Why Greg Mortenson's Shame is on Us

Now that self-made humanitarian and "stones-into-schools" false prophet Greg Mortenson has been ordered to repay more than $1-million to the charity he founded, exploited and financially mismanaged, it's as good a time as any to assess the disgraced Three Cups of Tea author and his crumbling empire of goodness.

Quick recap of Mortenson's (true) journey:

• In 1993 Mortenson allegedly took a wrong turn (how prescient) while descending from a harrowing and unsuccessful summit attempt of K2 in Pakistan's Karakoram Range, into the village of Korphe where he discovered his inner altruist; 
• In 1996 he founded the non-profit Central Asia Institute (CAI) with seed money from a Swiss millionaire to fund educational development in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan;
• In 2006 he co-authored the best-seller Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time, and became a huge draw as a motivational speaker while all his expenses were being paid by CAI;
• He collected no fewer than thirty-nine literary and humanitarian awards and honorary degrees between 2004 and 2011;
• In 2010, US President Barack Obama donated $100,000 from the proceeds of his Nobel Prize to CAI;
• In April 2011 the investigative news show 60 Minutes exposed the fact that Mortenson's famous 1993 sojourn to Korphe, as well as other claims made in the book (such as his capture by the Taliban, and, er, building lots of schools) almost certainly never happened;
• A day after the 60 Minutes report, celebrated journalist, mountaineer and CAI donor Jon Krakauer released his own damning investigation of Mortenson, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way, detailing Mortenson's rap sheet of hypocrisy and how he (Krakauer) was duped into investing.

Charity fraud doesn't often come with the kind of alarm bells as Three Cups of Tea, a nauseating read whose obnoxious aggrandizement of Mortenson is both its marketing genius (it was published by Viking Press) and its flashing red warning light.

That is not to say that its millions of readers should be (solely) blamed for seeing a halo form above the author's head. Our appetite for such tales is as ravenous as our wallets are fat and our secret shame of wealth is heavy. Greg Mortenson created a religion and made himself its prophet. And like others before him, things didn't quite pan out the way he'd prophesied, if mainly because, as Nicholas Kristof noted, "Greg is more of a founding visionary than a disciplined CEO."

Krakauer and others concede that Mortenson is not pure evil (Bernie Madoff is the cited contrast), just someone in whom we invested an unholy amount of unearned trust.

That is why, we must conclude, bold promises attached to fabricated tales of education-starved children in Asia resulted in tens of millions in book sales and funds raised, a charity-funded book tour, private jets, disgruntled donors, shoddy financial statements, deliberate misinformation, and yes, a few schools.

In other words, Greg Mortenson did what he did because nobody stopped him. Nobody checked the facts, and nobody tempered his idealism (or our own) with a dose of reality. Or if they did, it didn't work.

His real success was not in exploiting his unique encounter with poverty in Pakistan to build schools, but in exploiting our naïveté with respect to encountering poverty. Greg Mortenson's shame is on us.

May we think about that before we write our next cheque to charity.

Markets of the World: A fresh take on food, photography and book publishing

Anyone who finds sterility and repetition lurking in the food-and-foodie assault on popular culture, or perhaps a fetid insouciance in photography book publishing--one pass by the bookshelves at the mega chain stores reveals that sellers have not lost their desire to peddle large-format photo spreads on Tuscan herb gardens or the Earth as seen from a rich man's helicopter--is likely to be refreshed by a new book, Markets of the World, by Toronto photographer Dean Bradley.

For an audience that doubtless craves an authentic, humble take on the photographic discovery of the simple pleasures in life, the book is an exhibition not just of talent and creativity but also of exploration and connection.

The market in Mr. Bradley's vision is a community crossroads, both a vibrant intersection of social threads and a common starting point for diverse moments of inspiration, from an evening meal to a flower arrangement to a special gift. The market is colour (p50), conviviality (p32), craftsmanship (p47), enthusiasm (p37), discovery (p71), simplicity (p39) and raw beauty (p27).

Part imaginative travel memoir, part photography exhibit of markets as far flung as Australia (the Sydney fish market), Spain (Valencia's mercado and Barcelona's boqueria), Cambodia, Vietnam, Morocco, Istanbul, Amsterdam and a dozen more, Markets of the World is truly an exploration of quotidian adventure.

(Mr. Bradley's YouTube channel contains a short video of himself eagerly opening the initial shipment of first editions outside his Toronto home. No doubt we can all identify with and admire the child inside this moment of discovery.)

