Book Review: The Shawl of Midnight

It's been awhile since I've posted an entry on this blog-- which I hope to neglect less in coming months. As in previous summers, I'm alternating 10-day stays in my city home and the tiny house near Guffey--actually a park model RV that I put on my friend Linda's land almost 20 years ago. I'm at my tiny house (a/k/a Mudbiscuit) writing this, having just finished reading a very special book.

Summertime...a season when time seems to stretch and there is more time for reading. I remember many childhood summer afternoons heading for the library and returning home with an armload of books. Now, decades, later my library visits are mostly online, with my kindle and Libby library app having replaced print for the most part. At the same time, I welcome print when it comes my way, as did a pre-pub copy of The Shawl of Midnight. In this blog entry, I'd like to share why it impressed me so much.

In this novel, Jacqueline St. Joan* has written a powerful story that brings the reader many gifts: a young woman’s coming of age story,  a lens into the lives of women in Pakistan, a compelling suspense novel, and a tribute to the resilience of women who fight back.  It’s a great read and sequel to the author’s first novel centered in Pakistan, My Sisters Made of Light. 

The story begins in 1996 in Islamabad with an assassination of a women’s rights advocate and the birth of her daughter, the story’s protagonist, Nafeesa. Her mother, Meena, is shot at a rally demanding the release of her sister, Baji Ujala, jailed for aiding women targeted for honor killings. Also at the rally is another activist sister demanding justice for Baji Ujula, and she has been the victim of an acid attack. The rally ends in gunshots, and at the hospital Meena dies as her daughter is born. Baji Ujala escapes from jail and the sisters scatter, creating new lives in other places.

Fast forward 18 years and Nafeesa is entering adulthood, carefully shielded from the family history by her protective father. But she learns enough to know that she wants and needs to learn more. And this is where the real story begins. Nafeesa’s dying grandfather wants to see his daughters one more time, and a heroine’s mission begins: the journey to reunite them all in their original home. 

Like many heroes, Nafeesa benefits from a family heirloom that comes in handy at just the right moment, and her supernatural power comes from myth—specifically, the stories of Durga (Kali) and Mahakali. No magic amulets come into play but the power of those stories boost Nafeesa’s courage and strength. She needs both on the perilous journey she’s on—involving nighttime treks in Kashmir, a heavily militarized area on the border of India and Pakistan. How to stay safe? She is ambivalent about carrying a pistol during one episode when she must travel through a forest to find help for an injured aunt. A vision or hallucination—we need not decide which—of Mahakali appears. This terrifying goddess, Protector of the Himalayas, helps Nafeesa find courage. And then there’s Durga (Kali) wearing a golden crown and riding the back of a lion, one of her seven arms holding a sword aloft. Who wouldn’t find more than a bit of back-up in that?

Thanks to St. Joan ’s skill, I could begin to feel the texture of this land with its extremes of temperature and altitude, as well as many cultural features. Dance, clothing, food and animals are woven into the story to underscore readers’ sense of place. I especially enjoyed references to birds—symbols of freedom or portents of change perhaps. And then there’s history interwoven through it all. Much of the story centers on the borderland of Kashmir, still a contested land half a century after the wrenching partition of India into two countries—Muslim Pakistan and Hindu-dominant India. 

Leaving Pakistan to connect with another aunt in Mumbai, India, our heroine broadens her vision when she discovers that her aunt is in a lesbian relationship, resulting in a broadening of her vision of family as well as culture. There are fragments of poetry too in this book, supporting the theme that all journeys have a physical and spiritual dimension.

Nafeesa’s story is a complex one—more than simply a tale of finding the fortitude to reach a goal. She has moments of doubt and confusion—needing to decide who to believe amid strangers who may not be what they seem. But there are enough helpers along the way, and the journey continues. Yet as we all know, one journey leads to another, and by the end of the story all of the well-developed characters in it must make new decisions about where there lives should go. 

