Autumn in a Very, Very Small Town

A Real Epidemic and the Best Halloween Ever

In the summer of 1955, a polio epidemic attacked the United States, and its epicenter was Appleton, Wisconsin.  The infection rate in Appleton and the surrounding county was 128.48 per 100,000, compared with 37.55 per 100,000 in Boston, Mass., the nation's second-hardest hit area. 

My family was in the process of moving from Marinette, Wisconsin, to Appleton that very summer.  My parents prudently decided to ship me and my little sister Alison to our maternal grandparents, who lived in the tiny town of Yorkville, Illinois . . . far enough from the polio outbreak to be a safe haven.  Mom was with us most of the summer, and Dad visited when he could.  Because we had spent a week or so every summer in Yorkville, this extended visit didn’t seem unsettling: I loved my grandparents’ big house on the river, and I was happy doing pretty much nothing other than reading and playing the piano.  There were fireflies to catch and ice cream to eat in the warm evenings while the adults played bridge and whispered about illness and death.

Things changed when the leaves began to turn.  My mother left Yorkville to join my father in Appleton, to look for a house and to begin negotiating how to fit into a new town and a new life.   The polio epidemic there was subsiding slowly although the threat remained; my parents decided that their children were safer in Yorkville, at least until Christmas.  So my sister and I stayed with my grandparents, and I entered third grade.  I was seven years old.  

The main Bristol-Yorkville school building was constructed in 1888; my mother and her sisters also attended school there.

I should explain that in 1955, what we knew as ‘Yorkville’ was actually two villages separated by the Illinois Fox River: Yorkville proper to the south, and Bristol to the north.  Each micro-municipality numbered about 500 people, if you counted dogs, cats, and chickens.  So we’re talking about an extremely small town, or towns . . . so small that the only school (grades 1 through 12) was a no-nonsense brick building two blocks north of my grandparents’ house, in the more genteel portion of this bifurcated place.  The school ‘belonged’ to those of us who lived on the north side of the river (often, families like mine who had lived there for generations).  The kids from the south side were . . . well, kids from the south side.

As an entering third-grader, I needed what any third-grade girl needed – a best friend.  I found one right away, a sweet girl from a big family that lived on the south side.  To get to school, she had to walk from ‘below town’ (‘town’ was directly across the bridge that divided north from south, Bristol and Yorkville); we would join up in the ‘City’ Park a block up from my grandparents’ house and proceed the half block to school.  In my memory, walking through the park was always leisurely, a series of small discoveries (really red maple leaves that hadn’t been there the day before, a lost biscuit from a weekend bake sale).  I don’t remember much about school itself, except that on the rare occasions I had homework, I’d sneak into what had been my Aunt Mary’s bedroom – enchanting in yellow and shelves full of painted porcelain – to study at her ‘desk,’ which was really a vanity table.

This changing-venue maneuver wasn’t really necessary.  That autumn, my sister and I had moved from the back bedroom of my grandparents’ house (a somewhat claustrophobic space that used to be reserved for the ‘hired girl’) to the airy, blue-and-white double bedroom that had been shared by my mother and my Aunt Eleanor, a room that had generous windows overlooking the river . . . and a vanity I certainly could have used as a desk.  But because I was in school and my sister, just turned four years old, was not, I guess I needed my own separate space.

The bridge between Bristol and Yorkville as seen from a corner of my grandparents’ backyard; a new bridge – much less elegant – was built in 1985.

Space.  That’s what Yorkville/Bristol gave me that lovely autumn.  It’s not that I had been particularly restricted: in Marinette, when I was six or younger, I had walked unaccompanied to school (behind my house, but one had to go around the block), to my best friend’s home down the street, to the corner store, to the library on the river.  But Marinette – a hardworking town of then about 10,000, suffused with the paper industry’s sulfur smell and the demographic divisions that followed – had not been a free-range environment for a little kid.  I always knew that my town had ‘other’ places (downtown with its big department store and bars and even less reputable dives, ‘rougher’ neighborhoods where we knew no one) where I could not wander and would not be welcome. 

But my grandparents’ little town was wide open to me.  Of course, it was much smaller than Marinette; even a third-grader, with a bit of resolve, could walk from one end to the other (Yorkville then was very vertical . . . strung along on Bridge Street, from top to bottom, but only a couple of blocks wide) and feel as if she had tramped through the whole place. What I didn’t understand that autumn was that free movement in that tiny double village was also a function of local history and social custom.

Everybody knew my grandparents and my grandfather’s family.  My great-grandfather had been the town’s first lawyer and had founded a bank there.  My grandfather followed in his footsteps, and brought his college-educated bride from Wisconsin to enrich his life . . . and the town’s.  [At this point, all I need to say is: read Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street to understand this part of my family.]  Various relatives were scattered about, in town (like Aunt Alice, across the street) and on neighboring farms (like Uncle John, just outside Bristol, or other, more hazy people, like Aunt Wathena, with whom I associate osage oranges).  My mother and her sisters had been popular and eligible girls in Yorkville (my grandparents had the good sense to send them to college far away, and none of them married Yorkville boys . . . although their cousin Joyce did marry a local man who became the first mayor of consolidated Yorkville/Bristol in 1957.  But I digress). 

The point is: it was easy for my grandparents to let me go alone ‘over town’ across the bridge, to visit the library, to pick up the mail (there was then no home delivery), to indulge in a double chocolate soda at Webster’s drugstore . . . or walk to school, or even to the Game Farm (basically a fowl reserve with a few farm animals on display) northwest of the school, bordering on rich farm land.  Everybody knew my grandparents, had known my mother, and therefore knew me.  I could neither get lost nor get in serious trouble.  All the space I could possibly conceive of, there, was mine.

