196 Books: Hungary

 Embers by Sandor Marai

Hungary is here:

Summary is here:

Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs.

In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife. And they will return to the time the three of them last sat together following a hunt in the nearby forest--a hunt in which no game was taken but during which something was lost forever. Embers is a classic of modern European literature, a work whose poignant evocation of the past also seems like a prophetic glimpse into the moral abyss of the present.

Firstly, this book is not long. I don't know why it took me forever to read it. Second: it seems weird that, in the middle of WWII (I almost wrote the Civil War?!), this guy was just going about his life writing and publishing a book. ::shrug::

I used to really love the classics: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters...but I'm not so sure anymore. Okay I know they're not in the same time period, but this was written similarly. It seemed like things were drawn out unnecessarily, the talking went in circles around the point. The story between the two men was interesting, the retelling of it was less so. And off we go...

Straight from the general's childhood, we get a sense that he's a bit melodramatic: "Of course, nobody uttered a word about the cause of the child's illness, but everybody knew: the boy needed love, and when all the strangers had bent over him and the unbearable smell had surrounded him on all sides, he had chosen death." Uhhh...ok theater kid. This is like the biggest temper tantrum a child has ever thrown. The problem? Kid had to go visit his grandma that he'd never met. Poor you. 

It wasn't all bad, though. This was my favorite quote: "'Is he your friend?' asked his father. 'Yes.' 'Then he is my friend too,' said his father seriously." 

The meeting of the two boys and their childhood friendship is recounted, interspersed with more present thoughts: "One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy." Umm...what? Okay, I will admit that I don't really know what he means by "sustaining the loss." Is it just bucking up and being fine? Is the inability suicide? Depression? I'm not sure but damn that seems weird. Later on we get, "Whoever survives someone is a traitor." I'm really not sure what people are supposed to do here, but I think therapy needs to be involved. 

Although it fits with this next one... "But slowly the suspicion took hold of Henrik [the general] that music was not such a harmless pleasure after all. Naturally the academy did not tolerate real music, with its power to arouse and erupt into naked emotion." GASP! NOT EMOTION!

Oh my word. Rereading these quotes is making me so angry. I'm trying to find a direct quote but apparently I didn't highlight it...the dad originally makes the comment that Konrad (the friend) is "different." And later on the general says the same sort of thing. Since the book is set in the 1930s (and the 40 years prior), I thought maybe that meant Konrad was gay. As Henrik talks about this big betrayal, I thought maybe Konrad hit on him or something, which seems like it would be really looked down on at that time period. Nope. Turns out Konrad just liked music? And maybe had emotions? And that made him "different"?

SPOILER

Turns out the betrayal was that Henrik's wife and Konrad had an affair. Terrible, yes. But honestly Henrik seems unbearable. Still not okay. Just sayin. 

But the hits just keep on coming: "A feeling known only to men. A feeling called friendship." Sorry, ladies! I'm not sure how our relationships are categorized, but it's not friendship! FFS. 

"We were friends, and the word carries a meaning only men can understand. It is time you learned its full implication. We weren't comrades or companions or fellow-sufferers. Nothing in life can replace what we had. No all-consuming love could offer the pleasures that friendship brings to those it touches." Alright, now I think Henrik might be in the closet. 

And then we get this: "All of a sudden the objects seemed to take on meaning, as if to prove that everything in the world acquires significance only in relation to human activity and human destiny." Well, I guess that matches the colonialist (I don't even know if that fits here) attitude of that time period. 

Cameo! Konrad had run away to the tropics, and he talks about working with the coolies. Of course it turns sour, but I love how these books can connect sometimes. 

And here is our last dig at the female folk: "And there is something else that is rare in women: she understood the responsibility to which she was committed by her own inner sense of self." Just picture me rubbing my temples. So, if most women don't have an inner sense of self, what exactly do they have? Are we destined to just be empty husks? Perhaps that's why the men must seek such intimate friendship. 

So, Henrik basically delivers a monologue all night. He says he wants answers from Konrad but then decides he doesn't. And then they part ways again, with apparently shared permission to go die. Fin.

196 Books: Honduras

 The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

Here's Honduras:

Here's the summary:

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.


Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.


Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.


Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

You know that I've been trying to stick with native authors for this challenge, but every once in a while I find one that seems so intriguing I have to read it. That happened here, and it was totally worth it. My biggest criticism is that the book wasn't longer. Seriously. When I got to the end I just went "Wh-what?"

I find history and archaeology so fascinating. I'm sure I wrote about it in my Paris posts, but one of my favorite things to do while visiting was look up the places we had gone to that day to see what happened there historically. And it was so huge to me, the things that happened in a space I had just gone to. There's a feeling that you just don't get in the US. Of course the Native Americans were here, but it's a totally different atmosphere. To go on an expedition and visit a place that nobody stepped foot in for hundreds of years...unfathomable. Well, let's get into it. 

Preston delves into a lot of detail and history around the country and expedition, which is really interesting. He talks about the country's instability and, of course..."But even more debilitating was the country's unhealthy relationship with the United States, whose shortsighted policies and business interests had kept the country politically unstable for more than a century." I mean...can we stop ruining everything for everyone please? It's getting to be a real downer. 

As the expedition flies over the sites to use the Lidar, and ultimately flying in and out of the chosen site, Preston describes the pockets of demolished rainforest. "The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Again, bummer. Apparently the areas they saw were cut down for cattle grazing. Admittedly, I know absolutely nothing about raising cattle, but it seems like maybe you could not cut down the forest for that? I dunno. Not an expert. 