St. Joan delved deep into Pakistani culture before writing this book and its predecessor, My Sisters Made of Light. As she explains in an author’s note to The Shawl of Midnight, she had the good fortune to meet “the Harriet Tubman of Pakistan” nearly 20 years ago. Aisha (pseudonym) was a teacher who was also active in the rescue of women targeted for “honor crimes” by their families.  As St. Joan explains it, “honor crimes are a patriarchal practice (not based in religion) by which family members target and punish (sometimes through killing) another family member who is perceived to have transgressed norms, usually related to sexuality, in order to restore  the family’s ‘honor’.” 

St. Joan asked for permission to write Aisha’s story and the two began a collaboration which resulted in these two historically-based books of fiction. As a reader I felt drawn into both stories and found myself more interested in how women’s rights were developing in Pakistan. Coincidentally, while watching the PBS Newshour one evening, I saw a film segment Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the director of a the new Ms Marvel series which features a young Muslim woman as hero. Obaid-Chinoy has also directed two short films, Saving Face (about acid attacks) and Girl in the River (honor killings) which are currently on HBO Max. I have since watched both and recommend them highly as context for The Shawl of Midnight and for a look at feminist resistance in Pakistan.

*Full Disclosure: I am a friend of Jacqueline St. Joan, and as such, may be suspected of writing an overly praise-filled review. Never fear--you see my true opinions above. As a reader, I’m grateful to my friend for writing these books; otherwise I may never have found them given the sea of excellent writing around us all.) 

The Shawl of Midnight is published this week (August 8) and is available here in print or ebook.

 

Visiting Africa with Paul Theroux

Afternoon is reading time here at the cabin, and one of my favorite ways to read here is through audio books. Readers are often talented actors, and as I listen, my hands can do other things, like chop the morning's greenhouse foraging. Yesterday I finished what felt like a tour of Angola, Namibia and South Africa, all through the eyes and mind of travel writer Paul Theroux. His book, The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013) was Theroux's farewell to Africa, a continent he first discovered more than 50 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. In 2011, at the age of 70, he went again, as the book jacket says, "to explore the little-travelled territory of western Africa and to take stock of the place and himself". At the beginning he sensed it would be his final journey there, but perhaps he did not expect it to end with such sorrow, anger, and often fear.

The book has been described as "depressing yet compelling", and it was to me--though not without much insight and touches of humor. I put one CD in after another yesterday, watching afternoon rain clouds roll by, fascinated, unable to really do anything else. I have never been to Africa, though at one time, about 10 years ago, I thought I might go with a Japan-based group of English teachers called "Teachers Helping Teachers (THT)". It was the inspiration of the late Bill Balsamo, a kind, funny, generous man, who had a knack of talking with English teachers from other countries at international conferences, asking if they'd like our group to come visit them and do workshops for their colleagues. The answer was usually an enthusiastic "yes!" I joined THT for three week-long journeys, one to Laos, another to Bangladesh, and another to Hue, Vietnam, all during school holidays in Japan. We also visited a teachers' conference in Vladivostok, Russia, together.  Bill had a contact in Africa and there was some talk of organizing a trip there, but before any plans could be made, Bill developed an aggressive form of cancer and died within the year. A photo of Bill from our 2007 trip to a school in Laos:

And one more, showing a bit of his playfulness, sitting next to me at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh:

At this point in my life, I doubt I'll ever go to Africa. Now retired, I have less money, more contentment with being in either of my Colorado homes or with family in Illinois, more motivation to plan short rather than long excursions. Like Theroux, who was my age when he went to Africa for the last time, I'm happy, more often than not, just being at home. In picking up his book, perhaps I'm initiating myself into a future of armchair travel.

Theroux had more substantial reasons for ending his last Africa journey early, and he recounts them after he decides not to get on the train for the zone verde, the open land known as the bush. During the last weeks of the trip in Angola, he continually asks himself, "What am I doing here?" Three people he spent time with on the journey have died, two violently. Boku Haram and al Quaida were active in the direction he had planned to go, as murders and kidnappings filled the news. But more important, was his increasing revulsion with dysfunctional urban slums, full of violence, squalor and human despair. One seemed more like any other, he reports, noting that he never really cared for cities that much anyway; the villages brought him the experiences he was looking for. (In fact, some of the best parts of the book deal with his travels outside cities, in the townships.) Finally, he admits, he just can't stand any more jostling in bus lines, any more jeers from the gangs of young unemployed men loitering everywhere, any more of the relentless poverty.

