Book review – Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn

I ordered this book, published in hardback in the UK in 2022, from my local library, intrigued by reviews. Julia Blackburn has written widely, combining her non-fiction writing on topics like anthropology, nature and history with memoir, as well as fiction.

Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam is loosely structured as a journal, beginning in March 2020 and ending a year later. The book draws together two separate threads of narrative, one following Blackburn’s enforced months of widowed solitude locked down in the UK during 2020 and 2021, away from her three children and their families, and one following the historical story of German linguist Wilhem Bleek’s investigations into the language and culture of the /Xam people of the South African Karoo, together with his English sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd.

As Blackburn works on her book on the /Xam in the UK, after her research in South Africa is cut short by COVID-19 in March 2022 (she gets virtually the last seat on virtually the last flight out of Cape Town), Blackburn longs desperately for her family, while thinking of the /Xam people in the 19th century “doing their best to hold tight in a world that has become utterly unfamiliar and more dangerous”. She tends to her chickens, and reflects in a way that is both sad and matter of fact on life and death, and history, and it’s all absolutely fascinating.

Her reflections and digressions spring off the page, as she pores over old notebooks and adds little wandering references to a trip to the Venice Biennale, making marmalade, getting the COVID vaccine and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Meanwhile, back in the 19th century, Lucy Lloyd worked with indigenous people like /Aikunta and /Dia!kwain (the ‘!’ is apparently a sort of guttural click) to slowly compile a dictionary of /Xam words, with a /Xam-English dictionary preserved in the Cape Town University Library. No one alive today speaks the /Xam language.

Lloyd sounds to have been altogether more empathetic, and significantly less well-recognised, than Bleek. Four decades after Bleek’s death she continued to be described as his assistant, although she had dramatically expanded upon and developed the work that had begun with him. 

The whites devastated the countryside of Karoo from the 1600s “with our guns, our presumptions and our cruelty, as we moved like a plague through unexplored regions, claiming everything as our own and leaving a trail of destruction in our wake”.

In 1836-37 Captain W. C. Harris wrote, dispassionately, of leaving the bodies of baby elephants abandoned around their mothers’ corpses in the whites’ greed for ivory:

“There could have been no fewer than 300 elephants within the scope of our vision … they all proved to be ladies and most of them mothers, followed by their old-fashioned calves … eventually both wagons were so crammed with spolia that … we were reluctantly compelled to leave the ground strewed with that valuable commodity“.

Whole species, like the quagga, a sort of brown and white striped zebra, were wiped out: quagga have been identified in cave paintings, so had had a long and hardy heritage. By the 1850s /A!kunta, another man interviewed by Bleek and Lloyd, thought that elephants were mythological rain-bringing creatures. The land was taken over by the whites’ sheep, never mind that they are unsuited to the environment and rubbish at camouflage.

The whites’ cruelty did not stop at animals, with /Dia!kwain recorded thus by Bleek and Lloyd:

“We shall see whether we make those people cry as we do, for they do not seem to know that we are people“.

Heart-rending as such words are, the book succeeds in a small miracle in bringing the reality of these lost people, who were so much more connected with the natural world, to life. A bonus is the photos Blackburn has reproduced of some of the /Xam people who spoke to Bleek and Lloyd, and of contemporaneous drawings. An excellent and unique book.

Book review: The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut (South Africa)

I read my first novel by Damon Galgut last year, his Booker-winning The Promise (which I loved, and reviewed here). I just finished reading an earlier book, The Good Doctor, published in 2003. This was another excellent, psychologically astute novel, although it is missing the black humour that made The Promise a standout of 2021 for me.

The book is written from the first-person perspective of Frank, a doctor from a privileged background, in early middle age. Pragmatic, or simply disillusioned, he works under Dr Ngema in a small, dilapidated hospital in the South African homelands, which an author’s note states “were impoverished and underdeveloped areas of land set aside by the apartheid government for the ‘self-determination’ of its various black ‘nations'”. Dr Ngema is well-meaning and has her own ambitions, but her insecurities about her position, as a black woman hospital director in a country that has only recently emerged from repression, mean that she is often afraid to rock the boat.

