Tag Archives: Politics
Sharon and My Mother-In-Law: Ramallah Diaries by Suad Amiry
For most of us in the west, our filtered news of the Middle East is, more often than not, rife with contention, violence, and tragedy. Laughter would certainly be a rare reaction to the decades-long Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and yet Palestinian author Suad Amiry manages to “step out of the frame and observe the senselessness of the moment” in order to capture the “absurdity of my life and the lives of others” in her award-winning debut memoir, complete with giggles and guffaws. Her ability to generate laughter most recently had her center stage – billed as a “comedian”! – for a public performance in Washington, DC earlier this month.
By training, Amiry is a PhD-ed architect and founder of Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, Palestine where she currently lives. By experience, she is a refugee, an activist, a peace negotiator. Only by accident, she is also a writer.
Amiry’s authorly life began virtually – as late night emails to “intimate friends” during the Israeli occupation of her Ramallah neighborhood from November 2001 to September 2002: “Writing was an attempt to release the tension caused and compounded by Ariel Sharon and my mother-in-law.” Those sanity-searching missives went selectively viral among relatives and friends of friends, morphed into a manuscript (some of the lost content retrieved from friends’ in-boxes), and soon Amiry was awarded the 2004 Viareggio-Versilia Prize, one of Italy’s top literary awards.
Amiry’s winning memoir is an intimate read, comprised of her “personal war diaries” from 1981 to 2004. Born in Damascus, Syria, and raised in Amman, Jordan, by Palestinian parents forced to flee their home in Jaffa in 1948 with the creation of Israel, Amiry returns to an occupied Palestine she knows only through her parents’ recollections and a few childhood memories. She arrives in 1981 to teach at Birzeit University. She falls in love, marries, and settles in Ramallah, trying to live an everyday life in spite of being caught in the crossfire (politically and literally) of a perennial war zone.
In Amiry’s world of constant checkpoints, changing borders, and unpredictable curfews, grocery shopping is a race against time while whole days can get lost waiting for an Israeli government-issued gas mask. Amiry’s dog can easily get an identity card to move freely in and out of Jerusalem, while Amiry struggles for seven epic years to get her own identity card which will allow her to legally live with her own husband in their Ramallah home. Amiry and that husband get taken into official custody because of a staring contest Amiry won’t concede against an irate Israeli soldier. Amiry decides last-minute that she cannot have her mother-in-law’s missing front door replaced because the blacksmith’s tools might look too much like weapons to the patrolling Israeli soldiers whose “colleagues blew open [the door] three days previously.”
Throughout the quickly-paced 200 pages, Amiry’s stories are of the ‘you can’t make this stuff up’-variety, so ludicrous that only her irreverent humor – even as it is sometimes mixed with tears – can make you feel her desperation, her anger, her own unwilling complicity with the all-too-often appalling challenges of day-to-day life. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Amiry’s own book, translated into 11 languages and available all over the world, has more global freedom that its author, not to mention the majority of her Palestinian neighbors.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2003, 2005 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Palestinian
The Flowers of War by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman
First things first: Don’t let the book cover lead you too far astray. What you see here is actually the movie poster for legendary Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou‘s latest international endeavor. While the film, The Flowers of War, is based on Geling Yan‘s novel, originally titled 13 Flowers of Nanjing, the details of the two mediums are quite different, most obviously that the film’s male lead, played by Stateside actor Christian Bale who embodies an American mortician posing as a priest, is a character who does not even appear in Yan’s original story. As I haven’t seen Zhang’s film, I can only address Yan’s novel here …
Sixteen young girls from the St. Mary Magdalene mission school have been forced to take shelter in Father Engelmann’s Catholic church [yes, that's Engelmann as in 'angel-man']. The Japanese have taken over the city of Nanjing, and the girls – all orphans except for two girls whose parents could not pick up their daughters before the city fell – are unable to reach the Safety Zone.
The city is in violent turmoil, in the midst of one of history’s most gruesome war massacres, commonly referred to as the 1937 “Rape of Nanking.” Father Engelmann and his protegé Deacon Fabio Adornato [as in 'fabulously adorned?!'] – an Italian American by background, a Yangzhou village Chinese by upbringing and cultural adoption – together with a skeletal church staff, remain dedicated to keeping the girls safe.
Into the temporary sanctuary arrive a group of flamboyant prostitutes hoping for food and shelter. Try as they might, Father Engelmann and Deacon Fabio cannot turn them away … to certain death. The innocent girls are both repelled and fascinated by the worldly prostitutes.