Theroux zeroes in on the causes, a major one being the corruption of the government and exploitation of foreign companies. Angola, with a population of 25 million in a land area twice the size of Texas, is actually a wealthy country, a major exporter of oil and minerals. Yet, none of the benefits were apparent in the cities he visited. In Angola, the few at the top enjoy ostentatious wealth, and the expatriate community--largely oil companies and Chinese business investors--live in their own enclaves. Did Theroux believe once, as I did, that Africa's future would be a bright one, once the shackles of colonialism were thrown off? That was the dominant ideology among those of us on the Left in the 1960s; "the people united will never be defeated." Yet....Angola won independence from Portugal in 1975 after a long liberation struggle. Then a nearly-30-year civil war ensued. Since that war ended in 2002, Angola's economy boomed, thanks to its vast oil and mineral reserves. But the majority of the people continued to suffer. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates are among the worst in the world. If Theroux had visited in 2016, he would have certainly written about climate change as well. Drought has produced the worst food crisis in 25 years. Malnutrition rates have doubled and food prices are soaring. Reading Zona Verde, I find it hard to believe things could have gotten worse, but they have and will continue to deteriorate through the end of the year, according to a May article in The Guardian.

Theroux's anger and frustration are apparent in this book, as are his fears that the world will become more and more like this, as globalization progresses. Most people in the world now live in cities, and the pattern is so often the same, he reminds us: slums develop as rural people can no longer live in their home communities, and then squatter camps develop around the slums. No doubt this pattern is evident to some degree in Rio de Janeiro this summer, as complaints of crime, pollution, and poor preparation for the Olympics continue to come in.

But the real story behind these stories is the globalization story, including trade agreements. Theroux's book inspired me to do a little checking today, as this African journey is still very much on my mind. The US signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) in 2009 with Angola, and not surprisingly, there's a trade deficit: we buy twice as much as we sell. The US imported $2.7 billion worth of mineral fuels in 2015 from Angola and another 66 million in diamonds and precious metals. (Total imports: $2.8 billion) While our election rhetoric focuses on free trade, especially, the TPP, as it affects this country, our focus needs to be a lot broader. I think Theroux would agree that if we tied human rights to our trade agreements, we'd be contributing to a much better and fairer world.

No doubt Theroux needed a healing experience after his Africa sojourn, and perhaps he found it in the U.S.,  his home country, as reported in his 2015 travel memoir, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads. Healing, in the sense that he turned away from megalopolises in favor of small communities, yet "unflinching", as the amazon blurb reports. His many readers, now including me, would expect no less. It's on my list.

Lives in Ruins: my introduction to archaeology

Archaeology is a science that never really appealed to me that much. Every time I saw pictures of toiling students sifting through rubble under a hot sun for bits of bone or pottery, I turned the page. So much toil for such scant reward. This is a review of a book that changed my thinking. It has a title that should belong to the genre of romance novel: Lives in Ruins. Instead it's a wonderful piece of participatory journalism by an author who is responsible for my digging one dusty toe into the field of archaeology this year. Lives in Ruins, by Marilyn Johnson, has a subtitle: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble (Harper, 2014). Johnson's repeated forays into this diverse intrigued me even though I never had much interest in it before.

It's a tribute to Johnson's writing that she made me take more than a second look. And probably it's her book that encouraged me to say yes to an invitation to become a site steward in Park County, Colorado. Working with a partner, site stewards volunteer to visit places in the county where remains of early human habitation or migration have been found. The idea is to document any change or damage--human or natural--to that site. Volunteers agree to visit 2--4 times a year, carefully looking at the land and taking photos. I'll have more to write after I get started this summer. So far I have a modest weekend of training behind me and a practice visit coming up next week when I return to Florissant for awhile.

This photo was taken during our training session last month. Diane Parisi (second from left), a field coordinator with the site steward program in New Mexico, explains an aspect of a stone fragment.

