I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience FIVE books, FIVE films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST, CENTRAL ASIA AND THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
First published in Russian in 2015, Three Apples fell from the Sky is a whimsical and fable-like book by the Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan. It features a huge cast of characters living in the isolated mountain village of rural Maran but, like the Yacoubian Building, also reviewed by me this month, I found the novel lacked real depth of character or intensity of feeling, instead going for more of a broadbrush, scatter-gun effect.
Historically, Armenia has been marked by repeated tragedy: in 1915 the Turks systematically murdered huge numbers of Armenians in what is widely considered to have been an act of genocide, and the country’s past has also been marked by famine and the devastating impact of earthquakes. Similarly, the villagers in this novel experience, and often don’t survive, repeated disasters: earthquake, massacre, war, famine and even a plague of locusts.
The book has been garlanded with praise, and is a winner of the prestigious Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana award for traditional-style works written in or translated into Russian and of the Russian National Bestseller Prize. However, I found getting through the book to be an exercise in endurance. I found the prose stilted and the structure incoherent, and the narrative dotted with unfeasibly long sentences, which could have done with an edit. Perhaps I am too habituated to contemporary Western fiction (though, in my defence, I can hardly be accused of being blinkered in the breadth of my reading matter, hey).
The book comes with an endorsement from Russian author Ludmila Ulitskaya, who is quoted as describing the book as “balm for the soul“. I found the recurrent tragedies anything but a balm, and certainly not countered by the book’s more heart-warming moments. I should probably give more detail about the story itself, but I was so keen to finish the book that the last thing I feel like doing right now is wasting more time summing up the plot! Ha!
I’ve been listening to the new Avalanches album on repeat since it landed on Spotify in the UK on Friday. The Australian electronic dance duo’s first sampletastic album Since I Left You was released in 2000. That album, featuring the instantly iconic Frontier Psychiatrist, was a point of mutual appreciation for me and my new boyfriend (now husband) at the time.
His likes tended towards indie, while I was a bit of a raved-out raver, and Avalanches ticked a few boxes for both of us. Then they disappeared, and their comeback album of 2016 passed me by entirely.
The new, 25-track, multi-guest album is pretty long, at about 71 minutes, and opens with the spooky Ghost Story, and the voice of a hesitant-sounding young woman: “Hi, I’m sorry I left so suddenly… I will always love you...”, as if communicating from somewhere beyond the ether (but identified, more prosaically, by the band as a teenage break-up voicemail recorded by the artist Orono).
The second, gospel-influenced track, Song for Barbara Payton, references the tragic, alcoholic Marilyn Monroe-lite actress, who died – far too young – in the 1960s, interspliced with a brief reprise of the sample from track 1.
Title track We Will Always Love You, featuring Blood Orange, combines shoe-gazing rap with a rapturous chorus. The Divine Chord, with guest artists MGMT and Johnny Marr, and Interstellar Love subsequently introduce a welcome dose of joyful, whirling psychedelia.
Ghost Story Pt. 2 comes with a reprise of the first track, together with added Clanger noises. But then we’re back to laidback dreaminess with Reflecting Light, albeit heavy on the chipmunk-singing (a term I’ve coined because it brings to mind the ear-splicing, animated Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise, which features a bunch of animated, wannabe pop star chipmunks). There’s a surprising amount of chimpmunkery around on the popular music scene these days, so maybe those damn rodents were onto something.
Oh the Sunn! goes more upbeat, unexpectedly featuring Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell. We Go On continues the dancey vibe, belying the content of the really rather mournful lyrics, sung by Cola Boyy and a sampled Karen Carpenter: “We go on, hurting each other“.
Until Daylight Comes, featuring Tricky and children’s chanting, gets more sinister, with the refrain “I was the light, I was the light“. Meanwhile, Wherever you Go, featuring Jamie xx and Neneh Cherry, makes sure we don’t lose that banging, transcendent vibe: “on the dance floor, that’s where you get yours“.
Music Makes Me High bring the much-needed party to 2020 (as long as it’s a party for no more than 6 people, and you’re all outside standing 2 metres apart).