As friction builds inside the church walls with supplies quickly vanishing, three wounded Chinese soldiers, who have miraculously escaped barbarous mass execution, arrive at the church gates seeking sanctuary, bringing reports too horrific to imagine. When the Japanese Imperial Army inevitably demands access, the church’s men, women, and children must figure out a way to survive, in spite of the unthinkable sacrifices …
Yan’s chilling story is told mostly through the teenage eyes of student Shujuan, one of the two non-orphans, angry at her “cowardly parents” for not having rescued her. Yet Yan also sidesteps into omniscience to capture pivotal moments of the prostitutes’ past lives, the decades-long relationship between the elder Father and the younger Deacon, the short-lived exchanges between Fabio and Yumo. As spare as this ‘inspired by true events’-novel may be, it provides indelible testimony to finding humanity in the most inhumane conditions.
Tidbit: Miss (Minnie) Vautrin makes a brief appearance on page 213, as “one of the organizers of the Safety Zone.” The fictionalized account of her life in Ha Jin‘s latest unforgettable novel, Nanjing Requiem, provides quite the companion text to Flowers.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Chinese
Zahra’s Paradise by Amir & Khalid
“The authors have chosen anonymity for obvious political reasons.” When you know something like that about a book – that lives were willing to be risked to get a story out – how could you possibly not read it? In the case of Zahra’s Paradise, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Written by Persian activist/journalist/documentary maker Amir and illustrated by Arab artist Khalil making his graphic novel debut, Zahra’s Paradise began as an online serial webcomic. In the name of worldwide access, the series was released simultaneously in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Korean, Hebrew, Portuguese, German, Swedish, and Finnish. The story – set in the aftermath of Iran’s contested June 2009 presidential elections that declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad victor – was considered that important. Now with Iran back in near-daily headlines, the urgency to read Zahra’s Paradise grows ever stronger.
The book opens with a gruesome prologue that will be alluded to again and again throughout the coming pages: a brutal father forces his young son to witness the monstrous destruction of a litter of newborn puppies. In the prologue’s ending panels, the butchered, bagged remains sink down in a watery burial: “Now you too are in the stream touched by all that’s still and waiting. A lost generation buried inside the eye of this blog. Zahra’s Paradise.”
“[T]his blog” is the work of a young man named Hassan desperately searching for his younger brother, Mehdi Alavi, who disappeared from Freedom Square (the irony!) while protesting the outcome of the Iran’s elections. From June 16 to August 19, 2009, Hassan records his family’s desperate search via the technological tools remarkably still available to him – his phone camera, his computer, the internet – first for Mehdi himself, and then, as time passes, any news of Mehdi at all. Hassan and his mother beg, demand, even call in dangerous favors to work through a labyrinthine system of hospitals, prisons, government offices, the morgue, and even the cemetery just outside Iran’s capital city of Tehran known as Zahra’s Paradise, named after the prophet Mohammad’s daughter. What Hassan is able to unveil is worse than any nightmare …
That the resulting panes make for an unforgettable story might be enough, but that so much of this graphic fiction is indeed fact is a sobering, outrageous slap of reality. The creators use a “composite of real people and events,” supported by an appendix-like 40+ pages at volume’s end they label “Glossary” that serves as historical record. Most haunting are those final 13 pages of names – real, true, once-living brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents – that make up the “citizens of a silent city named Omid (‘hope’ in Persian).” Printed in near-blinding tiny type, these names are an ultimate reminder to “[l]et them challenge our conscience so that in the future we will prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again.”
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration by Shelley Tougas
Take a careful look at this book cover … no exaggeration that “a picture is worth a thousand words”!
The day is September 4, 1957 and 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford is on her way to her first day at Little Rock Central High School. “Nine African-American teenagers, who would forever be known as the Little Rock Nine, were supposed to arrive at the all-white high school … and make history together.” Meanwhile, Hazel Bryan, a white teenager, walks behind Elizabeth, “… her face twisted with rage. ‘Go home, n****r!’ she screamed. ‘Go back to Africa!’” At that moment, Will Counts, a newspaper photographer for the Arkansas Democrat, clicked the photo and made American history.
Little Rock Girl is one of six titles thus far in the Captured History series from Compass Point Books, which “explores how a single moment captured on film can influence society and change the course of history.” Indeed, author Shelley Tougas uses the powerful photograph to tell the story of the brave Little Rock Nine students and their pivotal participation in the long fight for integration. Tougas devotes the first chapter to Eckford whose first-day experience was even more frightful because she did not get the message the night before about the fateful morning’s plans.