"It was a long, dusty drive over mountain roads, through a succession of impoverished villages with dilapidated houses, heaps of trash, open sewers, and sad-faced, droopy-eared dogs slinking about. We did pass through one strikingly different and pretty village... Those streets were clean and well swept. But as we entered the town, the soldiers warned by radio that under no circumstances were we to stop, as this was a town run by a powerful drug cartel." I found this really interesting, and not all that surprising. I remember seeing some documentaries about...maybe Pablo Escobar?...and the people in the town loved him because he could employ them. I guess when your country doesn't present a lot of opportunities you'll take what you can get. But this is going a bit far... "While there, I learned from a local businessman that the cost of a contract murder in Catacamas was twenty-five dollars."

"I'd been in sketchy aircraft before, but a helicopter is another level of concern." Yup. When I was working tourism in Alaska they would have to cancel a lot of the helicopter tours because they couldn't tell the difference between the clouds and the glaciers. That's no bueno. In fact, Soldier likes to call helicopters Spinny Spinny Death Machines. 

In AD 426, a ruler named K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' (Sun-Eyed Resplendent Quetzal Macaw)...  Ummm can we all agree that this is the most baller name in the history of names?! I want one like this. But he gets better. "His bones showed that he had taken quite a beating over the course o his life: His skeleton was peppered with healed fractures, including two broken arms, a shattered shoulder, blunt trauma to the chest, broken ribs, a cracked skull, and a broken neck. The physical anthropologist who analyzed his remains wrote that, "In today's world, it would appear that the deceased had survived an auto accident in which he had been thrown from the vehicle." But in the ancient world, the injuries were probably caused by playing the famed Mesoamerican ball came called pitz in classical Mayan." WHAT. WHY. "One sixteenth-century friar, a rare eyewitness, spoke of players being killed instantly when the five pound ball, made of solid latex sap, hit them on a hard rebound.." WHY WERE THEY PLAYING THIS GAME. It sounds like death dodgeball. No thank you. 

"Having no metal tools to chisel with, these ancient sculptors shaped them using a laborious grinding process, using handheld rocks and sand to abrade a block of stone into the desired form." See, this is why history is so interesting. The things they made were stunning, and they didn't have anything like we do today. I guess you had to fill your time somehow, but man. Sounds like a process. 

Then we get into a little bit of post-Columbus "discovery," and the difference between Old World and New World diseases. And just in case you forgot Columbus was a horrible person, let me remind you: "But overall, the Spanish (and Columbus personally) were deeply dismayed by the vast die-offs [from smallpox]; the deaths of so many Indians interfered with their slaving businesses, killed their servants, and emptied their plantations and mines of forced labor." Even better, "One biologist told me that what probably saved may indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease." COOL. I'M SURE THEY'RE VERY GRATEFUL. 

Lastly, let's make some disease comparisons. "Think what it would be like for you...to watch all these people die--your children, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, your friends, your community leaders and spiritual authorities. What would it do to you to see them perish in the most agonizing, humiliating, terrifying ways possible?" Hmm...something's coming to mind...can't quite put my finger on it...OH YEAH. "The world's last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people--about 5 percent of the world's population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain." Foreshadowing?! I just looked up the worldwide death toll from covid, and it's 4.55 million. So that's fun. 

Here are my takeaways: 

• stop invading other countries
• the US needs to leave people the fuck alone
• i want to go on an archaeological dig
• GET VACCINATED. WEAR A MASK. SOCIAL DISTANCE. 

Now if you'll excuse me I need an update on this site because the book stopped abruptly.

196 Books: Haiti

 Kannjawou by Lyonel Trouillot

This is Haiti:

This is the summary:

In this energetic celebration of Haiti and its capital in the early 2000s, Trouillot embodies the nation's indomitable spirit in the voice of his narrator. This anonymous, world-weary, 20-something male student keenly depicts a country entering a new era after years of dictatorship, oppression, corruption, and the chaos wrought by the most recent foreign arrivals: the international peace-keeping forces sent to restore order after the departure of the U.S. Marines, known as "the Big Boots." In a series of journal entries, the young protagonist introduces readers to his world within a world—a community center in Port-au-Prince peopled by a motley group of friends, lovers, revolutionaries, compatriots, dreamers, schemers, and mentors, all living under the watchful eye of Mam Jeanne, the proprietress. Readers meet the "gang of five," among whom are two beautiful young women who work at the local bar, Kannjawou, and the men who pursue them; the wise older veterans scarred by the torture of past regimes; the nonchalant tourists and foreign officials who populate the bar; and the gentle mentor, rival in love, and father figure to the group, known lovingly to all as "the little professor." In KANNJAWOU Trouillot has penned a love song and a swan song to that era of dispersion for Haiti's people, who, even when they are far from home carry with them the kannjawou spirit.

I feel like a lot of the country books I've been reading lately are stories about occupied countries. It's so interesting to me that this sort of thing still happens. I guess in this case it was somewhat justified, as there had been a regular election, and then a coup d'etat that put a dictator in place. It was called Operation Uphold Democracy, which I find annoying for some reason. The next phase, the time in which this book is set, was the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. But the way they went about it was to mostly bring in a bunch of military and police so...*shrug.* Anyway, here are my highlights. 

"But an occupied country is a land without a sky or horizon, where it would be wrong to believe that as long as there's life, there's hope." The narrator talked about how there were two sides to the city: basically the rich and the poor. The foreigners had their nice homes and cars, were protected if they broke a law or something bad happened to them, and they stay away from the poor areas. When I went on a Caribbean cruise a couple of years ago I saw this. Everything at the port was built up and nice, but just a couple of miles away were dilapidated shacks. It was so sad, and it made me feel like an asshole for being a part of that system. 

"Yes, there was all of that. But the worst was when the boots came." Mam Jeanne is talking to the narrator and the little professor about the past, and how the occupation was the worst thing to happen. She recalls a hurricane, a epidemic, and droughts, but says occupation was worse than all of that. The narrator says the past is all lumped together in Mam Jeanne's head, except for that time. 