The book is set in the immediate post-apartheid period, but the (unidentified) area of the bush in which it is located is poverty-stricken, with some villages still without electricity, and very few locals even aware that the underfunded and looted hospital exists. When a patient does find themselves there, if they need more than the most perfunctory care they are immediately transferred to the big hospital in the nearest city.

Life is ticking along apathetically for Frank when Laurence arrives, an idealistic, recently qualified doctor on a year’s community service, with whom he has to share a room. Laurence is full of ideas for outreach schemes and other improvements.

Laurence sees the apartheid era as very much behind South Africa, and is full of optimism for the future. In contrast, the older Frank, although supportive of the democratic changes in society and the progress towards equality, is more guarded about the prospects for positive change, as for him the apartheid regime continues to weigh heavily on the present.

The two doctors represent two sides of the same coin, a bit ying and yang, while there are undercurrents of homoeroticism. Laurence and Frank attract and repel each other in equal measure, while their living arrangements create a forced intimacy.

“Right from the beginning, Laurence was like two separate people to me. On the one hand, he was my shadow, waiting for me when I opened my eyes, following me to meals and work, an unwanted usurper crowding me in my own room. And on the other hand he was a companion and confidant, who leavened the flat days with feeling and talk.”

Frank’s other closest contact is ‘Maria’, a woman living in a nearby shack with whom he has a transactional sexual relationship. Frank is wilfully blind to inconvenient truths, but his evasive, often amoral behaviour increasingly tests his sense of self-worth, already undermined by a defining situation during his national service in the apartheid era when he was forced to provide a medical opinion on how much further ‘interrogation’ a black detainee could handle.

I found the book almost unputdownable as the tensions mounted, especially after a military border service takes up residence in rooms above a local bar, and Frank’s past comes back to haunt him. Not everyone is going to get out of there alive.

Reading plans for the beginning of 2023

The picture at the top of this post isn’t of my home, sadly, but it’s something to aspire to! As I mentioned in my first post of the year yesterday I’m going back to deep-diving into books and other areas of culture from individual countries, month by month.

I didn’t keep this up very well last year, mainly as I found work and family took over and I ended up pushing my leisure activities and ‘me’ time further and further into the long grass.

So, a resolution has to be to not let overwork and presenteeism take over my life! (Something that my husband has been saying to me for over 20 years now.)

My job in publishing is elastic, in that it can take any amount of time you throw at it. It is never ‘finished’; it’s like painting the Forth Bridge. Quite apart from the book publishing side of my work (in international politics and economics) and the inevitable endless meetings and author emails, we have an online presence that we update continually in response to world events, and there is no one else to take over my part of the world if I’m ill, on holiday or hit by a bus. Combine that with family commitments and an upcoming home extension and it’s hard not to feel overwhelm!

My refuge is reading, and I find that by writing up what I read I reflect on and understand it more deeply, and better remember what I have read. So, one resolution has to be to spend a minimum of half an hour a day totally on my own, and – importantly – not at work, so I can focus on my own reading a little, a lot.

My first country of the year is South Africa, and I opened with J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant, funny and erudite 2009 novel Summertime. South Africa feels like a ‘gateway’ country when looking at Africa, as there are so many readily available books by well-published authors, although white writers are over-represented here (eg Damon Glagut, Nadine Gordimer), and I will be making sure to read black writers too, such as Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue, which I am reading right now.

I’ve often found myself focusing on the African diaspora when reviewing African literature and culture, so I’m trying to focus more on people who have spent a significant portion of their adult life in the country in question.

I’m also intending to read and review a book from my TBR, Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces, for Annabel’s Nordic FINDS in January (which I excitedly bought in January 2021 and left languishing), and I will be tackling W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz for the Classics club by the end of the month – though I’ve not clicked with it yet!

Book review: Summertime by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa)

A new year, and with revived good intentions I’m returning to my earlier attempts to focus on writers and culture from one particular country at a time, plus work my way through the 1,001 books list, tackling 2 or 3 a month. I’m not eschewing new releases all together though, but I read far fewer of those than I used to.