Four decades later in 1997, President Bill Clinton held open the front doors of Central High for the Little Rock Nine. Photographer Will Counts was also there. And so was Hazel Bryan Massery. Counts was able to take a very different photograph this time … one that would be used for a poster titled Reconciliation, now sold at the Visitor’s Center near the school. For the full story – inspiring and disturbing both! – and its aftermath, you’ll have to read the book.
Author Tougas effectively pulls together history, memories, and, of course, many photographs to present a mesmerizing, multi-layered mosaic of our challenging past. The title photo “told the story of segregation in an instant. But it did more than tell the facts – it provoked a reaction.” Change is still in motion … “and the state of America’s inner-city schools can be seen as evidence of racism in disguise.” Little Rock Girl, however, ends with the greatest hope, with a visit to Central High by one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals, who remembers being welcomed by a young African American boy: “‘Welcome to Central High School. I’m the president of the student body.’” Beals’ reaction is understandably tearful: “‘… I was expecting something other than this black child. This had been my dream, my vision. This was why I had endured all the pain and physical punishment – so this boy could stand there and say that. It was amazing.”
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Words from a Granary: An Anthology of Short Stories by Ugandan Women Writers edited by Violet Barungi
Considered together, this collection of 15 stories is a welcome statement of women’s literary empowerment. The second anthology published by FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association founded by novelist/short story writer/playwright-turned Ugandan Cabinet member Mary Karoro Okurut and officially launched in 1996, is testimony that “Ugandan women writers refuse to be discouraged by the appalling lack of a reading culture in the country,” insists editor Violet Barungi in the introduction. “They keep wielding their pens, churning out more and more reading material in the hope that one day, our people will realise that reading is the backbone of intellectual empowerment and an integral part of development.”
With respect and admiration for such commendable intentions, Words – examined as individual stories – is an uneven mix ranging from disappointing amateur efforts to memorable glimpses into even stronger writing to come. The majority of the 15 here understandably reflect Uganda’s turbulent history since its independence in 1962; the gruesome, all-too-common violence against women is undeniably prevalent in these pages, as is the constant struggle for survival amidst unfair, unjust conditions.
“Chained” by Monica Arac de Nyeko is perhaps the most terrifying of all, about a student forced to betray her entire convent school and witness their heinous massacre by a rebel gang, then herself commit an unthinkable act in order to buy her freedom. Just as disturbing and tragic is a silenced, almost casual violence against women, as documented in a wedding-day rape in “Esteri’s Secret” by Winnie Gashumba Munyarugerero, incestuous rape in “Out of the Trap” by Ayeta Anne Wangusa, workplace rape in “Hard Truth” by Lillian Tindyebwa, and random multiple rapes during a bus raid in “End of a Journey” by Waltraud Ndagijimana.
Among the anthology’s 15, two stories prove most resonating. The collection’s first, “I Watch You My Sister” by Goretti Kyomuhendo examines a homeless woman from afar as she fights to be noticed in order to stay alive; the repetition of the phrase “I watch you, my sister …” is a strangely lulling refrain against the tragedy playing out from paragraph to paragraph. Closer to the end, “Stepdaughter” by Deborah Etoori is the only happy tale, capturing the developing relationship between two students and their eventual decision to become a true family.
“The anthology is the outcome of a three-year programme of training workshops geared towards equipping creative women writers with writing skills,” explains editor Barungi. In the decade since the collection’s original publication, a number of the authors included here have continued to hone those skills … as I continue my own multi-culti literary education, I’m planning to explore some of those efforts here on BookDragon. Do join me!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2001 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Remember the title of Katherine Boo’s new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, because you will see it on upcoming nominee lists for the next round of Very Important Literary Prizes. That Boo won the Pulitzer in 2000, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2002, became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 (contributor since 2001) after 10 years with The Washington Post, and is just now publishing her debut title, will guarantee media coverage. That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well-deserved.
From November 2007 to March 2011, Boo became a regular fixture in Annawadi, “the sumpy plug of slum” next to the constantly-modernizing international Mumbai airport, and home to 3,000 inhabitants “packed into, or on top of 355 huts.” Settled in 1991 by Tamil Nadu laborers from southern India hired to repair an airport runway, 21st-century Annawadi sits “where New India collided with old India and made new India late.” Encircling Annawadi are “five extravagant hotels,” luxurious evidence of India’s growing global presence: “’Everything around us is roses,’” describes an Annawadian, “’And we’re the sh*t in between.’” In this fetid microcosm, everyday dramas range from petty jealousies to explosive violence fueled by religion, caste, and gender.
