Jan - March 2022: Around the Indian Ocean

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Jan - March 2022: Around the Indian Ocean

1thorold
Modifié : Déc 31, 2021, 4:55 pm

     

Overview
The Indian Ocean counts as the third biggest ocean on earth, with about 20% of the world’s surface water.
Humans have travelled over it since prehistoric times, migrating from Africa through South Asia into Australasia and the Pacific islands, and it has played an important part in trade throughout human history.

It’s the place where cultures as diverse as East Africa, Egypt, Arabia, India, China, Indonesia and Australia come together. Characters like Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama and Admiral Zheng He have sailed its waters (not to forget Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin...); Ottoman, Moghul, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British empires (at least) have left their mark on cultures around its shores.

It has its own unique weather system, the Monsoon, that gives sailors predictable winds and farmers a (fairly) reliable cycle of growing seasons, and has left its mark on all kinds of aspects of society and culture.

In this theme, I’m hoping that we’ll get a chance to look at the places where those interactions happen and at the people involved in them, through the traces those things have left on the pages of books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian\_Ocean

2thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 10:33 am

Countries around the Indian Ocean

Precise definitions vary, and there are many other small islands I haven’t listed here — this is just a quick overview of places we’re likely to meet on our reading travels.

I would suggest that we focus on islands and coasts (or the sea itself!) rather than taking this as blanket permission to read any book from India or East Africa. But decide for yourself what you want to do with the theme.

Islands
- Madagascar
- Zanzibar (Tanzania)
- Comoros
- Seychelles
- Maldives
- Mauritius
- Réunion (France)
- Sri Lanka
- Cocos (Australia)
- Anadaman & Nicobar (India)
- Diego Garcia (UK)

Africa
- South Africa
- Mozambique
- Tanzania
- Kenya
- Somalia
- Djibouti
- Eritrea
- Sudan
- Egypt

Arabian peninsula / Middle East
- Saudi Arabia
- Yemen
- Oman
- UAE
- Qatar
- Bahrain
- Kuwait
- Iraq
- Iran

South Asia
- Pakistan
- India
- Bangladesh
- Burma
- Thailand
- Malaysia
- Indonesia
- Timor-Leste

And not forgetting a couple of small landmasses…
- Australia
- Antarctica

3thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 11:09 am

Key themes

- Environment and natural history
- Indigenous people and culture-contact
- The Monsoon, driver of all seasonal activity, crucial for trade patterns in the days of sail
- Global warming and rising sea levels
- Travel and trade (iron, pearls, spices, slaves, opium, petroleum…)
- Arab seafaring
- The Portuguese and after
- Napoleonic wars
- Opium wars
- Modern Pirates



Admiral Zheng He, who is said to have sailed as far as the coast of East Africa with his armada of 317 Chinese ships in the early 15th century (Wikipedia)

4thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 11:12 am

Some books and writers
General ideas to get us started — I’ll add to this list as we go on.

General, and non-fiction background
- Ibn Battuta (Morocco, 1304-1368) — with a good claim to be called the first great travel writer, he was certainly the first person to have travelled extensively for fun and written about it. He visited just about everywhere in the known (Islamic) world on his incessant wanderings, including many places in and around the Indian Ocean, from Egypt to China. There’s an approachable modern condensed translation of his Travels edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who has also written several books about his own travels in Ibn Battuta’s footsteps.
- Luís Vaz de Camões (Portugal, 1524-1580) — the poet who turned Vasco da Gama’s voyage into a kind of Portuguese Aeneid, The Lusiads. For fun, read it in Richard Burton’s florid Victorian translation instead of the prosaic Penguin Classics one by William Atkinson.
- Slow boats to China — Gavin Young’s classic 1981 travel book doesn’t really need any excuse; he hitch-hikes from the Mediterranean to Canton on local craft.
- Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders by Richard Hall — looks like essential background reading, given the reviews…
- Arab Seafaring: In the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times by George F. Hourani — speaks for itself
- Beyond the blue horizon : how the earliest mariners unlocked the secrets of the oceans by Brian M Fagan — this has a global scope, but it’s written so that you can read any part in isolation, and it has a very good section on the early history of seafaring in the Indian Ocean
- When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes — Admiral Zheng He doesn’t get much coverage in Western history books, this seems to be the most accessible book dedicated to the topic



Ibn Battuta in Egypt, from a painting by Hippolyte Leon Benett (Wikipedia)

5thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 10:39 am

East Africa
- Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, UK, 1948- ) — the latest Nobel laureate is an obvious place to start. He’s from Zanzibar, and often writes about the interaction between African and Arab culture there, e.g. Paradise
- M. G. Vassanji (Kenya, Canada, 1950- ) — Vassanji writes about the Indian diaspora in East Africa, e.g. in his debut novel The gunny sack.
- Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974) — French adventurer who sailed a traditional trading boat based in Djibouti and wrote numerous books about his adventures carrying various illegal commodities, e.g. Secrets of the Red Sea

6thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 10:48 am

Arab peninsula
- Abdelrahman Munif (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, 1933-2004) — famous for Cities of Salt, a novel criticising the rise of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia.
- Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) — British travel writer who grew up in Ethiopia and travelled extensively in the Horn of Africa, the Arab Peninsula, and Iraq. See e.g. his childhood memoir The life of my choice
- Yemen : travels in dictionary land — before he became Ibn Battuta's modern alter ego, Tim Mackintosh-Smith was an expat living in Yemen: this is a nice account of the joys of that country before its current troubles.
- Yémen by Hayîm Habshûsh (1833-1899) — a gloriously off-beat memoir by a Jewish trader in Yemen who acted as assistant to the French explorer Bernard Halévy

7thorold
Modifié : Déc 30, 2021, 10:49 am

Mauritius / Réunion, etc.
- J. M. G. Le Clézio (France, 1940 - ) — another Nobelist, a Frenchman but with deep roots in the 18th century settler-colony of Mauritius, which often features in his writing, e.g. The Prospector
- Nathacha Appanah (Mauritius, France, 1973- ) — a well-known French novelist who often writes about her background in Mauritius, e.g. in Les Rochers de Poudre d'or. Her book Tropic of violence is set on the French island of Mayotte.
- Louis Garneray (France, 1783-1857) — French marine painter who wrote a string of lively, if not particularly truthful, memoirs about his adventures as a seaman in the Indian Ocean during the Napoleonic period.

8thorold
Modifié : Jan 1, 2022, 12:50 pm

Indian sub-continent, Sri Lanka
- Amitav Ghosh (India, 1956- ) — many of his novels deal with Indian Ocean themes, e.g. The hungry tide, set in the Sundarban Islands, or Sea of Poppies, a historical novel set against the background of the Opium Wars.
- Kunal Basu (India, 1956- ) — another Bengali novelist interested in historical fiction. Several of his books involve the Indian Ocean trade.
- Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka, Canada, 1943-) — although he’s mostly a mainstream western writer, Ondaatje has also written a few books that draw on his Sri Lankan Burgher ancestry, e.g. Running in the family and Anil’s Ghost
- Shyam Selvadurai (Sri Lanka, Canada, 1965- ) — author, amongst other things, of the first gay-themed Sri Lankan novel, Funny boy.
- Roma Tearne (1954-) — Sri Lankan-born artist, filmmaker and novelist, based in the UK. Several of her books deal with the Sri Lanka civil war, e.g. Mosquito and Brixton Beach (cf. >11 jveezer: below)
- Island's End by Padma Venkatraman (India, US, 1969- ) — this sounds intriguing, or potentially dire: a prize-winning YA novel about the conflict between modern India and the traditional way of life of people on a remote Andaman island.
- M M Kaye (UK, 1908-2004) is most associated with colonial India, but after independence she moved around the Indian Ocean (and elsewhere) with her army officer husband, giving her the settings for murder mysteries like Death in the Andamans and Death in Zanzibar.

