Thanks to anaemia, a traffic accident, and a broken glass bottle, I've been (in roughly equal measures) sulking and reading at home.
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
Zeinab Badawi
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| Cover of Zeinab Badawi: An African History of Africa Penguin Books |
It's been energetically praised in the British press, and I am also charmed by this book, which I found at a bookshop near the Free University here in Berlin.
BBC World anchor Zeinab Badawi sets aside many of the piles of colonialist histories of (in the earlier chapters of her book) northern African countries, to expose the reading public to snippets of neglected knowledge about former kingdoms, leaders, and citizenries. She draws from modern experts and personal travel in nations like Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea as much as she can, rather than relying on archives only.
It is also an 'alive' field of study: while ancient Egypt's dynasties are well charted, ancient sites of the kingdom of Kush in Sudan, and Adulis and Qohaito in Eritrea, are only partly excavated. There is much left to reveal itself.
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| Cover of Francisco Coloane: Feuerland Unionsverlag |
Feuerland (Tierra del Fuego (1956))
Francisco Coloane (tr. into German by Giò Waeckerlin Induni)
Like Jorge Luis Borges historical stories/essays, Coloane's collection of tales puts the reader back into the morally ambiguous, colonialist era – this time, in southernmost Chile.
Die untergehende Sonne ließ ebenfalls große Goldnuggets am Rand der Horizontpfanne zurück, goldene Kumuluswolken, mit denen die feuerländische Abenddämmerung ihre unablässig wechselnden Phantasmagorien entzündet.
('The setting sun left behind huge gold nuggets at the rim of the horizon's pan, golden cumulus clouds with which the Fuegian dusk was kindling its unceasingly changeful phantasmagorias.')
The first tale touches on Romanian gold magnate Julius Popper, his mercenary army, and genocide of Ona Indigenous peoples; and the multifarious journeys of Europeans to South America. In inhabiting a men's world, it is rather like Hemingway. But perhaps it is more philosophical.
It's impossible not to picture the landscapes, birds, and animals that Coloane portrays in so much detail, in my mind's eye – no matter how ignorant I was of Patagonia going in.
Coloane experienced popularity abroad in the 1990s, and the Unionsverlag hardcover copy of Feuerland that I am reading was printed during that time.
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| "Patagonian landscape with single tree before night sky" (1832) Eduard von Buchan (1800-1876) Wikimedia Commons |
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U
A descendant of a United Nations Secretary-General, raised in the United States but drawn into Burma/Myanmar at various epochs in the 1990s through to the present, Thant Myint-U has written not just a scholarly examination of the country's history.
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| Cover of Thant Myint-U: The Hidden History of Burma W. W. Norton |
He also gives a journalist's insights into life stories of Burmese people who have fallen prey to external and internal social, political, and economic developments; as well as a diplomat's insights into international and national machinations.
It would be too crude to state without qualification that the path to hell is paved with good intentions: the intentions of a few Burmese governments, of Aung San Suu Kyi, of the U.S. government, of the United Nations, ... But, with more nuance, this phenomenon is at least one leading thread in Burma/Myanmar's recent history.
I'm listening to the audiobook recording.
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Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Vol. II (1830)
Thomas Moore, ed.
Inspired by a seminar I'm in about the Greek Revolution of 1821, which had led the English poet to travel to the mainland north of the Peloponnese, I looked up Lord Byron in Google Books. There I found a very "warts and all" compendium of letters, journal extracts, book passages by Byron's partner Teresa Guiccioli, and commentary from Thomas Moore (who had been Byron's friend), published 6 years after Byron died of fever.
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| "The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi" (1861) Theodoros Vryzakis (1814-1878) Wikimedia Commons |
...This is more of a rant than a review. I will start by apologizing to the above authors for inadvertently grouping together their works with Byron's. Secondly, because people often feel injured by what they consider 'cancel culture,' I'll emphasize that I don't judge the many readers who appreciate Byron's poems on their own merits.
So:
First of all, this is not news, but: he was not a considerate romantic or sexual partner. He chatters incessantly about his 'conquests' to his male friends in his letters, underlining how little respect he has for these women. In 21st-century terminology: toxic masculinity leaks from every page.
Secondly, Byron keeps lying to himself and others about his intentions:
To give one example, he got rid of his illegitimate daughter Allegra in a convent school.
It was supposedly a good school. But she became 'peculiarly quiet' according to visitors who'd known her before, and she died from a fever there at the age of 5. Claire Clairmont, her mother, was inconsolable.
He had made a big deal in letters to friends about how noble he was, nobler than that atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley (who'd by all accounts been kind to Allegra), for wanting his daughter to grow up religiously and 'purely' ... Not that he'd ever put his money where his mouth is, and tried to be properly 'religious' or 'pure' himself.
Thirdly, he's hugely catty about Leigh Hunt, John William Polidori, and others. Part of it can be explained, I suppose, by his being bisexual but not wholly self-accepting.
But the worst passage so far is a letter to Sir Walter Scott, in January 1822:
I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. […] I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest; whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of our virtuous purpose.
I think a few years of imprisonment might have helped, and I certainly hope no one will excuse him on the grounds of being 'misunderstood.'
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Also reading:
Auf der Reise im Dazwischen (Austria, poetry) by Omar Kir Alanam
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (United States, nonfiction) by Michelle Alexander
