Tag: yale press

Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

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Rosa Mistika by Euphrase Kezilahabi

Tanzanian fiction

Original title – Rosa Mistika

Translator – Jay Boss Rubin

Source – Personal Copy

For me, as a reader, my reading journey is about reading as widely as possible, and one of the things I had in mind for this year was forst to add a few new countries, which I did last month. But then to also to read from areas of the world aI had missed the last few years and I have read a lot from Africa but I feel I need to build picture of each country over time and each place literature so whehn I saw this Swahili classic that was banned when it first came out was available in English for the first time I had to read it. Euphare Kezilahabi was a professor of African languages and had given several talks, including one on the concept of the hero in African fiction. Which tickled me, as this book has at its heart a female voice: that of Rosa. Like Euphrase, she lives on the island of Ukerewe on Lake Victoria.

This was the manner in which Rosa was brought up; this was the manner in which she was cared for; this was the manner in which she was watched over by her father. After the beating, Rosa ceased talking to boys altogether. When Zakaria learned of this, he was very happy. He boasted-especially when he’d had a little to drink-that he knew how to raise his daughters. But Zakaria didn’t understand that Rosa was at a difficult age, and that strictness was not appro-priate; he didn’t understand that daughters require a certain independence from their fathers; he didn’t understand that by beating his daughter, he was exercising an authority he didn’t rightfully possess, and that when it came to opinions on marriage, his were practically worthless. He didn’t understand that Rosa needed to get to know boys. And so, as a result of her upbringing, Rosa began to see boys as people she need not associate with, or even speak to. She began to think that she needed to be self-sufficient. Rosa grew more remote by the day.

Rosa and her father clash here

Rosa is turning thirteen as the book opens, and she is growing aware of how her father is abusing her mother. But her father will not let a boy near her, and he is now starting to turn on her. So when she gets the chance to go to a school on the mainland, she has to make it happen, to escape her father, a man who drinks, a man who seems to want to escape his life.  He is a failed teacher. It seems his daughter has maybe got the same type of mind.  So when she manages to get to school, no thanks to her father, who is unwilling to pay, but her mother and sisters help her scrape the money together to go, she vows to be unlike the other girls around her, who are all obsessed with Boys and dancing. But she puts her head down and does well for the first few years. But this marks her out with the other girls. So when she finally goes to a dance, she meets the wrong man and like many a girl sheltered from the world falls for him what follows is how she then goes to teacher traing college but she wants to remain a virgin and when an event happens that changes all this with a man it has a horrific ending this is a book about escaping domestic abuse but how a woman like Rosa will always be failed by the fact she is living in 1970s Tanzania!

Rosary, the all-girls school where Rosa was headed, was built along a road hemmed in by mountains. The mountains were dotted with large black boulders and caves that sheltered hyenas. At night, you could hear them cackling, but during the daytime they were nowhere to be found.Five other schools were tucked into the same mountains-all boys’ schools. Despite this discrepancy, one girls’ school was enough to make the mountains an interesting place to study. From one side, delicate feminine voices could be heard; they were answered from the other side by the sturdy sounds of boys. Only rarely were these voices heard interacting directly-during a discussion or debate, or maybe at a dance. This was the environment Rosa entered: a joyful set-ting, albeit one in which girls were incredibly scarce. If a girl didn’t have a boyfriend, it was no one’s fault but her own.

Srosa didn’t want a boyfriend then!

It is an interesting voice for the time it was written about a daughter escaping a violent father. But, also doomed by those around her, she tries but eventually wears down in the world. A book of double standards in 1970s Tanzania was banned when it came out. Rosa’s voice was considered radical for the time; even though it was written by a male writer, it is strong. A woman beaten down by her world, she tries but fails, then has a shocking event that ends the whole story. I like the spare nature of his narrative at times; he leads the reader to think, which I appreciate. It is a book that captures those post-colonial years and also the male-dominated world Rosa lives in. The book was banned after an outcry by the catholic church when it came out with its abortion storyline, which was the first time this subject had been tackled in a Swahili book.  This is the first translation from Swahili that translator Jay Boss Rubin has done. I hope it isn’t the last, as I think we don’t have enough books from Swahili translated into English.

Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

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Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Guatemalan Fiction

Original title – Severina

Translator – Chris Andrews

Source – Personal copy

This is the second book I have reviewed on the blog from Rey Rosa, the first was the African shore like this book was published by Yale Press. Rey Rosa travels after school, this is where he meets the American writer Paul Bowles in Tangiers, where Bowles translated his books into English, also on his death made Rey Rosa in charge of his estate. This book is a love story of sorts both of a relationship and the life long journey we all take as readers through the city of Lit and its many turns.

The next time, two or three weeks later, when I saw her come in , I said good afternoon and asked if she was looking for something in particular.

“Yes, I’m looking for a present ” were the forst wprds I heard her say .