Last week the intrepid photographer launched the self-published book at the classy, clean-lined Miele Gallery in the upstairs Market Kitchen of St. Lawrence Market in Toronto (St. Lawrence Market is also featured in the book), where dozens of guests and photography enthusiasts mingled among the exhibit of Mr. Bradley's work and sampled fresh hors d'oeuvres made from produce from just downstairs. 

It's a rare treat to find a photography book whose essence is no more or less than the artist's passion for his craft and the life in what surrounds him.

Markets of the World ($29.95; hardcover; 103 pages) is available at independent GTA bookstores such as Another Story, Nicholas Hoare, Type Books, Ben McNally, Book City and A Different Drummer Books, as well as at Ten Thousand Villages. It can also be purchased online from the photographer's website www.photosbydean.ca. 

Quote-Unquote: The Primal Land [Adibhumi] by Pratibha Ray

"Life in the city had taught Somra Sisa a great deal. He had seen leaders arriving to address crowds, their motorcars raising clouds of dust; he had seen the strings of red and blue electric lights, heard the croaking of loudspeakers reciting litanies of false praise, caught the whiff of meat being cooked for celebratory feasts.

"Dhangras and dhangris [young men and women] of the Lower Bonda, Kandha and Paraja tribes were conscripted to dance and sing for the entertainment of the babus [government officials]. Endless discourses on the glories of tribal culture were staged and the ranting of speakers was drowned in the thunder of applause.

"When the meetings ended the adivasi [aboriginal] youths were sent back to their villages with empty bellies. The adivasi was only an item in the list of the disadvantaged: a slogan that could be screeched to bring political glory to the leader."

--From Adibhumi [The Primal Land*], by Oriya novelist, poet, literary critic and social activist, Pratibha Ray. Ms. Ray is an unshakable voice for the rights of Adivasi ('indigenous') peoples of Orissa.

The Primal Land is a novelized ethnography of the Bonda people, a primitive tribe living deep in the forested plateau of remote Malkangiri district on Orissa's southwestern tip, where Ms. Ray did research as an anthropology student in the 1970s.

The story of the Bonda in The Primal Land is told parallel to the sundry government attempts at development and "civilizing" the tribals, which has had both comic and very tragic results. Today, the Bonda number fewer than 5000 and face possible extinction.

[Buy The Primal Land at Amazon]

* The Primal Land, by Pratibha Ray
Translated by Bikram K. Das
Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd, 2001
Excerpt from pp. 254-255

Oriya Literature in Translation

I was introduced to Oriya literature by chance and by suffering. In a Khan Market bookshop in Delhi, I decided to spend a whopping 800 rupees on the Orissa edition of The Beautiful India reference book series.

There is a different edition for each Indian state, approximately 350 pages, written in imperfect Indian English (albeit scholarly Indian English) in the style of a mid-twentieth century social science Ph.D. dissertation. In other words, it is the kind of book that would cure insomnia in a sloth; a very, very dry reading on the history, economy, language, culture, politics, demographics, industry, art and architecture of the state. But one of the few gems was the section on Oriya literature—specifically the names and themes and significance of prominent writers, novelists and poets—that set me off on the path of local literary adventure.

Within the otherwise drab pages of that textbook I discovered the name of Umesh Chandra Sarakar, whose 1888 story Padmamali is considered the first-ever novel written in Oriya. Fakir Mohan Senapti (1843-1918) is called the father of modern Oriya prose. In the late 19th century a literary movement called Satyabadi came along, known for its Oriyan nationalistic spirit. There were satirists and romantic poets and fiercely politicized short story writers. The famous brothers Mohanty, Gopinath and Kanhu Charan, wrote now-classic stories on themes of social consciousness and cultural battles with modernity during the post-partition era of early Indian nationhood.

I desperately wanted to read these works to understand the place where I’d be spending a year or more of my life.

By further chance, I stumbled upon a glorious website called Grassroots Books India, billed as the largest website of Oriya literature in translation (though it could equally call itself the only website of Oriya literature in translation). Here to my delight I found Padmamali and many of the works of Senapti and the Mohantys and other important Oriya writers, available in English translation, for download in PDF format—absolutely FREE!

Grassroots Books, a non-profit, aims to “open doors to India’s best writing — selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers and translators — by publishing and promoting these works on the web. We also serve as an advocacy organization for literature in translation, producing events that feature the work of Oriya writers and connecting these writers to the world at large.”