Later, Running Red Lights, sung by Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, is uplifting and joyful in sound (though I guess partly a paean to lovestruck traffic violations). It’s instantly catchy, but I can see it becoming unbearable after multiple listens, so if you’re in it for the long haul this is nowhere near the best track on the album.
The album closes with Weightless, which is composed mostly of self-indulgent ‘space beeping’. The band say their new album explores “the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit”. Elsewhere I read that it was inspired by the impact of Carl Sagan’s wedding proposal in 1977. The EEG of his loved-up wife-to-be Ann Druyan, Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, was transmitted into space as part of an audio time capsule that aimed to communicate elements of the human condition to extra-terrestrial life.
This all sounds a bit pseudy concept album, but why not? I really love, perhaps will always love, We Will Always Love You.
This Egyptian best-selling novel, written by former dentist Alaa Al Aswany, was first published in 2002, and immediately had an enormous impact, becoming a national bestseller and the world’s best-selling work of fiction in the Arabic language. The Yacoubian Building has therefore achieved something that very few Middle Eastern novels manage: a huge popular readership, not only domestically, but throughout the wider region and across the world.
The book, in its broadest sense, describes the changing fate of a building, a beautiful but now faded apartment block built during the 1930s:
“ten lofty stories in the high classical European style, the balconies decorated with Greek faces carved in stone, the columns, steps and corridors all of natural marble … an architectural gem that so exceeded expectations that its owner requested of the Italian architect [his signature] on the inside of the doorway … as though to immortalise his name and emphasise his ownership of the gorgeous building“
The novel’s focus on a crumbling architectural gem serves more widely as a metaphor for the history of Egypt pre-Arab Spring, with the gradual disillusionment experienced by many of the characters, who find themselves, variously, embroiled in family feuds, sexually coerced and manipulated, and thwarted in their attempts to make their way in the world on the basis of merit.
It is noteworthy that the book openly discusses subjects such as political corruption (“it’s true that Egyptian elections are always fixed in favour of the ruling party“), police brutality and homosexuality – areas that Middle Eastern writers might typically be expected to have been more circumspect in describing around the turn of the millennium.
However, to a Western reader, the narrative voice can appear sexist and homophobic. Aziz runs a bar frequented by gay men, and “he is a victim of that same condition“. About wives, we read: “When the children are asleep … and the room they all live in is clean and tidy, and the husband has come home … and asked for his wife, is it not then her duty to obey his call, after first bathing, prettying herself up, and putting on perfume?” The book, for me, was more socially conservative than it seems to think it is.
The Yacoubian Building is Dickensian in scope, carrying a message about the failings of society and with a diverse range of characters. Like the Yacoubian Building itself, the novel is densely populated, and this did initially make it difficult for me to remember who was who, as I struggled to keep all the unfamiliar names straight in my head. Also, like Dickens, we have surface-level characterisation and a reliance on stereotype.
One of the most powerful elements of the novel is its examination of the transition of a young, ambitious police academy hopeful, Taha. He gradually becomes disillusioned by the doors that are shut in his face in secular Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, as a result of his humble background, and turns to radical Islam, encouraged to propagate a “true love for death in God’s cause, and [a] deep contempt for the evanescent pleasures of this world“. Meanwhile, Taha’s former childhood sweetheart Busayna is shocked to discover that her male employers assume that sexual favours are part of her contract of employment.
I found the prose didn’t flow as easily as I would have liked, whether to do with the style, different narrative norms or the translation (or, of course, a mix of all three!). However, the book’s vivacity lends itself to film, and a quick Google search showed that it has already been adapted successfully both for film and for the small screen. I feel that I might enjoy the movie more.
“I am the wanderer always searching. You are in me, and I in you. And we will meet again. I cannot be tricked. I cannot be fooled. I am the wanderer. And you are mine forever.” – Lazarus, played by Tshamano Sebe
I hadn’t seen any African horror films before (I’m discounting Atlantics, which felt supernatural rather than horrifying). 8, otherwise known as The Soul Collector, written and directed by Harold Holscher, is set “somewhere in South Africa” in 1977, against the background of the apartheid regime.