“Can I ask who it’s for ?”

“For my boyfriend,” She said. She had an unidentifiable accent.

“well, you’re the best judge. There are  some new books  in the Japanese literatuere section ”

Her face lit up

“Ah ,” She said.”I love Japanese literature”

He saw her take some Japanese books on the previous visit, this passage made me Laugh

Severina is the name of a girl, we don’t find this out till later in the book. We first see her in a bookshop being observed by the narrator who is also the owner of the said bookshop “La Entrenida” that he and a group of friends they choose to open due to paying so much for their own books. This is a boring Monday afternoon when he observes the girl he had seen before but this time he follows her around the shop noting each of the books that she has picked up and hidden on a couple of occasions. He lets her off but is drawn into her life. Where we see both her life and his life of a bookseller. But also as a lover of lit from the writers he reads and his friends reads.Again another book that mentions Borges and his Mirrors and maybe the Narrator sees a mirror in Severina  Then Ana Severina grandfather falls ill and this changes the picture between the two main characters.

“I rushed to the door and down the corridor , ran up the stair, but she had disappeared. I returned to the bookstore. My head was spinning. A pemonition sent me back to the shelf beside which I had kissed her, and I discovered that she had taken another book. A hardback edition of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, translated by Borges. Rather than anger. I felt a strange relief. I went to the cash register and added Faulkners novel to the list of stolen books.

Wild Palms was a book that was influnencial in the latin american world after this translton by Borges .

This is a very short novella clocking in at 87 pages unlike the African shore this is a story told from the unnamed shop owner a first person narrative. There is a  book revolves around a book that might have been Borges and inspired one of his Mirror stories. I always love the way Borges stories ripple out and touch other writers.There are lots clever names like the shop is Spanish for Mistress the surname of Ana grandfather Mr White to name two there are others. There is also the love story between the narrator and Severina is almost like a mirror.

The Corpse washer by Sinan Antoon

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The Corpse Washer

The Corpse washer by Sinan Antoon

Iraqi fiction

Original title –  وحدها شجرة الرمان

Translator – By the writer himself

Source – Personnel copy on Kindle

Sinan Antoon is and Iraqi/American writer born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and American mother ,he lived and studied English in Iraq  .Before moving to the US in 1990 where he gained a Phd in Arabic and Islamic studies from Harvard .He is currently an associate professor at Galltain school in New York .He has written five books and also made a well-known Documentary called  About Baghdad.

If death is a postman, then I receive his letters every day. I am the one who opens carefully the bloodied and torn envelopes. I am the one who washes them, who removes the stamps of death and dries and perfumes them, mumbling what I don’t entirely believe in. Then I wrap them carefully in white so they may reach their final reader— the grave.

Very poetic thoughts at times as they look after the cities dead .

 

Well this was the one book on this years IFFP I didn’t see being there ,but that said one I was pleased to see on the list as however curates the Yale imprint ”  THE MARGELLOS WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS” has rather good taste from the other two books I have read from the list Diary and Blindly .So to the book the corpse washer is set in the Shi’ite community and follows Jawad who at the beginning of the book is working with his father as a corpse washer following the Islamic practice of Ghusl ,were a body needs to be washed in the correct water and shroud  in the Kafan ,as soon after some one dies .Now young Jawad has his own dreams he wants to become an artist  so he leaves his father and goes to follow his dream of art becoming a sculpture .But as  he is studying and then the gulf war and Saddam leadership becomes more manic ,his father dies ,his mother becomes very ill and the family rack up cost in her care so Jawad life goes full circle and in the middle of the violence yet again becomes a corpse washer telling us the horrors of conflict as he washes and shrouds the bodies of the dead .As war brings Jawad so many more stories and bodies to clean and shroud .

Like all children I was very curious and would pester Father with questions about his work, but he said he’d tell me all about it later when the time was right. I would accompany him when I was old enough. “It’s too early, focus on school.” Ammoury had started helping Father when he was fifteen and started to wash at eighteen, but my father never allowed me to go inside his workplace. He wanted to keep work and home separate. When I used to ask Ammoury about work, he never gave me satisfying answers; these were matters for grown-ups and I was still a child.

I loved visiting my father factory as a kid didn’t we all do this ?

Now I found this maybe the most powerful book I have read so far from the list and knowing the IFFP it will be a good contender for a winner Jawad is a man caught in the vicious circle of failed dreams he glimpse another life ,he wants more than his father but in the end maybe sees what his father didn’t in their job when he returns to it .When the story is washed clean it is a universally themed story of father and sons ,foiled ambition ,family ,war and losing a dream .A modern tragedy maybe ,War story maybe ,but for me most of all one mans struggle Jawad he could be compared to characters from a dickens novel or even an older version  Billy Casper where Jawad’s art is like Billy kestrel and escape a dream of a better life .