The original Kendall County courthouse, Yorkville, built in 1864 and reconstructed after a fire in 1887; my grandfather and great-grandfather had law offices there.

Branches became bare, and Halloween was near.  My southside best friend invited me to go trick-or-treating.  I was a reasonably well-behaved granddaughter, partially because I was a relatively self-sufficient child and partially because I didn’t want to provoke my grandmother’s sharp tongue (she was known for pronouncements such as “Alison is clumsy, but [pause in which I would wait for the rare word of praise] Deborah is stubborn”).  Therefore, I asked her permission, which – after a few acid comments about my friend’s family, who although having lived in Yorkville for as long or longer than she had, were, to her, marginally disreputable, probably because they were not white-collar folks – she granted.

I remember little about a costume (pillow sack for treats?  scraps from Grandma’s sewing basket to approximate a pirate?)  What was important was that my friend, in company with her siblings and a small gang of other southsiders, called for me at my grandparents just after sunset . . . and we were off.  Like, all over the place.  Northside, Southside, Bristol and Yorkville.  No Mary Jane, Milk Dud, or apple (yuck) went unclaimed.  When a rumor reached us that a house was giving out full-sized, real candy bars, we hit it three times.  We sat in the middle of the bridge and exchanged treats that we didn’t like for ones we did.  It seemed like midnight, or later, but it was probably nine o’clock – still fairly late for an unsupervised seven-year old – when I got back to my grandparents’ house. Playing cards in the library, Grandma and Grandpa reminded me that it was time for bed. 

Upstairs, I woke my little sister.  Alison had been too young to go trick-or-treating, so I shared some of my loot (not, I’m sure, the full-sized Hershey bars, but still . . . ).  I fell asleep feeling as if I owned the world.

Halloween many, many years later . . . students and friends, David Letterman, the Mad Monk, Wall Street crooks, the local ghoul . . .

That Halloween was almost sixty years ago.  Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful Halloweens.  When my daughter was young, it was great fun to concoct costumes from whatever was lying about – she was a particularly fetching fortuneteller, a beautiful princess, and even an adorably non-threatening pirate; I remember fondly looking in on her after trick-or-treating, as she painstakingly arranged her candy into arcane categories [size? ingredients? color? desirability?]  that marked a personal Halloween landscape. In later years, I enjoyed hosting Halloween parties for my graduate students (whose costume creativity was a source of endless wonderment), then passing the baton to the Luyendyk brothers, who’ve exceeded anything I ever concocted but let me attend anyway, and kibbutzing on the fantastic Halloween extravaganzas my sister Alison has created.

But that long-ago Halloween, when I was seven years old, remains my best Halloween ever.  Reason number one, as I’ve tried to explain, is that it was the moment in my life that I felt like an autonomous individual . . . free to go where and do what I wanted, even if only for a few hours.  I’ve also tried to explain, however elliptically, reason number two:  that it was a small, circumscribed time that affected me so deeply that I’ve revisited it over the years . . . and have realized that its pleasure was in large part a function of class divisions, social prejudices, and economic disparities, and – yes –responses to a dangerous disease. 

Yet these adult realizations, no matter how important or how true, do not take away the visceral memories of freedom, of the sheer exhilarating joy of being able to go anywhere that I could possibly imagine, which adhered to that best Halloween ever, the capstone of autumn in a very, very small town.

We’re Not In Oz Anymore . . . Or Are We?

Dorothy Must Die

You wouldn’t think the world needs another Wizard of Oz adaptation.  We already have movies, plays, Broadway musicals, comics, cartoons, games, merchandise . . . not to mention the thirteen additional Oz books by L. Frank Baum himself, the nineteen by Ruth Plumly Thomson, the three by Oz illustrator John R. Neill, and a host of others.  But we’ve got a new one -- Danielle Paige’s Dorothy Must Die.  And it’s not bad at all.

I’ll tear them apart.  I may not come out alive, but I’m going in there. 

– Cowardly Lion (MGM, 1939)

The conceit is this: a lonely teenager, Amy Gumm (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), rides a tornado from a Kansas trailer park to a grotesque, sinister Oz.  The Munchkins are enslaved, Glinda is a heartless overseer, the Tin Woodman leads death squads, the no-longer-cowardly Lion is a ravenous killer, and the Scarecrow is a mad scientist conducting infernal experiments on unfortunate Ozites.  Worst of all, Dorothy rules the realm with a conceited, amoral tyrant’s deft touch. 

Amy is recruited by ‘evil’ characters from the whole range of Oz books, notably old Mombi, a surviving wicked witch.  Amy’s mission?  To kill Dorothy.  To do this, she fights and connives her way out of various perils, and she trains with the witches in both magic and martial arts.  Part Katniss Everdeen and part Harry Potter, she’s a perfect Young Adult novel heroine – brave, smart, and moody enough to be a believable teenager – stranded in a typical Young Adult novel dystopia.

As is true with many Young Adult novels, Dorothy Must Die aims at both teens and their parents. In this case, not-so-young adults who have fond memories of the original Wizard of Oz books, and of course of the 1939 movie, will enjoy the creative twists on familiar characters and settings.  The sturdy prose, while not as cleverly sophisticated as J. K. Rowling’s, moves the plot along briskly without much of the dumbed-down syntax that can make this genre unbearable to anyone over twelve.

Of course, some people do go both ways.