9thorold
Déc 30, 2021, 11:13 am

Reserved (9)

10labfs39
Déc 31, 2021, 11:54 am

Thanks for all your work setting up this challenge, Mark! I don't know how many books I'll get to, but I hope to explore a few as I follow along. At the very least I will learn a lot and gather book bullets. Which book will you choose as your first?

11jveezer
Déc 31, 2021, 12:37 pm

>8 thorold: I really enjoyed Brixton Beach and plan to read more of her novels soon, so Tearne would be a great edition to your list! Maybe I'll tackle another of her books as part of this topic...

12thorold
Jan 1, 2022, 12:56 pm

>11 jveezer: Thanks, I didn't know about Tearne. Sounds interesting, especially given the overlap in subject-matter with Ondaatje and Selvadurai, which I read ages ago.

>10 labfs39: What I've got actually on the TBR at the moment are Sea of Poppies and two Gurnah novels, Afterlives and Gravel Heart. I think I might go for the Ghosh first, haven't quite decided.
I've got a copy of Empires of the Monsoon on order too. And then I shall work out from there.

13labfs39
Jan 1, 2022, 4:45 pm

>12 thorold: I read Sea of Poppies a few years ago and loved it. The next in the trilogy, River of Smoke, I found only so-so. I didn't read the last. I read Paradise by Gurnah last month and liked it.

14CurrerBell
Modifié : Jan 1, 2022, 6:55 pm

>13 labfs39: Ditto! (as to the trilogy). I gave the first book 5***** and the second only 4**** (and I might have rated the second lower than that except that I thought it really picked up toward the end). I do want to get to Flood of Fire and I figure this group topic will be a good opportunity.

But in the interest of picking from an island, I think I'm first going to try for Mahavamsa, the chronicle of Sri Lanka, assuming my copy arrives from ABE in time. It was translated into German by William Geiger and from the German into English by Mabel Bode, and it apparently was strongly Buddhist-influenced. It should also tie in well with the January topic on the Reading Through Time Group, "Eastern Philosophies and Religions" (which is my own chosen topic).

15Gypsy_Boy
Jan 5, 2022, 1:17 pm

Worth adding to the list of Sri Lankan authors is Romesh Gunesekera. Although he is an expat, living in London, his books all deal with Sri Lanka. Of them all, I'd very highly recommend Reef, his first novel, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker. Gunesekera is an absolute master of those moments in life that are fleeting and indescribable; of a moment between two people. Of the evanescent. I cannot think of anyone I have ever read who does it better. There is an exquisiteness, a tenderness, a stunning beauty to his images. Ostensibly the story of a houseboy in Sri Lanka, it becomes the story of two lives inextricably woven into the tragedy of the civil war in that country. It is a deep, unforgettable reflection on the passage of time, chances taken and chances lost, on identity, and of exile. Stunning.

16AnnieMod
Jan 5, 2022, 3:59 pm

I'll probably be back with more at some point but as I somehow managed to read 2 novels from Mauritius authors set in Mauritius last year and as there aren't that many authors from there I thought I'd mention them here:
Kaya Days by Carl de Souza
Silent Winds, Dry Seas by Vinod Busjeet
Neither is perfect but both work on some level. Reviews added to both if someone is interested.

17thorold
Jan 6, 2022, 5:56 pm

>15 Gypsy_Boy: Thanks, I’d forgotten him. I read Reef about the same time as Paradise. I’ve got a couple of Gunesekra’s books on order now.

18SassyLassy
Jan 10, 2022, 8:30 am

Rooting around in the basement, I found The Crows of Deliverance by Nirmal Verma, short stories translated from Hindi. I'm going with that for now, although he didn't actually live on the Indian Ocean part of the country, but was from Sinla in the mountains and lived in Delhi. Interesting bio bit; he lived in Prague for some time, and translated Czech to Hindi, leaving when the Soviets came in.

19thorold
Modifié : Jan 10, 2022, 9:26 am

>18 SassyLassy: Some time we could perhaps do a mini-theme on "exotic writers behind the iron curtain" (I'm sure there's a less clumsy way to express that). I've come across quite a few over the years, people from Africa and Asia who studied in Eastern Europe or the USSR, diplomats, children of diplomats, political exiles, etc. Lola has mentioned some more I never followed up as well.

20MissWatson
Jan 11, 2022, 3:27 am

I have finished Sea of poppies which I loved for its linguistic richness.

21thorold
Jan 11, 2022, 7:11 am

>20 MissWatson: Me too! I agree completely about the language.

Sea of poppies (2008) by Amitav Ghosh (India, 1956- )

  

A historical novel set in 1838, with the East India Company's lucrative opium trade stalled because of the frivolous objections of the Chinese government to the import of large quantities of addictive drugs. There are rumours that Lord Palmerston may be contemplating firm action to teach them the value of Free Trade, but that's for the later parts of the trilogy.

In this first part, Ghosh sets himself the task of getting a bunch of very diverse characters on to the schooner Ibis, sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius with a cargo of indentured labourers ("coolies", or girmitiyas). But he has a lot of scene-setting to do, and social and historical background to fill in, and after all it is a trilogy, so there's plenty of time, and the ship doesn't sail until about three-quarters of the way into the book anyway.

The book picks up a lot of the typical themes of 19th century adventure stories: disguises, rescues, accidents, orphans fending for themselves, people passing as other races or genders, cruel tyrants, pirates, prisons, shipboard floggings, and all the rest of it. There's even a widow rescued from her husband's funeral pyre in the nick of time, although sadly Ghosh forgets that you're supposed to do this from a hot-air balloon... But this isn't a pastiche of Kipling or Jules Verne: there's a hard modern edge to the threats that the characters face, and you know that it isn't necessarily all going to turn out right in the end. And, perhaps more to the point, there's a sharp postcolonial view of life that questions what it sees and doesn't allow the reader to slip automatically into identifying with the European characters.

Ghosh is evidently deeply in love with the languages of the period, from the bizarre Indianised English of the British (what would later be called Hobson-Jobson) and the peculiarities of nautical English and the very specific shipboard pidgin used to communicate between European officers and their multiracial "lascar" crew members. Not to mention Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, etc. His exploration of odd words and their origins is perhaps a distraction from the unfolding of the story, but it is a great part of the enjoyment of reading the book.

The only place where he strikes a slightly wrong note linguistically is in the character Paulette, whom he makes to speak an implausible Hercule Poirot sort of Franglais, to remind us how different she is in her background from the British around her. But she's also a clever teenage girl, who has grown up bilingual in Bengali and French, in a city where (Indian) English was being spoken all around her, and has lived in a British family for a year when we first meet her. Young people accommodate to the language around them very fast: there's no way she would still be saying "attend" for "wait" and "regard" for "look", entertaining though that is to read. She'd be much more likely to have picked up "have a dekko..."

Sample of Ghosh at his most linguistically over the top, making fun of the English in India:
The unexpected dinner invitation from the budgerow started Mr Doughty off on a journey of garrulous reminiscence. ‘Oh my boy!’ said the pilot to Zachary, as they stood leaning on the deck rail. ‘The old Raja of Raskhali: I could tell you a story or two about him - Rascally-Roger I used to call him!’ He laughed, thumping the deck with his cane. ‘Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native - kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn’t a man in town who could put on a burrakhana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we’d wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he set a rankin table I can tell you - and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Cunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right! He was a sly little shaytan too, the Rascally-Roger: if he saw you eyeing one of the pootlies, he’d send around a khidmutgar, bobbing and bowing, the picture of innocence. People would think you’d eaten one too many jellybees and needed to be shown to the cacatorium. But instead of the tottee-connah, off you’d go to a little hidden cumra, there to puckrow your dashy. Not a memsahib present any the wiser - and there you were, with your gobbler in a cunchunee’s nether-whiskers, getting yourself a nice little taste of a blackberry-bush.’ He breathed a nostalgic sigh. ‘Oh they were grand old gollmauls, those Rascally burrakhanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled.’