The story centres around the white family of William Ziel (Garth Breytenbach), who returns to the large farm he has just inherited, after years of absence from the area. He is accompanied by his uptight wife, Sarah (Inge Beckmann), and their creepily, porcelain-doll beautiful orphaned niece, Mary (played by Keita Luna).
Shortly after their arrival, Mary wanders into the forest that borders the farm, where she meets an old farmhand, the all too appropriately named Lazarus, who was present at William’s father’s death. He chats to Mary in a friendly fashion, and Mary seems quite chill with the the whole set-up, despite the fact that he is accompanied by a maggot-infested monkey corpse.
Aunt Sarah is immediately suspicious of Lazarus, but after he helps William to get the unco-operative electricity generator going William allows him to stay in the old barn. Mary and Lazarus, both with a history of deep personal loss, soon form a strong bond.
There’s just one problem. Lazarus engaged in some ill-advised necromancy after the death of his little daughter in a fire many years before, and has since been indebted to unspeakable dark forces. Had he not read The Monkey’s Paw or watched Pet Sematary?!
This film contains many of the standard Hollywood-style Gothic tropes (with the ‘haunted house’ iconography of the farmstead, and frequent jump scares), mixed with uniquely African folk horror elements. There are fantastic performances from both the conflicted healer Lazarus and the wise and mystical village elder Obara (played by Chris April).
From early on in the film, even before encountering Lazarus, Mary displays an unexpected knowledge of elements of African folklore, unsettling her aunt Sarah and uncle William, though she matter-of-factly informs them that her info comes from school, or from a book.
Lurking behind all this, of course, is the fact that the film is set during the apartheid era, and there is a sort of background hum of suspicion and innate hostility in William and Sarah’s interactions with the black characters, evident not only in their behaviour towards Lazarus, but towards the local community as a whole.
The intrusion of the outsider into a close community is a standard trope of horror movies (think of The Wicker Man or the excellent Midsommar). Nor is the ingrained racism of outwardly benevolent white people towards black people something that can now be written off as historical – as evidenced by Jordan Peters’ brilliant Get Out.
8 defies straightforward interpretation and comes with bags of potential. It is never boring, but I came away thinking that the film didn’t quite live up to that potential. Nevertheless, it was a real treat to step outside the standard US/European horror genre and experience something eye-openingly different. And amid the scares are beautiful shots of the epic mountains and enormous skies that seem to be a feature of film from South Africa and adjacent countries.
(In Dutch with English subtitles, running time 2hr 25mins)
Black Book (titled Zwartboek in Dutch) is a 2006 action thriller directed and co-written by the prolific Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who returned to his native Netherlands to make the film after years of success in Hollywood.
He is best known internationally for directing glossy American films from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Robocop, Basic Instinct (the film that made Sharon Stone famous, if not notorious) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall.
His latest films have been French-language projects: the hysterical and confusing Elle, which I watched on its release in 2016, and the upcoming film Benedetta, based on the book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, which sounds like it might need to work hard to appear more than simply titillating (the art work for the film features a sexy nun flashing a bit of nipple).
Black Book, which claims to be inspired by actual events, retains key elements of Verhoeven’s aesthetic – overt eroticism, high gloss, glitz and lots of imaginative violence – and is set in occupied Holland during the Second World War. It tells the story of a young Jewish chanteuse, Rachel Stein (played by Carice van Houten, probably best known as the sinister, hot priestess Melisandre, otherwise known as the ‘Red Woman’, in Game of Thrones).
After tragedy strikes, Stein obscures her Jewish identity, becoming ‘Ellis de Vries’ in order to infiltrate Nazi HQ and assist the Resistance by ingratiating herself with the military leadership. Sebastian Koch (perhaps most well-known for German film The Lives of Others, which I reviewed earlier this year) plays the target of Ellis’s subterfuge, Ludwig Müntze (the ‘Hauptsturmführer’), but he is revealed as a conflicted Nazi who is nurturing an inner pain.