Will I find a "seductive lure" in the whole thing, as Johnson did during her years of research and participation in this field? That remains to be seen, but after reading her book, I could see how others have found a kind of seduction in the dust or watery depths of the past.

Johnson takes us around the world with her as she joins digs or visits projects in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, South America and the US East Coast. She interviews archaeologists, attends conferences and reflects on what she is experiencing. She has that rare gift of enjoying her subjects’ eccentricities while never mocking them, as well as giving the reader an understanding of issues in the field of archaeology today.

Some key insights: Archeology is a field where jobs are scarce, deadlines often dictated by developers ready to excavate, and devoted practitioners face less financial security than fledgling artists. Much work depends on volunteers. Many sites are not protected, and as Johnson writes, “The tension between keeping a site secret so it won’t get looted and publicizing it so it can be preserved and appreciated is a constant in archaeology.” Furthermore, archaeology is much more than a retrieval process. Even when a team is ready to dig or resurrect (as in the case of Revolutionary War ships still sunk in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island), other essentials may not have been funded, such as a place to store and preserve artifacts and a team to do the work. Twenty-plus years after sensors first located the fleet in Newport harbor, those essentials were still not available.

Although archaeologists may be hired by owners or developers, their first responsibility is to the site and its resources. If a proposed project may cause harm, they have to “mitigate”—record and rescue what they can. For example, when surprised archaeologists discovered an 18th century wooden ship in a Manhattan landfill in 2010, they had to scramble to protect the giant timbers, which began to disintegrate the moment they were exposed to oxygen.

Two of the most fascinating chapters deal with forensic archeology and the protection of humankind’s cultural heritage during war. Forensics deals with buried bodies, and Johnson takes us through efforts in Fishkill, New York, to protect the Fishkill Depot, the graveyard of America’s first veterans—soldiers who died during The Revolutionary War.  Protection and development of the site is still not assured.  My favorite interview in the book is with Laurie Rush, an archaeologist with the U.S. Department of Defense. (That was news to me--that the D.O.D hires archaeologists.) Rush’s job is to make sure that past military mistakes are not repeated. A prime example: in 2003 US troops, assigned to protect Babylon, put their base on top of the ruins and bulldozed ancient temples into helicopter pads. Rush, the cultural resources manager at Fort Drum, has supervised much and built excellent relationships with Native American tribes, Johnson reports. She has also designed one of more creative teaching projects I’ve encountered: a deck of Iraqi and Afghan Heritage playing cards, teaching soldiers what they need to know as they play poker or solitaire.

Marilyn Johnson wrote two other fascinating books, both about people documenting the past in one way or another. One is about librarians and the other about obituary writers: This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper Perennial, 2011); and The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (Harper Perennial, 2007) You can find out more about her and her work at on her website.

While I enjoyed Johnson's stories immensely, I also need to keep in mind this quote from her in a Daily Beast interview. "We’re conditioned by narrative to expect some resolution, whether it’s answers to our questions or solutions to a mystery. We expect a neat wrap-up to the story, but in fact there are many things we don’t understand and might never understand."

At our site steward training, we got a list of the top ten things archaeologists never find. Tops on that list were buried treasure, mummies, and secret tunnels. We all laughed. No expectations there! For those things, rent an Indiana Jones movie.

Still, we hope to find something. Yet, prehistoric people have been gone so long and so much of what they used has been lost. Will I find any identifiable rubble at all as a site steward? Perhaps not, but at the very least, I hope to learn to see and recognize more than I can today.

A conversation with author Joanne Greenberg

Monday was a special day for me and other friends in the Guffey Library Book Club. We had a special guest, writer Joanne Greenberg and her husband Albert. Traveling from their home in Golden, they have been coming to Guffey every year for several years now. Last year’s plans fell through, though, so we were all anticipating this year’s visit. It was special for another reason: Joanne and Albert were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and we wanted to join the celebration. Here they are before we cut the cake, icing to an excellent potluck lunch and lots of talk about books and reading.