– Scarecrow (MGM, 1939)

Showing the good side of a bad Oz character, or vice versa, isn’t a new gimmick (see, for instance, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked).  Danielle Paige, however, inverts almost every character while building in enough ambivalence and mystery that readers truly don’t have a clear ethical perspective or even a clear ‘side’ to root for.  Are Amy’s trainers dedicated to restoring Oz or to furthering their own dark designs?  Is the Wizard, who appears later in the novel, friend or foe?  Is Princess Ozma (readers of the full Baum canon know her well) brain-damaged or biding her time to regain power?  Is Glinda’s twin sister (who insists on good manners) a force for Ozite civility or a malevolent doppelganger?

Most of all, what are Amy Gumm’s motives?  First, of course, is survival.  But there are a lot of possible seconds, including understanding ‘home’ and reconciling herself with her dysfunctional mother . . . and personal empowerment in the face of a drab and sad life in Kansas.  In this sense, she plays against Paige’s to-this-point-despicable Dorothy, who also sees Oz as a compensatory stage on which to enact her ‘true self.’  Dorothy’s metastasizing narcissism is explored in No Place Like Oz, the ‘prequel’ to Dorothy Must Die (available only as an inexpensive e-novella); I don’t think it’s necessary to read the novella, though, to see that Amy and Dorothy are being set up as similar girls facing similar dilemmas but taking different paths.

 Going so soon?  I wouldn’t hear of it.  Why, my little party’s just beginning.

--Wicked Witch of the West (MGM, 1939)

Yet maybe they won’t take different paths.  Dorothy Must Die, which pointedly does not resolve the conflicts it sets up, is obviously the first book in what promises to be an endless stream of sequels (hey, it already has a prequel).  In fact, the next book in the series is scheduled for 2015 publication.  Moreover, the book (and/or its subsequent publications) is already under serious negotiation for a TV series.  Is a film far behind?  Or a graphic novel franchise?  Or a multi-platform video game?

Danielle Paige is in good company.  Due in no small part to Baum’s own efforts, The Wizard of Oz has become the quintessential American fairy tale, the ur-text of the contemporary U.S. Young Adult novel (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn notwithstanding), and a prime example of how a singular work of the imagination can engender a cultural phenomenon that lasts for well over a century.  It’s hard to think that Dorothy Must Die and its forthcoming progeny will measure up to the magnificent 1939 film, to the captivating musical version of Wicked, or – for that matter – to Baum’s own continuations. 

But, again, as a series, it has promise, even in the problematic (but potentially lucrative) genre of the Young Adult novel.   As MGM’s Wicked Witch of the West wisely said:  “that’s not what’s worrying me.  It’s how to do it.  These things must be done delicately . . . or you hurt the spell.”

                     Dorothy Must Die.  Danielle Paige.  New York:  HarperCollins, 2014.

                                             Hardcover, paperback, electronic format.

Of Ebola and AIDS, Sorcery and the State

The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government.

– Robert Lansing, U.S. Secretary of State (1918)

AIDS demonstrates how economics and politics cannot be separated from disease; indeed, these forces shape our response in powerful ways. 

–Allan Brandt (1988)

Liberia’s history of bad governance and foreign exploitation explains citizens’ reluctance to trust the intentions of government officials and international health workers [regarding Ebola]. Years of extortion by police, vast and highly visible inequalities in wealth and a sense that even aid workers arrive to enrich themselves have taken their toll.

–Ashoka Mukpo (2014)

Two months ago, reporting from Liberia, U.S. citizen Ashoka Mukpo wrote a perceptive article about what one might call the ‘sociology of Ebola.’  Today Mukpo is himself battling the disease, after being evacuated to a hospital in Nebraska.  The U.S. press is characterizing Mukpo as a brave journalist risking his own wellbeing to report truthfully from an afflicted country. 

In contrast, some people are accusing Liberian citizen Thomas Eric Duncan, who died yesterday of Ebola in a Dallas hospital, of a variety of pre-mortem sins.  These include falsifying documents so he could: escape the epidemic, seek medical treatment abroad, or take advantage of what the extreme right calls ‘Obama’s Liberian Amnesty’ to skirt immigration protocols.  (This strange charge seems to refer to the Deferred Enforced Departure directive, instituted by President George W. Bush in 2007, when the Temporary Protected Status for some Liberians was due to expire . . . a directive extended by President Barack Obama. President Obama’s mythical responsibility for the Ebola epidemic, based on his African roots, is such a disturbingly insane theory, albeit one gathering steam with U.S. extremists, that I cannot treat it today, nor can I treat how Ebola is being used in Republican political campaigns.  Stay tuned.)

Whatever degree of accuracy adheres to both characterizations, they share one trait:  they praise or blame the victim, ascribing their fates to individual agency.  People in West Africa often see things from a different perspective, things including why one is struck by disease and how one interprets medical assistance.  To understand some reactions to Ebola ‘on the ground,’ reactions that can seem either ignorant or ungrateful to some Western observers, it may be helpful to refer to the attitudes of Haitians toward the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the country in the late 1980s.

Sending Sida

At the very time that AIDS was being identified as a ‘Haitian disease’ in the United States, the illness was spreading through rural Haiti.  Sida (AIDS in kreyol) was a new phenomenon and thus engendered fear and confusion.  It didn’t seem to be a ‘normal’ sickness that could be treated by herbalists, vodou priests, prayer services, or such Western medicine as was available.  Thus it was frequently attributed to sorcery.  Sida was ‘sent’ against a person, often a person who had offended social norms in some way or who was marginally better off than his neighbors.  But as the epidemic grew, sida attacked ‘innocent’ people as well, and other causes were posited.  Primary among these: a brutal and corrupt government (although Jean-Claude Duvalier had been exiled, the new regime was seen as ‘Duvalierism without Duvalier,’ and murderous oppression continued) and the United States, whose long-standing economic exploitation of Haiti – not to mention its discriminatory policies against Haitian immigrants and would-be immigrants – was seen as a major factor in aggravating the country’s already abject poverty. 