At the center of Boo’s story is garbage trafficker Abdul, the oldest son and prime earner of the 11-member Husain family who comprise almost one-third of Annawadi’s three-dozen Muslim population. Thoughtful, quiet Abdul, who is 16 or 19 – “his parents were hopeless with dates” – his ill father, and his older sister stand accused of beating their crippled neighbor One Leg and setting her on fire. For three years, the family is victimized by a labyrinthine legal system controlled by open palms constantly demanding payment.
Life continues in Annawadi: Asha, a lowly-paid kindergarten teacher, works her growing political connections toward escaping the slum, determined her daughter Manju will become Annawadi’s first college graduate. Manju’s best friend Meena wants something more than to be a trapped, arranged teenage bride: “Everything on television announced a new and better India for women,” but “marrying into a village family was like time-traveling backward.”
The toilet cleaner Mr. Kamble is literally dying to raise enough money for a new heart valve so he can continue to shovel sewage and feed his family. The tiny scavenger-turned-thief Sunil (first introduced to Western readers in Boo’s February 2009 New Yorker article) worries that he will remain forever stunted, but at least he’s not a “baldie” like his taller, younger sister whose rat bites have become “boils [that] erupted with worms.” Meanwhile, thieving Kalu recreates the latest Bollywood films with his talented impersonations, entertaining slum kids who will never witness such marvels themselves.
Mumbai, for its marvelous rebirth, remains the largest city in an India that, in spite of being “an increasingly affluent and powerful nation … still housed one-third of the poverty, and one-quarter of the hunger, on the planet.” With the wealth of India’s top 100-richest equaling almost a quarter of the country’s GDP, today’s gap between top and bottom is virtually unfathomable.
Having built her lauded career on capturing the experiences of those living in some of America’s poorest communities, Boo moves “beyond [her] so-called expertise” to her husband’s country of origin, ready to “compensate for my limitations the same way I do in unfamiliar American territory: by time spent, attention paid, documentation secured, accounts cross-checked.” Once the Annawadians accepted the novelty of her foreign presence, “they went more or less about their business as I chronicled their lives” on the page, on film, on audiotape, in photos.
Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit – is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty, nor a political treatise on widespread corruption. Beautiful is pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible about specific individuals who populate a clearly demarcated section of ever-changing Mumbai.
The details of Boo’s process – with a glimpse into her experiences – are added in the “Author’s Note” at book’s end. Further details about Boo follow in “A Conversation with Katherine Boo” conducted by Random House power editor Kate Medina. Before ever “meeting” Kate Boo, readers thoroughly experience Annawadi with Abdul, One Leg, Manju, Sunil, and so many memorable others. Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet throughout that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.
Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 26, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Indian, Nonethnic-specific
Which Side Are You On? The Story of a Song by George Ella Lyon, artwork by Christopher Cardinale
If you’re an American of a certain age, and went to public school when music class was still considered relevant and mandatory, you’ll most likely recognize this historical song. Here’s the link to legendary folk singer Pete Seeger’s rendition.
“What’s going on here?” the front book flap asks. “Let Omie, the eldest, tell it – eighty years after it happened.” That 80 has since become 81, but the story’s power doesn’t age. Welcome to Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931 where the men work long, dangerous hours in the coal mines: ”We live in a coal company house on coal company land, and Pa gets paid on scrip that’s only good at the company stores. He says the company owns us sure as sunrise. That’s why we’ve got to have a union.”
But Pa’s views don’t make him popular with the controlling coal company, nor with the local sheriff and his “gun thugs.” With mounting threats, Pa goes on the run. Ma stands firm, announcing “‘We need a song’” to her frightened children hiding under the bed. “‘This ain’t easy, but sometimes you’ve got to take a stand,’” she insists. “This is how the night goes: bullets through the walls, talk under the bed, words on the page.” When Pa returns, he recognizes that Ma’s newly composed rallying cry will “bring folks together … And it still does.”
Harlan resident George Ella Lyon tells the remarkable story of how Florence Reece wrote “Which Side Are You On,” the song that “has been sung by people fighting for their rights all over the world.” The broad strokes of graphic artist and muralist Christopher Cardinale (who imbued magic realism onto the pages of Luis Alberto Urrea’s Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush) add a sense of urgency, the firm depictions emphasizing the determination to survive and succeed.