"A goose and an ostrich." They kept calling some guy a goose and an ostrich. I don't even know what it means, but it was cracking me up.

"The little professor likes to believe that we are what we do with our hands." I thought this was beautiful. Think about it-are you using your hands to hurt? To dry tears? To give or take? To play music? To share knowledge? 

"Children are traveling all the time--rising up to the sky, descending into the depths of the sea,, dancing with colors and words, bringing together the living and the dead and the young and the old, replacing reality with dreams whenever reality is bad, showing you a dream while saying, 'Look, this is real' and looking at you with a challenge in their eyes whenever you'd like to say that their dream isn't true." This was also beautiful. Kids have so much imagination and wonder about the world, and we lose it as we get older. Sure we still daydream, but it's not nearly the same as the daydreams you have as a kid. 

As with all books from poorer countries, it's sad to find out how they live. And these people weren't in a terrible position-they all had housing, food, and jobs. But it's sad hearing about the stark contrast between the rich and the poor, and how it makes the poor people just lose hope. 

196 Books: Guyana

 Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur 

Here's Guyana:

Here's the summary:

In 1903, a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guiana as a ‘coolie’ – the British name for indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and travelling alone, this woman, like so many of the indentured, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on complex lives. Many were widows, runaways or outcasts who migrated alone in epic sea voyages – traumatic ‘middle passages’ – only to face a life of hard labour, dismal living conditions and sexual exploitation. As Bahadur documents, however, it was precisely their sexuality that gave coolie women a degree of leverage. In new worlds where they were the scarcer sex, they could have their pick of Indian partners. This often incited fatal retaliations by the men who were spurned. Meanwhile, intimacy with white overseers sometimes conferred privileges. It also provoked plantation uprisings, as a struggle between Indian men and their women intersected with one between coolies and their overlords. The women’s shortage gave them sway but also made them victims, caught in a shifting borderland between freedom and slavery. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a
double diaspora – from India to the West Indies in one century, and from Guyana to the United States in the next – that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

I originally thought this was going to be more of a narrative of the author's great-grandmother, but it was kind of a study on the whole indenture society. It was interesting, and of course sad. Even though slavery was technically over, the indentured people were treated much the same as slaves had been. Bahadur also focused largely on women's stories in this situation; and of course women got the short end of the stick. It seems that it was normal for husbands to beat their wives, there were sexual assaults, and so many murders caused by suspected infidelity. 

The only point I want to touch on that doesn't include women: "...the CIA, paranoid at the thought of yet another Caribbean Marxist right in Castro's geopolitical neighborhood, pushed him out and paved the way for Linden Forbes Burnham, the dictator who banned flour." 1. Can the US just get off of everyone's ass at this time? For God's sake. Leave people alone. 2. The guy...banned...flour? (Alright I just looked it up and the story is not interesting. He banned imports, which included flour. Mostly just a dick move.) 

Alright, on to the women. 

"The 1891 census of the United Provinces reported that 90 percent of girls between ten and fourteen were already married." That's just...disgusting. Why are there so many countries that allow child marriages, and why are men so gross? Leave those children alone!

"After their husbands died, they were supposed to negate themselves in mourning, forever. For the rest of their lives, they could wear no long tresses, no colorful saris, no vermilion in their hair, no rouge on their lips, no kohl decorating their eyes, no bangles tinkling on their wrists. Enshrouded in white, almost erased, they were viewed as inauspicious and shunned by many. They could not remarry, especially if upper-caste. They could not inherit property. If they had no sons to support them, they were subject to hunger and poverty. And they could be forced to sit on their husbands' funeral pyre, a practice known as sati." Ok so you're telling me you can have this baby, at 10 years old, become a widow and her life is basically just over? WTF is that? And if you didn't pick up on it, sati basically means she kills herself because her husband died. I wonder if there are similar customs for a widower? Doubt it. 

Back to indenture. The difficulty for women started on the voyage over-sailors would exploit or assault them. "On Holman's mutinous vessel, the first mate charged that the women, 'very often...very cheerful themselves,' would 'meddle' with him on deck, and the captain testified that they 'would take liberties and laugh and joke with the men.'" There are a lot of men right now saying that the whole Me Too movement is scary because now they don't know how to act around women. Women have been dealing with this for all of our existence; these women were making accusations of assault and the men are like "yeah well, she talked to me." 

"The newspaper editorialized: 'We protest the barbarous and flagitous system of bringing into a strange country hundreds of men without an adequate proportion of women.'" Ooooh, this is getting me all riled up! Once again the women's purpose is to be used by men. Fuck that. And this shit is still happening. "From behind the rust-red walls of the New Amsterdam Prison, a cane-cutter who stabbed his common-law wife to death on 23 July 2010 told me the old indenture-era story, a tired plot about provocation and punishment, set in motion once a woman leaves." I had first glossed over the date, then got really startled when the detail was added that the guy smashed his wife's cell phone. I mean get it together, guys. 

Bahadur talked about Indians trying to go back home, sometimes to a place they'd never been or hadn't seen in decades. That they could get home and be disowned, seen as dirty. It was sad; in some cases they had to fight to be able to go. Indenture took everything from them. 

The only thing that kind of annoyed me about this book is the author would muse with a whole bunch of questions and it got tiresome. I think she meant to be thoughtful about what life was like, but I just found it useless. Other than that, it was really interesting learning about how, once again, colonialism sucked. 

A Love Story

 Grow old along with me

1971, an Officer's Club in South Carolina. A young officer is having a drink with a Colonel and they argue over who's going to pay. There's a dance coming up, and the Colonel asks the officer if he has a date, which he doesn't. So the Colonel says that his daughter will go. The young lady reluctantly agrees. 

