"Indigo. Or Mapping the Waters" by Marina Warner

Indigo is one of the many works of literature inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest. In this novel Marina Warner spills the beans about her ancestors, who were the first colonizers of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts (Enfant-Béate in the novel), back in the seventeenth century. In the novel, Kit Everard sails for the New World, where he establishes a new colony and has some skirmishes with the indigenous people. The author also explores the character of Sycorax, Caliban's witch mother who in the book is a Carib woman, who dies indigo and heals with the herbs she can find on the island. She has adopted two children: Ariel, an Arawak girl from the mainland, and Doulé (Caliban), an African baby boy littered by the ocean. While Caliban will leave and search for his African roots, however, Ariel will become a sort of Caribbean Malinche, and will bear Kit Everard's children.

Back in the twentieth century, we encounter Miranda and Xanthe, descendants of the first Kit Everard, who both live in London and have issues with their family of former planters. The attention is on Miranda, who is artistic, and worried about her heritage. With a Creole grandmother and dark features, she is constantly looking for her identity and her place in the world. Her young aunt (and almost half-sister) Xanthe, instead, is carefree and eager to earn some money by exploiting the possibilities tourism has brought to Enfant-Béate. She decides to go back to the islands, together with Miranda, for the anniversary of the first landing. The two girls will find answers on Enfant-Béate, but in different ways.

At first I loved this book and I couldn't put it down. Marina Warner is certainly an excellent writer; too bad that the last part was a little flat. I wish that the last section, set in the present time, had reached its full potential: you get only glimpses of the conflicting thoughts that the past of Miranda and Xanthe's family brings to their minds. All in all, it was a fascinating reading: it's good to read about the colonies from the perspective of the colonizers with an awareness of the guilt that such an identity can bring.

"Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid

Growing up in Antigua, one of the many islands of the Caribbean Sea, is not easy for Annie: she has to endure the competition of her schoolmates, deal with her changing body, with pubic hair sprouting in a couple of places, and get along with her beautiful mother who, much to her dislike, has just started to consider her a young girl, rather than a child. While white English teachers impart her lessons on Shakespeare and the right way to write autobiographical essays, Annie also experiences an alternative culture: when she is weak and feverish from an undiagnosed illness, her father calls an obeah woman, who puts scraps of paper with names of her father's former lovers all around her, drawing crosses on the soles of her feet and on her head. Her mother, who believes in Western medicine instead, takes her to an English doctor, and the medicines he prescribed end up next to the ones from the obeah woman. Which one was responsible for her recovery it is not clear.

As her body grows, so does her dislike for her mother, and  the desire to be independent. This brings Annie to leave her island, which is intrinsically connected to the figure of her mother. At the end of the book, before leaving for England, Annie reflects on the fact that she is going "away from my home, away from my mother, away from my father, away from the everlasting blue sky, away from the everlasting hot sun, away from people who said to me, 'This happened during the time your mother was carrying you'" (134). 

Jamaica Kincaid reflects on the eternal tropes of colonizer/colonized in a clever way. She references The Tempest more than once, constructing a fascinating answer to Shakespeare's text. For example, Annie's English schoolmistress, Miss Moore, is compared to a fish, "her throat [beating] up and down as if a fish fresh out of water were caught inside. I wondered", thinks Annie, "if she even smelled like a fish" (p.36). Here Kincaid is reversing the moment in Shakespeare's text when Caliban is described as a strange kind of fish, because of his smell and appearance. Shakespeare's play is also referenced directly when another teacher of her, Miss Nelson (note how "historical" all the surnames sound) is seen as reading an "elaborately illustrated edition of The Tempest" (p.39).

 

"Annie John" is a strange novella: there is the hint of a homoerotic bond and then its dismissal, and a growing difficult mother-daughter relationship that is not resolved until the end of the book with an unconvincing tear and a hug before sailing for England. It is clearly an autobiographical work, as it has been observed that the author is haunted by her own conflict with her mother. All in all, it is beautifully written, with short, simple and sometimes poetic sentences, of the kind Naipaul has accustomed us to. It is a window, albeit small, on how life was on a Caribbean island before mass tourism arrived.

