sky / dra (***) / (**) mini

Excerpt from the excellent story of Marina Nemat’s life as a political prisoner in Iran.
She now lives in Toronto with her family.

—

The walls of the cell had been painted pale beige, but some of the paint had peeled off, exposing the plaster underneath. The remaining paint was covered with fingerprints, strange, greasy-looking marks of different shapes and sizes, and a few brownish-red stains which I suspected were blood. Also, quite a few words and numbers were engraved on the walls, most of them illegible. I traced the engravings with my fingers, as if they were written in Braille. One of them read: “Shirin Hashemi, January 5, 1982. Can anyone hear me?”

…

No, Shirin, no one can hear us. We’re here alone.

…

I followed an invisible line, like a road map, connecting words, dates, sentences that surrounded me like tombstones. Death was present here, its shadow sieving every word with finality. “Can anyone hear me?”

Excerpt from the excellent story of Marina Nemat’s life as a political prisoner in Iran.
She now lives in Toronto with her family.

—

« Sirus is dead, » she said in a calm voice.

I tried to find the right words to say, but there were none.

“I have two pens,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I stole them. They don’t know.”

She took a black pen out of her pocket, pulled up her left sleeve, and began writing on her wrist: “ Sirus is dead. We went to the Caspian one summer and played on the beach with a beach ball. So many colours. The waves splashed…” I noticed there was more written on her arm. The words were small but legible. They were memories. Her memories of Sirus, her family, and her life.

…

I found her a piece of paper, but it wasn’t enough for her. She began writing on walls. She wrote the same things over and over about our elementary and high schools, the games we played, the books we read, our favourite teachers, new-year celebrations, summer vacations, her house, our neighbourhood, her parents, and all the things Sirus liked to do.

When we finally had warm water one night, she refused to take a shower.

“Sarah, you have to wash up. Whether you shower or not, the words will fade. If you wash up, then you can write again…”

When Sarah took off her clothes in the shower room, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Her legs, her arms, and her stomach were covered with tiny words.

“I couldn’t reach my back. I’ll take a shower only if you promise to write on my back, “ she said.

“I promise”

And she washed the words off her skin. The Book of Sarah. Alive, breathing, feeling, remembering.

On the West’s accusation that Africa simply cannot rule itself:

Western governments enforced draconian budget policies in Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. The IMF and World Bank virtually ran the economic policies of the debt-ridden continent, recommending regimens of budgetary belt tightening knows technically as structural adjustment programs. These programs had little scientific merit and produced even fewer results. By the start of the twenty-first century Africa was poorer than during the late 1960s, when the IMF and World Bank had first arrived on the African scene, with disease, population growth, and envrionmental degradation spiraling out of control.

When it comes to charges of bad governance, the West should be a bit more circumspect. Little surpasses the western world in the cruelty and depredations that it has long imposed on Africa. Three centuries of slave trade, from around 1500 to the early 1800s, were followed by a century of brutal colonial rule. Far from lifting Africa economically, the colonial era left Africa bereft of educated citizens and leaders, basic infrastructure, and public health facilities. The borders of the newly independant state followed the arbitrary lines of the former empires, dividing ethnic groups, ecosystems, watersheds, and resource deposits in arbitrary ways.

As soon as the colonial period ended, Africa became a pawn in the cold war. Western cold warriors, and the operatives in the CIA and counterpart agencies from Europe, opposed African leaders who preached nationalism, sought aid from the Soviet Union, or demanded better terms on Western investments in African minerals and energy deposits. In 1960 , as a demonstration of Western approaches to African independance, CIA and Belgian operatives assassinated the charismatic first prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and installed the tyrant Mobutu See Seko in his stead. In the 1980s, the United States supported Jonas Savimbi in his violent insurrection against the government of Angola, on the grounds that Savimbi was an anticommunist when in fact he was a violent corrupt thug. The United States long backed the South African apartheid regime, and gave tacit support as that regime armed the violent Renamo insurrectionists in neighboring Mozambique. The CIA had its hand in the violent overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in 1966. Indeed, almost every African political crisis - Sudan, Somalia, and a host of others - has a long history of Western meddling among its many causes.