The officer, wanting to make things slightly less awkward, brings a friend along to the dance. He's very taken with the young lady and wants to take her on a date. He makes multiple attempts to take her out and she makes multiple excuses not to go. Finally, he decides he's going to make one last effort. This time, she agrees. They dated for a weekend. Dropping her off one night, the officer says "Hey, we should get married sometime." The young lady replies, "Okay. I have to go inside now." Three months later, on July 10, 1971, they did just that. 

Those two are my parents, and today is their 50th anniversary. They've lived and travelled all over the world, raised 6 pretty cool kids, and have been an example of generous, kind, loving people to everyone they meet. They're both retired and they do everything together, and they're more lovey-dovey now than I remember them being when I was little. 

I'm so lucky to have them as parents. My mom always says that parents are supposed to give their kids roots to keep them grounded and wings to fly, and they did just that. They gave me the confidence and strength to just be who I am. They showed me what a healthy, loving, respectful relationship looks like. I count them as two of my best friends. Happy anniversary to my favorites. 

196 Books: Guinea-Bissau

 Amilcar Cabral by Peter Karibe Mendy

Predictably, Guinea-Bissau is next to Guinea:

Summary:

Amílcar Cabral was an agronomist who led an armed struggle that ended Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. The uprising contributed significantly to the collapse of a fascist regime in Lisbon and the dismantlement of Portugal’s empire in Africa. Assassinated by a close associate with the deep complicity of the Portuguese colonial authorities, Cabral not only led one of Africa’s most successful liberation movements, but was the voice and face of the anticolonial wars against Portugal.

A brilliant military strategist and astute diplomat, Cabral was an original thinker who wrote innovative and inspirational essays that still resonate today. His charismatic and visionary leadership, his active pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. Peter Karibe Mendy’s compact and accessible biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.

Man. This one was a chore, and I can't tell you how many times my eyes glazed over. It's a bummer because Cabral's story is actually really interesting; he went from studying how to grow things to dismantling colonialist Portugal's hold in Africa. But it was just so boring in this book. It was written like a textbook and made me think of the history teachers that just drone on and you get nothing out of it. Come on, people, history is exciting and interesting! Stop taking the fun out of it!

I knew I was in for it when the first FOUR AND A HALF PAGES were consumed with abbreviations and acronyms. That's SO MANY and basically impossible to keep track of. Cue eye glaze. Ok, I'll try to bitch less and cut through the bullshit to some of the more interesting bits. 

"Cabral's importance lies in the fact that (i) he competently organized and led one of Africa's most consequential armed liberation struggles, (ii) he skillfully mobilized more than a dozen ethnic groups into a united binationalist cause, (iii) he ably led a successful united front against Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and (iv) he wrote incisive essays and innovative books that still resonate today." See? This guy was a badass, but when you write it like this...oof. Ooops, guess I wasn't finished bitching. 

Here's Cabral's review of the education he received in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde:

"All Portuguese education disparages the African, his culture and civilization. African languages are forbidden in schools. The white man is always presented as a superior being and the African as an inferior. The colonial 'conquistadors' are shown as saints and heroes. As soon as African children enter into elementary schools, they develop an inferiority complex. They learn to fear the white man and to feel ashamed of being Africans. African geography, history and culture are either ignored or distorted, and children are forced to study Portuguese geography and history instead." 

At least in the US, this is still pretty much how history is taught. The white people are great and came to save the people of color from themselves. The more I read about colonized countries the more astonishing it is. The white people came in (usually because there was something they wanted there), somehow deluded themselves into thinking they were helping the native people, took over, then refused to leave. It's crazy. 

Later on, Cabral went to study in Portugal. This line was funny (but not haha funny): "It is obvious that in the metropole you will not encounter racism so rooted as, let's say, in the United States." I love how half the people in the US think this is the best most amazing place you could be and the rest of the countries are glad they're not as bad as the US. 

Bitching again... "Deeply grief-stricken, he went into self-imposed solitary confinement in his bedroom for several days." Come on, man. I imagine him drinking expensive scotch and smoking a Cuban cigar as he writes this overly complicated, pretentious line. 

Anyway, the gist of it is that the Portuguese came in, basically turned the native people into slaves or indentured servants at best, and of course didn't want to leave. So Cabral mustered the people, and they were good. They managed to out-maneuver the Portuguese military with some help from other Communist countries. This reminded me a bit of the book from Grenada, except with a bit of a happier ending. It also coincided with the book from Guinea, as it was the same time period and the author of that one was in some of the same places. Very interesting. 

I think it's about time to wrap this one up. Cabral is eventually assassinated by a supposed friend, just as he predicted. But, kind of surprisingly, the movement goes on and eventually gets freedom for Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. "The men and women he inspired went on to defeat Portugal militarily and politically and establish the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. But the victory was also consequential beyond the borders of these two countries: its ripple effects contributed significantly to transformative developments in Portugal and the rest of her African colonies."

196 Books: Guinea

 My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, My Amadou by Kadiatou Diallo

Here's Guinea, in West Africa:

Here's the summary:

Descended from West African kings and healers, raised in the turbulence of Guinea in the 1960s, Kadiatou Diallo was married off at the age of thirteen and bore her first child when she was sixteen. Twenty-three years later, that child—a gentle, innocent young man named Amadou Diallo—was gunned down without cause on the streets of New York City. Now Kadi Diallo tells the astonishing, inspiring story of her life, her loss, and the defiant strength she has always found within.

It was Kadi Diallo’s voice that captivated the public when she came to America to defend her slain son, and it is that same voice—candid, wise, and generous—that fills the pages of this extraordinary book. Kadi reaches back to her earliest memories of growing up in Guinea, the daughter of a strict man who was thwarted by the relics of the French colonial system. Raised in a world in which age-old religious and cultural rituals were disappearing before the onslaught of modernity, Kadi saw her own childhood end abruptly at age thirteen when her father literally gave her away in marriage. Kadi prayed for death, but instead she found herself plunged into a baffling new life—the life of a second wife in a strange household in a distant country, and soon afterwards the teenage mother of a sweet-natured son.