This film has all the standard Hollywood action tropes, but also allows room for a little nuance. How far a person might be willing to go to save their own skin becomes a central theme. This is particularly salient given the constant twists and turns of the plot. What makes someone good? Is it possible to be a ‘good’ Nazi? Can someone automatically be assumed by us to be ‘good’ if they work for the Resistance?
The film was noteworthy for being, according to Wikipedia, three times more expensive than any other previous Dutch film. Fortunately for the makers, it has also been the Netherlands’ most commercially successful film. It is highly regarded in terms of quality, too. We (my husband and I) found it consistently entertaining. Not just us: in 2008 the Dutch public voted it the best Dutch film ever made and, looking at IMDB, users have rated it a healthy 7.7/10. US review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes summarises it as “shamelessly entertaining” – sounds about right.
“You know, when you’re a kid on an island of 250,000 people, you have to stay in your lane. I wasn’t really good at that.“
– Tavares Strachan, quoted in Elephant magazine, autumn 2020
During September and October this year work by US-based Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan (b. 1979) was on display at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London, presenting an “immersive and site-specific experience“. A Guardian journalist described it slightly differently, as “baffling, complex, not to say deeply complicated” (while giving it a five-star review), although looking at and into Strachan’s work it seems no more confounding to me than any other conceptual oeuvre!
I didn’t make it out of South London into the Central London galleries between our first and second ‘lockdowns’, and I’m not much inclined to now, until the new Covid vaccine is hopefully wheeled out in early 2021 (I’m biting back the feeling that it is all too good to be true, after all the dire news in 2020).
In 1972 John Berger noted that “The days of pilgrimage are over, it is the image of the painting which travels now“, which gives me a handy ‘out’. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to agreed with the art critic Ossian Ward, who some 40 years later wrote in his book Ways of Looking, that “encountering a work of art in the flesh is paramount to its understanding“.
As a sort of compromise solution, many galleries have set up online viewing rooms and gallery walk-throughs so that people can engage with art as it is hung in an exhibition (and, presumably, buy it), while they are unable to visit either due to temporary restrictions on movement, or due to safety fears. The Marian Goodman gallery is one of these institutions, so although I missed the physical show, I was able to view some of the work online, and download a handy list of the works exhibited (together with little thumbnail pictures).
Strachan has a fascination with human aspirations and physical limitations, as well as the obstacles that have traditionally been imposed on people by cultural strictures and structures, rather than by the limits of the human body.
Specifically, his art has been influenced by the life of Matthew Hensen (1866-1955), an African-American explorer who, in 1909, took a key role in the first recorded expedition to reach the North Pole. For some reason (entrenched racism, presumably) his name seems to have been virtually erased from history.
Strachan’s interest in inhospitable climates, in the achievements of Matthew Hensen and in the power of the individual is not new. For his 2005-06 work The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want he arranged for the excavation a 2.5-ton block of ice from the Alaskan Arctic. The ice was then transported to the Bahamian capital Nassau using some kind of special refrigeration unit and was displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of Strachan’s childhood primary school.
The piece is, quite literally, monumental, and evocative at the personal level of individual biography, as well as in the much wider sense of referencing the fragility – but also the adaptability – of the natural environment and the dissonant beauty of displacement. My husband points out that this work of art could also be interpreted as a massive ‘fuck you’ to Strachan’s old school, given it seems to involve plonking a massively inconvenient hunk of Arctic ice in the playground.
Strachan’s later multimedia, multi-part work Orthostatic Tolerance (2010) makes reference to the physiological stress that astronauts experience when leaving and re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. As part of the work, Strachan experienced some of the training received by Russian astronauts as well as taking part in experiments at the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center; as part of this ‘installation’, he endured 16 units of G-force.
More recently Strachan has been working on an ongoing written work of art called The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), included in the London exhibition, which currently comprises some 2,400 pages and 15,000 alternative entries. These describe individuals, locations, objects, concepts, works of art and scientific phenomena that have been un(der)recognised or have simply … disappeared, including both an ancient Israeli unit of measure called the omer, and Richey Edwards of British band the Manic Street Preachers. On archival paper, leather-bound, the work was exhibited in a glass case evoking the silent power of books compiled in past centuries by colonial-era white men, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, in a work that questions the validity of our collective memory.