NB: Fellow Orissa-based VSO volunteer Sheila Ash has written a very informative introduction to and review of some Indian and Oriya lit on her blog, Ashramblings.

India Book Review: Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga

Duly celebrated young Indian author Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize and shot the young man to stardom. I've still not read that book. It is sitting on my virtual bookshelf, which is to say that it is stored on my partner's Kindle that I haven't yet deigned to use, which means it stands a tiny chance of achieving the paradigmatic distinction of being the first electronic book I ever read.

However, my actual non-virtual bookshelf is blessedly still full of actual non-virtual books, one of which is Adiga's second book published (but first written), Between the Assassinations, a collection of short tales ("a novel of stories") set in a fictional town of Kittur on the southwest Indian coast during the seemingly arbitrary but nevertheless poetically named era in India's history between the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the assassination of her son Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Arbitrary, because the stories follow no discernible chronological order, nor are they pegged to any specific date during that seven-year span, nor do they at any point reference either of the two assassinations as events significant to the narrative. Should any of these facts put you off reading the book, you'll be the sorer for it.

What Adiga writes in these character-driven stories of daily life in all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society tucked just beneath the innocent surface of fictional Kittur, is a tale of a transcendant, modern India, where the barriers, both physical and culturally imagined, between all corners, sectors, classes, religions and ages of Indian society are being torn down by the thrust of modernity, which as a character itself takes the thematic forms of, for example, a globalized economy, linguistic convergence and domination, identity politics of sub-national groups, and the better-informed but ceaselessly futile revolt of the have-nots against the haves--all of which characterize India's coming of new age in the late 1980s.

And, as the prose comprises the earliest, rawest writings of a young, talented author, Adiga's style is wonderfully sardonic, purposeful, and not at all off-key when it hits the occasional epiphanous note.

You should read this book.

Between the Assassinations
By Aravind Adiga
Free Press, 2009
339 pages

India Book Review: Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

If my memory is to be trusted I don't recall ever in my near-thirty-four years of life in the fortunate company of some of the best people in the world any one them uttering hinting gesturing that Salman Rushdie is his-or-her favourite most-loved best writer.

Having reread what is unswervingly credited as his best novel, Midnight's Children, here in India after first pre-dieting on other, mostly non-fiction books of subcontinental history, I can without hesitation or surprise express an reborn affinity for the book and its (after considering all possible adjectives, I'll go with 'infectious') prose.

Even in spite (or because?) of Rushdie's grotesque disfigurement of international conventions on the use of the semi-colon; I willingly endured what I had previously admonished discarded vomited as knickknack illusionist storytelling combined with an ineluctable rhapsodical unquenchable urge to build my vocabulary. (I'm looking at you, The Moor's Last Sigh; Shame, you're forgiven because your imagery of Pakistani coup culture was enticingly tabloid-esque.)

What can I tell you? This time round his alluring chutnification of fictionalized autobiography with the history and wars and rulers of India really snorted me up and away into the nasal passages of the life times adventures of Saleem Sinai. No, next time you see me I won't be telling you that Rushdieji is my new bestest prose-wallah; only that the experience of reading his masterpiece while ensconced in India is unlike any other encounter with the author.

Deservingly the novel is one of the most celebrated of the 20th century; if you're spending a bunch of time (especially down-time) in India, add it to your reading list.

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Vintage Paperback, 1995
463 pages

India Book Review: Inhaling the Mahatma, by Christopher Kremmer

Nearly fifty years after the assassination of the Mahatma Gandhi, a copper urn containing part of his ashes--which were supposed to have been emptied into the Bay of Bengal in 1948--was found in a bank vault in the Oriyan city of Cuttack. Gandhi's great-grandson Tushar Gandhi won a custody battle for his ancestor's remains, and brought the urn to Allahabad--the city built at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers--for a scattering ceremony.

Aussie journo Christopher Kremmer, a foreign correspondent from Sydney, attended the ceremony and found himself a prime vantage point for photography as Tushar, standing in the Ganges River, opened the urn to release the cloud of ashes. Wrote Kremmer:

"Clicking away with my camera, I didn't realise that the amorphous cloud was creeping close to me, pushed along by wayward zephyrs. The first thing I noticed was a strange, metallic taste in my mouth. Then, a peppery sensation infiltrated my nose, like that preceding a sneeze. Suddenly, shockingly, I realised that I was inhaling the Mahatma."