Yet somehow, Kadi managed not only to survive but to flourish. Despite the rigid strictures of African-Islamic culture, she attended school and later started a successful business of her own. She eventually divorced and remarried and lived for eight years in Bangkok. Back in Guinea, she learned that her oldest child Amadou had been shot in New York City in a case of racial profiling.

Kadi read with outrage the American newspaper description of her son as “an unarmed West African street vendor.” “Nothing,” she writes, “could be more distant from the truth.” Now, with great pride and searing love, Kadi Diallo finally tells the truth about herself and her son.

My Heart Will Cross This Ocean is an extraordinary book—a girl’s story of desire and innocence, a wife’s story of defiance, a mother’s story of unbearable loss, and a woman’s story of unshakable strength and love.

Whew. What a book. After I finished it this morning, I had to call my mom so I could talk to someone about it. It was beautiful and intriguing and heart wrenching. Honestly I was hooked after just reading the prologue. And this is going to be a really long post because there's so much to talk about, and I highlighted so many passages. But I felt like I should be highlighting more; the entire book felt important. Maybe that's because you know the ending before you start, but I actually like spoilers so it was a nice change. Alright, let's get into it. 

Let's start with colonialism and modernity vs. tradition. 

These two go together: "The French had announced that each family must choose one son to go to the government's European school..." It goes on to say how the French (much like happened with the Native Americans here) wanted to "teach" the natives the modern ways. Next. "Before the French left, the emptied everything from bank accounts to file cabinets. They burned records, and took nearly all of the country's engineers and agriculture experts. ... The last of the planes flew out over crops still burning from the fires they had started." It's just...the audacity of colonialists. We're going to go into this country, take over, make them conform to our ways, squeeze everything we can out of the country, then fuck them all over when we leave.  

Now we have modernity vs. tradition/religion.

"If I wanted an educated wife, I would marry one from the city. I married a girl from the village on purpose." DAMN THE MAN. "Before the scholars entered Guinea with the word of Mohammed, the Fulah women picked their husbands. ... Then, after days or even months have gone by...she could declare a change of heart." "The men told the women what to think and then thought little of what the women said. The men preached the Koran to the women but did not let them read it." Why does it seem like so many religions came in and just oppressed women? Can we bring back the matriarchy please? I think we'd have more empathy. 

These ones don't necessarily go together, but they're just about Kadi growing up. 

"There was a field outside the health ward and in this field were strewn the discarded utensils and supplies from the ward: small needles, bandages, cups, tubes with blood, plastic bags, pillows, bigger needles, a couple of file cabinets, and mostly, old bottles of penicillin." WHAT?! I was just so grossed out by this. 

When it came to the female circumcision, Kadi's father originally said he didn't want her to get it done. That times were changing and that tradition needed to go. Her mother said she would comply with his wishes, then took her daughter to get it while the dad was away. It made me so sad. 

Kadi talks about a rally for their president, Sekou Toure, holding a rally at the local school. "A few months later, they started hanging people on the football field." Supposedly they were people trying to overthrow the government. The President then tells the populace that, "for the good of Guinea, he had arrested the country's scholars and thinkers and put them in a military compound in the center of Conakry, Camp Boiro." There was a lot of panic and fear. But, what really surprised me based on many of the other books I've read, "In a few weeks, the worst of the crisis seemed to have passed." And things seemed to just kind of settle back into the norm. 

Next we have married life and motherhood. 

So one day a relative comes to the house and decides he wants to marry Kadi. Who is fucking THIRTEEN. Her dad asks her if she wants to and she tells him if he wants her to she will and, neither of them really want it, but for some asinine reason they both go along with it. Kadi's family makes her new husband promise that he'll send her to school and not make her a young mother, but it turns out a 28(ish) year old man who decides he wants a second wife who's 13 is an asshole. So she's pregnant at 15. And she doesn't have her mom or her family and her husband was out of the country and nobody told this poor girl anything about sex education or childbirth! "'How is this baby going to come out?' I asked Saikou. He laughed and said that when it was time I would know, and that nature would take care of everything." WELL ISN'T THAT HELPFUL. So Amadou is born to this poor 16 child who was robbed of the opportunities she had and who wasn't given any information on how to take care of her baby. But damn it, this girl is a rock star. She ends up running a successful business, living in multiple countries, taking care of her children, and finally getting rid of that dickhead. And Amadou was a gentle soul, kind and wise. He was left-handed and stuttered and of course his wanker father has an issue with both of these and sees them as weaknesses. Because he sucks. 

And then Amadou decided he wanted to make a life in New York. I know I came at this book in light of all the things happening in the US today, but reading the description, I just assumed his murderers were cops. But I'm skipping ahead. It made me sad that when Kadi and Amadou said goodbye, it wasn't emotional. "I did not say I love you. Nor did he. We did not hug. It was not our way." I couldn't imagine not repeatedly hugging my family and saying I love you, especially if I was moving to a different continent. But he goes and moves in with some relatives on his dad's side, and they have a pretty good life together. "Theirs was a communion rooted in a sense of triumph for having made it to New York, constant fatigue from their long working hours, and a lingering, gray sadness for the people they had left behind." It talked about how they shared everything and took care of each other, and it was a really warm feeling. But, there was also some foreshadowing; "'In America,' Amadou said, 'the police know how to handle things.'" 

