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The hungry road

Written by the Nigerian author Ben Okri in 1991, this magical realism story delves into the harsh life conditions in a Nigerian ghetto during the British colonial rule and the world of spirits, which mingles with day-to-day reality.

Azaro is an unborn child who lives with his spirit companions in a world of their own, where they are free from the heartlessness of the human beings, from injustice, unfulfilled longings and the fear of dying. In fact that’s why babies cry when they are born and severed from the world of spirits.

As these unborn children approach their next incarnation, they make pacts with their spirits companions that they will return at the first opportunity. However, if they break these pacts, they will be assailed by hallucinations and haunted by their spirit companions. The unborn children who make these pacts are known as Abiku or spirit children and thay keep coming and going, dying and rebirthing, often to the same mother, causing great suffering in the family.

Contrary to other babies, Azaro is born smiling and, despite his pact with the spirits and the hardships ahead of him, he changes his mind about his pact, decides to make his mother happy by staying and clings to life. His zest for life is greater than any threat or any fear, greater than the spirits’ constant harassment and their repeated murder attempts to have him back in their world. There’s a dichotomy between not wanting to get born at all, knowing for sure that there will be suffering, and wanting to live it all, with innocence and an open mind.

As an Abiku child, Azaro is half-way between both worlds, and sees things that nobody else can see. His world is populated with akward characters, albinos and people with weird deformities who are not really human beings, but spirits who have borrowed bits of human beings to partake of human reality: life, sex, alcohol… He encounters many of these spirits when he is at Madame Koto’s bar, where he is ’employed’ by the tough and imposing woman as a ‘lucky charm’, although in the end he seems to attract spirits and drive the regulars away.

Everyday, Azaro goes back to an extremely humble home populated by rats and mosquitoes and swarming with creditors and to his father’s fits of rage after being exploited all day. His father gets into fights, gets sacked and then work under deplorable conditions, both physical and ethical, since the boss asks the workers who they are going to vote for before letting them carry his loads.

The political arena is equally disappointing, with the politicians only interested in getting votes. The world of politics is satirically polarised into the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor. During their campaign, some representatives of the Party of the Rich, together with their thugs and the landlord appear in a van to deliver their speech, but people living in the poors’ quarter don’t fall for their deceiptful rhetoric and ridicule them. After receiving a ‘gift’ of rotten powdered milk to conquer their votes, the bash the politicians and burn their van.

This novel displays several different layers of existence, whether social, political, religious, cultural, colonial or spiritual; all of them woven together but occupaying different spaces at the same time, and which we see from the point of view of this peculiar and endearing child who faces every challenge without drama.

Nationalism

In order to figure out what nationalism is all about, we must firstly ask ourselves what does nation mean. Nation is an elusive concept, as all abstractions are, that defines a unified imaginary community in which an elite is chosen to speak on behalf of the people but don´t recognise the role of the less privileged or opposing views in order to convey that image of unity it is based upon.

The sense of national belonging is forged by the exclusion or denigration of others and the nationalist discourse uses several mechanisms to try and create that delusional sense of belonging. The nation, as a myth, needs to create that feeling of belonging to something greater than oneself and does it by resorting to symbols, to a common culture, to language and traditions, as well. Also, race and ethnicity are typically used to set the limits of the nation by discriminating individuals on the ground of physical features, positing boundaries that establish who can or cannot belong to the nation according to certain parameters. Racial difference is socially and discursively constructed and used for particular porpuses within nationalism. According to Etiènne Balibar there are two main forms of racism; external racism, which involves the discrimination of those who live outside the border on the grounds of race and internal racism which discriminates those within the nation not deemed to belong to an imagined community by keeping them in a subservient position in society or, in some cases, by their extermination.

There are several well known examples of the use of race and ethnicity for privileging one racial group as the nation’s true people as a strategy to build the myth of the nation.

