Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver

Anna Aemelin is an artist and somewhat of a recluse. She paints pictures of the forest ground, in minute details then sends them to the publisher, who adds the text. The books are published once every two years. Anna is rich. She lives in what the villages calls 'rabbit house.' And she sketches rabbits, scattered with flowers, on the otherwise realistic pictures. But she does not do that by choice, but because the publisher requests it. How else will he be able to sell the books as children's books? She receives letters from these children, her avid readers, and replies to them diligently and compassionately. Up until Katri, Mats and their nameless dog come into her life.

Katri is not a local, nor, of course, is her brother. But what's striking about Katri are her yellow eyes, their yellow disconcerting in a village where everyone has blue eyes, and where its citizens wonder “what sin [they have] committed that things can't be normal.” But Katri does numbers. She is brilliant with numbers. She calculates. She analyzes. You go to her with your financial affairs and she advises you on how to manage these finances. Her advice is always to the point. Accurate and always proven fruitful. Taxes. Severance pays. Retirement plans. Employment issues. Katri takes care of it all. Flawlessly. “A remarkable woman,” according to Anna, because not only does she have a head for maths, but she reads literature.

Katri's brother, on the other hand, like Anna, only reads adventure books. And through these adventure books he develops a taste for designing boats, as most of the adventures he reads happen at sea. His designs are brilliant and made with precision. In that, he seems to be the connection between Katri and Anna. He sketches creatively, like Anna, but is very methodical, like Katri.

Through calculated, deliberate and cunning planning, Katri manages to secure herself a place in Anna's house, along with her brother. It is around that time that the village children start chanting 'witch, witch, witch' whenever she passes. And in their life there, she also manages to save money to get her brother's boat sketches turned into an actual boat, her way of making her brother happy. But to do this, she convinces Anna that she has been cheated by the shopkeeper, the publisher, even the children whose letters she answers, and in this Anna begins to change from the trusting gentle artist to one who mistrusts everything, much like Katri does, and eventually struggles in her inability to paint or write her letters to the children. But in this money saved for Anna through managing her finances, Katri also secures a small fund herself, towards Mat's boat. Because she believes that “without money, a person's thinking does narrow. It shrivels.”

In her introduction, Ali Smith writes that it is a book “concerned with locality, money, winter, wildness, social unacceptability and power,” but also about “whether there's such a thing as objectivity.” Katri's methodical objectivity becomes the backbone of the novel. But Katri is also the true deceiver in the book, even though her deception rests on utter truths and completely well-calculated arithmetics. Katri's calculations are based on her own assumption, often proven accurate, that “every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbours.” And trusting nothing but her own accurate calculations, Katri manages to get Anna to trust her. In a cunning exchange about how to treat her dog. Katri tells Anna that obedience means “believing in a person and following orders that are consistent.” She insists: “It's a relief, it means freedom from responsibility. It's a simplification. You know what you have to do. It's safe and reassuring to believe in just one thing.” And although Anna blatantly rejects Katri's doctrine, we see gradually her observing it in her own life affairs.

But the true deceiver is also Anna, who paints the forest floor in exact measures, then adds unrealistic rabbits and flowers to please her readers. The novel poses the question of this line between what is true and what is right, a line that begins to blur when Katri and Anna's characters begin to evolve. What Anna sees in the beginning as social niceties and acts of kindness, Katri sees as deception. What Katri sees as truth and absolute decisions, Katri sees as cruelty. And in the merging of these two absolute worlds, the novel weaves itself in beautiful and simple language that is set against the dark unrelenting Scandinavian winter.

This is a beautiful book, very endearing in its presentation of plot and characters, very straightforward in the line it draws between truth and justice, but one that leaves the reader no solutions. Anna's world eventually falls back into its pattern, but we know Anna is not the same person. Katri also eventually displays characteristics that are not typically hers. The characters change to a noticeable degree. But we are not sure what the book is saying about these changes. I don't like books that preach. Do you? And this one doesn't. It just tells a very beautiful story set in a very cold and treacherous weather.

Octavia Butler: Kindred

I just finished reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I picked it up because I wanted to expand my sci-fi readership. And somehow a novel that is part sci-fi part slave narrative seems to feed right into my interests. It’s like reading a book co-authored by Toni Morrison and Aldous Huxley, or Alice Walker and Ursula Le Guin, or Alex Haley and Frank Herbert. Okay. You get the picture.

Now let’s talk about the novel.

