Reading Margaret Thatcher: Two Novels on Her Era

The Iron Lady has died at 87, after, it would seem, a long illness punctuated by strokes and other calamities that destroyed her intellect and personality.  What she meant to British life has been the topic of the Chattering Classes today.  Depending on what news feed you're reading/watching she was great or dreadful.

I've never followed politics in the UK as closely as I have the North American game, but two novels came to mind today as appreciations of her and her era.

The first is Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.  Published in  2006, it is a somewhat autobiographical story of an adolescent boy caught up in his own growing pains but also swept along by jingoism during the Falklands War of 1983. His naive patriotism is a proxy for a lot of criticism of the Thatcherite dismanteling of Post War Britain.

The second is Bridget Jones's Diary, published in 1996, shortly after Tony Blair and New Labour were swept into power in a wave of anti-Thatcherism. Helen Fieldiing's immensely successful first-person account of what was happening then, told by a loveable but somewhat ditzy 30-something young woman, gives a brisk, funny look at what many in Britain were thinking then.   Bridget hated Mrs. Thatcher and loved Tony Blair, in large part because each represented part of the British persona that either she rejected or revelled in.

I'd read both again beginning tonight if I hadn't handed off my copies to friends whose names I didn't note down
.  Sharing books I like with people I think might appreciate them is a big pleasure, and, although I know I ought to keep track of who has what, I always forget.  It is as if doing so would negate the pleasure of being generous with something I've enjoyed.

Do you think Ms. Thatcher lent books?  Perhaps, but I'm sure that she kept a list, and checked to see that she got them back. 

Memories of a Lost City: Baghdad and Babylon

Ten years ago  the world was in turmoil after the ill-advised invasion of Iraq by American-led forces.  Over the last two weeks there has been considerable comment on what happened--and didn't happen.  Sadly, it seems that the lot of Iraqis is perhaps even worse than it was before. 
   
 This kind of reflectioin always sends me looking to see what I've read in the past that might resonate with the future.  One of the most interesting is Naim Kattan' memoir Farewell, Babylon, first published in French in 1975 and in English in 1976 by McClelland and Stewart.  In 2005, Raincoast brought it out again: it seems to have disappeared from their list, but Amazon.ca insists it is available. Certainly, it is worth looking for. 

 Winner of Quebec’s top literary award the Prix Athanse David in 2004 as well as the French Légion d’Honneur, Kattan has published 32 books of poetry, essays and fiction in French since he came to Canada in 1954.  His first literary language was Arabic, however, and it still holds a part of his heart.  The nuances of Arabic dialect and vocabulary are center stage in the opening section of his memoir  and set the tone for a drama of the loss of one world and the discovery of another. Kattan’s observations also cast welcome light on Iraq: what we see today grew from the colonial, Muslim-dominated society Kattan grew up in and from which he escaped. 

Kattan begins by explaining that he and his friend Nessim are the only Jews in the group of young intellectuals who meet each evening in a Baghdad café not long after World War II.  They argue about the foreign literature they are reading and  the difficulty of  creating a unique Iraqi literature in the newly independent country. Kattan and Nessim had rejoice
d like everyone else when the British were forced to give up control, but nevertheless they feel themselves outsiders.  No matter that the Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500  years to the times of Babylon and the Bible, or that  the best Arabic grammarians come from the Alliance Israélite school or that the best students on Arabic examinations are Jews:  Jews are different and the Jewish dialect is considered comic.  Needless to say, Kattan usually speaks classical Arabic when discussing with his friends.

One  night, however, Nessim makes a strong political statement by insisting on speaking it: “we were Jews and we weren’t ashamed of it.”  The others are surprised, but slowly the Muslims began to listen with “respect.” Indeed, Kattan says, “in the heat of discussion Janil and Said borrowed some of our familiar expressions.  They stammered over words they had heard so often but never allowed to cross their lips…Nessim's tenacity bore fruit.”

From that beginning, one might think that Iraq might be able to build a country for all its people, but the section which follows show how the book’s bittersweet ending could be nothing but the end of the Jewish community.. Kattan takes us back to the Farhoud, the vicious pogrom which began on a hot night in May, 1941.  British forces had beat back German-backed Iraqi insurgents, but before they could enter the city angry Bedouins swept in. “A wind of impunity was blowing…The Jews would bear the cost of this repressed hunger, this devouring thirst. Two days and a night.  We could hear shots in the distance…”

Luckily, the conflagration stops just short of Kattan’s house when the Iraqi regular forces take control of the city. Slowly things return to normal and young Naim is allowed to grow up precocious and loved.  His first story is accepted by an avant-garde literary magazine while he is still in short pants; he dreams of women in a society where all respectable females wear veils, he wanders the crowded streets of Baghdad, visits its many gardens, swims in the mighty Tigris.