Kremmer covered Indian news for international media for much of the period between 1991-2004, and collected his professional memoirs in this excellent travelogue.

India's slow emergence, after the Cold War, as a burgeoning global power buoyed by a shift toward free-market capitalism and privatization parallels the latent development of contemporary identity politics in a country whose people and regions are almost as diverse as they are numerous. And Kremmer saw and wrote about much of it, from the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 to the Gujurat riots of 2002.

In addition to inhaling the Mahatma, Kremmer was also caught smack in the middle of the Ayodhya affair--the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu fundamentalists--perhaps the single most illustrative event of the new Indian era.

Along the way, Kremmer explored the softer sides of Hindu political, historical and cultural identity, in ashrams and ancient temples; he also married an Indian woman and established a life for himself as an expat wallah.

The book is an able companion to the traveller's discovery of modern India; an informed and compassionate catch-up on the last twenty years of Indian current events.

Inhaling the Mahatma
By Christopher Kremmer
HarperCollins, 2006
419 pages

India Book Review: A New History of India, by Stanley Wolpert

Reading UCLA historian Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India (8th ed.) is your (and my) just punishment for not taking an Intro to India course at university.

And reading the dense volume passim in 35-minute intervals on the TTC* during a typically bleak Canadian February (as I did) might be the best way to approach the book (and might actually make winter look not too difficult by comparison).

To be fair, Wolpert’s history of India, now in its eighth edition (the academic equivalent of the best-seller list and the Oprah book club, combined), offers you infinitely more insight and considerably more depth than those forgettable history passages in Lonely Planet.

From the Vedic civilization’s economic development to agricultural innovation on the Deccan plateau; from Hindu philosophy to the Dutch East India Company; from Mughal ascendancy to English utilitarianism to the political context of the assassination of Gandhi—actually of several Gandhis—Wolpert has you covered with agonizingly precise historical minutiae of the sort that usually attracts only lonely history buffs and comatose hospital patients (the latter in book-on-tape form, obviously).

Still, it is patently irresponsible to attempt to travel India without some concept of its history, and although there are more enjoyable ways to devour it, there is no more complete way (possibly short of enrolling in Wolpert’s class). Read it before you travel but carry it along at your own risk; while it is a sure-footed reference guide, it is not a light book!

A New History of India (8th ed.)
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press, 2009
548 pages

* TTC equals Toronto Transit Commission, or more specifically the Dundas and Spadina streetcars for this blogger.

India Book Review: The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple

This past week I went to hear the famed Scottish historian and travel writer William Dalrymple deliver a live reading from a couple of his works, including The Last Mughal, at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, on the occasion of Penguin’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

I imagined a charismatic, perhaps forgivably pompous man at a lectern, a master of the subtle arts of storytelling: pitch, tone, pace, gesture, and expression. I was hardly disappointed; even his slight rotundity emerging from his long, white kurta and the beads of sweat on his large forehead fit the prescribed image of a craftsman raconteur.

The flamboyance of Dalrymple’s live performance is exceeded only by the fine tune of his prose. And The Last Mughal, so I am told by those who’ve read him more widely than I, is probably his driest book. It is a deeply practical, well-researched and well-imagined history of the Indian uprising of 1857 (the word ‘uprising’ is often substituted in the history books by ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ or ‘first war for independence’).

Dalrymple covers the full lay of the land of Delhi in the mid-nineteenth century, from the political court and palace intrigue of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (the title character) to the martial strategies of the British high command.

But it is the depiction of the men and women in between these two poles that really grants the reader a sense of the vitality of historical Delhi: the merchants and tradesmen of Shahjahanabad; the rebellious Brahmin Hindu sepoys; the newspaper editors of the city; the Mughal court poets; the English civilian administrators and their families; the fiery Protestant missionaries.

The full breadth of life of the city is overturned by Dalrymple’s lengthy inquisition into how and why this massive and popular rebellion of the native forces under British command occurred, how the dying embers of the once-great Mughal royal lineage came to reconcile with its almost inescapable fate, and how the vengeful British besieged and finally took down the mighty walls of the great city of Delhi and in doing so altered the course of India’s history forever.

And to credit Dalrymple’s robust sense of place where it is due, his (and as importantly, his many Indian grad-student researchers’) assiduous efforts in the Indian National Archives—poring over the famed Mutiny Papers, which consist of the municipal records of Delhi during the summer of 1857 as compiled by Mughal royal officials and preserved by the British after their victory in the bloody siege—provide, to use an apt phrase, the most fodder for his storytelling cannon.