Also included in the recent London exhibition, the immense double-panelled 2020 painting Every Knee Shall Bow (measuring some 2.5m x 2.5m) immediately brings to mind the Black Lives Matter campaign and the colonial past of the Bahamas. The pop-culture style painting features Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie on the cover of a 1952 magazine, while Queen Elizabeth gazes out at the viewer, foregrounded by incongruous (to me) snowy owls. Importantly, in terms of context, the Queen ‘took the knee’ when she met Selassie, with emperors deemed to be of higher rank than simply royalty.
The upstairs gallery at the Marian Goodman Gallery was given over to a collection of busts entitled Distant Relatives, individually named for influential people of colour throughout recent history in the USA and the Caribbean. They are named for, for example, the writers James Baldwin and Derek Walcott, nurse Mary Seacole, Henrietta Lacks (whose cells revolutionised the understanding of cancer), and the explorer Matthew Henson (of course). However, the realistic busts are often obscured by elaborate African masks, their individual features symbolically erased by the foregrounding of their African ethnicity.
Strachan’s neon works are also iconic, and his latest is intended to be installed in Colorado in the near future, on a massive scale. Conceived prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but resonating very deeply with the situation in 2020, individual words make up the simple phrase “We are all in this together“, whether interpreted as a call to action or as an expression of unity.
“Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. She was definitely our mother – but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all. Since her dispersal among the fronds of Notley, she had changed. Now her skin was carpeted by spongy, verdant moss and thin tendrils of common filmy fern. Six large fronds of tree fern had sprouted from her back and extended past her waist in a layered peacock tail of vegetation. And her hair had been replaced by cascading fronds of lawn-coloured maidenhair – perhaps the most delicate fern of all
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, according to received wisdom. But how about judging a book by its opening line, or its opening paragraph?
Set in the extravagant natural environment of Tasmania, off the Australian mainland, this is a debut novel like no other: highly imaginative, incredibly creative and confoundingly faux-mythological.
In an attempt to save his 23-year-old sister Charlotte from the distressing tendency of the bodies of the deceased females of the McAllister family to return from the dead and self-immolate (bear with!), Levi McAllister decides to design and build a high-quality coffin to contain her ashes when she eventually dies. However, when Charlotte catches sight of evidence of his plans she assumes the worst, and runs for her life…
The novel seems on its way to becoming a straightforwardly alternative road movie of a book, but author Robbie Arnott employs a diverse range of storytelling devices, and the narrative veers into something more technically ambitious, with strong folkloric elements and a focus on the diversity, cruelty and wonder of the natural world.
At times we have a standard third person narrator, but at others the story is told from, say, the first-person perspective of an alcoholic lady detective, or via the lost journal of an insane (or possessed?) wombat-farmer, or the belligerent letters of a temperamental carpenter or even the consciousness of a power-mad (or just straightforwardly godlike?) water rat.
These efforts to push the boundaries of traditional narrative and the hyper-focus on a sort of elemental magical realism can occasionally be taken further than is perhaps wise, tipping into faint ridiculousness. However, the prose is saved from becoming too self-reverential by touches of humour, and is always wonderfully original.
I don’t read much fiction from Australasia, and I meant to get involved with Ausreading month, hosted by @bronasbooks earlier in November. At least I’ve managed to squeeze in one read!
The Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and composer Ólafur Arnalds has written numerous film and television scores and has already released four previous solo albums. His new, 10-track album some kind of peace (no caps please!), released in early November this year, is mesmeric and transporting.
Shortish, at 38 minutes, the album provides an enveloping soundscape of what might broadly be described as ambient electronica, although classical instruments, notably strings and piano, are prevalent throughout.
The tracks are virtually devoid of lyrics, but do feature occasional guest artists. Josin, otherwise known as the soaring German singer and composer Arabella Rauch, is credited on The Bottom Line, while Back to the Sky features vocals by female Icelandic singer and musician JFDR.