  • We can all recall the genocide in Rwanda, grounded on ethnicity, in 1994: the mass slaughter in Rwanda of the ethnic Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu peoples. Some estimates claim that anywhere between 500,000-1,000,000 were murdered, along with thousands of Tutsi sympathizers, with another 2 million refugees in neighbouring countries. These kinds of conflicts based on ethnicity are not rare in those countries who inherited their borders from the colonising countries, given that withing those borders many different ethnic groups, different cultures and religions can be found.
  • In the Basque Country, Sabino Arana and others based their nationalist discourse on some theories which established the Basque physical and genetic features, such as the fact that the Basques possessed the highest global apportion of the Rh- blood types, or that they had certain craneal and physical features. These theories were also supported by authors such as the geneticist L. Luca Cavalli Sforza, who stated that the Basques were the descendants of the Cro-Magnons, and served to build a sense of exclusive national identity which was used by Basque politician Xabier Arzalluz in 1993, not that long ago.
  • Hitler intended to foster an Aryan Germany by the extermination of other ethnic groups and those he considered defective and undertook the Lebensborn project,  a state supported association in Nazi Germany with the goal of raising children of persons classified as “racially pure and healthy” as based on Nazi ideal ethnicity.

Sources:

Beginning Postcolonialism – McLeod

http://www.worldwithoutgenocide.org

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The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss (1903) is an account of the life conditions of the poor in the East End of London collected by Jack London during his first hand experience staying in workhouses and sleeping in the street as part of his personal exploration of the under-world. He carried out his experiment at a time of affluence, in 1902, but during which 500,000 people were estimated to live in the described conditions: “The starvation and lack of shelter encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery, which is never wiped out, even in periods of great prosperity”, he asserted. In January 1903, there was no space left in the workhouses and the means were exhausted.

He visits Johnny Upright’s home in order to have a place where he could receive his mail and, work on his notes, and gets a cold treatment as he usually does in his shabby clothes, until he speaks to Mrs. Upright. He then starts looking for a room, and learns that even the largest families in this stratum of society took just a room and even took lodgers in. He´s offered a room with two other lodgers and exchanges impressions with a lower class youth: “From the moment of his birth , all the forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed his wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could not shake”, and learn about the aged poor, a 71% of the population of London, through a newspaper article, how they age alone and die of self-neglect, 450,000 a day. “The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them (…) the full belly and the evening pipe is all they demand, or dream of demanding, from existence”. The environmental conditions they live submerged in are poisonous, as pollution forms solid deposits on every surface.
Jack London decides to see things for himself and not merely to be informed by other people´s theoretical work on the subject of poverty, such as Engels’ or Jacob Riis’s, so that he could see the human factor: “how they live, why are they living, what for”. He finds that there was a slum at a five minute walk from any point in London, but the cabbies refused to drive to the East End, which was a neverending slum packed with a “crowd of shabby white people” belonging to a new different race of “short, beer-sodden, wretched” individuals. He stops by an old-clothes shop and the shop owner thought he was a high-class American criminal. He arrays himself in the shabby clothes and sews one gold sovereign in the armpit just in case he encounters difficulties. He then experiences the different in status effected by his clothes and notices that “all servility – towards him- vanished from the demeanour” and he was called ‘mate’ instead of ‘sir’ or ‘guv`nor’, escaping “the pestilence of tipping and encountered mean on a basis of equality (…) I had to be more lively in avoiding vehicles. Life had cheapened in direct ratio to my clothes”. Lower classes “talked as natural men should without the least idea of getting anything out of me”. The fear of the mob vanished completely as London became –in appearance- one of them.

He got immersed in the life of the poor and dejected population of the East End where several men lived encaged in just one room working for 15 hours a day, with their teeth worn down by the friction of the metallic brads used in their trade –shoe-making -. He witnessed the lives of those half-starved men and women dying of consumption, those who could only afford to eat rotten meat once a week, who could only wait patiently for death; cramped rooms full of undernourished infants. He lived with those who couldn’t even afford lodging and tried to sleep in the Spitalfields Garden, a surface with patches of grass here and there and a sharp-spiked iron fencing to deter them from entering its enclosed space. Others, in search of a roof, slept on the benches within Christ´s Church; people covered in rags and filth, open sores and bruises, women who would sell themselves for a loaf of bread. He experienced life in the casual ward and the workhouses. “The Abyss is a huge man-killing machine”.

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The life before us.

“The life before us” is a very special book, not only due to its content, but also to the story surrounding it. It was thanks to it that, for the first time in French history, an author could circumvent the rules to win the Goncourt Price twice, as it can only be awarded once in a lifetime. “The life before us”, by Émile Ajar, won the same year it was written, in 1975. What the jury ignored was that the psedonym Émile Ajar didn’t belong to its impersonator, Paul Pavlowitch. The truth was only revealed in the suicide note left by Roman Kacew, better known as Romain Gary, who had already been awarded with the Goncourt price in 1956, and who was the man behind Ajar. Later on, he would explain the process of the creation of Émile Ajar in “Vié et mort d’Émile Ajar” -”Life and death of Émile Ajar”- (1981), which was published posthumously. Kacew/Gary/Ajar committed suicide on December 2nd 1980, at 66, by shooting himself. He left a note in which he stated specifically that his death had nothing to do with that of his ex-wife Jean Seberg the previous year, and that Émile Ajar was himself.