Zachary nodded, as if no word of this had escaped him.

22MissWatson
Jan 12, 2022, 3:55 am

>21 thorold: That's a very nice and precise review! And I do agree about Paulette's idiom.

23wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 12, 2022, 5:52 am

For Sri Lanka can I mention the Gratiaen Prize, which Michael Ondaatje set up with the money he received for winning the Booker? (Gratiaen was his mother's maiden name). Not all the books are widely available, but a few are. I really enjoyed The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka.

24labfs39
Jan 12, 2022, 11:35 am

>23 wandering_star: ooh. Nice resource

25Gypsy_Boy
Modifié : Jan 20, 2022, 7:40 am

>thorold: Thanks for the insightful review. I used to be a great fan of Ghosh. After Sea of Poppies, though, I knew my affair with him was over. I thought it too self-indulgent, too showy ("Look what I can do!"); it seemed to me that he abdicated here, writing a high-quality pot-boiler. (It all puts me in mind of my review, posted here years ago now, of Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence.) He too often seemed more interested in displaying his research than in good writing. I've always thought it a pity because he is clearly a man of many talents, not the least of which is a gift for observation, and an ability to write perceptive, lovely prose. I appreciate your different take.

26thorold
Jan 20, 2022, 2:34 pm

>25 Gypsy_Boy: Yes, I haven’t read his earlier books (yet), but I can see how you might come to that conclusion: the detail is a lot more interesting than the overall structure, which all felt rather mechanical (and possibly a bit too close to William Golding’s trilogy, as well).

27Gypsy_Boy
Jan 20, 2022, 6:42 pm

I've also been meaning to add a few books to the list:

For the UAE, consider Thani al-Suwaidi's "The Diesel" (not my cup of tea, but YMMV)

For Saudi Arabia, I'd suggest (in addition to Munif):
Turki al-Hamad's Adama
Ahmed Abodehman's "The Belt"
Abdallah al-Nasser's "The Tree and other stories" - although I was pretty unimpressed with it, truth to tell
Yousef al-Mohaimeed's Wolves of the Crescent Moon
and, arguably considered partly Saudi (he was born in India but educated in Saudi),
Omair Ahmad's Jimmy the Terrorist (excellent) and "The Storyteller's Tale" (less so, but worth a read)

The only book I even know of for Eritrea is Gebreyesus Hailu's "The Conscript," but it looks to Libya, not the Indian Ocean.

For Malaysia, multiple books by both Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng are worth your time.

And finally (for this post, anyway), though I have several books by Thai authors, the one I'd recommend is "Many Lives" by M.R. Kukrit Pramoj.

(I have placed a number of books in quotes since the books they link to are, in each case, the wrong work.)

Happy reading!

28thorold
Jan 23, 2022, 10:05 am

>27 Gypsy_Boy: Thanks! A lot to explore there.

My first step towards catching up with Gurnah's back-catalogue:

Afterlives (2020) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

This novel is set against the background of Tanzanian history from the beginning of the German colonial period until after independence, through the experiences of a family living in an unnamed coastal trading town. It looks very like a sequel to Paradise: one of the characters has a back-story that matches that book very closely, but Gurnah has changed all the names to get away from that label, and there's certainly no need to have read the earlier book.

At the centre of the book is the experience of the First World War in East Africa. This is often treated in general history books as a mere sideshow to be summed up in a rag-bag chapter on "colonial actions", but of course it was enormously disruptive for the people directly involved, the thousands of African and Asian soldiers who fought it out on behalf of the colonial powers, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who found themselves in the path of the action and were robbed, murdered, raped, or forced to become refugees. We see this through the eyes of Hamza, who has volunteered as an Askari in the Schutztruppe to get away from his previous life, and who goes through most of the war as servant to a German officer, to emerge wounded and with a knowledge of Schiller and Heine that isn't going not help him much under British rule.

But really, something that's probably true for everything Gurnah writes, it's all about gloriously fluent, engaging storytelling, as much when he's dealing with the horrors of war as with the quiet contentments of everyday family life. He is supremely good at making you feel that you know these people and can identify with their way of seeing the world, even when it's completely different from anything you might ever have experienced yourself.

29NoPlanetB
Jan 27, 2022, 10:02 am

Couple of books I've enjoyed from the Indian Ocean region: One is The Crow Eaters: A Novel. Very well written story, you can see my review. Another is more obscure: The Outlaw: and other stories, set in Indonesia from shortly after independence from Dutch rule, into the late 60s. I enjoyed the stories, enlightening, especially given my limited knowledge of Indonesian history.

30Gypsy_Boy
Modifié : Jan 27, 2022, 1:46 pm

>29 NoPlanetB: ThoughtPolice: Thank you! I was unaware of this book (The Outlaw) by Lubis somehow, despite owning (and having read) his Twilight in Jakarta. Definitely sounds like something to keep on the lookout for.

Speaking of Indonesia, a fascinating "recent" arrival on that country's literary scene is Eka Kurniawan. I have read and recommend his books, including Beauty Is A Wound and Man Tiger. Not for everyone, but a very talented writer.

And staying in Indonesia, there is an older (1957, as I recall) lovely volume by Maria Dermout (1888-1962), The Ten Thousand Things, which is a largely autobiographical account of her own upbringing in Java more than a century ago. Beautiful, sensitive and evocative writing.

31labfs39
Jan 29, 2022, 12:01 pm

I started reading The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh. It takes place in the Sundarbans, the island archipelago at the delta of the Ganges River.

In the early pages of the novel, the myth of the Ganges is told: how the goddess Ganga descended from heaven and Lord Shiva bound her flow to his hair, forming a heavenly braid which is the river's path. But there is a point at which his braid unravels and spreads, and the tangled mass is the Sundarbans.

The modern place name Sundarban ("beautiful forest") comes from the name of a species of mangrove called the sundari. But the Mughal emperors named the region bhatir desh ("tide country") and specifically the outgoing tide or bhata. At high tide many of the thousands of islands are underwater, and it is only with the outgoing tide that everything is visible. (from the first chapter)

32cindydavid4
Modifié : Fév 2, 2022, 4:57 am

some how did not star this so a bit behind!

>8 thorold: re MM Kaye, must include far pavillons, one of my all time fav books, and a book that compares with Kim in its great sense of the place, the people, and the time. ETA however seeing this theme is more coastal, probably doesnt fit. In an antique land is one ive read several times and recommend

33kidzdoc
Fév 2, 2022, 5:33 pm

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  

My rating:

The latest novel by last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is set in the former colony of German East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905-07), in which an armed insurrection by local residents against harsh demands and working conditions imposed on them by the colonists was met with brutal and overwhelming force, and the resultant genocide by the Germans cost approximately 300,000 Africans their lives.

Khalifa is a half African, half Indian young man who is hired as a bookkeeper by a cunning and largely unscrupulous merchant in a port city in German East Africa. After he agrees to marry the niece of the merchant, a match which benefitted the merchant but did not bring happiness to Khalifa or his new wife, he meets and befriends a younger man, Ilyas, who enters town with a letter of recommendation by his German overseer. Ilyas was orphaned at a young age and rescued from bondage by his master, who taught him both the language and the customs of the mother country. Once he is settled Ilyas returns to his home village and rescues his beautiful younger sister, Afiya, from the family who has kept her as little more than a house servant. After the two settle in a peaceful existence in town Ilyas suddenly decides to enlist as a soldier in the schutztruppe, the colonial troops which were tasked to crush any rebellious activities or behaviors by the resentful and downtrodden subjects of the Germans. Afiya is left unprotected, but is rescued from a life of abuse and bondage by Khalifa and his wife Asha.