So now we get to the crux of the story. It's maybe 1 or 2 in the morning, Amadou has had a long day, he dozed on the couch, and then went out to the front porch. He sees a car. "The car moved past Amadou, by about four houses, and then it stopped and began to back up." Four men got out of the car in front of Amadou. "The first two men each fired sixteen bullets, emptying their weapons. The man on the sidewalk fired four times, the man on the street, five. Forty-one shots in all. Nineteen bullets struck Amadou." "The shots kept coming while Amadou was falling and even after he was down." "The four police officers, members of the New York City Police Department's elite Street Crimes Unit, were taken away, complaining of ringing in their ears." 

Let that sink in. Four police officers put nineteen bullets into a man and then complained about the sound in their ears. 

But of course, the cops wanted to paint the victim as a villain. They tore apart his room, grilled his friends about whether he used drugs, had enemies or a gun. They wanted anything to make it okay. They said they thought his wallet was a gun. 

After that, it's a media storm. Kadi goes to New York and eventually Amadou's body is brought back to Guinea for burial. When they land all the important people are there. Kadi says, "Modest Amadou had returned a hero." But how is that heroic? Getting gunned down for no reason. I'm not sure you can even call him a martyr. It's just a tragedy. And in a final fuck you, "I waited at Saikou's house with Nene and Laoura, prohibited by custom from attending my son's funeral." Just...just so messed up. 

During all this, many famous lawyers and advocates rush to Kadi's side. They even secure Johnnie Cochran (of OJ Simpson fame) for their top counsel. She paints him as a pompous jerk, which kind of made me laugh. The officers were charged, but were found not guilty. Which is surprising because it's so obvious, but not at all surprising. 

Again, I read this book in light of what's going on in the US today. I plan on doing some more digging on whether or not anything ever happened to those officers. There will probably only be a few people that read this post, but I want them to be named. Edward McMellon. Sean Carroll. Kenneth Boss. Richard Murphy. They are murderers. And I would be more than willing to bet Amadou wasn't the only one. 

Please, please, please, if you have the slightest interest, read this book. We need to know these stories so we can stop them in the future. 

196 Books: Guatemala

 The Good Cripple by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

This is Guatemala:

This is the summary:

A young man, Juan Luis Luna, is kidnapped in Guatemala City and held at the bottom of a rusty, empty underground fuel tank in an abandoned gas station. The kidnappers demand a ransom; his rich father does not reply. The kidnappers threaten to cut off his son's foot and still hear nothing. They then slice off one of Juan Luis's toes and send it to his father, who still refuses to act. So the next day... The Good Cripple obsessively focused, chilling, allegorical is stunningly explosive. With its enigmatic beginning, however, and its circular relentless structure, the novel is also dense with ideas: can one be whole after mutilation? Can the injured transcend violence? Rodrigo Rey Rosa's style is of a lithe pristine clarity, but beneath that calm surface cruelty, revenge, and diffidence churn darkly away. The Good Cripple is an astonishingly intense book, and as unforgettable as the sight of "the place where the foot had been severed, where a circle of red flesh, now a little black along the edges, could be seen, with a concentric circle of white bone that was both milky and glassy..."

Well that was fast. 

For Guatemala, I was torn between this and another book. I asked a few friends if they wanted to help me pick my book for Guatemala. They were not helpful. (My bffffffff later asked if I was back from Guatemala and I was like, umm don't you think it would be a bit weird for me to go Surprise, I'm immediately going to Guatemala!) So I asked my mom. She told me to pick the other one because this sounded depressing and awful. I ended up picking this because I thought it sounded thought-provoking. 

Once again, you just can't completely trust the summary. I've said before that I'm not the best one at reading into the text, but I did not get those deep questions in there. I mean, yes, there were mentions of the prosthetic foot bothering him and of the limp, but no emotional or mental questioning. Don't get me wrong, I did like the book, and it was one I was excited to get into each day. Ok wait, now thinking back on it, maybe it did get into that stuff later on. SPOILER. Luna eventually finds one of the guys who kidnapped him and goes to talk to him. Just to talk, just to find out more about what happened and why they did it. And then he just walks away. It talks about a couple of times that Luna wants to hurt the guy, but he doesn't. Although he does say, and this is a great insult, "Thank you for being so sincere, you son of a thousand bitches."

But, of course, there were a couple of bits that bothered me. 

"She began to weep, but she felt neither pain nor rage, only a disturbance caused by the father's lack of compassion and natural coldness, the son's helplessness, and her own womanly powerlessness." ..."womanly" powerlessness? Come on. Would anyone say "manly" powerlessness? No. So can we stop with that crap, please? Powerlessness would have worked just fine. Also, I felt a little bit bad for the father. I mean it's real fucked up that he ignored these people who kidnapped his son until they cut off his foot. But the coldness and lack of compassion seemed to just be depression and apathy. Like have you ever been so depressed that you just actually can't care about anything? That you can't dredge up any kind of feeling? It's worse than when you feel shitty, because if you just don't care about things, what do you have to live for? And then of course the dad knows he's fucked up, but he can't really do anything other than pay the ransom at that point. 

"Don't forget he's half Jewish," the Horrible insisted. "He'll fuck us over if he can." The more I read these stories the worse I feel for Jewish people. Can we all just leave them alone? Can we stop with all the stupid stereotypes, across the board? Can we all just be nice already?!

196 Books: Grenada

 The Grenada Revolution: What Really Happened? by Bernard Coard

Here's Grenada with some reference points:

Here's the summary:

Finally, the inside story: honest, self-critical, and based on a wealth of credible and independent documentation. Bernard Coard reveals in dramatic detail the factors, forces and personalities which cumulatively led to deepening crisis within the Grenada Revolution and ultimately to wholesale tragedy. Bernard Coard, United States and British trained economist and university lecturer, played a leading role in the NJM and in the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada. His experience, including 26 years as a political prisoner, offers a unique insight into the causes, course, and finally the implosion of the Revolution.