 

For those of you who don't know her, Jamaica Kincaid is a writer born in the Caribbean island of Antigua in 1949. She moved to the USA in the 1960s to be an aupair there, and then studied photography and started to write for newspapers and magazines. She is now considered one of the most important Caribbean women writers. In her works, she often deals with issues regarding the colonial education she received and the failures of the postcolonial Caribbean nation. Her anger, directed at both the colonizers and the Antiguan people, is sometimes the reason why she is still nowadays a controversial writer.

In italiano: "Anna delle Antille" di Jamaica Kincaid
Edito da DeAgostini, 1997
pp.176, € 9,30

"Il paese dove non si muore mai" di Ornela Vorpsi

Ornela Vorpsi ha una storia un po' particolare: nata a Tirana, in Albania, nel 1968, ha studiato per alcuni anni all'Accademia di Brera, per poi trasferirsi nel 1997 a Parigi, dove vive con il marito francese. Nonostante per lei l'Italia sia stato solo un paese di passaggio, ha sempre scritto in italiano, fin dall'esordio avvenuto appunto con Il paese dove non si muore mai, pubblicato prima in Francia, ma in traduzione, nel 2004 e poi scelto da Einaudi, che ne ha pubblicato il manoscritto originale. Inserita tra i 35 migliori scrittori europei nell'antologia Best European Fiction, Ornela Vorpsi, come molti altri scrittori, ha adottato una lingua originariamente non sua adattandola ai suoi bisogni letterari. L'hanno fatto prima Conrad, poi Nabokov, ed innumerevoli scrittori provenienti dalle colonie più disparate. Tuttavia non siamo abituati a questo tipo di operazione con la lingua italiana: spesso la letteratura scritta da migranti in Italia appare spurgata dagli usi non convenzionali, quasi una mano magica sia passata a ripulirli. Ornela Vorpsi, invece, non si vergogna del suo italiano “spaesato”, come è definito nella quarta di copertina, ed in effetti il risultato è una ventata di freschezza della lingua, piuttosto che una cacofonia, come alcuni malintenzionati potrebbero pensare.

Il paese dove non si muore mai è un libricino sottile sottile, da leggere tutto d'un fiato, e può essere preso come un romanzo o come una raccolta di brevi racconti, chiaramente autobiografici. La protagonista di ogni capitolo, o racconto, cambia infatti nome diverse volte, ma è comunque sempre una bambina o un'adolescente che vive nell'Albania maschilista e crudele della dittatura comunista di Hoxha. E' evidente come la scrittrice sia voluta partire da quello che hanno scritto i grandi della letteratura albanese, primo tra tutti Kadaré, conosciutissimo anche in Italia, volgendo l'attenzione però alle donne albanesi: a come sono state bistrattate, picchiate, sfruttate, giudicate male anche solo per la loro bellezza. Le loro sofferenze e la loro tenacia sono infatti al centro di questo libro, che ha come motivo ricorrente il colore rosso, il colore del sangue ma ovviamente anche della passione e, non da ultimo, del regime comunista che ha segnato l'infanzia e l'adolescenza della protagonista.

Chi è di buone letture, tuttavia, potrà riconoscere nel titolo un'altra influenza di Ornela Vorpsi, Italo Calvino, che tra le sue Fiabe Italiane ne ha proprio una intitolata Il paese dove non si muore mai. L'Albania a tratti forti narrata da Ornela Vorpsi, apparentemente sembra aver poco a che fare con il realismo magico e con le leggende dal risvolto storico di Calvino e Kadaré, ma il gioco sta tutto nel scoprirne le assonanze e le dissonanze.

Il Paese dove non si muore mai di Ornela Vorpsi

Edito da Einaudi, 2005
pp.116, € 11

"Cast me out if you will" by Lalithambika Antherjanam

In the jungle of Indian writers you may have never heard the name of Lalithambika Antherjanam (1905-1985), in spite of the fact that she was a highly regarded writer in her native Kerala. This is perhaps because she used to write in Malayalam, the local Dravidian language, and as far as I know this is her only book translated into English, or at least the only one that is easy to find. It collects some of her short stories and some interesting memoir pieces.