After the story — which came to Lyon via “Bev Futrell, a member of the Reel World String Band, who heard it from Reece herself” – Lyon’s informative “Author’s Note” is not to be skipped. “Whenever one side has all the power in a relationship something needs to change,” she writes, while also acknowledging that “[l]ike anything we humans make, unions are not perfect.” Greed and power plague unions, too, but unions can play a positive role in improving work conditions and establishing fair workers’ rights, she explains.
Like the song’s rallying cry, Lyon’s storytelling is ultimately a powerful call to seek social justice at any age: “It’s never too soon to become informed, decide what you think, and speak out. You have a choice. You have a voice. We are how change happens.” Great advice for the 18+ set, too, especially in this election year …
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Nonfiction, Nonethnic-specific
A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman by Lisa J. Shannon, foreword by Zainab Salbi
Can anyone really understand such a number: 5,400,000. The death of a single loved one can leave you staggering and lost … how can anyone even fathom 5.4 million human beings who have been murdered in a single country … since 1998!
Lisa Shannon, a Portland art director, lived a contented life in her cozy Victorian home with her charming partner in both business and life. Yet when her father dies, she’s paralyzed and can’t even drag herself off the couch, relying on Oprah for company. Then on January 24, 2005, a 20-minute segment highlighting the ongoing violence against women in the Congo catapults Shannon to the other side of the world.
“I have to do it now, before it becomes one more thing I meant to do.” So Shannon joins 6,000 Oprah viewers and sponsors two Congolese women. Then she starts running: 30.16 miles to raise 31 more sponsorships through Women for Women International (whose legendary founder, Zainab Salbi, writes the Foreword here). Her first time out, she raises $28,000, enough to change the lives of 80 Congolese women and their children.
She takes her runs on the road, organized as the Run for Congo Women (runs are happening regularly). And in 2007 she arrives in the Congo … where she will meet the most unforgettable women, each survivors of unimaginable atrocities and tragedies. These are her thousand sisters (and more) by whom she will be changed forever though laughter, tears, desperation, anger, gratitude, and finally furaha – joy. Amidst the horror, furaha sana – ”so much joy.”
I read A Thousand Sisters without pause on a long flight that took me away from where most of the book happens – Africa. I had started Sisters numerous times while traveling next door to the Congo, but the font size in the paperback version was so tiny as to make my aging eyeballs roll into the back of my head in defeat. Inflight, I found myself extremely thankful for the sharp, focused beam of the personal overhead light … yet another head-thunking reminder of the choices I have, the privileges I’ve been granted, mostly because the random circumstance of my birth far away from ‘the worst place on earth to be a woman.’
Now that I know, now that you know … what will we do? Shannon is certainly prepared … two of the final pages, entitled “Find Your Own Furaha,” gives you seven immediate actions “you can do for the Congo right now.” All you have to do to get started is open to page 1 …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, African, Nonethnic-specific
The End of the World by Sushma Joshi
Few Nepali writers have thus far landed on western bookshelves, with only two exceptions who come immediately to mind – elegant Samrat Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts) and activist Manjushree Thapa (The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight). So to find another Nepali author writing in English is a gratifying discovery indeed.
Born and based in Kathmandu, Sushma Joshi is another hybrid global writer (and filmmaker), with her Indian and American education, as well as numerous fellowships and residencies all over the world. First published in Nepal in 2008, Joshi’s debut short story collection (which includes an acknowledging – small world – nod to Thapa), was one of 57 titles long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Reprinted late last year, World is immediately available via Kindle (for just $2.99 currently). [NO, I am absolutely not a sudden Kindle-convert, but impatience will make me do strange things!]
What proves most memorable about the collection’s eight stories is an open earnestness in Joshi’s storytelling. Her writing is guileless and energetic, at times refreshing although occasionally a bit clumsy. If her writing seems to lack a polished, sustained subtlety, her directness gives her stories a welcome sense of truthful urgency.
Notables include “Cheese,” in which a servant boy must wait decades to finally taste the precious foreign treat called “chij,” “Law and Order” in which a wannabe officer settles for the local police force but can’t live according to the law, “The End of the World” about the ironic sense of freedom people briefly experience thinking that tomorrow will never come, and “The Blockade” about a man who has spent a year away in foreign menial labor in order to support his family and returns home to disaster.
In each of Joshi’s stories, everyday people are merely trying to survive challenges far beyond their own making, whether strict social stratification, unending war, widespread corruption, political upheavals, or all-consuming natural disasters. Nepal’s last tumultuous decades have left the citizens with little room for anything more than the struggle to just get through the day. Most tragic of all is a sense of resigned acceptance that leaves little hope for a future desperately in need of change.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Nepali
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview
Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.
Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.
At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.
Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]
Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
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