Dana, living in California in 1976, is repeatedly transported to 19^th Century Maryland. Gradually she learns that she is transported by some unexplainable powers of her white ancestor Rufus Weylin who calls her into his plantation whenever his life is at risk. This starts when Rufus is a child and continues till he dies. Rufus is a plantation owner and Dana soon realizes that her journeys into the past are needed to insure her own existence, as Rufus will father Hagar from his slave Alice, and Hagar is Dana’s great grandmother. And though she begins by questioning her role in his survival, she is soon to shake that doubt and accepts this tole.

Again, what would have happened if the boy had drowned? Would he have drowned without me? Or would his mother have saved him somehow? Would his father have arrived in time to save him? It must be that one of them would have saved him somehow. His life could not depend on the actions of his unconceived descendant. No matter what I did, he would have to survive to father Hagar, or I could not exist. That made sense.

But somehow, it didn't make enough sense to give me any comfort. It didn't make enough sense for  me to test it by ignoring him if I found him in trouble again. 

Preparing to read sci-fi, this novel’s theme of slavery seems to have overshadowed the sci-fi element, at least for me. Though the actual transportation, its details and the way the characters deal with it makes this an interesting new look into sci-fi, it is Dana’s life on the plantation that is most captivating here. How would a modern day black woman deal with being a slave? This seems to be the question this novel poses. How submissive will modern day Dana be when she is hardened (or softened) by actually being a slave? And how would Kevin, her white husband, behave when, in one of her journeys, he is also transported with her? 

But Dana herself knows she is a mere observer and isn't really living the life of a slave as she begins to realize how both Kevin and herself are fitting rather too well in their life: 

We weren't really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

Yet, her observer state does not prevent her from feeling guilty at being the woman who saves Rufus's life. Butler highlights Dana’s feelings of guilt over any other feelings of being transported across time and place. Dana visits the plantation 6 times, saving the slave-owner Rufus from imminent death in every one of her visits. This makes her, in the eyes of other slaves on the plantation, a culprit in their enslavement. And like other submissive and complacent slaves, Dana chose her own safety, a choice she has earlier looked down upon when she notices it in another slave woman, Sarah:

She had done the safe thing - had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called "mammy" in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom - the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

And she soon admits that she genuinely cares for Rufus, even as he enslaves her, has her whipped, and almost causes her death in one instant. Guilt over rescuing a man who is constantly cruel to his slaves haunts Dana more than any other feelings she might have by leaving her time/place. However, it is finally as threat to Dana’s body that she manages to end this cycle. As long as Rufus’s interest in her is as his savior, Dana accept becoming his slave, but when he becomes interested in her body, upon the death of his Alice, she immediately decides to end this cycle and kills him. I’m not sure what to make of this. Slavery is not longer the element that repels Dana from Rufus. She seems to have accepted that, even justifies it. But in the end this is a novel about a woman whose body refuses to be violated, not about a black woman who refuses to be enslaved. And even though she utters her rejection to being his slave, she has long been accepting the duties of a slave, it is the duties of a lover, forced by a slave-owner, that she actually resists with her knife.

A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus - erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my mater, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.

I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me. I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side. 

Of course the body does matter here. In the end, when Dana is finally free (through Rufus’s death) she is left with her arm amputated. Her body is violated, if not sexually, then indeed physically. Her arm remains in the grips of Rufus's hand even when she manages to come back to her 1976 life. Butler argues that she does this because she refuses to leave Dana untouched by her experience, that it doesn’t make sense to her that Dana should go back to her old life untouched. But Dana is left untouched. Her life continues as it had been before. Her awareness of slavery hasn’t changed. She knew what it was as did Kevin. It might now be a more personal awareness, but it’s not a big change. And having been responsible, through saving Rufus, for so many of her slave friends being killed, whipped, and sold is too huge to be equated with a loss of an arm.

Now don’t let these questions and investigations fool you. This is a very good novel, and I don’t think Octavia Butler needs me to vouch for her. This novel is an interesting investigation of the slave mentality. It is also an interesting twist to the usually sci-fi novels. It is worth reading, interesting to read, and most enjoyable as well. As sci-fi, I wouldn’t rate it as a favorite. As slave-narrative, I also wouldn’t rate it as a favorite. But as one that combines two unlikeable themes, it stands out indeed.

Radwa Ashour: Siraj (رضوى عاشور: سراج)

This is a beautifully written novel by Radwa Ashour in 1992, before her fame kicked in with her Granada Trilogy in 1994. I picked it up and finished it in one day mostly because of how easily its narration flows. But it is also a very short novel of a 116 pages that reads fast and is highly recommended.

The story is framed by a narration from Amna’s point of view. And between the first and last chapters where we read Amna’s thoughts and worries, we are taken to other character’s lives beginning with the Sultan and his struggles with the English presence in the area, Amna’s son Saeed and his travels into Alexandria then towards Yemen and southeast Africa, old and kind-hearted Ammar whose old love for Amna’s mother stays with him till the end, mischievous Tawaddud and her early ambition to become a sailor, all of whom become active members in a revolt against the Sultan led by the Sultan’s slaves, and thwarted by the British troops.