Sorcery might be at work, but indigenous logic looked for reasons behind the poverty that made people so envious or desperate that they might send sida to someone living right next door.  In the countryside and in city slums, people competed for scanty resources – food, water, shelter, employment – made even scantier by the long alliance between kleptocratic Haitian politicians and United States business interests.  NGOs and religious missions dedicated to providing health services were also distrusted; they were suspected of infecting the populace, using people as guinea pigs, or profiting in some manner by their sickness (suspicions based in part on the business of exporting Haitian blood, a trade that stopped only when AIDS hit).

Then there’s racism.  Not only did the blatant racism coloring the first U.S. Occupation (1915-1934) leave permanent scars; a large percentage of Haitians have relatives in the United States, relatives who reported increased anti-Haitian bigotry (not to mention the treatment of ‘illegal Haitian aliens’ in Florida detention centers). 

In sum, while poor Haitians understood sida as an evil that might have as its proximate cause an envious neighbor or a virus, the ultimate causes were dysfunctional government, civil strife, and U.S. exploitation of what had been a paracolony for a century or more, plus white and mulatto disdain for average, darker skinned Haitians, who constitute well over 90% of the population.  Sida was indeed ‘sent’ by enemies.

Ebola is the brainchild of HIV

This is the conclusion of Dr. Gobee Logan, County Medical Officer at Tubmanville Hospital, Liberia.  Dr. Logan evidently has some success treating Ebola patients with a drug from the anti-HIV/AIDS cocktail, a plan he devised after reading that HIV and Ebola replicate inside the body in the same way.

Other sorts of consanguinity are voiced by other doctors.  Dr. Cyril Broderick, former Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia and Director of Research at Firestone-Liberia, directly links Ebola with AIDS in that they are both pathogens deliberately manufactured and disseminated by Western pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. Department of Defense.  And the doctors of the church are not far behind.  Just as some churchmen in Haiti and the United States saw AIDS as a divine punishment, so do many churchmen in Liberia.  In July this year, evangelical protestant pastors, plus Episcopalian and Catholic priests, issued a unanimous resolution:

That God is angry with Liberia, and that Ebola is a plague.  Liberians have to pray and seek God’s forgiveness over the corruption and immoral acts (such as homosexualism, etc.) that continue to penetrate our society.

Ebola is ‘sent’ by God.  And/or big pharma and the United States in general.  And/or by the collusion of the Liberian government with these malevolent interests over the entire history of Liberia (which, of course, began as a United States paracolony sponsored by an uneasy alliance of abolitionists and former slaveholders).  And/or even ‘sent’ by sorcery, as the rumors of uncanny ‘resurrection’ and ‘Ebola ghosts’ suggest.

It’s not surprising that Liberians can be wary of or hostile to medical personnel who wear giant white spacesuits to invade rural communities or who staff clinics and hospitals that are known as places where one is sent to die – or even worse, as places where rapacious conglomerates test poisons and deadly viruses on a victimized populace.

There is a foundational similarity between Haiti’s reaction to AIDS thirty years ago and Liberia’s reaction to Ebola now: a widely held belief that the causes of catastrophic disease are deeply embedded in the country’s history, political economy, and social practice – plus a consequent distrust of the ‘help’ offered by those who may have precipitated the disease in the first place. The fact that these epidemics followed an extended period of political chaos and, in Liberia, of horrific all-out war, both periods marked by U.S. support of venal dictators and refusal to help the imperiled citizenry, only adds to fear and confusion.

Chimpanzees and Bush Meat

Then there’s the common denominator of racism.  In-country racialized attitudes have differing vectors:  in Haiti, the mulatto elites vs. the ‘African’ blacks, in Liberia, the descendants of Black American settlers vs. the indigenous peoples whose land was appropriated, one (the lighter, or ‘more civilized’) supported by the United States (the Reagan administration’s temporary support of Samuel Doe is an exception).  Racism ‘sent’ from the outside – in particular, via Western reportage – also contributes to the difficulties diseased-gripped countries have in dealing with an epidemic.

While poor sanitation, rudimentary medical services, and degraded infrastructure certainly contribute to the spread of infectious disease, the way these conditions often are portrayed plays into centuries of racist discourse.  I.e.:  Africans are dirty, careless, and lazy.  They are to blame for the shabby state of their countries – as if colonialism, enabling craven leaders, and deliberate underdevelopment had no role at all.  Moreover, Africans are savage, atavistic . . . close kin to the chimpanzees from whom they supposedly contracted the disease.

How convenient that both AIDS and Ebola have been traced to African people’s interaction with chimps.  The ‘science’ about disease origins keeps changing, but the reporting does not.  In the 19^th century, ‘sexual encounters’ between African women and male apes were posited to have been the source of venereal disease; in the 20^th century, AIDS was transmitted to humans from apes because humans hunted and consumed apes (a sanitized version of the hoary ‘cannibalism’ calumny); in the 21^st century, Ebola has been traced either to being bitten by a chimpanzee or by eating ‘bushmeat’ (in itself a racially-inflected term for wild game that includes great apes but is most often animals that could have been infected by a chimpanzee).  The face of Ebola and AIDS is . . . a large, violent, disease-ridden monkey?

All that said, it’s predictable that the death of Thomas Eric Duncan can be read darkly, through a racist glass by African Americans and darkly, through a racially inflected conspiracy glass by Liberians and other Africans.  As Chiangozie Nwonwu wrote earlier today:

But, seriously, why would it be difficult to think that Mr Duncan’s death would have served the US state’s interest? Think about a flood of people from Ebola-hit regions of West Africa heading to the land where everyone with Ebola had, until Duncan, survived.