Writing under pseudonym was a habit for Romain Gary, and he did so under the names Shatan Bogat, Fosco Sinibaldi, besides Ajar and Gary itself. As Ajar, he wrote four works which became well known, and he ironically entitled the third one “Pseudo”. Paradoxically, Gary was accused of imitating Ajar’s style: “I’m a pseudo-pseudo!” he would later laugh.

“The life before us” introduces us to Momo, a child who lives in a run-down urban neighbourhood, Belleville Boulevard -Edith Piaf’s birthplace-. There is a high concentration of immigrants in it: North-African Muslims, black Africans from every nationality, Eastern-Europeans… They know and respect each other and lead their daily lives as anyone would. Momo lives with Madame Rosa, a retired prostitute of Polish Jew origins and who lived the WWII and was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Germans. She takes long-term care of the sons of other prostitutes who are unable to tend to their children properly due to their jobs, and first met Momo when he was three.

Among others, we meet Madame Lola, a transgender prostitute and former boxing champion in Senegal, whom Momo is very fond of, as she’s very kind and motherly. Mr. Driss is a café owner, in whose café several important scenes of the novel take place. There, Momo regularly meets old Hamil, a street carpet vendor, for his lessons about Muslim culture and the Q’ran, as it is Madame Rosa’s wish for the kids to maintain a link with their respective cultures. This is attained through the means available: Momo is in charge of taking 3-year old Banania (Turé) to Bisson Street, where most black Africans live.

At the time, Momo is around ten, although doubts are raised about that and Madame Rosa, with whom he feels a very strong link, is in her late sixties, but very ill. Madame Rosa is quite a character; she keeps a portrait of Hitler under her bed, so that when she’s feeling down, she can remind herself of what she has been put through and cheer herself up just for having survived all that. Her famous sex-appeal has bidden farewell long ago and she has several ailments, some of which she tries to conceal, as they may hinder her life and that of her kids, including Momo. She keeps secrets, but Momo knows, and suffers. We will walk downstairs with Madame Rosa and Momo, and into Madame Rosa’s basement, where she retires when woken up by nightmares. The place is crammed with memories, Jewish paraphernalia and secrets; it is there where we will witness the most dramatic moments in Momo’s life.

In 1977, Moshe Mizrahi brought the novel to the big screen -Madame Rosa-, featuring Simone Signoret as Madame Rosa.

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TONY HARRISON, a working class poet.

Born into Leeds in 1937. Son of a baker, and a proud member of the working class.

“…the baker’s man that no one will see rise

and England made to feel like some dull oaf

is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes

and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf”.

He was granted a scholarship for the Leeds Grammar School at 11 and as a result he was dislocated from his background and family. The alienation from his social class and community, and from his loving and rooted upbringing had an effect on him. He went through a process of loss which implied letting go of his Leeds working class vernacular, which he experienced as class colonisation. As he explained it later, he had to confront the internal colonialism of British education, with its marginalisation of the working class by the dominant middle-class culture, a fact which elicited his anger. Harrison is very much concerned with the social, economic, and political implications of the suppression of working-class language by the educated classes. He recounts how his teachers coached him on how to speak “proper” English:

“All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
‘s been dubbed by [us] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe (us)
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’

We say ‘(us) not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘Flat cap’)
my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great
lumps to hawk up and spit out … E-nun-ci-ate!”

(Them and [uz])

He borrowed from classical poetry but used his own dialect, themes and characters, all belonging to his working class backgroud. He never allowed middle-class education to engulf him and has always been proud of who he is. Thus, he is regarded as a writer with integrity whose edge hasn’t been dulled by age, and who speaks openly about a wide range of subjects.

In his poetry, controlled metre and rhyme contrast with his use of colloquial language and obscenities:

“Which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem

and taking a short cut home through these graves here

they reassert the glory of their team

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.

Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.

One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT

sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.”

(V)

Upon Ted Hughes’ death, he was considered as the next poet laureate. Anxious to share his contempt for the position, the wrote “Laureate’s block”:

“…

I’d sooner be a free man with no butts,

free not to have to puff some prince’s wedding,

free to say up yours to Tony Blair,

to write an ode to Charles I’s beheading

and regret the restoration of his heir.