First country up, for January 2023, is South Africa, which has turned out a prodigious number of great writers. White South African authors have tended to be over-represented among those, and I will be making sure to read a number of black South African authors.

Summertime (2009) is my first Coetzee, but it won’t be my last. This book wasn’t what I expected: it’s a sort of literary joke or experiment. The third in a series of fictionalized ‘memoirs’, it has a fascinating premise, and I hope that I can do it justice here.

An English biographer is carrying out research, by compiling interviews with women in the younger life of a deceased writer, John Coetzee, who seems to have been a great, indeed Nobel Prize-winning writer, just like Summertime‘s real-life author. Given that many of the Coetzee character’s contemporaries are dead, the resulting “obscure book” will be partial at best.

The women include a cousin, Margot; Julia, a married woman with whom John Coetzee had an affair; and a Brazilian woman, a dancer with a tragic backstory, whose daughter was one of his former English pupils.

“I shiver with cold when I think of, you know, intimacy with a man like that. I don’t know if he ever married, but if he did I shiver for the woman who married him.”

From these self-deprecating, fictional interviews we learn that John was an awkward, ‘autistic’ lover; a bad dancer, who was also vaguely inappropriate, and kinda creepy; an uptight man who lived with his father in a smelly house and insisted on carrying out vast amounts of laborious, bad DIY.

“…I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn’t have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me at once, I can’t say why, as célibataire, I mean, not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impressions). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step towards civilized manners.”

In its focus on a biographer researching a life, it faintly recalls Alan Hollinghurst’s 2011 novel The Stranger’s Child, another brilliant novel. This is the more complex book though: there is a meditation here on what constitutes an author (all very meta and a bit Barthesian), and on why and whether ‘the author’ as a concept should be particularly worthy of interest.

Of course, significant authors are intrinsically interesting to many readers, and given our innate nosiness, to my mind the metaphorical ‘death of the author’ is simply an intriguing mind game.

Since we are bound within and shaped by the historical and cultural milieu in which we find ourselves, removing ‘the author’ from a text is surely impossible – they will always haunt their creation. But this book does read as a plea to focus on the work not the man.

There is humour in Summertime, but also an exploration of the essential unknowability of another person, whose inner world is essentially unreachable, and can only ever really be a projection filtered and refracted through the consciousness of the one observing them.

Together with all this, in Summertime there seems also to be an interrogation of the writer’s own conscience and perceived betrayals, in the frequently pompous, sometimes ridiculous fragments of life events recounted in these imagined interviews.

The book overall is a clear-eyed, neatly erudite and deft reflection on issues of authorship, identity and memory, which also happens to be highly entertaining, and frequently raised a smile.

Art review: London’s Fourth Plinth – Antelope by Samson Kambalu (Malawi)

A few weeks ago my husband and I found ourselves with an unexpected free morning after a cancelled meeting. As a result we got to hang out in central London, completely childfree, for the first time in years.

Before window shopping and nice lunch in Liberty, we did a bit of culture, visiting the National Gallery for the Winslow Homer exhibition, and peering up at the current art work gracing the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – described at the website of the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority, as “probably the most famous public art commission in the world”.

Since 1999 that sometime vacant plinth has hosted 14 different art works by contemporary artists, including a large blue cockerel, an over-sized gold rocking horse and a replica of Nelson’s ship – encased in a giant bottle.

Since September it has been occupied by Antelope, a pair of bronze sculptures (not antelopes but human figures) by Malawi-born artist Samson Kambulu, now professor of fine art at the University of Oxford. At a glance they blend in with the symbols of tradition that surround them (not least Nelson’s Column). However, like Kara Walker’s 2019 installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Fons Americanus, this is a work that repays a proper second look and a bit of research.

The largest figure here represents John Chilembwe, a 5.5 metre-high black preacher from what is now Malawi, holding a Bible and sporting a wide-brimmed hat. Chilembwe towers over the other (3.6 metre) figure, representing missionary John Chorley, glasses in his hand, in a revisionist interpretation of a photo taken in 1914, at the opening of Chilembwe’s church. The realism of the figures reportedly owes much to the fact that they were based on 3D scans of live models. My photos (below) also show the crazy way perspective is distorted too in the way the figures seem to both approach and repel each other, depending on where I was standing.