I first heard of Joanne's writing under her own name in the mid-80s when In This Sign was published in paperback. That novel explored the dynamics of a deaf couple and their hearing daughter, a story told from multiple viewpoints. Despite my having a deaf cousin, it was my first real entry into deaf culture and I learned a lot from it. A check of reviews on Goodreads shows it’s still being read and sometimes assigned in sign language classes.

Joanne, now 83, continued to write—both short stories and novels. One Publishers Weekly reviewer called her “a shrewd observer of human nature and societal differences”. That can be seen clearly in No Reck’Ning (1993), set in post-World War II Colorado. It’s the story of Clara, a young woman from an abusive home who pursued her dream to be a teacher, succeeds, and then encounters conflict with a powerful, wealthy parent. A very positive Library School Journal review, said “Young adults will be intimately involved with Clara’s struggle to succeed”.  However, Joanne told us matter-of-factly, “It sank without a trace” in sales, and “my publisher has rejected me ever since.”

Nevertheless, Joanne continues to write, and to me, her ability to be a “shrewd observer” of human behavior and cultures is still up front and center. At our gathering Monday, we talked about some unpublished works she had sent us. She read two of them aloud.  "Geography" concerns the loss experienced by a long-time rural woman who no longer knows the local geography because she no longer knows people on once-familiar roads. "Diversity" uses the loss of an expensive ring as the focus on class differences between a working class narrator and a rich neighbor.

Is she working on something now? Yes. She teaches Biblical Judaism classes and is writing an article about the dynamics of conversion. “Judaism is a strange religion,” she explained. “It makes no promises about the future. Things that Christians look for are not religious issues for us.” She’s also working on a book about “what happens when people are cut off by an avalanche.”

Joanne’s interest in what I think of as “elemental things”, as well as in psychology and cross-cultural encounters is evident in her book recommendations. One long-time favorite of hers is Devil in the White City (2003) by Erik Larson. It juxtaposes the history of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with an account of a serial killer. Excellent book, but one that still haunts me, as I have a low tolerance for psychological terror. Given that predisposition, I will probably not add Kitty Genovese: the Murder, the Bystanders, and the Crime that Changed America (2015). But I can trust that Joanne knows a good story when she sees it. I’ll look up the reviews for the author’s take on bystander behavior, which I’m curious about, and read about what really happened on the night of this 1964 murder that really did shock America.

Two other recommendations, both dealing with wolves in some way, interest me:

1. Wolf Totem (2008) by Jiang Rong. This bestseller in China is based on the author’s experience of going to the Mongolian Steppes as a young boy and living with the nomadic Mongols during the Cultural Revolution. As one Goodreads reviewer noted, “What matters most to (the) story are the depictions of the untamed steppe,” which “does not passively give what human life needs, but everything must be taken from it.” The story details how the Red Guards tried to “push back the last of the wolf hordes, threatening to destroy this way of life forever.”

2.  Ordinary Wolves (2005) by Seth Kantner. Again, a reviewer who gave it 5 stars puts it succinctly: “This book is a stunningly honest and unsentimental look at contemporary life in Alaska. The book touches on big issues (racism, loss of wilderness, alcoholism), but it is fundamentally a coming of age story (semi-autobiographical, I think) about a white boy whose father drops out of the mainstream to raise his three children in a sod igloo in a remote part of Alaska. It is beautifully written, and will stay with you for a long time.”

She had other recommendations too—The Jew in the Lotus and Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example. She would have had more had she not forgotten to bring her notebook of copious notes on everything she’s read this year. (She’s promised to send them to us.)

Shifting to talk about our favorite reads, Joanne was not shy about expressing her dislikes as well as likes. The author Sue Monk Kidd came up. She wrote the modern classic, Secret Life of Bees, which I loved, thinking it should be on every high school reading list. Joanne’s reaction? “I nearly died of sugar poisoning.” The discussion moved on to Jane Eyre and the 19th century. Joanne: “The gothic novels (pause). The men had the IQs of grapes.”  Wuthering Heights: “It was the best book when I read it at 15, but later… “These people needed jobs.”

The afternoon progressed. It was past 3. We cut the cake, wishing Joanne and Albert more years of happy marriage. Book club friends packed up their potluck leftovers, perhaps, like me, content--but wanting to go home and read something before dinner.