An antherjan in a recent movie adaptation of Lalithambika's novel "Agnisakshi". 

 

Lalithambika Antherjanam was born into the Namboodiri brahmin caste in what was then the state of Travancore. She came from a particularly constrictive society: women from her community were kept in seclusion inside the women's quarters of the house, called antahpuram, where they had to go with the upper parts of their body naked. In the rare occasions when they left the house, they had to screen their faces with palm-leaf umbrellas and cover themselves entirely with a piece of unbleached cloth. Antherjanams, the way namboodiri women are called, had to follow strict rules for everything: they could not receive an education and they could only marry the eldest son of a namboodiri household. For the slightest transgression of the rules, antherjanams were trialed and cast out of society.

 

Lalithambika had the luck to have an illuminated father, who gave her an education. However, when she threw away her palm-leaf umbrella and went to a meeting of feminist activists she was cast out, together with her husband. She began her career as a writer, in spite of the disapproval of everyone. Her stories are all about women: women who committed sins and ended their life in poverty or repentance, young widows whose lives have been shattered by the untimely death of their husbands, mothers who have lost their sons in a war or for the strict rules of their community, and even a prostitute and a yogini. Whether social workers like Bhanumati Amma in "Come back", or strong mothers in the isolation of a farway city like Meena Mami in "The Boon", or again disillusioned wives turned prostitues in what is in my opnion one of the best pieces of the book, "The Goddess of Revenge", the women in Lalithambika Antherjanam's book are hard to forget. If you like Mahasweta Devi's stories about women and tribal people, about injustices and unspeakable horrors, then you would probably like Lalithanbika's work. She was inspired by the work of Tagore, especially by his novel "The Home and the World". As a result, her stories are impregnated with activism, to the point that some of them are more an exposure of some unbearable wrongs in the namboodiri society than a pleasure to read for the way they are written. However, I am only reading this in translation, and I might never know how the stories were like in the original form. The book is interesting also from an anthropological point of view, to understand the customs of this small community, resistant to the changes that nationalism was bringing throughout the country.

"Cast me out if you will. Stories and Memoir" by Lalithambika Antherjanam 
Translated and edited by Krishnankutty, with a foreword by Meena Alexander
Published by The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1997, pp.188

"Timira" di Wu Ming 2 e Antar Mohamed

Una delle realtà più innovative e interessanti del panorama letterario italiano sono certamente i Wu Ming (di cui avevo parlato anche qui).  Forse unici nel loro genere, i Wu Ming sono un collettivo di scrittori con idee del tutto particolari: non pubblicano con i loro nomi veri ma con lo pseudonimo di Wu Ming, che in cinese può significare "senza nome" o "cinque nomi", distribuiscono le loro opere anche gratuitamente in e-book, e non si fanno problemi a mescolare nei loro libri finzione e reportage storico, e ad incorporarvi documenti o personaggi realmente esistiti.

 

Timira. Romanzo Meticcio, come dice il titolo stesso è un ibrido. Nato da una serie di interviste con Isabella Marincola, la Timira del titolo, si è poi sviluppato come un romanzo, scritto con la collaborazione di Mohamed, il figlio di Isabella, ma vuole anche essere un libro di memorie, e non da ultimo un libro sulla memoria culturale. Ambientato tra Roma e la Somalia, narra la storia, verissima ed incredibile, di una donna italo-somala, nata dalla relazione extraconiugale di un sottufficiale italiano in quella che un tempo era una colonia italiana con la sua boyessa, termine che deriva dalla femminilizzazione di boy e che indicava all'epoca una donna di servizio, da utilizzare anche biecamente come amante. Tra le pagine troviamo documenti, carte d'identità e foto d'epoca, come nel più classico dei memoir. Solo che tra le memorie s'inserisce la narrazione degli autori che riempiono i buchi lasciati dalle parole di Isabella, morta improvvisamente prima della fine della stesura del libro. Sorella di un partigiano nero ucciso dalle parti di Biella, nel libro vediamo Isabella recitare in Riso Amaro di Dino Risi pur non avendo la carnagione tipica della mondina, fare la modella per numerosi artisti, subire il razzismo strisciante di un'Italia in cui la mentalità del colonialismo fascista non sembra essere scomparsa e, dopo numerosi amori e peripezie, andare a vivere a Mogadiscio, terra della madre. Rimpatriata in Italia all'inizio della guerra civile somala, Isabella si scontra con la burocrazia italiana, che inizialmente le nega lo status di rifugiata. Con un caratteraccio e una faccia tosta invidiabile, la nostra Isabella scrocca cene a destra e a manca, frega i soldi ad un uomo che non le garba abbastanza e fa passare una vita d'inferno a tutti. Tuttavia finiamo per volerle bene, a questa capocciona che alza un po' troppo spesso il gomito e che risponde per le belle a tutti, anche a Siad Barre.