For me, Woven Song had echoes of mid-1990s world music ensemble Deep Forest, if you can remember them (it actually samples the voice of Herlinda Agustin Fernandez of the shamanic Shipibo of Peru).
The hypnotic Spiral is gorgeously meditative, while Zero is a wavelike instrumental track. Elegiac closing track Undone is full of mournful surging strings, and opens with sampled speech faintly reminiscent of The Orb’s classic chill-out listen Little Fluffy Clouds (although that vocal sample, of an interview with US singer Rickie Lee Davis, was unauthorised – The Orb are apparently forever known to her as “those fuckers”).
Bonobo, aka talented US-based British DJ, producer and musician Simon Green – who has, I guess, chosen to name himself after a particularly sexually profligate breed of monkey – is credited on the first track, Loom, which also features a wordless female vocal. I found it to be a particularly gorgeous listen (the video can be found at the end of the post).
According to semi-trusty Wikipedia, Arnalds unexpectedly turns out to have drummed for heavy metal bands before embarking on his solo career. He is nothing if not innovative. The New Statesman noted that his previous album, Re:member, featured “two self-playing, algorithm-driven pianos of [his] own design”.
At its most basic the album provides a kind of enveloping aural wallpaper, that you can sink into like an accommodating sofa while you WFH. But at its best it approaches transcendence. It’s an album that benefits from repeated listening, and here in the UK is available on Spotify.
“The kitten had an inferiority complex and persecution mania and nostalgie de la boue and all the rest. You could see it in her eyes, her terrible eyes, that knew her fate.“
Jean Rhys died at the age of 88 in 1979, although her death had first been announced in 1956 (“I feel rather tactless at being alive” she reportedly quipped). The quality of her writing was not recognised for decades, despite the boost provided by her earlier entanglement with influential modernist Ford Maddox Ford.
Rhys published no work between 1939 and 1966, when her magnum opus Wide Sargasso Sea, which was apparently pieced together from a manuscript kept in carrier bags under the bed, won the Royal Society of Literature Award. “It has come too late,” she said.
Although Rhys spent much of her life in the UK, she felt that her Creole colonial background in Dominica and her Caribbean accent had marked her out as an outsider in England as soon as she arrived at boarding school in Cambridge in her late teens. She had momentous struggles with alcohol her whole life.
The first-person narrator of her novella Good Morning, Midnight (which I devoured as part of Novellas in November month) is Sophia Jansen, who has restyled herself as Sasha. She has been drawn back to Paris, specifically Montparnasse, from London, where she has been living in grim lodgings on the Gray’s Inn Road following an unhappy, brief first marriage.
A legacy brings in a regular, though far from extravagant, income. But the arrival of some form of financial stability has not necessarily been a wholly positive event:
“Well, that was the end of me, the real end .. It was then that I had the bright idea of drinking myself to death.”
We sense past tragedy, which is revealed as the novel progresses, while Sasha has been consistently let down by her forays into both love and work. Around her, male characters repeatedly weave in and out of her consciousness, fading out before reappearing unexpectedly. Her closest neighbour in her seedy hotel (who appears to wear only dressing gowns) is compared overtly to a spectre, while her new (supposedly) Russian acquaintances, her errant husband Enno and her tergiversating drinking companion René, known mainly as ‘the gigolo’, seem to manifest themselves intermittently and then disappear.
Nicholas Delmar, one of the “Russians”, espouses an attractive philosophy: “that’s what I say to myself all the time: ‘You didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t make the world as it is, you didn’t make yourself as you are. Why torment yourself? Why not take life just as it comes?’ … you have the right to take life just as it comes and to be as happy as you can.”
However, Delamar doesn’t necessarily seem able to stick to this recipe for life, while Sasha’s narrative voice is predominantly deadpan and melancholic, with elements of fatalistic humour. The fragmented prose reflects the refracted and splintered nature of Sasha’s existence, which has become defined by alcohol.
“I’ve had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I’ve had enough of thinking, enough of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus … ‘ Drink, drink, drink … As soon as I sober up I start again.”