On perspective where terrorism is concerned:

For me, the 9/11 attacks were harrowing events, but they did not change everything - unless the United States acted recklessly in response. After all, Americans had experienced terrorist acts before, and will experience them again. We have seen repeated terrorist acts throughout the Middle East, in Kenya and Tanzania, and on US soil at the World Trade Center in 1993 and in Oklahoma City in 1995. Terrorism is a scourge that can be fought, but it cannot be eliminated entirely, just as the world will not eliminate entirely the scourge of infectuous disease. President Bush made the same point during the 2004 election campaign - “I don’t think you can win it [the war on terrorism], but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world” - but then reversed himself the next day.

Terrorism is not the only threat that the world faces. It would be a huge mistake to direct all our energies, efforts, resources, and lives to the fight against terrorism while leaving vast and even greater challenges aside. Almost three thousand people died needlessly and tragically at the World Trade Center on September 11; ten thousand Africans die needlessly and tragically every single day - and have died every single day since September 11 - of AIDS, TB, and malaria. We need to keep terrorism in perspective , especially because the ten thousand daily deaths are preventable.

Italics his, bold mine.

From the foreword, written by Bono :

…fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventable, treatable diseases - AIDS, malaria, TB - for lack of drugs that we take for granted.

This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality. What is happening in Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern, and questions our commitment to that whole concept. Because if we’re honest, there’s no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Certainly not in North America, or Europe, or Japan. An entire continent bursting into flames? Deep down, if we really accept that thier lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It’s an uncomfortable truth.

From Prof. Sachs :

I believe that the single most important reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them. Even more important than having specific resources in the ground, such as coal, was the ability to use modern, science-based ideas to organize production. The beauty of ideas is that they can be used over and over again, without ever being depleted. Economists call ideas nonrival in the sense that one person’s use of an idea does not diminish the ability of others to use it as well. This is why we can envision a world in which everybody achieves prosperity. The essence of the first Industrial Revolution was not the coal; it was how to use the coal. Even more genrally, it was about how to use a new form of energy.

Emphasis mine.

It was a long and bitter winter for the British Expeditionary Force in Northern France. Nothing much happened. They dug trenches, secured supply lines and were sent out on night exercises that were farcical for the infantrymen because the purpose was never explained and there was a shortage of weapons. Off-duty, every man was a general. Even the lowliest private soldier had decided that the war would not be fought in the trenches again. But the antitank weapons that were expected never arrived. In fact, they had very little weaponry at all. It was a time of boredom and football matches against other units, and daylong marches along country roads with full pack, and nothing to do for hours on end but to keep in step and daydream to the beat of boots on asphalt. He would lose himself in thoughts of her, and plan his next letter, refining the phrases, trying to find comedy in the dullness.

Atonement

Do yourself a HUGE favor and read the book. It’s about 1 000 times better than the movie.
It also features one of the best sex scenes ever written.

From the book’s back cover :

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

I can’t even begin to properly explain how much genius is packed in such a short book. Ian McEwan can write like very few authors can, making you unable to put the book down until you find yourself having read it twice in a week, to catch all of its nuances. Briony, Cecilia and Robbie become more than characters in a book. They become actual people who you can imagine going about this private history. You love and dislike them in turn, try to excuse them, wish you could hug them or save them from atrocities, you want to shake them sometimes, or grab their hand and walk away, to try and avoid what you know is about to happen. And being able to foresee what will happen in no way takes away from the novel. It makes you want to read faster in the hopes that you’re wrong, that it can’t happen that way, that it’ll work out better. (Incidentally, Robbie is the sexiest male in a novel since Henri in The Time Traveler’s Wife (which you also should read — now)).

Even the bit at the end, in the present, doesn’t bother me much this time while it normally really aggravates me.

The backdrop is impressively detailed and relevant to each character’s personnal road down the story. And as such, it becomes increasingly important to the reader to soak all of those details in. Fascinating accounts of the retreat of the Brits, of the daily life of a nurse in training, of adoption of families by people with homes in the country side, weave together a very complete tapestry to render the story ever more believable and real to the reader.

At any rate, if you don’t read the damn book, I’ll have to read it to you. Actually, that’s kinda hot considering the library scene. Hm.

Sky