 

Un libro insolito, scritto cercando di rendere la parlata di una donna che nella vita ne ha viste di tutti i colori, e che con gli anni è diventata cinica e ruvida, ma al punto giusto e con garbo. Un libro affascinante, che parla di una cultura - quella somala - che raramente entra nelle pagine della letteratura italiana. Una storia che meriterebbe di essere approfondita oltre le sue 525 scorrevolissime pagine: la storia del fratello Giorgio morto per far risorgere un paese che molti non volevano neanche credere potesse essere il suo, la vita che scorre in una città coloniale, Mogadiscio, che non è ancora quella martoriata da vent'anni di guerra civile di cui leggiamo nei reportage giornalistici. Ma soprattutto il racconto di una vita straordinaria, passata in bilico costante tra coppe di champagne e calze rattoppate alla buona.

Timira. Romanzo Meticcio di Wu Ming 2 e Antar Mohamed

Edito da Einaudi, 2012

pp. 525, € 20,00

 

Back to blogging!

I am sorry I haven't written for months, but I have been very busy with my studies and almost everything I have been reading was connected to it. I even had to write reports on some of the books I read for university, so I did not bother to write a second review for the blog.

 

I do miss blogging though, and receiving some feedback abut the things I read. I MUST get back to writing, and I hope that I will be more constant in the future. I also miss reading whatever comes in my hands and reaching the enormous amount (for me) of fifty books per year. This year I am reading a lot of essays and poetry, because as you may know my doctoral thesis will be on three Indian women poets.

 

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

 

This was the saddest and sweetest novella I have ever read. I think it's nice to say how I came across this book. As you may know, I spent some months in London doing research at the British Library. On my way back from lunch break I saw a book on the pavement in front of the entrance, and I picked it up. I looked around to see if it belonged to someone. I imagined a tourist with a big backpack on his way to King's Cross station, just around the corner. The book had a price tag in Canadian dollars, so the owner must have come from across the ocean. I sat on the marble bench in the library backyard, with the book next to me, in case someone claimed it. I waited 20 minutes, drinking a coffee in the meantime, but nobody came. That's how the book came in my possession.

 

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a classic of American literature. This said, I was reluctant in resuming Steinbeck, after I found The Grapes of Wrath not to my taste. Not that it was badly written (mind that I read that about thirteen years ago), but it was terribly depressing, and I could not connect with his characters, who lived in the Depression era in the United States, and had to travel for thousands of kilometres just to find a few days' work on a farm.

 

Of Mice and Men is set roughly in the same period and its characters are equally desperate for any kind of unskilled job. George and his simple-minded friend Lennie travel from one farm to the other. They keeping losing their job because Lennie often finds himself in trouble. What I found touching in the story of George and Lennie is the friendship between the two men: they look after each other, and in this way they try not to feel too lonely. Without a family, and constantly travelling, they live a meagre life. They dream of buying a place of their own, and this is what keeps them going. In the backdrop, you read about the poverty of America in those years, something not often talked about in fiction I think, and the racial divide that is strangling the country. It's a sad and hopeless America what John Steinbeck writes about. I must warn you that Steinbeck is not a writer for everyone: his writing is so down to earth that it reminds me of Hemingway, at least in this work. There is no complacency in his style, and this means no esthetic "ribbons". As you know, I am not a big fan of Hemingway. I understand his point (and Steinbeck's) but I don't find much pleasure in reading that kind of literature. I appreciated this book, Lennie is a sweet character and the metaphors at the end of the book are heart-breaking (I can't go on here without a spoiler!), but I am not going to dive into Steinbeck's opera omnia any time soon.