The schutztruppe in German East Africa is used to fight against the askari, Africans of other countries who were often forcibly recruited to engage in war against enemy colonies during the First World War, under inhuman conditions and with heavy loss of life. One survivor of the war is Hamza, who returns to the port city that he escaped from by joining the schutztruppe. He is hired by the son of the merchant who employed Khalifa, and he gradually gets to know, and ultimately fall in love with, Afiya, who remains unmarried and available.

The primary focus of Afterlives is the growing relationship between Afiya and Hamza, and their story is beautifully conveyed by the author, with rich portrayals of the young lovers and the other major characters in the novel. The brutality of colonial rule under the Germans between the end of the Maji Maji Rebellion and the end of World War I is also compelling and evocative, particularly Hamza’s often harsh treatment by his commanding officers. However, the end of the book is quite rushed, underdeveloped and somewhat unconvincing, as if Gurnah wanted to be done with the book. As a result I knocked down my rating of Afterlives by half a star to four stars, but it is still a superb novel and one well worth reading.

34labfs39
Fév 4, 2022, 1:01 pm



The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Published 2005, 333 p.

Piya is a young American woman of Indian descent who is in the Sundarbans to study the the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella). Kanai is an Indian translator and playboy visiting his aunt. The two meet on the train, and Kanai extends an invitation to Piya to visit Lusibari, the island where his aunt lives. He is visiting there under duress, having only been there once before as a boy, but his aunt says he's been left a packet of papers by his deceased uncle, and she wants him to retrieve them in person. He thinks Piya would be a welcome distraction. Piya, however, is eager to get started with her survey and sets off on a hired boat with a government keeper. Before long, she realizes she is in trouble, and ends up with a fisherman and his son instead. Despite the language barrier, she feels instant empathy with Fokir, and they make significant progress in her project. After several days they head for Lusibari, where Kanai and Fokir's wife wait.

The chapters alternate between Piya's and Kanai's stories, and then with the diary of Kanai's uncle as well. Piya's research with the dolphins is discussed in some detail, as is the ecology and history of the Sundarbans. The diary of Kanai's uncle is concerned mainly with the Marichjhapi massacre, the forced removal of refugees from a government protected forest reserve in 1979. But it's not dry reading, for all of this is the backdrop for an adventure story complete with man-eating tigers and a cyclone.

The first half of the book is a bit slow with a lot of background on the islands, but I found it interesting as I knew nothing about the area. The second half of the book speeds up for a page-turning climax. It was the perfect book for the Indian Ocean theme read in Reading Globally.

35thorold
Fév 13, 2022, 4:56 am

This was a bit of background reading that I was hoping to get to before we started this theme:

Empires of the monsoon (1996) by Richard Seymour Hall (UK, Zambia, Australia, etc., 1925-1997)

  

British-born journalist Dick Hall lived in Zambia during the fifties and sixties and worked for various African papers before moving back to the UK to write for the Observer. This is the last of several books he wrote on contemporary and historical African topics.

This is the classic three-decker sandwich: in the first part, we get an overview of the long-established trading patterns in the Indian Ocean driven by the predictable winds of the monsoon: the triangular traffic between Arabia, India and East Africa and the links between India and South-East Asia and China. Hall obviously loves a good story and an eye-witness, so he spends a lot of time on the stories of Captain Buzurg, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo and various other less well-known travel-writers, as well as on the surviving accounts of China's brief flirtation with naval superpower status in the 14th century under Admiral Zheng He. But in between also manages to slip in a pretty clear account of how it all hung together, and how little medieval Europe knew of the geography and politics of the countries around the Indian Ocean.

That ignorance was in many ways at its crassest with the first incursions by European ships, the Portuguese "voyages of discovery" around the end of the fifteenth century, which are covered in the second part of the book. The treaty of Tordesillas had given the Portuguese the — supposed — right to claim most of Africa and Asia for themselves, but the people who already lived there weren't too impressed by that legal detail. Portugal didn't have the manpower and resources to establish colonial territories in the way Spain was doing in the Americas, so they relied on setting up a few small trading enclaves, in places like Goa, Sofala, and Mombasa, and on terrorising local shipping into compliance with their trading rules using their superior naval firepower. The combination of engrained Portuguese hatred for Islam with the need to make a very small number of warships impress people over a very large area resulted in some very public atrocities that often make the activities of the Spanish Conquistadors look relatively harmless in comparison. Captured seafarers and their passengers were regularly submitted to mutilation and burning alive, preferably within sight of the shore.

Needless to say, Portugal soon faced active resistance from the Ottoman Turks (helped on the quiet by their Venetian trading partners) and competition from other European ships that started to arrive in the ocean, and the Portuguese dominion over Africa and Asia never came to very much beyond Goa and a few slave plantations along the Zambezi. One odd part of the story, that Hall spends quite some time on, is King Manuel's obsession with forming an alliance with the legendarily wealthy Christian emperor Prester John, who of course never existed either in Africa or India (the legends allowed for both possibilities). The closest match that could be found was in Ethiopia, a country that was certainly Christian, but had little to offer as an ally — Portuguese efforts to establish a presence there and convert the Ethiopians to Roman Catholicism were predictably disastrous.

The final part of the book fast-forwards us through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the post-Napoleonic period, with a focus on Zanzibar under the crafty Sultan of Oman, Seyid Said, and his successors. The political situation has some interesting parallels to the present day: Seyid spent a lot of money with British arms manufacturers (especially in British India), so the British government, committed as it was to ending slavery, tended to overlook the fact that he controlled all the main slave-markets and most of the slave-ships in the region. And had tens of thousands of slaves working on his own plantations.

Hall also looks at how European trade goods (especially guns) and the increasing incursions of European explorers and missionaries created the volatile situation in which European colonies started to be established in East Africa, in the famous "race for Africa" of the 1870s and 80s. We get cool, hard looks at colourful figures like Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Stanley, and a few reminders of the abuses that went along with the establishment of "benign" protectorates. This process is mostly just sketched in: Hall obviously takes it for granted that readers will already know the outlines of the 20th-century history of Africa, which seems fair enough.

An interesting, lively book, with a good balance of colourful narrative and hard facts. Probably not the only book you will want to read about the region — it's pretty light on India, for example — but a good overview that also comes with with a lot of detail about East Africa that will be new to most readers.

36thorold
Fév 14, 2022, 4:05 am

Gurnah, again:

Gravel heart (2017) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

At first glance, this is the ubiquitous autobiographical first novel every young postcolonial writer carries around in his suitcase, the story of a naive but clever boy from a modest background who has the good fortune to be sent to study abroad and made to question his assumptions about who he is and where he comes from, so that he can return home and come to terms with the unexplored rift in his relationship with his family. The sort of thing V S Naipaul could knock off before breakfast.

But of course this is Gurnah, and nothing is ever quite so straightforward. There's the obvious incongruity that the first-person narrator, Salim, is actually a generation younger than the author, growing up in Zanzibar in the 1970s and 80s. And of course it turns out that the real story is not about him, but about the catastrophic incident in his parents' lives that took place when he was too young to know about it. The Shakespearean title is already a broad hint at what is going on (and if you don't happen to know the play in question, don't worry, it's all explained later), but it takes Salim a while to work out what it's all about and what that means for him.

Gurnah brilliantly pulls off the deception of mixing his experience as a refugee and overseas student with what he's obviously learnt from the more recent experiences of his own students, and I don't think you'd ever spot that there was anything odd about it unless you happened to have an idea of how old he really is. You unquestioningly take Salim as a child of the mid-seventies. In the process, there's a lot of cunning laying of groundwork to prepare us for the narrative of Salim's father in the final chapters and teach us about what Tanzanian history in the years after the revolution did to human relationships. Enjoyable to read, and moving at the same time.