It’s not difficult to think that, particularly given the current U.S. paranoia about illegal (and non-white) immigration (a factor also at play during the Haitian AIDS epidemic).  In my opinion, Duncan’s death was not deliberately ‘sent,’ but his race, ‘foreignness,’ and lack of insurance seem to have shaped the initial, non-vigilant response to his illness. Duncan was caught in a huge web of layered and intersecting causalities, histories, and rumors, when – as far as individual agency goes – it appears all he was trying to do was reunite with his son’s mother, whom he had met in a Cote d’Ivoire refugee camp.  As was Ashoka Mukpo caught.  No doubt a committed journalist and humanitarian, Mukpo has been equally subject to the factors that he wrote about so well, not long ago.

References

[Note:  The first illustration is a street mural in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, by Jerry Rosembert Moise. The second is a detail from a sequined banner by the Haitian artist Myrtlande Constant. The third is a photograph of nurses removing a corpse from an unspecified Liberian location.  The fourth is the cover of Newsweek magazine, August 29, 2014.]

Azango, Mae.  “Liberian Doctor Defends 3-5 Days Ebola Treatment with HIV Drug.  AllAfrica 9/29/2014. http://allafrica.com/stories/201409292050.html

Brandt, Allan.  “AIDS:  From Social History to Social Policy.”  In AIDS: The Burdens of History.  Ed. Elizabeth Fee and David Fox.  Berkeley:  U of California P, 1988, pp. 147-151.

Broderick, Cyril. “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?”  Cyril Broderick.  The Daily Observer 9/9/2014

http://www.liberianobserver.com/security/ebola-aids-manufactured-western-pharmaceuticals-us-dod

“DED Granted Country – Liberia.”  Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. Updated 10/1/2014. http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/temporary-protected-status-deferred-enforced-departure/ded-granted-country-liberia/ded-granted-country-liberia

Doloquee, Franklin.  “Dead Ebola patients resurrect?”  New Dawn Liberia 9/24/2014. http://www.thenewdawnliberia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12763:dead-ebola-patients-resurrect&catid=3:general&Itemid=68

Dubois, Laurent.  Haiti:  The Aftershocks of History.  New York:  Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2012.

Duva, Anjali Mitter.  “Liberia and the United States: A Complex Relationship.”  UNC Global Connections,2002.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/globalconnections/liberia/essays/uspolicy/

Farmer, Paul.  Aids and Accusation:  Haiti and the Geography of Blame.  Berkeley and Los Angeles:  U of California P, 1992.

Flynn, Gerard and Susan Scutti.  “Smuggled Bushmeat is Ebola’s Back Door to America.”  Newsweek 8/29/2014. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/smuggled-bushmeat-ebolas-back-door-america-265668.html

“God is Angry with Liberia.”  The Daily Observer 7/31/2014. http://www.liberianobserver.com/news-religion/god-angry-liberia

McNeil, Donald G.  “Chimp to Man to History Books: the Path of AIDS.”  The New York Times 10/18/2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Mukpo, Ashoka. “The biggest concern of the Ebola outbreak is political, not medical.”  Al Jazeera America 8/12/2014.  http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/ebola-virus-liberiasierraleonepolitics.html

Nwonwu, Chiagozie.  “Ebola:  Did the U.S. let Thomas Eric Duncan die?”  This is Africa 10/9/2014. http://thisisafrica.me/ebola-u-s-let-thomas-eric-duncan-die/

Owen, James.  “AIDS Origin Traced to Chimp Group in Cameroon.”  National Geographic News 5/25/2006.  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060525-aids-chimps.html

Samb, Saliou and Adam Bailes. “As Ebola stalks West Africa, medics fight mistrust, hostility.” Reuters 7/13/2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/13/health-ebola-westafrica-idUSL6N0PO0V220140713

Seay, Laura and Kim Yi Dionne.  “The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place.”  The Washington Post 8/25/2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/25/othering-ebola-and-the-history-and-politics-of-pointing-at-immigrants-as-potential-disease-vectors/

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph.  Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism.  New York:  Monthly Review Press, 1990.

The Eternal Return of Politics

Today is the Feast of Saint Francis, when in many Roman Catholic parishes animals of all sorts are blessed.  Heaven knows that United States party animals (I’m referring to Republicans and Democrats) need some divine intervention in order to get back to the business of trying to govern in a sensible manner.  

For that matter, it seems like the world at large could benefit from saintly nudges.  It doesn’t take the literary gifts of Yeats or Achebe to fear that things are falling apart in ways big and small.  For me, as a small-time essayist rather than a gifted poet or novelist (alas), there’s too much going on in the world that makes me curious, ruminative, or just plain angry to stick to writing book reviews. 

Therefore, I’m reviving my old blog so I can mark some virtual space for rants, commentaries, and meditations about world, national, local, sometimes personal events.  And still, on occasion, about books.  It’s not that I’ve all suddenly stopped reading.  As people close to me know, I read about five books a week and have done so ever since I knew the alphabet.  And it’s not that there aren’t fascinating books I’ve wanted to discuss and to recommend. 

But hey, it’s election season.  And there’s another Middle East war.  And a plague that may reach Biblical proportions.  And a Vatican synod about the family that may have huge consequences.  And melting glaciers and missing schoolgirls and NFL scandals and, and, and. . .

So look for the next blog entry soon.  It probably won’t be a book review.  Then again, it might.  After all, another Francis – St. Francis de Sales – is the patron of writers and journalists and, by extension, books.  While he had his hectoring side, he also could offer good advice that applies to writing about the world, whether manifested in books or in politics:  “Attend to the Business of Life Carefully, but without Eagerness or Over-Anxiety” – an excellent admonition that’s easier to admire than to follow.  But I’ll try.