A couple of quick notes before I get into the actual book... 

(About the map): Grenada is the little island with the two arrows pointing towards it. The book made it seem like Cuba was basically next door. I'm not great at Caribbean geography, but it makes Grenada's close friendship with Cuba a bit weirder. 

(About the summary): Maybe I just misread it, but the book says NOTHING about Coard having been a political prisoner for 26 years. Although I believe this is book 1 of 3 on the events so maybe it comes up in one of the others? Whatever. Rude. 

Ok. 

I was super excited about this book; I think I was expecting something along the lines of a political thriller. Guess what? Life is mostly not like that. The first half of the book was basically day-to-day running a country, trying to get social programs in place, working at bettering the economy and way of life for the country, trying to iron out the issues. Guess what else? It's not that interesting or exciting. Well, I'm sure it is for some people. I'm not one of them. 

BUT. 

The second half of the book really picked up for me. There was intrigue, back-stabbing, and foreign interference. Looking back at all the sections I highlighted, there's definitely a bigger shift in dynamic than I'd originally realized. So I guess all the day-to-day stuff is a bit more interesting in hindsight. With that, let's get into some of the highlights. 

Highlights regarding the US

"The United States strongly opposed any country in the Western Hemisphere having friendly relations with Cuba. Grenada on the other hand, insisted that no 'big country' had the right to dictate what we should do." Um, yes. Totally with Grenada on this one (and tbh, I stayed with them against the US for the whole book). Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! I hate the right-wing idea that the US is better than everyone else and gets the ultimate say in what everyone should be doing. 

"They highlighted for us a key passage in the US Army's Field Manual on Psychological Warfare which stated that "PEACE IS THE CONTINUATION OF WAR BY NON-MILITARY MEANS." Excuse me? We can't just...I dunno...leave people the fuck alone!? 

"There were three uncompromising demands [from the Reagan administration]: free elections must be held by the PRG right away, all detainees not charged must be released immediately, and Grenada's close relations with Cuba must end." So, again, the US thinks it can just push everyone else around. 

"..Reagan told the American people in nationwide broadcasts that Grenada was 'a threat to the National Security of the United States.' He used a map of Grenada and pointed to our Point Salines International Airport under construction, claiming it was a Soviet MIG-fighter base." So, this is after multiple experts had told Reagan that it was just an airport, no shady business. Despite the fact that Grenada is tiny. Despite the fact that it's really not close to the US. Just straight up lies because he didn't like what they were doing with their government. Can we stop electing celebrities to lead our country PLEASE?

Highlights regarding Cuba

"From henceforth, apparently, the Grenadian Revolution now had a 'Maximum Leader' model of decision-making decreed by Havana!" Another country deciding that their way is best and that's how everyone should do it. 

"A few months later, a shipment with some of the supplies [from Moscow] arrived from Cuba. We were informed that the rest, including all the 'heavy stuff' would be kept in Cuba 'for the time being.' This included those which would provide for our defence against naval and aerial bombardments. ...They would never arrive." I assume here that Cuba just decided they wanted the stuff and kept it, but it's still a dick move. And it makes it seem like Castro is at least trying to steer Grenada, if not setting it up to take the country over. 

Highlights regarding the Revolution

"When the revolution speaks, it must be heard, listened to. Whatever the Revolution decrees, must be obeyed; when the Revolution commands, it must be carried out..." Basically it's saying the revolution is more important than any one person. Party members got sick from being overworked and constantly complained that they couldn't do it, but were just told to figure it out and be more organized. Honestly this part sounds a bit culty to me. 

"Fitzy then joined the other Party members who criticized my resignation from the CC the previous year. ...he said, "When Comrade Coard resigned last year, I had openly called such a resignation counter-revolutionary." The Revolution is more important than the individual. You must stick with the Party, even if you don't think it's working. Even if you don't believe in it anymore. Even if it's killing you. 

"We all get wisdom from the collective wisdom of the Party." If they'd left off the Party, I would have been good with this. But again adding it in makes it sound a bit like a cult. 

"The unvarying rule of the Revolution and the People's Revolutionary Army has been that, once persons are unarmed, you do not open fire on them." SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK.

"I asked him what he understood 'Communism' to be. He said that he did not know, except that it was very, very bad." SOUNDS FAMILIAR.

Highlights regarding people

Though Maurice Bishop was the Prime Minister during the revolution, Bernard Coard was his right hand man and they mostly made decisions together, as well as a party-wide decision approval process. They'd known each other from the age of 12, lived next door to each other, and talked multiple times every day. One of the worst parts of this book was seeing the deterioration of such a close friendship, because of power and malicious intent. At the same time, they were so intent on the needs of the Revolution that the people element got somewhat lost. As time goes by, Bishop starts listening to people who are trying to gain more power for themselves, as well as being swayed by Castro, and starts making decisions single-handedly and selfishly. Bishop even starts a malicious and dangerous rumor that Coard and his wife are trying to kill him. By the end, Coard and his wife (also a prominent member of the party) decide they have no choice but to leave the country with their children.  

"Grenada was a small, poor, developing country. We were desperate to transform our society as quickly as possible. The timeframe in which we set our goals, and the expectations which we had unleashed in our people, were unrealistic." It's sad. They had such good intentions and really believed what they were doing. I've seen it with a lot of the books I've been reading-one dictator gets overthrown and another steps in. Ultimately it's the general populace who suffer. 

Though Coard did use lots of testimony and interviews, a lot of this was his point of view, so I was interested in what else was out there about this time. I read the Wikipedia entry (I know, not the most reliable source, but certainly the most convenient) and those details differ somewhat. The entry states that Coard intentionally overthrew Bishop and became Prime Minister. In the book the events leading up to Bishop's overthrow and murder (spoiler) are quite different, but the book also ends at that point. Coard puts much of the blame on the US infiltrating and starting shit, and some people in the Party as well as Castro telling Bishop what to do. I think I'm going to stick with giving more weight to the book. Moral: maybe don't read the Wikipedia page. 