37thorold
Modifié : Fév 23, 2022, 2:24 am

Slightly off-topic, but I (re-)watched John Houston’s 1951 film The African Queen, which is of course set in German East Africa (Tanzania) in 1914, although it seems to have been filmed in central Africa. The combination of Huston, Hepburn and Bogart is pure magic, of course, and the film stands up pretty well as a drama, but it won’t tell you much about the history of East Africa except that black Africans can’t sing(!) and all Germans are evil. I don’t think either of those things came from the original 1930s novella by C S Forester. Some of the engineering content is a little dubious too…

38labfs39
Fév 23, 2022, 9:25 pm

>37 thorold: True, but ah, Kate. And Bogart's face when dealing with the leeches...

39CurrerBell
Fév 24, 2022, 1:41 am

Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire (4½****), the concluding volume of the Ibis Trilogy, set in eastern India, southern China, and the surrounding maritime regions in the lead-up to and through the First Opium War. I read Sea of Poppies (5*****) and River of Smoke (4****) some months ago; and while I can understand why some would find Ghosh a bit over-the-top, the trilogy is far superior to those James Michener sagas. The second volume suffers as do most second volumes from a bit of a lag, but Ghosh comes back to speed in Flood of Fire. My only problem is that the conclusion is a bit too neat of a "wrap up"; and yes, over all, there are a bit too many coincidences of characters meeting up with each other throughout the entire trilogy.

40thorold
Fév 27, 2022, 10:08 am

Similar territory to >39 CurrerBell::

I read Gunesekera's first books Reef and Monkfish Moon back in the 90s, then lost track of him somehow, apart from his odd cricket-novel The match from 2008, which didn't leave much of an impression on me.

The prisoner of paradise (2012) by Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka, 1954- )

  

This historical novel is basically the love-child of A passage to India and Paul et Virginie. An idealistic young Englishwoman (named Lucy!) brought up on Romantic poetry and Enlightenment politics arrives in the repressive, colonial society of 1820s Mauritius and is thrown together with a Sri Lankan intellectual, interpreter to a prince who has been exiled there by the British. The island is full of (justifiably) discontented slaves, convicts and indentured Indian labourers, the French-Creole settlers distrust the arrogant new British administrators, and the handful of free black Africans and Indian traders expect to be caught in the middle as soon as any trouble starts, so everyone is very much on edge.

There is plenty of local colour, with several disastrous picnics and garden-parties, a lot of Mauritian botany, a slave-revolt, and the obligatory hurricane-chapter. Maybe a few details of dialogue that don't quite ring true for the period, but overall a very competent and entertaining historical novel, just a little bit too predictable, perhaps. Certainly interesting reading if you don't know much about the history of Mauritius, but it didn't seem as witty and original as what Amitav Ghosh does with similar settings and periods.

41varielle
Mar 9, 2022, 7:28 am

>37 thorold: I remember thinking the same about The African Queen. The Germans in the book behaved quite honorably compared to the Germans in the film. I guess it was too soon after the war.

43JonathanLerner
Mar 18, 2022, 5:29 pm

It seemed a great coincidence to discover the current theme of Around the Indian Ocean because I am 2/3 of the way through Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. Which at 1349 pages is the longest single-volume book I've ever read. I don't mind the length or how long it's taking me to go through it, because it's a marvelous immersion in family saga, that of four interconnected families. And also a revealing picture of tensions and conditions just after Partition in '47 (the book is set a couple of years later).

It's not about the Indian Ocean directly, but the monsoon could almost be considered a character in the novel. People are always coming or going from places in relation to when the monsoon is expected to begin or end, or to attend the "monsoon semester" at college. Or they are exhausted by the dry heat and waiting desperately for the monsoon to break. And so forth.

The copy I'm reading was purchased in Mumbai some years ago by a friend. It's a paperback, a 1999 (fourth) printing of an edition published by Penguin India. Aside from the story, I'm mesmerized by the book itself. The pages are vanishing thin; I almost always am turning two at a time and have to separate them with a fingernail. They feel like they should be transparent, but they're not, and the printing is perfectly clear, no ghosting. Mainly I'm amazed that this book hasn't fallen apart, since it's so heavy and it's not new, and at least one other person has read it; actually it shows no sign of doing so. The original price was 500 Rupees. I wonder what that would be in today's dollars?

44JonathanLerner
Mar 18, 2022, 5:34 pm

>21 thorold: Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke are breathtaking achievements. Imagination meets historical research and a world comes into being. How does Ghosh do it? As soon as I get through the final 500 pages of A Suitable Boy I'm going to have to dive into the third of his trilogy.

45thorold
Modifié : Mar 22, 2022, 6:50 am

We're getting towards the end of Q1, but I still have a few books left for this theme...

This is someone I hadn't heard about before, but came across whilst reading about Arab traders on the Red Sea. My ereader proposed these three books to me as a trilogy for a bargain price, but they aren't anything of the sort: two volumes of memoirs and a novel that are all set more or less in the same time and place.

Les secrets de la Mer rouge (1931) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)
Aventures de mer (1932) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)
Les deux frères (1969) by Henry de Monfreid (France, 1879-1974)

    

Les secrets de la Mer rouge: Henry de Monfreid came from an artistic French family and grew up on the Mediterranean coast doing a lot of sailing with his parents. He studied engineering and worked in the dairy industry for a while: after the collapse of one of his business enterprises he moved to Djibouti in 1911, working as a coffee-buyer travelling around Ethiopia. Eventually, in 1913, he made the career-move that he's most famous for, buying a sailing dhow in Djibouti and using it to trade in the southern Red Sea. In the 1930s, he moved back to France and started to make a name for himself as a writer of adventure stories. Like many adventure-writers of the time, he was captivated by fascist ideas and became very close to Mussolini and Pétain, although this didn't seem to do his long-term career any harm: in old age he was still scheming with friends like Cocteau (who bought drugs from him) to get himself elected to the Académie Française.

In this first volume of memoirs, he describes his adventures during his first year as a skipper, pearl-fishing, trying to set up a cultured-pearl farm, and doing a bit of light espionage and gun-running. There's a lot of fascinating, detailed description of the natural hazards of sailing on the Red Sea, with its many reefs and hidden rocks, powerful tidal currents, and sometimes very dangerous local winds. But he also writes a lot about the people he's working with, their jobs — especially the hazards of the pearl-divers' lives — their families, the communities they come from, and so on.

Being a European adventurer of the time, of course it almost goes without saying that he speaks fluent Arabic and Somali, dresses in local style, and has converted to Islam. But despite all that, the colonial authorities still find it a nuisance, in the prickly political situation of 1913-14, to have a rogue Frenchman going around doing all the illegal things you have to do to make money out of running a dhow. So, eventually, goaded by British complaints about the number of people shooting at their troops with French-made guns, the authorities in Djibouti decide to get him out from under their feet by (as he tells it) framing him for something he didn't do and then allowing him to volunteer for the trenches instead of going to jail.

I don't think Monfreid really expects us to take everything here as literal truth — there are some very Tintin-esque moments, like the one where he sinks a pirate dhow by tossing a lit stick of dynamite on its deck at just the right moment. But it's a great story, if a little rambling, and it's obviously told with a great deal of affection for the region and its culture and people.

Aventures de mer: This book continues Monfreid's Red Sea adventures when he returns to the region after a brief period fighting in Europe. He's apparently been declared unfit for military service because of a lung problem: it's interesting that he's still able to do some terrifying long-distance swims despite this (and the malaria and Spanish 'flu that strike him down at various points in this book...).

He describes continuing his business of transporting French arms and other unspecified contraband across the Red Sea (he always denied being involved in slaving, but he seems suspiciously well-informed about the mechanics of the trade in "luxury" slaves — eunuchs and young girls — that continued well into the thirties).