(If you want to see what my old, often but not always political blog looked like, here's the URL to the first one I wrote (the others are archived by month on the side.  I was a writing fool in 2012!  http://deblog2012.blogspot.com/2012/02/font-face-font-family-cambriap.html)

Violent Culture and Women's Agency

Hitler’s Furies:  German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies was nominated for the National Book Award, which certainly suggests that there is much to admire.  Yet the reviews I’ve looked at are not uncritical.  In particular, they (1) object to the book’s somewhat muddled organization; and (2) question how much ‘new’ historiography is at work here.  Both points have merit, I think.  In the quest to turn an academic study into a mass-market (or at least general readership) book, Lower – or her editors – jammed together new material with useful overview sections, resulting in a book that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

Hitler’s Furies presents original archival and, in some cases, interview-generated information about a baker’s dozen of women who actively participated in Germany’s ‘expansion’ to the East and its attendant horrors.  It also raises interesting, if not absolutely novel, questions about why women served that regime.  As opposed to the widely propagated ‘Church, Children, and Kitchen’ view of the German woman, Hitler’s Furies offers another vision, also widely propagated and disseminated by the Third Reich: that of women as patriotic workers whose skills and strengths were essential to the nation’s health. The book begins with chapters framing why a significant number of German women were drawn to Nazism and denoting the categories – nurses, teachers, office workers, wives/girlfriends – into which most collaborating women fell.  It then introduces specific women.  But instead of following their lives during their ‘service’ in Poland, the Ukraine, and Belarus, the book shuffles their experiences with more general analyses of how Nazi expansionism, added to prior Weimar Republic reforms, opened lebensraum for women’s ambitions and adventurist dreams of self-realization.

 This organizational strategy prevents the featured women from becoming individualized, compelling even if contemptible, characters.  Because the case histories are not complete enough (despite the author’s impressive research) and because Lower understandably avoids ‘novelizing’ her subjects, the women remain fairly bland examples of the occupational category that they represent – not to mention that the fragmented presentation of their stories makes it hard to keep track of them, much less care about them.  Conversely, the freshly presented material about the state-sponsored allure of ‘the East’ is diluted by these life-story snippets.   In addition, it’s never clear whether Nazi women as a group were any different from Nazi men as a group – other than the fact that women usually did not have the ‘opportunity’ to join death squads or front-line military operations and thus participated in direct carnage much less frequently than did men.

Lower sensibly avoids the poster girls of Nazi depravity, such as Ilse Koch, and she also avoids the category of prison guards.  In so doing, though, she elides active (say, nurses who participated directly in ‘euthanasia’), passive (say, secretaries who typed genocidal orders), and sociopathic (say, wives who decided to use prisoners as target practice) women.  She also collapses the levels of violence surrounding these women, almost all of whom were quite young when they entered the Nazi bureaucracy in whatever way, many of whom were from small towns and their attendant restrictions, for whom even the promise of controlling and enjoying their own bodies was enticing.

 As I read Hitler’s Furies, I kept feeling a sense of unease quite different from what would be expected when reading about Nazi atrocities, organizations, and     propaganda.  What is Lower asserting about these women’s agency?  On the one       hand, she emphasizes how the women made conscious, relatively informed choices.  On the other hand, she shows how these women were entrapped in a powerful, violent ideology permeating all aspects of their lives.  So are we left with a subaltern version of the Eichmanesque just-doing-my-job justification?  Or are we invited to condemn these women as active agents in the horrors of the Holocaust?  Or just as disturbingly, to understand these women as victims themselves?  Or, as may be true for most people of whatever gender who’ve been caught up in horrific situations, are they a mix of individual decisions and environmental factors?  It’s not that there are ‘right’ answers to these questions.  It’s more that a book like Hitler’s Furies promises answers, even if they be tentative, and that this book does not provide them. 

My last criticism may fall into that dreadful pit of  ‘if I’d written this book I would have. . . .’    Caveat acknowledged, I might have paid more attention to the role that anti-Semitism played in these women’s decisions and actions.  Lower does write compellingly about how violent, scapegoating propaganda shaped German public opinion in the 1930s, when her ‘furies’ were growing up.  She even suggests how it shaped perceptions of many occupations, like nursing and teaching (preserving ‘racial hygiene’ and promoting ‘Aryan’ identity).  But these suggestions remain shadowy, as do the possibilities that omnipresent Nazi depictions of sexually depraved Jews preying upon vulnerable Nordic maidens could have influenced German women’s willingness to acquiesce to (or actively participate in) the Holocaust.

 The aporiae of Hitler’s Furies may have a positive aspect, however.  They invite additional areas of inquiry, such as how romanticizing the frontier can appeal to women raised in restrictive societies, how a regime based on violence can appeal to some women’s experience of repression/suppression, how state-sanctioned switches of ‘dangerous’ outsiders into justified recipients of violent ‘justice’ can appeal to some women’s sense of victimhood.

In brief, I’d have liked Hitler’s Furies to offer more conclusions, even if provisional, about the subject Wendy Lower has decided to tackle – conclusions based on her research, of course, and on her own judgment as a scholar and a woman.  I also think that this is a book well worth reading.  As what I assume is a ‘target reader’ – one conversant with Nazi history but not a historian as such – I did find a lot here that made me think anew about what ‘the East’ meant to Germans before and during World War Two, and to German women in particular . . . and what it means to collaborate not only in the face of unmitigated evil but also in the face of what may appear to be routine business as usual.