From a modern perspective the slippery prose also reflects that churning, infinite looping repetitiveness of thought that characterises the thought processes of survivors of trauma: inchoate ruminations on her brief ruinous marriage, her immeasurable loss and the way that time concertinas as we gain the perspective of age.
“I don’t believe things change much really; you only think they do. It seems to me that things repeat themselves over and over again.”
The wheeling repetition of themes and phrases gives the book a poetic feel, while the prose is marked by dashes and ellipses, which express the lack of coherence in Sasha’s thought processes, but also, of course, a pervasive sense of omission. Irmgard Keun’s Berlin-set The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), another book that feels very much ahead of its time, similarly makes liberal use of the ellipsis, expressing the dizzy-natured antics of protagonist Doris. She is another misused heroine, but that book has a much lighter-hearted feel.
Despite Sophia/Sasha’s state of brain fog and cognitive dissonance, the structure of Good Morning, Midnight is nothing if not tight. The prose weaves its way to its carefully carved out conclusion, in a narrative that gives a voice to the dispossessed.
In Portuguese with English subtitles, running time 55 minutes
Written and directed by Nuno Miranda, this 2020 film uses its focus on a homeless eccentric, known locally as Kmêdeus (literally translatable as “Eat God”), to explore the culture and history of the West African archipelago of Cabo Verde, which is home to some 500,000 people.
The enigmatic Kmêdeus lived on the island of São Vicente, Cabo Verde’s principal port. Through interviews with people in his home town of Mindelo, an affectionate portrait is built up of a well-known local character. Bedecked in the contrasting religious imagery of a Star of David and a Christian cross, he carried a tin can and would apparently revel in telling people that he “ate God with rice”.
While many people who met him remember him as mentally ill, others consider him to have been something closer to a philosopher or a street and performance artist. The film challenges us to avoid reductive labels applied to “those we call crazy”. I’d have liked to have been told more about the life of Kmêdeus, who we learn “must have had a sense of humour as he attempted to kill the President” (no more information is forthcoming!) and who met a “violent end” (not expounded upon), in contrast to his apparently largely peaceful life. He actually sounds to have been hugely vulnerable, and I question the philosopher label!
We are shown extracts of a 2008 piece by the contemporary choreographer and dancer António Tavares, based on the life of Kmêdeus, which inspired the film itself. From here we are introduced, through the course of three distinct acts and archive photography, to a wider examination of the importance of representative art, music and film in Cabo Verde, and the power of mythology and the imagination. Notably, the film highlights the significance of the euphoric annual carnival, and the opportunity it provides for people to cast off, if only temporarily, their everyday identity.
In focusing on the multiple interpretations of Kmêdeus’s life, he becomes a sort of metaphor for the paradoxes and inconsistencies in Cabo Verdean identity, and showcases the multiplicities inherent in the islanders themselves, as well as the pervasive impact of their national history. Edouard Glissant, best known for academic theories focusing primarily on the Caribbean and the so-called New World experience, is quoted in the film (“a man on an island knows of life abroad”): thus, the life of an islander is not necessarily closed off and insular. Indeed, the inhabitants of this tiny country appear to be incredibly cosmopolitan and creative. Notably, too, Glissard’s Caribbean Discourse sought to interpret the experience of islanders (not specifically Cabo Verdean islanders) as infinitely varied, rather than encapsulating a fixed, homogenous meaning imposed by the history of colonization.
The organizers of the Africa in Motion film festival (which showed the documentary this November) noted that the film (which was made in conjunction with the Cabo Verdean film collective Negrume) ultimately becomes “a search for the roots of one of the oldest Creole communities in the world”. Doing a bit of research after watching the film, I learnt that until the 15th century, when Portuguese settlers discovered the islands, the archipelago was completely uninhabited. The islands finally achieved independence from Portugal in 1975, but due to their isolated location, as well as the population’s primarily mixed heritage, the inhabitants can inevitably feel, both literally and figuratively, somewhat cut adrift from the rest of the continent and the wider world.
Although let down somewhat by poor subtitling, this was a interesting insight into Cabo Verde, a country about which I knew very little, and a thought-provoking and often beautiful film. I really fancy visiting one day…
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 
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