We're also told about his project to build a bigger ship, including a catastrophic trip to Ethiopia to buy timber, during which he comes close to death from 'flu and one of his men is mistaken for a horse-thief and killed by a poisoned arrow. The new ship is not a success, but Monfried (literally) picks up the pieces and starts again.

However, the biggest story in this book is really the one about Monfried being caught up in the war, which — from his perspective — was essentially a conflict between Britain and France to determine who would control the oil-fields after the collapse of Ottoman power. He is arrested by the British on two occasions, both times getting away by a mixture of guile, luck, and the faithful assistance of his crew-members. When he's confined on a British warship for a few days he confesses how much more he likes the British, as individuals, than the French authorities, despite his strong resentment for the results of Britain's devious colonial policy, which hurts the local people as much as it does France. He reserves particular contempt for T E Lawrence, whom he accuses of genocide by the "classic" British method of giving guns to both sides in a regional conflict and standing back to let them wipe each other out. Still, his time in the wardroom of the destroyer must have been quite amusing to watch, given that only one of the British officers could speak French and none of them Arabic, and Monfried of course was a true Frenchman of his time without a word of English...

Les deux frères: This is a bit of romantic adventure fiction — if anything, more like an opera libretto than a novel — in which Monfried figures mostly as narrator, with only a couple of encounters with the characters as passengers on his ship to bring him into the story, set on the coast of the Red Sea ca. 1914. The plot is loosely based on Schiller's Robbers — a young Somali blacksmith is in love with a beautiful girl, but he needs Rs. 1000 to pay off her mother. By enlisting as an askari in the French army he will get a premium of Rs. 500, which is enough to put down a deposit on his fiancée, but his evil brother is also scheming to get hold of the girl (and his brother's money). We get a delightful tale of desertion, shipwreck, identity-theft, slaving, murder, a thrilling prison escape, and much, much more.

Had this actually been written in the times when it was set, we might have been impressed with Monfried's enlightened attitude to his African characters. They are treated very straightforwardly as human beings with all the normal positive and negative qualities of human beings, who simply happen to have grown up in a different cultural, geographic and economic setting from the (presumably) European reader. Monfried knows the people he is writing about and broadly understands how they come to have certain attitudes and ways of behaving that might be quite different from "ours", and he manages to present them as people whose problems we can identify with. But of course he's writing in 1969, and by that time European writers couldn't take their right to speak on behalf of non-European characters for granted any more, so we look a bit more critically, and realise that despite his obvious affection and sympathy, he's a product of the times he grew up in, and can't help being crass and patronising from time to time. And that's before we even start on his female characters...

Good opera, but probably not the best place to look for an understanding of Somali culture.


Southern Red Sea after the First World War

46MissWatson
Mar 23, 2022, 4:03 am

>45 thorold: Thanks for the detailed descriptions! I forget where I came across his name, but the books have been hovering somewhere back in my mind. I may actually go looking for them.

47AnnieMod
Mar 23, 2022, 6:36 pm

I finally have a book that at least partially fits here (and I finally got around to reviewing it). Another one coming in the next day or so as well but for now:


53. By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Type: Novel, ??k words
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2001
Series: N/A
Genre: Contemporary
Format: hardcover
Publisher: New Press
Reading dates: 6 March 2022 - 9 March 2022

A man flees his home country to escape persecution. Another one fled years earlier. And then Fate puts them together - twice - once back home on Zanzibar, and now in England. That's the main premise of this short novel - but behind the almost mundane story of refugees and finding one's home, Gurnah manages to tell a story of Zanzibar and a story about the power of memories and perceptions.

Zanzibar is not a locality most people will be familiar with - I suspect the name will be familiar but other from that, it is usually just one of those places that you never think about. The part of this novel which take place there paint a picture which will stay with me for a long time (and which made me wonder again what were the Omanis doing there at all) and which may be better than almost any history text you can find about these times. But it is also a personal story - we see the island through the eyes of the two men - both of which fled the island, each for their own reason and yet, they both made the decision to do it. And if it is not enough to remind you about the power of telling a story, the dependence of a narrator when you are told a story, Gurnah reinforces us by having the two men remember the same times and places... and remember them differently. Even if you add them up, you still seem to miss pieces of the puzzle - and that's what this is all about - every story has a lot of sides and when we live through a time, we get one side only.

And that duality and difference is there in everything - in how the two men became refugees, in how they adapted to the changes, in how they keep their memories for home (and what they actually want to keep), even in who they meet when they went away from Zanzibar. It is like one of those carnival mirrors - it seems like it is the same story but in reality, it is 2 different story - in a sea of separate stories. Being a refugee is not a story in itself; it is part of one's story, changing with the particulars of the individual. And yes, there are the mundane parts of the stories of both men - the stolen box, the German pen-friend, the room in the squalid house - the mundane is as much part of being human as is the exotic and interesting after all.

There had been a lot of decades in the last years about refugees and memories of home and finding your place in a new country. This is one of the more memorable ones I've read - even if being a refugee is at the front of the story, it is just part of it, almost getting lost behind the story about what a person tells themselves about their own life.

That is the first novel by Gurnah which I read and I probably would not have picked it up if he had not won the Nobel prize - there are a lot of authors out there and he was not exactly popular (the day the Nobel was announced, my local library had a single copy of a single book by him (this one, the copy I read after waiting for it since the announcement - quite a lot of people beat me to requesting it that day...; the library had added quite a few more since then). I plan to explore what else he had written now - because regardless of how I got to read this novel, I really liked his way of writing.

48AnnieMod
Mar 23, 2022, 11:19 pm

And a non-fiction book about one of the major powers in the region (I still have one more novel to review that will fit here even better than this one):


58. A History of Modern Oman by Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout

Type: Non-Fiction
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2015
Series: N/A
Genre: History, Modern History
Format: ebook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Reading dates: 11 March 2022 - 15 March 2022

When I read Celestial Bodies last year, I realized how little I know about Oman - I could find it on a map, I knew its capital and I knew that it is an Arab Muslim absolute monarchy and a non-OPEC oil producer. And that was about it. I could not even tell you if they are Shia or Sunni Muslims (as it turned out, the answer is none of the above - they are mostly Ibadi which unlike Wahhabism is not a Sunni or Shia sect (Wahhabism is Sunni) but on the same level as the two big ones). I don't remember if the novel mentioned Zanzibar or if I found about it being an Omani possession for awhile while checking other details from the book but that made me go and check my maps again - they are not exactly next to each other and Oman is not exactly one of the big colonizers that ended up with possessions all over the oceans. You don't need to know even that to enjoy Celestial Bodies but I feel uncomfortable when a war or an uprising is mentioned and I cannot figure out when in time it happened, at least down to a decade or 2 around the actual date (with Oman, I would have been hard-pressed to make a distinction between events in the 1950s from ones in the 1850s). So I looked around for a book about it, marked a few and got distracted. Then I read By the Sea which deals with the final expulsion of the Omani from Zanzibar and decided it is time to get un-distracted. Except that Oman is not exactly popular - they don't invade their neighbors, they seem to be getting along with everyone and most of the books I was finding were dealing with very specific events - and I really wanted a relatively modern general history (nothing against books such as Phillips's Oman: A History (and I may still decide to read it for the background) but it is from 1971 and the country had changed a lot since then and the western understanding of the region had changed a bit).

So where do you start the history of modern Oman? The authors settle on 1932 as the start of the modern history but they go back to 1749, the year when the first Al Bu Said Imam was elected as Imam (the dynasty which still holds the power) to fill in the background which is required to understand what happens post 1932. And even then they go back even from that - to the changes which the appearance of the Europeans brought to the Indian ocean and the internal struggles that led to the Al Saids taking power. Starting in 1932 means that modern Oman had had only 2 sultans in its history - Said bin Taimur (until he was deposed in 1970) and then his son Qaboos bin Said (now, they had had 3, Qaboos bin Said died in January 2020). After reading the book, that distinction makes sense - the history of these last 2 rulers is indeed very different from what came before that.