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. By Wendy Lower.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.  Hardcover, paperback (forthcoming October 2014), electronic format.

[A picky and personal point: In my Kindle edition of Hitler’s Furies (in which text and notes and bibliography are in the same font), the documentary material was just about as long as the text.  Mass-market books do not have this fifty-fifty split, which may indicate that the shift from scholarly publication to general readership here was not completely thought out. 

With non-fiction books I often browse the notes and bibliography before I read the book.  Electronic editions make this cumbersome to do, and authors should be aware that more and more books are being accessed electronically.  Even with a print edition, having a gigantic back-of-the-book apparatus can imply that the book itself is a thin distillation of previous scholarship. Because there really has been a lot of previous scholarship about ordinary women’s roles in Nazi Germany, Lower might have done well to address it, and her own interventions beyond it, more directly and extensively in her book proper, before the notes and bibliography kick in.  But then we return to the question of audience and marketing . . . and whether the decisions regarding audience and marketing did justice to Lower’s research and insights.]

Good News from Nigeria

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Meet Okey Ndibe, author of a wonderful new novel, Foreign Gods, Inc.  Born in Southeastern Nigeria’s Igbo lands, Ndibe has lived and worked in the United States since the 1980s, when he emigrated to study with Chinua Achebe at Brown University.  Since then, Ndibe has held various academic posts, written a debut novel (Arrows of Rain, 2000), contributed to North American and Nigerian newspapers and journals, and worked with organizations supporting members of the African Diaspora.  Foreign Gods, Inc., I believe, is his breakthrough, a book that should move him into the first rank of contemporary African/African-Diaspora novelists.  This is good news for him; it’s also good news for readers who welcome distinctive new voices in the capacious category of  ‘World Literature.’

The ‘Foreign Gods, Inc.’ of the title refers specifically to a Manhattan art gallery specializing in ‘exotic’ religious sculptures.  The novel’s dyspeptic and displaced immigrant protagonist is Ike (pronounced EE-kay, not, as his customers insist, Eekay, which means ‘buttocks’ in Igbo), whose job driving a NYC cab barely keeps bill collectors at bay and reminds him constantly of his elite education’s unfulfilled promises.  He devises a scheme to return to Nigeria, steal his people’s war god, and sell it to the gallery.  The novel traces Ike’s satirical, tragicomic journey back to his homeland and the surreal culmination of his entrepreneurial plans. 

It’s a good plot, and I won’t spoil it by disclosing more details.  Instead, let me discuss some ways that Foreign Gods, Inc. is an exceptional – not just an interesting and/or entertaining – book.  In fact, if I were still teaching postcolonial or world literature, I’d definitely include it on the syllabus.  Not only is it brand new and great fun to read (and short enough that undergraduate students wouldn’t rebel); it’s also packed with important themes and excellent topics for papers and class discussion.

For instance, the book treats the immigrant/exile/transnational experience with humor and perspicacity.  As people and circumstances keep reminding Ike that he’s ‘at home’ neither in the United States nor in Nigeria, he tries harder and harder to become accepted, to lose the metonymic ‘accent’ that marks him as an outsider, even a failure, on two continents.  Not merely linguistic, his accent also inflects cultural negotiations.  He’s uncomfortable schmoozing with his taxi fares to secure larger tips, he doesn’t quite understand how his Africanness appeals to certain sorts of American women, black and white, who see him as an exotic trophy; he tries to buck the bribery protocols necessary to do much of anything in Nigeria; he tramples on the kinship and generational expectations operative in his home village.  Any productive paper ideas here, fellow educators?

Generous syncretism: a depiction of Jesus Christ in an Igbo Mbari shrine to Ala, the Earth Goddess.

Like many Nigerian peoples, the Igbo characteristically have adapted new deities, artforms, materials, and celebrations into their own cosmology and cultural practices.

Or maybe students (and you) would like to begin by exploring the concept of ‘foreign gods.’  There’s the first-level connotation – the trade in, and shallow buyer desire for, African and other ‘tribal’ artworks: a sculpture of an Igbo deity, stripped of its function and ritual efficacy, becomes a trendy First World commodity.  There’s the second-level connotation, one Ndibe treats with care and comedy:  the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria.  Counterpoised against an interpolated story of the first English missionary’s sojourn to Ike’s homeland and his cluelessly patronizing conversion efforts is the fantastic account of a contemporary evangelical ‘pastor’ who’s running an ecclesiastical variant of the Nigerian Email scam. The third-level connotation is the worship of otherness, both by Nigerians (who in the book’s backwater village, still regard Michael Jordan as a demiurge and happily substitute expensive cars and Western-style houses for the traditional, relational ways that an individual accrues honor and status) and by wealthy North Americans who ironically fetishize the ‘primitive,’ be it art or human beings.  All these levels merge on the fourth, the deification of `money and the status it appears to confer . . . and point to a fifth level, a critique of absolutist belief systems that attempt to erase gray areas from human interactions and aspirations.

Yet another way to approach Foreign Gods, Inc. is via its manipulations of language.  Ike, like most educated Nigerians, speaks ‘proper English.’  (English is one of the country’s official languages, acting somewhat like Latin did in Medieval Europe.)  But when Ike talks with Nigerian functionaries or people in his home village, he is accused of ‘blowing grammar’ – of showing off and, more devastatingly, of renouncing his natal place by pronouncing words in mimicry of colonial and neocolonial masters.  Ndibe uses Nigerian pidgin to register average people’s English.  This organic Creole contains its own history, of indigenous syntax and rhythms plus functional English vocabulary, and Ndibe employs it accurately enough to give it legitimacy but sparingly enough to avoid making pidgin-speakers sound ignorant.  His biggest problem, I think, is how to represent conversations conducted entirely in Igbo. Ndibe’s solution involves flavoring dialogue with a judicious amount of untranslated Igbo words and phrases, interjecting many translated proverbs, and approximating the leisurely, circuitous way of approaching subjects characteristic of tradition-based rural societies.