196 Books: Greece

 Something Will Happen, You'll See by Christos Ikonomou

Here we have Greece:

Here we have the synopsis:

Ikonomou's stories convey the plight of those worst affected by the Greek economic crisis--laid-off workers, hungry children. In the urban sprawl between Athens and Piraeus, the narratives roam restlessly through the impoverished working-class quarters located off the tourist routes. Everyone is dreaming of escape: to the mountains, to an island or a palatial estate, into a Hans Christian Andersen story world. What are they fleeing? The old woes--gossip, watchful neighbors, the oppression and indifference of the rich--now made infinitely worse. In Ikonomou's concrete streets, the rain is always looming, the politicians' slogans are ignored, and the police remain a violent, threatening presence offstage. Yet even at the edge of destitution, his men and women act for themselves, trying to preserve what little solidarity remains in a deeply atomized society, and in one way or another finding their own voice. There is faith here, deep faith--though little or none in those who habitually ask for it.

It was obvious this was going to be a bleak read. Sometimes I could only read a little bit in a day because it left me feeling a little hopeless. Since it was more a series of short stories and not an overarching plot, there's not a lot I can describe on the book as a whole. You just see all of these families who are at the end of their ropes, trying to make it with no idea how to. But they keep on. I had a lot of passages that I highlighted in this one, so instead of going over the characters or plot, I'm going to touch on those. 

"things from the past are old wounds and if you scratch them they start bleeding and get infected and stink." This made me think of anxiety. Like how you said or did something stupid 10 years ago and your brain doesn't let you forget it, it just sits there and mocks you. And then all the moments of stupidity or embarrassment (that really don't matter at all) just pile up and make you feel worse. It's like a wound on your mind. 

"That's what real democracy is. When poor people don't wait for the rich to come and save them but take the situation into their own hands. Because that's how the trouble starts: with us thinking that the rich will ever help the poor. It just doesn't happen. We live in two separate worlds." This was pretty powerful. Here in America, this shows a lot in the Republican party. Not only are our social systems designed in a way to keep poor people poor, but so many people are convinced we can't afford better systems or things like universal healthcare, that having those things would encourage people to be lazy, and that bullshit like trickle down economics don't work. Not only are the rich people actively working against the poor people, the rich on top of that are convincing the poor that this is the best situation for them. And, side note: Kindle has a feature that will underline the most highlighted areas of a book. I underlined here what was in the book. But to me the second part was more poignant, and I was really surprised people didn't focus on the whole section. This quote also ties in with that: "In Europe people think being poor is a matter of bad luck. In America poverty is shameful. Can you bear to be poor and have to feel ashamed of it too?" There's an idea here that poor people just aren't working hard enough. I remember having a conversation with my dad years ago, my sister and I were trying to explain all of the circumstances that go into poverty and why it's so hard for people to get out. And he kind of stopped and went, "so what's the solution?" People who think poverty is a choice think there's one solution to it, but in reality the solution is different for each person. 

"Evil's victory is when it starts speaking your language." Again, anxiety, depression, self-deprecation. When those doubts and bad thoughts niggle in and you start believing them. 

"It's true, time is the worst healer. Time hardens people." You always hear "time heals all wounds." But nobody talks about how those wounds can scab over and scar. And when those wounds are emotional, it can harden you.

"Banks don't just take people's homes away. This isn't America." Does this not happen in other places? Are we really the only ones that foreclose? I mean, this country is truly run by corporations so it's plausible, but there has to be some sort of consequence when you don't pay your mortgage. Also...good burn. 

"Tonight I'm strangely agitated and I'm hearing everything not with my ears but with my heart." Maybe this just meant that the character was feeling especially sensitive, but I found it beautiful. 

"She'd always believed that there are two ways for a person to learn about herself and the world: by reading and by traveling." Ok I know I've said it over and over, but reading a book from each country has been such a journey. I'm not only learning about different people and places, but it's changing me and shaping my mind in a way. It's pretty remarkable. 

"Because we're living in the world but not with the world. For centuries now we've stopped living with the world." So I just finished listening to an audiobook called Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer). She's a Botanist by trade but also a Native American. She talks about trying to have a relationship with the earth and nature while also working on the calculated scientific side. It's so remarkably beautiful (also she narrates the audiobook and has such a soothing voice that works perfectly with the content). It's a thinking of really living with the world and sharing the space instead of using everything up. So this quote really hit me. Also I can't recommend Braiding Sweetgrass enough.

"I can't buy back all the years that have passed but I can buy you a piece of tomorrow." This was another one that was so touching. A husband and wife are moving out of the country because their home is being taken by eminent domain. He's talking about buying a boat, something to look forward to. It's so sweet that he's trying to give her this hope that they'll get through it and it will get better. 

"Piece by piece they're taking my world away." This is from the same story as the above quote, and the end of the entire book. What a fucking way to end your book. There's sadness but also resignation in it. She can't stop it. It's a much less dramatic situation, but I felt this way when we were leaving Cleveland. Soldier was transferred and we didn't have a choice. Sell the house, quit my job, leave our new friends, and move to a place we didn't know and didn't want to be. It was very hard on me. I'm still bitter about it. It's debilitating to have huge life changes forced on you. That one sentence really could describe the entire book. 

Well I didn't think I had much to say about this book as a whole, but I changed my mind. These weren't people's actual stories, but they gave a real sense of melancholy and hopelessness from the economic collapse. None of these people could really control their own lives. I wasn't so sure I wanted to read something so disheartening, but I'm glad I did. He's got a way of taking big concepts and putting them into simple sentences, and putting you in the mood of the story.