The history is interesting (even though if you are not used to the names, they can get a bit confusing but then the procession of Charles and Henry in Western European history is not much easier to untangle - at least here noone changes their name 3 times in the same year). I am still not entirely sure why the Omani ended up on Zanzibar initially (1698 is a bit before the scope of this book so it was just touched upon and it has to do with trade and wins and the Indian Ocean and the nearby African coast (and slaves)) but at least the later events on the island (or islands really) started making a lot more sense (the Omani Sultanate even moved its capital to Zanzibar for awhile in mid 19th century before the two countries were split (not without the help of the British - is there anything they had not partitioned?) and they were never again to be under the control of the same rulers. But that does not make the Zanzibari history less important for Oman - so the authors proceed to keep track of the double story until much later and well into the 20th century (and the expelled Omanis in the revolution of 1964 still had a role to play in the 1970 coup d'état in Oman (and its aftermath).

But that story, the story of Zanzibar and Oman, was the story of the merchants of the coastal areas in Oman. The interior belonged to the Imams - and the story developed differently. Since the mid 1850s, the country had been know as "Muscat and Oman" (or the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman in some eras), showing the internal division more clearly than anything else could; the name won't change to "Sultanate of Oman" until 1970.

And that's what made Oman so different from most of its neighbors - between the Ibadi Imams and the Sultans which were more merchants than politicians, the country went in a radically different direction than the rest of the Arab world through history. They never became British protectorate as pretty much anyone else in the area (although the British were there and interfered a lot). They kept their peace and diplomatic relationship with Iran through all the upheavals in the area. The Omani are one of the keeps of the Strait of Hormuz (and for big parts of their history, they actually controlled both sides, before selling the side that do not sit on the Arabian peninsula to Pakistan in 1958. Considering that the Strait of Hormuz is the only way for anyone from the Persian Gulf to leave and cross into the Indian ocean and the fact that all of the countries in the Gulf need the tankers carrying their oil out to actually leave the Gulf, that made Oman the mediator in the area more often than not. So it played its role - it kept the peace with Iran, it even tried to keep diplomatic relations with Israel when all other Arab countries cut them (and succeeded... for awhile).

But despite all the differences, it is still an oil state. They discovered it later than elsewhere but the country did change once that happened. It never got the high risers of some of its neighbors (partially because it was still working on its basic infrastructure, partially because it did not want to) and it kept its traditional dress even when they travel abroad (although as it turns out that is not exactly true - the "traditional" clothes we all are used to see were a modern invention designed to unify the country in the 1970s and make the different tribes and peoples appear less different).

And then there were some surprises - Oman had women in high positions before any other Gulf state. Its political structures are still getting changed and they are away from what you would call democratic as the West understands the term but the authors make the point that just because something worked elsewhere, it does not need to work here as well. Oman has its own traditions of consultation which don't exist in the same form almost anywhere. Despite the imams and the very heavy Ibadi influence, the Islam taught in schools is non-sectarian. Things are slowly moving towards a more modern state - one which probably won't copy its structure from the West but then... why should it.

Of course there is a lot in the book about the wars and rebellions which made the modern Oman - they don't exactly live in the most peaceful part of the world - Yemen next door had collapsed as a state (and Oman had had issues with them historically in the province closest to them) and the Saudis had always taken exception to the neighbor who does not like their brand of religion (aka the wahhabism) and does not want to adopt it.

At the end of the book, they try to make some predictions for the future in their 21st century chapter. The book was published in 2015, written mostly in 2014 and that is important to remember because this is when ISIS was consolidating its power (and declared its Caliphate up in the same area which had always been a problem in the region). Some of their prediction were spot on (they list 3 people as the possible next Sultan and one of them did succeed), they noted that the way succession works will probably change (this was the only Arab monarchy which did not have a Crown prince; the first thing the new Sultan did in 2020 was to declare one). Some were too vague or are still in play. None was wrong.

So at the end, I liked the book as it served its purpose although I do have two issues with it:
- there were 3 maps: Oman, Oman in the Gulf and Oman in the Indian Ocean. This book could have used a LOT more maps, especially historical ones showing the state of borders and cities and what's not.
- the authors have the very annoying habit to cite other books at length and to remind you that they talked about something in chapter 2 or that they will talk about in chapter 5 (while you are in chapter 3 for example). None of these is usually a big deal but there was a section in the middle of the book which felt as if that is all they were doing for pages upon pages.

The biggest problem I have now is that I want more details and I suspect I may end up reading more about Oman. But this history is a pretty good introduction and overview.

49AnnieMod
Mar 24, 2022, 12:58 am

Apparently I had a good day for reviews so here is the last one - off to Kenya (with a trip in the Indian Ocean thrown in) for a mix of myths and reality by a Kenyan author from Hadhrami descent (the Hadhrami are an ethnic Arab group indigenous to the Hadhramaut region in South Arabia around Eastern Yemen, western Oman, and southern Saudi Arabia with a pretty sizable diaspora communities around the world). I picked the book without seeing the Oman connection :)


60. The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

Type: Novel, 82k words
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2021
Series: N/A
Genre: Fantasy, Myths-based
Format: paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Reading dates: 16 March 2022 - 17 March 2022

That novel was delightful. It was not what I expected - in an attempt to find a parallel in known works of fiction, the publisher (and some of the blurbers) sold the story somewhat short - while I can see why they used these comparisons, they need a qualification (which is missing) and can attract readers who may not care for much of the story.

Aisha is not the normal girl from Mombassa, Kenya - she has Hadhrami ancestry, her mother's birth was shrouded (and so was her short life because of that) in scandal and her father treated her like a boy early in her life, taking her to the sea with him. Until he stopped and now Aisha needs to behave like a girl under the tutelage of her grandmother. Which is not how she would like to spend her life. And one day, her father does not come back from the sea. What follows is an adventure across the Indian ocean as no other - because in the world of Aisha, all mythical figures are alive and well and in order to save her father, she needs to defeat monsters and dead ships and sunken statues. But that is not her first touch with the magical - the talking cat which help her find a boat has this distinction. Neither is the sea journey the whole story - it ends in the middle of the book and once she is back in Mombassa, things get even weirder.

The book is full of the fantastical - from the sea monsters and the talking cat to the man who can cut the sea from a man's heart and the talking crows and the djinn (or something like that anyway) who finally decides to check who Aisha is. And if this was all this story was about, it would have been a nice fantasy novel. But Khadija Abdalla Bajaber treats that as if it is part of normal life so she builds Aisha and her family's life in the novel, showing us a glimpse of the real Mombassa (the author, just like Aisha is Hadhrami), with all its weirdness, with its mix of Kenyan and Arab culture, with the expectations of a woman at the verge of womanhood (although part of the reason why Aisha does not seem to have options is because she does not like to study and is not overly religious - her grandmother reminds her of that and the fact that if she cared for either, the family would have found the money). But all Aisha wants is the ocean.

I don't know much about Kenyan, Mombassan (because it appears that it has its own - supplementing the bigger national one) or Hadhrami mythologies. I am not sure which parts of the tale came from old legends and which came from the author's imagination. I recognized a few things (the stolen shadow, the sunken statue) but I am sure I missed a lot of references. But it ultimately does not matter. It is a coming of age story steeped into myths and reality; colored by the ocean and Mombassa.

The novel won't be for everyone - its blend of fantastical and real can get too mixed-up for most people's tastes. Although if one wants, one can read some of what happens as an allegory - although I am not sure all the fantastical elements can be carried that way - you will lose something of the tale if you try. But at the bottom of all this is the story of a girl who wants something different from what she can have - and is ready to fight for it.