…”

Among so many people who try to climb up the social ladder, sweeping thier origins under the carpet, it is not that easy to find writers who stand tall and announce their proud as Harrison does.

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JACK LONDON, an awesome person; MARTIN EDEN, an awesome book.

John Griffith Chaney, born in San Francisco on January 12th 1876, was the son of a traveling astrologer and a spiritualist. He worked while he was finishing his pre-university level studies and,among other jobs, he worked as a sea man, a fisherman and a smuggler.

He was a man of action, not an intellectual, and it is said that his ideas derived from reading Kipling, Spencer, Darwin, Stevenson, Malthus, Marx, Poe and Nietzsche, lack consistency and precision: he accepted Darwinism and racism, prevalent during his time, but at the same time he was troubled that the “inevitable white man” would destroy the rich cultures of various native groups he had encountered (in the South Seas). He was a supporter of women’s suffrage and married a New Woman (second wife, Charmian Kittredge) but was patriarchal toward his 2 wifes and daughters. He was a socialist but an individualist at heart, with a drive toward capitalist success. It is said that his self-taught and uninformed reading made of him a fervent socialist and a naïve fascist (because of his belief in the übermensch), but personally I disagree and think that it is quite a biased, oversimplistic and hyperbolic view, which partly prepare the ground for some of his works (for instance the one I present below). Besides, many “informed” writers, with a more extensive scholar background, have reached similar conclusions to those of Jack London.

Jack London lived to the full and went to Alaska to try his luck during the gold rush in 1897-8, an experience which proved a failure as a means of becoming rich, but which was fertile in literary terms, as the experience provided him with material for a collection of short stories and a background for his novels related to the “Homo homini Lupus” concept. It was during his convalescence, as he came back ill, when he started massively reading and writing. His writings deal with human survival, nature and socialist topics.

He died on November 22nd 1916, at 40 in his Glen Ellen estate, and there’s a romantic legend concerning his death. It’s said that he committed suicide because he was suffering due to his kidney condition, although it hasn’t been proved. You may get contradictory information about this fact, depending on the source. Other sources state that he died of renal failure with gastrointestinal uremic poisoning.

Martin Eden

Martin Eden is a sturdy working class mate who has spared a young high-class woman, Ruth, from having a rough time by defending her and getting into a fist fight for her sake. She is so impressed with him, as he “saves” her, and she finds him so different to the kind of men she’s used to, that she invites him over to her house to thank him. There he meets her family and has a look at her surroundings, her upbringing and her library, above all a volume of poems by Swimburne.

He has his own intellectual curiosities and concerns even though he’s automatically regarded as an unambitious working class fellow who is not able to see beyond his limits. But as he puts it: “insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they”, which is of course wrong.

The young couple keep in touch and have long conversations, as couples do, and she seems to strive to change him. In the meantime, due to his monumental strong will, he manages to surpass his own limitations by working and studying at the same time, until he is finally able to publish (“He hated the oblivion of sleep. There was too much to do, too much of life to live”). In the process, when he’s not known and he has to support himself by his physical work, the woman dismisses his works, but then her opinion changes as he manages to publish and gain a certain renown (“Martin had faith in himself, but he was alone in his faith”).

Then, he seems to be someone new for her, someone she can feel in awe of without feeling embarrassed; but this whole process had made him conscious of several painful truths: “Make me like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the thing you love” and “He knew now that he hadn’t really loved her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, and ethereal creature” and that ethereal creature belong to another world, to the “bourgeois swine” who despised him.

In his journey he meets Brissenden, who also belongs to the upper-class but has somehow rebelled against it in his own way, as an individual against the masses, just like Eden has. He’s a physically weak person who lacks Eden’s will and knows it, and he strives for new thrills in life through drugs rather than through action. He’s a good friend for Eden though and they both manage to understand each other. Eden seem to be in the process of stepping into the nowhere’s land: slowly he discovers that those who once were his mates -working class people- are not so close to him now and fail to understand him, but he doesn’t belong with the bourgeoisie either.

As an individual standing against the masses (“Herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals”), even having achieved his goal, discovers that he is alone. His estrangement from Ruth, Brissenden’s death and his growing apart from his former mates, makes him become increasingly disappointed and disenchanted with life: (“I care for nothing. Something has gone out of me. I am empty of any desire for anything.”)