The events take place at the end of the 19^th century around the time of the Ahmed Orabi revolution in Egypt. Its main characters belong to a small island in the Arabian Sea that escaped complete British occupation by becoming a protectorate as its Sultan allowed the British to establish their military base on parts of the island. While the novel tells of the Sultan’s struggle to ward off the British influence in the area, it also presents the Sultan as a dictator who shows no reluctance to punish anyone suspected of treason or revolt. And in a land that holds more slaves than natives, revolt was bound to happen. Yet the novel itself is more about Saeed and his growth from a young adventurous boy to a man risking his life for his land. It is mostly also a story of Amna, the mother, who begins by telling us she fears the sea and doesn’t understand men’s attraction to it:

الرجال يخرجون للبحر، يذهبون ويعودون، يذهبون ثم لا يعودون، فتخرج النسوة للانتظار وقد يبّس الخوف أكتافهن وحفر أخاديده في وجوههن. شاهدت آمنة كل شيء: لطم الخدود، ساعة يتأكد الخبر، وشق الثياب والعويل الذي يقطع الفضاء ويشطره كما يشطر سكين السياف رأس الحي عن الجسد.

And later when her son shows the desire to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps and take to the sea, she wonders again at men’s attraction to treacherous sea over abundant land:

في الغد يخرج للصيد فهل يضمر له البحر ما أضمره لأبيه وجده؟ الرجال يحبون البحر، يذهبون إليه بشوق كالعشاق فما الذي يحبونه في البحر والأرض بين أيديهم ماؤها عذب زلال؟ الأرض أكرم تودعها بذرتك فتمنحك نبتتها وثمرتها وتوفي، فلماذا يحب الرجال البحر؟

And when she finally loses her son, it is indeed the sea that takes him from her, not his life in the sea, but the English troops who come by means of sea. So her motherly intuition proves right.

The novel appears to be that of the struggles of simple people helpless against the stronger powers of the Sultan and the British armies. But to me it read more as a novel investigating our relation to sea and land. Saeed, the son of divers, tries his luck at farming but finds it hardly as appealing as life at sea. His mother, fearing he sea, presents us with a sea that is cruel and damaging unlike the land, which she equates with the womb of a woman that nourishes and cares for its seed.

I might be reading too much into this. But I’m used to literature by women that presents water and its fluidity as feminine, or at least feminist, an idea that is further developed by many theoretical feminist arguments that sees in this fluidity a closer link to woman's identity and her actual womb. Ashour seems to subvert this, whether intentionally or not, by showing the stability of land and its productivity as more of a feminine/feminist trait than the illusive, and here treacherous, sea. The sea/water is Amna’s enemy here, and by extension, the reader’s enemy.

And then again, appreciation of what the land provides is another dominant feminist motif when it is mingled with studies of ecofeminism. Yet Ashour’s separation between land and sea is one that clearly finds a difference between a nature that provides us with sustenance because we care for it as farmers, and one that survives without our interference. Saeed loses his father and grandfather to sea after all, and it is his mother, Amna, who allows his seed to grow. Amna is the land/woman that has finally been defeated by the sea. Nature is not one for Aisha. It can harm you just as easily as it can provide you with sustenance. And it seems that a nature that you care for, is, in the end, better for you than one that does not need your care.

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

An Oliver Twist-like story of deceit, secrets, crooks and an English scenery, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is a wonderful novel that kept me hooked as it unfolds its mysteries page after page. Waters clearly shows her debt to Dickens in the first page when her protagonist talks of going with her friend to beg at a play: the play being Oliver Twist of course.

The story is about a girl called, in those days, Susan Trinder. Susan grows up with other crooks in the house of Mrs Sucksby who makes a living ‘farming’ infants. When Susan turns 17, she helps Gentleman, later known as Richard Rivers, in convincing Maud Lilly, a young heiress, to marry him so that he can have her money by putting her in a madhouse and later splitting that money with Susan. The story is intriguing for its many twists of plot, the most important of which happens midway through the 548 page novel. It is a very elaborate scheme that includes crooks, demented gentry, mad women (always a favorite theme of mine), in a web that connects London to the country side, presenting London as the locus of thieves and crooks out to ruin a young women in the Briar. But twist after twist in the plot makes this more than just a simple story of Susan deceiving Maud.

Waters's style of writing makes this a smooth and quick read. Her rich narrative makes it a book hard to put down. This is a good novel to read. Very entertaining.