In donning that headwear at the long-awaited opening of his new church Chilembwe breached a colonial rule that forbade an African from wearing a hat in front of a white man. A year later Chilembwe was killed leading an unsuccessful anti-colonial uprising, which also protested the conscription of Malawians to fight for the Allies in WW1. His church was razed to the ground.

Nowadays Chilembwe is regarded in Malawi as a key figure in the fight for Malawian independence. The country celebrates John Chilembwe Day on
15 January each year, and his image appears on the national currency.

Kambalu is quoted as saying that the work’s title derives from the two peaks of Chilembwe’s quietly subversive hat, which are somewhat resonant of the
horns of an antelope: “the most generous animal in the bush, recklessly, stupidly generous” (as quoted in The Guardian). Kambalu, it is worth noting, is a flamboyant character, who himself is quite prone to wearing an excellent hat (check out his Insta).

My only criticism really – if you can even call it that – is that the sculpture needs all that background info to really appreciate it. Most people I imagine
will glance up and move on without ever knowing or caring much about its inspiration, due to the very subtlety that makes it so remarkable when you do
know that back story.

Kambalu has written a memoir, The Jive-Talker: Or, How to Get a British Passport, which I’m keen to read. The blurb says the books tells how “a little boy obsessed with fashion, football, Nietzsche and Michael Jackson won a free education at the Kamuzu Academy (‘The Eton of Africa’) and began his journey
to art school and artistic success.” Sounds right up my street.

Book Review: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton (UK)

I read a very enjoyable non-fiction book by Polly Barton, who is a translator of literature from Japanese, which was published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. Fitzcarraldo produce such beautiful books, that I’d be tempted to buy them for home decor reasons alone!

Fifty Sounds combines three of my interests: memoir, language acquisition and translation, so it was likely that I would enjoy it. The book is divided into 50 short chapters, each referencing one of fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases.

I attempted to learn Japanese for about six months from late last year, and my progress was so painfully slow that I jacked it in, despite the help of DuoLingo, plus a book-based course and eventually Zoom lessons with a professional. It’s so damn hard! So I’m awe-struck really that Polly Barton was able to hone her Japanese to such a high standard after starting to learn it only as a young adult.

Like Barton I spent time teaching English abroad – however, in my case I was teaching English in a grotty industrial town in Northern France in the early 1990s, where no-one in their right mind would want to spend more than an afternoon.

Fifty Sounds was a really enjoyable and enlightening read. Barton makes frequent reference to Wittgenstein, but don’t let that put you off!

Classics Club – My 1st Spin – Updated!

Joining in with this for the first time, as I’m working my way through a pile of ad hoc classics as well as the 1001 books list.

The number that came up is 6, so it’s Austerlitz for me! Feeling a little intimidated, but I’ve got till the end of January.

My Book Spin List for the Classics Club

1 Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
2 Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary
3 The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair
4 A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
5 Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
6 Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
7 Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
8 The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
9 Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
10 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
11 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12 Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
13 The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen
14 Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
15 On Writing by Stephen King
16 The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble
17 The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas
18 The Annotated Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
19 Tales of the Arabian Nights
20 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Artist Paula Rego (Portugal)

Just after the UK’s last COVID lockdown, and longing to visit galleries again, my mum and I did an online City Lit course on major artists whose work was to be exhibited in London over the summer of 2021.

One of those discussed was renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935-2022), an artist known for her feminist and political stance, along with skewed references to fairy tales, nursery rhymes and Portuguese fables, reminiscent of a painterly Angela Carter. Other interests and influences include traditionally female crafts such as embroidery and dollmaking (subtly subverted), Jungian psychology and surrealism.

I wasn’t particularly taken with Rego’s work when it was presented to me on screen, but when I went to see the large-scale retrospective of her work at Tate Britain that autumn I was converted. Mum and I saw more of her work on display at the Venice Biennale this year, when we escaped the UK for a whirlwind weekend (her work at the Biennale can be seen here).

Rego grew up in a wealthy family under the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, and at 16 moved to the UK for boarding school, later studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met her husband, Victor Willing.