Misunderstood ‘foreign gods’: a random and supposedly demonic image featured in a contemporary ‘anti-idolatry’ missionary publication.  Probably unknown to the graphic designer, this statue shows a ruler either smoking a pipe or biting on the munkwisa root . . . both symbols of political power, spiritual authority, and wise speech that are also used to ward OFF malevolent forces.

Even Ike’s ‘blown grammar’ retains traces of perception modalities encoded in non-English ways of knowing and describing the world.  Whereas to most Westerners, the sense of sight is paramount – particularly when one encounters new landscapes, new people, or art objects – to Ike these encounters involve other senses, particularly the sense of smell. This is an added layer of linguistic complexity (and, as you’ll see, of plot complexity), as are the hilarious episodes of willful mistranslation and of idiosyncratic neologisms and creative orthographies spun by characters driven by unmoored ambition and self-aggrandizement.

Then there is satire itself:  a risky mode not often employed in emergent national literatures when social realism is called on for muscular work and magical realism is called upon to capture absurdities of politics, cultures, even languages jerked into someone else’s definition of modernity.  Satire is also hard to write about, as one needs to know enough about what is being exposed and ridiculed in order to detect satire at all . . . and one needs to be attuned to satiric clues without which a text reads as purely funny or purely angry.  And thus satire is hard to write successfully.

Foreign Gods, Inc., succeeds in its satire, I think, as it does in its examinations of diasporan identity, of idols of the marketplace (and of the television and the cell phone, of the shrine and the church), and of language itself.  Read and enjoy.  Then consider teaching it (and tell me how it went).  Enwe akwukwo!

Foreign Gods, Inc.  Okey Ndibe.  New York:  Soho, 2014.  Hardcover, paperback (forthcoming in October), electronic format.

Marking What and How We Read

Blackened Fingers and Bent Pages, or

Why I Like But Don’t Yet Love My Kindle

After a pleasant hour reading The New Yorker yesterday, I put down the magazine and noticed black ink smudging my thumbs and the inside of my right middle finger.  On the way to wash my hands, I grabbed a large, thick book I’d finished reading, intending to put it back in the study.   First, though, I had to divest it of its ‘bookmarks’ – two Harris Teeter receipts, a Duke Power bill envelope, an ancient and toothless matchbook from a New York restaurant, and a cardboard coaster. 

I do have actual bookmarks, but they’re often not around when I need them.  Hence, the use of whatever random bits of paper are within reach.  I take them out if they interfere with re-shelving but often leave the smaller ones in place, tiny time capsules of the Knausgaardian minutiae of my life.  To rediscover them months or years later is to receive small shocks of pleasant nostalgia, rather like coming across the marginal notes, underlinings, and stars scribbled in old textbooks, or the ubiquitous folded corners that, in my case, range in size from dainty turn-downs to ruthlessly large triangles depending on the importance of the mutilated page.

This is one reason I love print books and magazines.  Not only do they have material personalities of their own (their covers, their weight, their fonts, their smell); they also mark the process and circumstances of reading . . . and, in the form of ink smudges, paper cuts, and red marks left when one falls asleep on top of a hardcover, they mark the reader herself.

E-books cannot do this.  Not being quite as ancient as Mary Worth, who was a senior citizen when the comic strip debuted in 1938 so now is about 130 years old, I do have a Kindle.  And I like it a lot.  It’s superior to print books when the print is small or the bulk is big.  You can get free downloads of most classic literature, so you can be equipped when seized with an overwhelming urge to re-read Jane Austen or finally get around to neglected Dickens novels like Little Dorrit.  Most seductively, virtually instantaneous delivery means you need never be without something good to read, nor do you have to suffer deferred gratification. 

Yet I don’t love it.  Yes, Kindle does have some sort of annotation function (I’ve never used it) and the electronic equivalent of crimped page corners.  But it’s not the same as a ‘real’ book or magazine.  Accessed through an electronic reader, books lose their individuality and become disembodied narratives.  I become anxious when, having stopped reading for a couple of minutes, the device automatically goes to sleep and shows me a creepy picture of Emily Dickinson.  A Kindle doesn’t function well for art books, most magazines, or other works with lots of photos or illustrations (I suppose I could upgrade to Kindle Fire, as I have a plain-Jane model, but I don’t like a small format for reading visually rich things . . . which is also why I’ve never watched a movie or TV show on a computer, pad, tablet, or god forbid, a phone). 

Then there are the big-picture issues, like Amazon driving every other bookseller on the planet out of business, like enabling bad writers to self-publish horrible novels, like contributing to the general cyborgization of our culture, as people seem less and less able to unplug themselves from their gadgets.  On the other side of the argument, e-books neither contribute to global deforestation nor to increased domestic book clutter. 

And they have a benefit I didn’t expect:  anonymity.  When you’re sitting in a waiting room or a coffee shop occupying time with your Kindle, no one knows what you’re reading.  You are not marked as an intellectual or a plebe, a spiritual person or a sociopath.  Your choice of reading matter does not lead to unwanted conversations with nosey or obnoxious strangers.  Which, unless you’re trying to make the acquaintance of random book lovers or are an academic trying to impress your peers by lugging around the latest translation of a trendily unreadable Continental author, is a very good thing.  Maybe even a lovable one.

                                         (Point of privilege:  I do like Kafka, in any format.)