The novel won the inaugural Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize in 2018 (it is given for a manuscript written in English or a non-published translation into English). Graywolf expect to publish the winner for 2019 later this year and if is anything like this one in quality, I really want to read it.

50thorold
Mar 24, 2022, 3:55 am

>48 AnnieMod: That sounds interesting. There was a lot about the period when Oman ruled Zanzibar in Empires of the Monsoon, I hadn’t really thought about the country much before that either. It also comes peripherally into the complicated mix of Red Sea politics in Monfreid, lumped together with Ethiopia as a handy independent polity outside the tussle between the European colonial powers and the Ottomans. Arms exported from Djibouti were usually said to be heading for Oman, but of course never actually travelled that far.

51AnnieMod
Modifié : Mar 24, 2022, 9:01 pm

>50 thorold: Oman may be a virtually unknown entity in most of Europe (I don't remember them even being mentioned in my history classes - geography covered them but then we covered the world) but the more I read, the more it becomes clear that they were anything but in Arabia, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. So not surprised at all that it comes up into the Red Sea politics - even if it is technically not on the Red Sea, it is close enough to influence it and was never part or under the formal protectorship of the empires - for awhile they even played France and England against each other (with predictable results) and later it played the games of the Cold War as well. It is almost funny about the arms - but not unexpected. Comes again as a proof that if you are in the right place, at the right time, interesting things happen.

52JonathanLerner
Mar 26, 2022, 4:07 pm

Finally finished A Suitable Boy. Whew, long haul.
Total immersion in both the intertwined saga of four families and the context of post-Partition India. Fascinating, sometimes sobering, often very funny, perhaps a few hundred pages too long (at 1349...) But it only flagged for me around p. 1100 when it got lost in the political weeds of a 1952 election, which wasn't essential to the plot. (Or, certainly not at that length.) But it quickly picked up speed with, for instance, one character having a jealous meltdown and stabbing his best friend in the stomach, and then the resolution of the big question, which of the three potential suitors is going to get the bride. Fabulous finale in a hilarious set piece blow-by-blow of the wedding. (less)

53thorold
Mar 26, 2022, 4:26 pm

>52 JonathanLerner: Congratulations!

I’ve enjoyed most of Seth’s other books, but somehow never quite had the courage to tackle that one.

54labfs39
Mar 27, 2022, 11:06 am

>52 JonathanLerner: My bookmark got stuck 2/3 of the way through, and I never finished. Sounds like I missed a good ending.

55thorold
Mar 30, 2022, 4:22 am

Another terrific Gurnah novel on the penultimate day of Q1...

I still have Anil's ghost on the TBR, I want to read some more Ghosh, and I haven't got to By the sea yet, either. So I'm obviously not going to stop here. I hope others will feel free to carry on posting here after the end of Q1 too.

---

When I read Gravel heart (>36 thorold:) I was wondering why Gurnah made his "autobiographical" narrator a generation younger than himself. It must have been because he'd already used a more straightforward version of his own early life in this book:

Desertion (2005) by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania, 1948- )

  

There are all kinds of desertions going on here: the relationship between an English traveller and an East African woman in 1899 ends — inevitably — in a way that hurts her (and her descendants) more than it does him; much the same thing happens with Britain's withdrawal from Zanzibar at the end of 1963, leaving an unviable minority government and a messy revolution waiting to happen; and the narrator also feels his own failure to return to Zanzibar and his family after completing his studies in Britain — he's been advised to stay away for his own safety and theirs — as a kind of desertion.

Using an exploitative sexual relationship to stand as a metaphor for colonialism is not exactly original, but it's never put as crudely as that of course. Gurnah presents it with his usual magnificent storytelling flair, presenting his imagined lovers of 1899 just as vividly as the more autobiographical parts of the story, set in a family rather like his own in the Zanzibar of the years immediately before independence. Tremendously engaging characters and a convincing portrayal of family life in both cases.

56labfs39
Modifié : Mar 30, 2022, 12:26 pm

>55 thorold: I loved Anil's Ghost when I read it years ago. Might be time for a reread. I also want to read more Gurnah...

ETA: Thank you for leading this quarter's theme read, Mark. Although I have only read one book so far, I enjoyed reading about everyone else's and adding to my wish list.

57thorold
Avr 6, 2022, 4:01 am

>55 thorold: >56 labfs39: Here we go! I've never quite made my mind up about Ondaatje, and this book left me as perplexed as ever.

Anil's ghost (2000) by Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka, Canada, 1943- )

  

Anil is a forensic pathologist, who returns to Sri Lanka, the country where she grew up, to take part in a UN investigation of human rights abuses during the recent (and still ongoing) civil wars. Together with archaeologist Sarath, his surgeon brother Gamini, and the artist Ananda, she pieces together the history of a recent skeleton that has anomalously turned up in an archaeological site from a much older period.

This is a book full of fascinating and often horrifying details about the consequences of communal violence, with some really beautiful writing that sticks in the mind, but it's also a very discursive kind of a book, constantly shying away from anything that looks like a neatly-resolved plot, something Ondaatje clearly felt would be inappropriate in this kind of context. As a result, there are all kinds of side-tracks that tell us fascinating things about the lives of forensic pathologists or plumbago miners, but don't necessarily deepen our understanding of the characters and their story. In a less-distinguished writer you'd call this "research dumping".

I think the focus on the technical aspects of what extreme violence does to human bodies works against the book as well: we end up with a striking, but very generic, picture of communal violence that doesn't have much to tie it to the specific Sri Lankan setting. Also, it gives a lot of weight to scientific details that Ondaatje isn't necessarily very competent to work with on his own: There were a couple of unimportant but conspicuous errors in technical terms that made it apparent that he hadn't run the final text past his expert advisors (e.g. "microtone" for "microtome", and "millimetres" for "millilitres" — those could have been dictation mistakes).

58cindydavid4
Avr 6, 2022, 9:10 pm

Ive read two by Michael Ondaatje The English Patient and Cats Table Had meant to read Anills Ghost a while back, should do that

Its late but since i am reading by the seafor the castaway thread, Ill add it for here as well.

59JonathanLerner
Avr 9, 2022, 2:04 pm

>53 thorold: I guess I couldn't face the idea of giving up. Not that I don't give up on plenty of books when I'm only part way through. But there was a lot of pleasure in sinking into that world...and being there for such a long time.

60JonathanLerner
Modifié : Avr 9, 2022, 2:07 pm

>54 labfs39: The wedding scene at the end reminded me of the high school reunion that opens Philip Roth's American Pastoral, although in that case you were being introduced to a kaleidoscope of people and in this case you were saying farewell to a similar number of people you'd already met.

61cindydavid4
Avr 13, 2022, 10:59 am

I am loving by the sea! What a great storyteller, and love that he weaves the history of his home and what colonialoism did to the culture within those stories. This wont be the last book I read of him!

62Gypsy_Boy
Modifié : Juil 26, 2022, 7:44 am

>7 thorold: thorold mentioned Nathacha Appanah of Mauritius. I recently read a book of hers I've been curious about for some time, The Last Brother. As World War II starts to wind down, Raj, a 9-year-old living in poverty in Mauritius, knows nothing about the war or, it seems, anything else outside of his immediate experience; given that survival for his family is a day-to-day matter, it’s hardly a surprise. One day he is badly beaten and is taken to the hospital of a nearby prison camp where his father is a guard. There he meets David, a boy his own age. David, we learn (though Raj doesn’t until later), is a refugee, one of a group of Jews whose escape from Nazi Germany ended in their extended internment in this camp in Mauritius. A highly destructive island-wide storm allows David to escape with Raj's help. Eventually, the boys flee into the forest which leads in turn to the central tragedy of the story. The story is told by the aging Raj through recollection, interspersed with current-day reflections on aging and (particularly on) loss. I enjoyed this more than I expected and found that the book resonated…and has stayed with me.