Muhammad Al-Mansi Qandil: A Cloudy Day in the Western Land (محمد المنسي قنديل: يوم غائم في البر الغربي)

As a young girl, Aisha’a mother takes her to get a tattoo of a cross so she can hide her in a convent, as protection against her abusive stepfather. But Aisha’s days in the convent are numbered because of a scandal that involves a nun and leaves Aisha homeless again. With the help of a friend from the convent, Aisha manages to find a job in an English Lord’s house but leaves that position and becomes a translator in a revolutionary newspaper when she begins to notice the clash between the Egyptians and the British. Eventually her stepfather manages to lure her back to their village and she falls victim to him until her wolves save her and she escapes. Impregnated by her stepfather and disgraced, she finds no other place of refuge but a brothel where she stays until an English painter, Carter, proposes that she joins him in his new expedition. While she is reluctant to follow a man she only coincidentally met 3 times, the story almost ends with Aisha and Carter together. Almost. Until the wolves appear again.

الذئاب تتحرك في اتجاهها، لا تخاف من شيء، ولا يوقفها شيء، تحيط بالبيت من كل ناحية، تتذكر النظرة القاسية التي رأتها على وجه أمها، تدرك أنه لا جدوى من الصراخ، ولا يوجد طريق للهرب.....

.....تقدم "توت" وسط عواء الذئاب، كانت تنتشر في كل مكان، تتقافز فوق التلال، أصبحت شديدة القرب منه، يراها بوضوح وتشم هي رائحته، وكان الحراس الاربعة يقفون بعيدا عنه، بالقرب من الشاطئ وهم يرتجفون، كان "توت" القديم يستيقظ من جديد، لا يحب ان يكون في هذه المدينة، ولا أن يعبد هذا الإله، يجب أن يقاوم "حورمحب"، يزيل النقوش التي أصبحت تحتل جدران مقبرته على رغمه، ويمحو صور هذه الآلهة التي يكرهها ولا يدعها تستولي على مصير حياته الثانية، تبعث أصوات الذئاب بنبضات حية، تمد جسده بطاقة إضافية، عليه أن يسترد مكانته، ويثبت للجميع أنه ليس خائنا، وليس محبا لآمون، ولا يدين بالفضل لـ "حورمحب"، سيعلن تمرده على كل شيء، لعله يسترجع رجولته الضائعة.

لمح ظل شبح يتحرك بالقرب من باب المقبرة، يختفي خلف إحدى الصخور، هل هو أحد الحراس أم لص مقابر، لم يعد خائفا، كان في هذه اللحظة يستطيع مواجهة الجميع، لن يجرؤ أحد على أن يمس فرعون مصر، ولكنه أحس بضربة هائلة ترتطم بمؤخرة رأسه، سمع صوت تهشم شيء ما، دارت الصخور، وابتعدت النجوم، وكان هناك ألم لا يمكن احتماله، ثم ساد الظلام فجأة...

It is through Carter that we hear the story of Akhnaton and Nefertiti and their adopted son Tut Ankh Amon whose tomb Carter is searching for, making this more than just a story of Aisha and Carter and their unrequited love to Mukhtar and Rosa. At times the story reads like a classic Egyptian black and white with the girl abused by her father, struggling for a living, finding herself impregnated and shamed into hiding from the man she loves. At others, it is an almost fantastic one of a young girl who is guarded by wolves, meeting a young British artist who has a similar connection to wolves, and who is fascinated by the story of Tut Ankh Amon, even more than his fascination with Aisha’s face.

The intertwining of all this makes this very long novel fun to read, though I’m not sure if it kept me at a single thread. I usually enjoy multiple narratives and open-ended stories but I feel that in this story it was a bit too disconnected even when the writer tried to connect the three stories (of Aisha, Carter, and Tut) through the sudden appearances of wolves in their lives, through their estrangement from their home, through their betrayals by the ones they love, and through their inability to find peace. This doesn’t make it any less inviting to read the novel, it’s just that, if you’re like me, and want novels to take you into their world and allow you to lose yourself in them, this one can’t do that because it’s a bit disjointed. 

The intertwining of all this makes this very long novel fun to read, though I’m not sure if it kept me at a single thread. I usually enjoy multiple narratives and open-ended stories but I feel that in this story it was a bit too disconnected even when the writer tried to connect the three stories (of Aisha, Carter, and Tut) through the sudden appearances of wolves in their lives, through their estrangement from their home, through their betrayals by the ones they love, and through their inability to find peace. This doesn’t make it any less inviting to read the novel, it’s just that, if you’re like me, and want novels to take you into their world and allow you to lose yourself in them, this one can’t do that because it’s a bit disjointed.