Willing, who Rego outlived by many years, sounds to have been a difficult man to have a relationship with. He was still married when they became involved, and Rego had repeated abortions. Eventually, she returned to her parents in Portugal, where her first child was born. She and Willing eventually married, but he had several affairs, and his health began a fatal decline from his 30s.

The psychologically complex The Dance (1988), a vast canvas (2126 x 2740mm), which has a spectral feel, took months to paint, and was completed after the death of Willing, who is understood to be depicted in the painting, which has often been interpreted autobiographically.

A child dances with two women (her mother and grandmother?); Willing dances first with a woman (perhaps a depiction of Rego), and then, in the foreground, with a faceless, blonde woman (a lover?). Finally, the woman who may represent Rego stands alone, larger in scale than the other figures.

The Dance (of life? of love?) takes place in front of a still, fortified building on a Portuguese beach. Willing looks young and open as he dances with the Rego figure, but appearing again to the left of that image, his expression is harder to read. Rego stated that:  ‘It was to have been the picture that would tie everything together, hung over the top of everything else’ (Tate website, quoting Fiona Bradley, Paula Rego, London, 2002, p.42). 

Other imposing paintings have the feel of a twisted fairy tale:

Her paintings often suggest a surreal children’s book, although there is sometimes a subtext of power and/or sexuality that is less than child-friendly, as in her famed Girl and Dog (below) paintings, and especially her Dog Woman Series from 1994, in which women are contorted into canine positions, complete with bowls of food on the floor.

Rego’s death was announced this year, but as this Guardian article testifies, she had continued to work in her studio, with her longtime model and sometime alter ego Lila Nunes, pretty much until the end.

Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Translated from Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth

Bosnian writer and editor Senka Maric’s 2018 novella Body Kintsugi (Kintsugi Tijela) has just been published in English by Peirene Press, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, who is well-known for her translations of work from the former Yugoslav republics.

I always keep an eye on what Pereine are publishing, as it’s such an interesting list. Autofiction is like catnip to me, so when I saw that this novel was upcoming I requested a review copy.

The novel, if you can call it that, follows the events that follow the breakdown of the protagonist’s marriage. We learn that her husband has left on the first page, leaving her with her two young children and a frozen shoulder (which I know from experience is very painful in itself!).

However, things are going to get worse. While manoeuvring awkwardly in bed to protect her painful shoulder she finds a lump, and is subsequently diagnosed with breast cancer, mirroring the author’s own diagnosis.

Kintsugi is a Japanese term referring to a method of repairing broken ceramics using liquid gold, which accentuates the fractures while arguably enhancing the aesthetic effect. It is an apt metaphor for this tale of resilience and recovery, which weaves together a narrative that intersperses the protagonist’s navigation of illness and single motherhood with traumatic childhood memories.

A visceral and angry book, it is not an easy read, despite its concise length and short chapters – although it ends on a more optimistic note.

Review: Music by Ali Farka Touré (Mali)

I know next to nothing about Malian music, although I do know that it has a rich heritage, and has inspired Western musicians such as Damon Albarn, who has played with Malian artists including Rokia Traoré (below) and Afel Bocoum (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxycsP0yea8). Efforts by Islamists in 2012 to suppress music in Mali had limited success.

I listened to Ali Farka Touré’s 2006 album Savane, apparently one of the “1001 albums you must hear before you die”, sung in a mixture of French and local dialects. I followed this up with his 1994 collaboration with eclectic US musician Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu.

Ali Farka Touré is probably the biggest name to come out of Mali. He died shortly after the release of Savane, which is regarded as his magnum opus, and led to worldwide recognition. He was posthumously awarded the Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mali (the highest national honour), and given a state funeral.

Savane comprises 13 tracks, with a running time of just under an hour. The title song tells of a man who has left the savannah for urban Europe and longs to return. The performance below was one his last:

The music, with its foundations in Malian folk, reminded me of US country and blues music (which were influenced by African musical styles), with heavy use of strings and harmonica, and sometimes plaintive vocals. Interestingly, a key instrument is the ngoni, a sort of African lute that may have been an influence on the development of the banjo. Something a bit different for my weekend listening!