It is impressive, vivid and exhaustive; maybe not a must-read for all travellers to India (not every traveller is wedded to historical enquiry, especially one so specific), but canonical for anyone who plans to tramp around the historical sites of Delhi, and for any visitor who can’t hope to know this place without understanding one of the most significant events in the history of the Indian people.

Dalrymple is the author of seven books about India, although before I got a hold of The Last Mughal, he was known to me only for his non-India work, a wonderful account of the journey of two sixth-century monks on foot across the Byzantine Empire, From the Holy Mountain (1998).

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
By William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006
578 pages

The Bookseller of Khan Market

At Faqir Chand & Sons booksellers in Khan Market, New Delhi, you can taste the sandalwood at the back of your tongue the moment you draw your first breath. The musty single-room shop is three times as high as it is wide, and five times as long as it is high.

And in this literary warren each and every book is individually wrapped in plastic--likely in defence against the volcanic ash of the incense--and stacked horizontally on the metal shelves, which is to say the books like flat stacked one on top of the other at least eight or ten volumes high per shelf, troublesomely necessitating both hands as well as a bit of stretch and muscle to retrieve any book not on top of a particular stack.

Authors are grouped together in coveys of their work. However, there is no discernible order or organization to the arrangement of the authors (you'll find Salman Rushdie one shelf above Bill Bryson and one shelf below Danielle Steele, e.g.), a result of which the visitor should not expect to spend less than half an hour rummaging through the shelves on tiptoes and haunches looking for great reads, unless of course you ask the plump old woman with the corrugated face sitting behind the desk hogging most of the fanned air; she'll find anything for you in under ten seconds.

With great, ascetic restraint I limited myself to two book purchases: Inhaling the Mahatma by Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer, and Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga, the former a travelogue and catch-up on the last twenty years of Indian news, and the latter a short-story collection by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger.

Pharaohs were gay, says Sadat widow

Okay, she didn't really say that exactly. But former Egyptian First Lady Jehan al-Sadat has had a few bizarre statements come out of her mouth during her publicity stints while promoting her new book.

First, there was this odd NYT interview, in which Jehan was asked why Islam is so hard on gays (pun apparently not intended). She responded:
"Homosexuality is against Islam. Here in Egypt, there are not many homosexuals, not like the United States. There are some. We’ve had them since the Pharaohs."

To which the NYT's obvious follow-up question was, "You mean the Pharaohs were gay??"

She denied this, although really, it's not like the Pharaohs were Muslim, so she could attribute homosexuality to the Pharaohs (which, I mean, come on: what about that phallic beard) and not run afoul of the Islamic establishment.

Hey, speaking of sweeping generalizations, the NYT also asked Jehan if Palestinians are as smart as Israelis. Stupid question, but she answered it anyway:
"Believe me, they [the Palestinians] are more like the Jews than us. Most of the Palestinians are very well educated. Because they are a minority, they are like the Jews. They are intellectuals."

Uh-huh. So by deduced, logical, inductive reduction, Egyptians are not as smart?

But Egyptians don't take shit from those smarty-pants Palestinians. Asked her thoughts on how desperate Gazans tried to flee into Egypt before and during the recent Israeli attacks, she said:
"When you want to cross into Egypt, there are rules. But the Palestinians want to come without anything, just like that. There were thousands and thousands and thousands who wanted to cross, which is not legal."

Boo-yah! Who's smart now!?

Okay, more likely our readers saw Jehan show up on the Daily Show with John Stewart this past week, which obviously proves the 75-year-old is much more interested in selling books to the stoned, hyper-educated news junkies who watch Stewart than she is in appealing to the hyper-educated stoners who read the NYT.*

A deferential John Stewart asked Jehan al-Sadat if any Arab leader today might be as brave as her late husband. [Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated in 1981 after concluding a peace treaty with Israel, a landmark in the history of the modern Middle East but also a big eff-you to the Palestinians who were hoping for a more comprehensive agreement.]

"Believe me, John. All Arabs want peace. All Israelis want peace. The problem is with the leaders."

Oh, so what about your leader, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak? Hmm, no mention there.

Then Stewart asked if Arab leaders use the Palestinian conflict as an excuse to keep their own populations disinterested in domestic issues.

