of the revolution and its aftermath. I must have read some place that missionaries had been stranded and murdered.”

     Soon after came the cakes and waffles and various ice creams and silence as we sat consuming them in delight.

     I recently read that David's book has been accepted for publication by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.