All this foreshadows the end:

“For too much love of living

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

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CAT tools and translation

purrpose3There is a lot to say for CAT (computer-assisted translation) tools: they enable you to check for concordance, improving your efficience and decreasing the time and effort invested in translating; the more stuff you have previously stored in your Translation Memory, the more dramatic this effect will be. It allows you to maintain the original format, type and size of the font, etc., that is, you will also edit the text perfectly. But…, are CAT tools really that necessary? Well, I think the answer is no.

I happen to own one of the expensive ones, which I bought years ago. I had to invest a whole month of my salary in it: I bought my license to operate it, which was the most expensive part of the purchase, and then I bought the instructions manual and the disks, so that I ran no risks after spending that kind of money on something. Years after that, when translating has become my main source of income -scarce as it is, though- I find out that it has become absolutely obsolete and it can’t even be updated. Alarmed as I was, I had some words with the company, who said that all I can do is buying the new version for a special 50 % price, which is three times the price they used to charge for updating it. Well, selling one of my kidneys in the organ trade black market is out of the question, so what do I do now?

I’ve been participating in some translation forums lately and I was very happy to see that there are people who don’t use CAT tools and they are perfectly normal, functional, socially adapted and happy and they get work! Enough to make a living out of it! Also, it must be said that these CAT tools are advertised and sold in/by certain marketplaces for translators who get benefits from them, that is, they force us to buy their very expensive tool if we want to take part in their select club. This makes translators dependent in a long term, due to the aforementioned updatings, upgradings and latest of the latest versions of the tools. Besides, we are turned into text editors for the same price, not to mention this fuzzy terms application, which doesn’t take into financial consideration words and expresions reapeated throughout the text for the final price, impoverishing us as a result. So, in a nutshell, should we buy this money-shrinking device?

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The Confederation Poets I

The Confederation Poets is the first distinctly Canadian school of poetry. It includes the four writers in Malcolm Ross’s anthology “Poets of the Confederation” (1960): Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, his cousin Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. Close contemporaries, all of them were born in the early 1860s and had prominence between 1867 and the Great War.

They share some common traits and background:

They had a Victorian education and were trained in the Greek and Roman classics, they blend cosmopolitism with Canadian nationalism, they draw from the Canadian landscape, the worship of nature is a main theme in their writing, they adopt Pan – the Arcadian fertility god of wild nature and patron of pastoral poets – as the centre of their personal mythology, they are linked to British Romantic-Victorian literary tradition and with American trascendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau).

Charles G.D. Roberts is the founder of this school of poetry. Roberts enjoyed a boyhood in close contact with the wilderness until his father accepted a post in Fredericton, away from the Tantramar region of New Brunswick. Once in Fredericton Collegiate School, he met his cousin Bliss Carman. Back in New Brunswick, he began writing poetry. He published over 21 volumes of poetry, among them “Orion & other poems” (1880), under the influence of Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Arnold, “Diverse Tones” (1886), which includes his famous poem “Tantramar Revisited”. He is credited for inventing the modern animal story. In his famous work “Earth Enigmas” (1896) animals are victims of the laws of nature. It is based on direct observation and free of didacticism.

Bliss Carman faced serious difficulties throughout his life, all of them related to his incapacity for making decisions. He only left his parents’ house after their death. He worked for two years for a religious weekly in New York and then in journalistic positions and giving lectures. From 1892 on, he lived as a visitor with many friends and relatives, his income being never sufficient to support himself. From 1908 on, he lived with Dr. and Mrs. King. He produced over 50 books of light verse, nostalgic tone, pastoral theme and Edenic setting (more obscure in his later volumes). He had always been interested in quasi-religious philosophies, especially with Mrs. King’s pantheism. Throughout his life he suffered from bouts of depression interspersed with manic joy, process which is reflected in his most effective poetry.

Archibald Lampman read Roberts’ “Orion” in 1881 and got astounded by it, sending a “fan letter” to Roberts. He wrote nature poems in which the descriptions are minutely detailed, compared to those of Roberts’ poetry. He combined his poetry writing with his post as a Post Office clerk in Ottawa, where he developed a close friendship with Duncan Campbell Scott. Both of them disliked urban life and took trips to the countryside.

Duncan Campbell Scott was very skilled with lyric forms due to his love for music. His poems are full of alliterative lines. As a clerk in the Indian Branch, he was able to explore the Canadian wilderness & to come into contact with Native Canadians, whom he idealized in his poems, full of Christian imagery.

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