"Yes."

Zing!

Well there you have it. Gay pharaohs, a stupid disinterested populace, a cowardly president: Jehan calls Egypt what it is, I guess.

[Thanks, Arabist.]

* Wait, at the Tuque Souq, we watch the Daily Show daily and read the NYT obsessively, yet we dispute the correlation between these two activities and smoking weed. We apologize for insinuating our own use of what is still an illegal drug. Kids, don't do drugs (until they are legal or you are 19).

Big Dance for Waltz with Bashir? [Update: No]

The much-celebrated, must-see animated documentary Waltz with Bashir--an Israeli film by Ari Folman about one man's journey to reconstruct his memory of war--is expected to land the honour of Best Foreign-Language Film at tonight's Oscar bash, the 81st Academy Awards.

On its way to the Oscars, Waltz with Bashir has picked up the U.S. Writer's Guild award for Best Documentary, Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes, and Best Picture by the U.S. Society of Film Critics (a tough bunch to impress). It also won 6 Israeli Ophir awards (the Israeli Academy Awards).

Despite its surface topic--the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and Israel's oversight of the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla--the film was received well and thoughtfully in Israel.

The Tuque Souq enthusiastically gives it 2 thumbs up (though I'm still of two minds about the stylistic decision made at the end of the film, which I won't spoil), and highly recommends pairing the film with the legendary narrative journey into a memory of the Lebanon War, Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness--a classic and unforgettable book!

Waltz with Bashir is Israeli cinema's eighth nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film; the previous seven all came up short, including Joseph Cedar's Beaufort last year (a film also about the Lebanon War).

Only 1 Arab or Middle Eastern film has ever won even half of this award: the Academy considers Z, the 1969 winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, a French/Algerian film. Algeria has had 3 other nominations. Iran (Children of Heaven; 1998) and Palestine (Paradise Now; 2005) have had 1 each.

[Oscar Update 1: Waltz with Bashir did not win at tonight's Oscars. Um, I hope I didn't jinx it.]

[Oscar Update 2: Yes, Philip Seymour Hoffman was wearing a tuque tonight. More on this development as it develops.]

Tayeb Saleh passes away at 80

"Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood."
--Tayeb Saleh, Season of Migration to the North

Critically acclaimed Sudanese writer, journalist and novelist Tayeb Saleh passed away this week at the age of 80.

Famous for illuminating the intersections between cultures and modernity, Saleh is especially acclaimed (or sometimes disliked) in the Arab world for depicting the contradictions inherent in cultural struggles on both sides of the modern East/West divide, which is a major theme of his work.

Obits & bios on Tayeb Saleh:

• BBC
• Le Monde (French)
  
• Libération (French)
• Al Jazeera (Arabic)
• Al Arabiya (Arabic)
• Al Hayat (Arabic)
  

Tayeb Saleh's masterpiece was a short novel called Season of Migration to the North (Arabic موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال) published in 1966, an all-time favourite of mine. It is sometimes referred to as an Arabian Nights in reverse, and has been called the best Arabic-language novel of all time.

In 2001, the Arab Literary Academy named Season of Migration to the North the most important Arabic-language novel of the 20th century, and a year later an international literary panel included this novel on a list of the 100 best works of all time.

[Season of Migration to the North on Google Books.]

Arabian Nights update

An update from an earlier post... Oxford's Arabic literature guru Geert Jan van Gelder has an article in the latest Times of London Literary Supplement on the new translation of Arabian Nights, with more analysis on the history of English-language translations.

“Three English translations from the Arabic appeared in the course of the nineteenth century. Edward William Lane, a good Arabist, produced a version in 1839 that was acceptable to a Victorian readership, which meant that he had to omit a fair number of stories, passages and poems.

“More complete was the version by John Payne (1882–4), which was soon overshadowed, and to some extent plagiarized, by that of Richard Burton (1885–8), a translation as eccentric as Burton himself. His obsession with matters of sex and eroticism (he also put his name to a translation of the Kama Sutra) is obvious not only from his copious notes, but also from the translation itself; Burton’s wife Isobel saw to it that an expurgated version was published for a general readership.

“Burton’s language, too, is eccentric and pretty unreadable, such that a not unlikely title might be 'The Shroff who Futtered his Cadette with the Two Coyntes.' Such words may be useful for players of Scrabble; modern readers deserve something better.” [MORE]

New dawn for 'One Thousand and One Nights'

Pop quiz - which of the following stories is an original tale of the famed collection of medieval Persian fables, originally scribed in Arabic
الف ليلة و ليلة (One Thousand and One Nights)?