 

 

"The Scarlett Letter": some intersections

I started to reread "The Scarlet Letter" hoping to see the connections with Toni Morrison's "Beloved", as someone had pointed out to me there were many. I also found many intersections between "The Scarlet Letter", set in the Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, and Jane Campion's movie "The Piano", set in nineteenth-century New Zealand.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, Hester Prynne is a young bride who, after having been sent to the new colony of Pennsylvania where Puritans lead a sober and gloomy life, is tempted into committing adultery (a word that is never mentioned in the novel), seen that her old husband is believed to be dead. For this reason she is banned from her own community and is forced to wear a big embroidered "A" on her corset, so that she will be always reminded of her sin. She lives in a cabin by the sea with her daughter Pearl, born out of wedlock. In Morrison's "Beloved", instead, a woman escapes from the plantation where she was a slave and when her master comes back to retrieve her, she kills her infant daughter to spare her a life of slavery. After this crime, the woman is also banned from the community and has to deal with the ghost of her baby, who haunts the house where she lives at the edge of the town.

What is striking about both "The Scarlett Letter" and "Beloved" is the way they deal with horrible things, like the plantation were Sethe and Paul D used to live as slaves or the mark Hester Prynne is forced to wear. Both texts conflate beauty with horror, showing how beautiful things can grow in the most ugly places and viceversa. The play is also indicative of the way in which a literary text can be beautiful and poetic even though it deals with terrible topics such as slavery, rape and  infanticide. This passage also shows how the reader might feel when reading "Beloved", which I consider one of the most beautiful novels of the last decades. At the beginning of the novel, Morrison writes about the plantation where Sethe grew up and from which she escaped:

suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out beofre her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6)

The same pattern is more than evident in "The Scarlett Letter", where similarly to what happens in "Beloved", the main character, a woman who has committed a hideous crime and is banned from the community, ends up living in a house isolated from the rest of the world, with no visitors and nothing more than a weird daughter. At the beginning of Hawthorne's novel, the prison where Hester is kept is dscribed in these terms:

Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple -peru and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. (chapter 1)

The best passage to show the affinity between "The Scarlet Letter" and "Beloved" is in chapter two of the former, when Hester comes out of the prison and the embroidered letter is described:

When the young woman - the mother of this child - stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token,which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

Many more passages between the two works could be found, for instance the importance of fairs and community, the fancy dress, crime, punishment and guilt. This has been noticed by scholars, but Morrison denies that she was thinking of Hawthorne's novel when she wrote "Beloved". Another interesting parallelism is between Sethe's remembrance of wishing to have a mark like her mother (chapter 6) and Pearl's innocent belief that her mother's scarlet letter is benevolent and that she will also have one when she grows up.

In Jane Campion's "The Piano", the references to narratives of the middle of the 19th century abounds, "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre" beign the first two that come to mind. As in "The Scarlet Letter", Ada is sent to a foreign land and is estranged from her lawful husband. Both Hester and Ada have had a daughter out of wedlock. Their names - Pearl and Flora - evoke a closeness to nature: they're wild creatures. They're both described as wild, angel-like or devil-like in an ambiguous way that is characteristic of both works (how much is Hester to be blamed for cheating on such a hideous man?). They represent the unstable boundary between nature and culture, thus allowing a nuanced portrayal of sin and virtue. In order to show an evocative connection between the two works I would like to quote a scene from "The Scarlet Letter":

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged footsteps, to catch the great snow-flakes ere they fell. [...] Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter,--the letter A,--but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import. (chapter 15)

And now a video from "The Piano". The setting is, as in the previous passage, the beach. Both the child, her mother and her lover are present. Notice Flora's use of sea-weed and her creativity with sea-shells, both recalling the passage quoted from Hawthorne's classic work.