As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that there will be no place for Kattan in the modern Iraq, no matter how deep his roots in the region or how elegant his Arabic.  His family begins the long process of getting passports right after Farhoud.  He transfers to the Alliance Française school and starts to dream of studying in Paris.  His friends—Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish—begin their own lives.  Then he gets a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne.  The memoir ends as he leaves Baghdad on a bus headed for Beirut, and thereafter for France.  He will not see his family for five years, when he visits them in a settlement camp in Israel.

How many other Iraqi exiles are now looking for their families--or mourning them?

If anything, Farewell Babylon  is more important now than ever.  Translator Sheila Fischman has deftly captured the fluidity and charm of Kattan’s style, making it read as if had been conceived in English originally.

The illustration, by the way, is an imagined plan of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, as lost as Kattan's Baghdad is. 

The Beothuk Saga: A Story Whose Ending You Know, But You Hope It Won't Happen That Way

A week ago, as a group of Native Canadian young people completed a 1,600 kilometer trek from Northern Quebec to Ottawa, I was reminded  of a .book whose ending I  knew  before I started  reading, but which kept me  fascinated all the way through anyway.  It is The Beothuk Saga by Bernard Assiniwi (translated from French by Wayne Grady, published more than a decade ago, but increasingly relevant.
                
 People who have listened even with one ear to the sad tale of North America's First People know that there are no more Beothuks. But Assiniwi  tells their story with such interesting detail that  half way  through I found myself hoping against hope  that such admirable people would survive.

The novel, which won the Prix France-Quebec in 1997, is divided into three main sections.  The first, "The Initiate."  begins at the start of the last millennium with  Anin two years into a voyage of initiation in manhood, paddling around Newfoundland.   As the story opens, his solitary mission is interrupted as he encounters a young woman, Woasut, whose people have been massacred by enemies from another Native tribe. They continue together, taking care to make winter camp well inland from a Viking settlement they see from afar.  In the  spring they're joined by a Viking woman fleeing her violent countrymen.  Before long the woman's sister also finds them, as do two run-away Scottish slaves.

What is striking about these encounters is the way the Viking and Scots  are shown to be from societies not much more modern than Amin's.  They have metal: the Scots girl slave has run off with an metal axe whose efficiency amazes Amin.  But these outlanders also come from a world where it's important to know about  hunting, fishing, hard work and rough shelter.  If anything Amin's  society offers more than their's did, since in the Beothuks' world there is no slavery, and no God Who damns people who don't believe in Him.

When they all arrive back at Amin's village,  the people he's brought home with him are assimilated into the society, his exploits pass into the Beothuks' oral tradition, and the stage is set for 500 years, more or less, of a hard but agreeable life.

The second section, "The Invaders," jumps forward to the 1500s when the first Portuguese and French explorers arrive.  The Beothuks repel the invaders at first, gaining a reputation as being as dangerous as wolves.  But they are unprepared for life in constant contact with Europeans.  After one final, losing battle in which they try to throw out the new arrivals, they are forced to retreat to the interior of the island .
                 
The third section, "Genocide," is the story of the 18th and 19th centuries, and is heart-breaking.  The Beothuks  struggle to survive, but don't.  We've known that all along, of course, but that doesn't detract from the poignancy.                
           
Born to a  Quebecoise mother and a Cree father, Assiniwi had been  a curator of ethnology and a researcher at the Canadian Museum of Civilization at Hull until shortly before his death in 2000 at  age 65.  He also was  author of nearly 30 non-fiction works   ranging  from books of traditional Native recipes  to the three volume Histoire des Indiens du haut et du bas Canada.

Without knowing Assiniwi's credentials it might be possible to dismiss his descriptions of the Beothuk Golden Age as Noble Savage sentimentalism, since the book has a bibliography but no footnotes.  But start to track his sources down, and it becomes clear  that his story is based on careful archeological and ethnological research.    Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders  (a saga of the Vikings' Greenland) and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel  (about what happens when societies collide ) also support Assiniwi's premises and make great supplementary reading, too.

It should surprise few, of course, that the day the young Cree marchers arrived at their goal--can you imagine! from Hudson's Bay to Ottawa on foot in winter!--Prime Minister Stephen Harper wasn't around to greet them.  Instead he was in Toronto, welcoming two pandas on long-term loan from China.