A) Aladdin's Lamp
B) The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor
C) Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
D) The Three Apples
E) All of the above

The answer is D*. Not among the original Arabic manuscripts, dating in fragments from as early as the 9th century, will you find the popular stories about Aladdin or Ali Baba or Sindbad sailing the seven seas. Those were added in the early 18th century by the inventive French writer Antoine Galland, who based them on contemporary folk tales he'd heard around the cafes of Aleppo.

Galland's translation of (and especially his additions to) the collection of medieval Persian stories, published under the title Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français, was immensely popular in Europe. It was not until the late 19th century that a credible English translation was produced, that of the astute Sir Richard Francis Burton. This longstanding English-language version has come by a number of names, including Arabian Nights and Tales from the 1001 Nights, etc.

Now, for the first time in more than a century, a new English translation has been made. SOAS scholar Hugh Kennedy wrote this detailed review of the new English edition of One Thousand and One Nights by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons, including a lot of the intricate history of the collection of tales.

The three-volume set contains nearly 3000 pages of all of the original 1001 stories, translated from their most complete Arabic version, with plenty of notes. And yes, it also contains Galland's inventions.

* The Three Apples is a gripping murder mystery in which, among other twists, the hero sleuth must solve the case in 3 days or else the Sultan will kill him.

Tuque Souq book alert: "L'art arabe"

The book L'Art arabe d'après les monuments du Kaire depuis le VIIe siècle jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe is a collection of extremely rare engravings, plates and lithographs that were collected by the 19th century French historian Prisse d'Avennes.

It is well worth a look for anyone interested in one of the most unusual collections of images from the Arab world. It seems Napoleon Bonaparte brought along 60 or so artists with him in his campaigns in Egypt and the Middle East. Those artists rendered hundreds of images over the years to follow, even staying long after Napoleon was through with the region. They were charged with illuminating the treasures of Arabic art from the seventh century onward.

It took the historian d'Avennes two decades to collect the works of these artists and transform them onto plates and other media for preservation in the volumes of his book.

To see many of the images online, visit the digital archive of the New York Public Library for a show. You won't be disappointed.

Canada versus Somali Pirates

Another pirate attack - the minimum 49th this year off the coast of Somalia - has left a Hong Kong chemical tanker in the clutches of armed Somali privateers.

The Associated Press also reported today that French Special Forces had rescued a family whose sailboat had been hijacked by pirates earlier this month.

Since June, Canada has held the command of the Combined Task Force (CTF) 150, a multi-nation joint naval patrol force, based in Djibouti, created to monitor shipping in the Indian Ocean as a part of the so-called War on Terror. (Denmark takes over command of CTF-150 this month.)

However, because CTF-150's main target is al Qaeda, not Somali pirates, and because shipping companies often quietly pay the hefty ransoms to get their boats back, combating piracy in the region has been a tough task.

An article from today's Globe and Mail describes Canada's role in tackling pirates:
"The three [Canadian] ships - the Iroquois, along with HMCS Calgary, a frigate, and HMCS Protecteur, a supply and refuelling ship - spent the past 3½ months serving in a multinational force known as Combined Task Force 150, with the Iroquois serving as the flagship of what is usually a 15-ship group. Their mandate stretched from the tense waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where coalition warships were often in close quarters with the Iranian navy, to the Egypt's Suez Canal.

"[Canadian] Cmdre. Davidson admits that 15 ships can do little to halt piracy among the 20,000 ships that annually travel in the Gulf of Aden, especially when CTF-150 had other tasks as well. He said the flotilla's main goal was just to make its presence felt in those otherwise lawless waters."

Earlier this year the UN Security Council passed resolution 1816, proposed by the UN's International Maritime Organization (IMO), which allows CTF-150 to operate within the territorial waters of Somalia in order to race down pirates before they can escape.

According to the Kenya-based East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme, there are at least 160 pirate groups operating in the waters off of Somalia and the Gulf of Aden, with an estimated 1200 pirates.

For a rundown of some of the pirate attacks in the world's waters this year, see this site.

For further reading on the world of modern piracy, the Tuque Souq recommends "The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos & Crime" by William Langewiesche.

[The Tuque Souq wants you to know that we resisted all urges to use "Aargh, matey" in this posting.]