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Desi News Corp - Desi News - April 2009 - Index

bookWORM
16 Desi News April 2009
A SURVIVOR’S TALE
The Book of Negroes
By Lawrence Hill
Harper Collins,
$24.95
On that slave vessel,
I saw things that
the people of
England would never believe. But I
think of the people who crossed the
sea with me, the ones who survived.
We saw the same things. Some of us
still scream out in the middle of the
night. But there are men, women and
children walking about the streets
without the faintest idea of our nightmares.
They cannot know what we endured
if we never find anyone to listen.
When Aminata Diallo sits
down write the story of her life
at the dawn of the 19th century,
tracing her path from a village
in Bayo, Africa, to London, England,
she has a world of experience
behind her, literally.
She witnesses the murder of
her parents before being kidnapped
at the age of 11 and
marched for months – shackled
to a growing number of
slaves – to the African coast
where they are pushed into
holds of a slave ship bound for
America. From South Carolina
to New York to Newfoundland
to Sierra Leone to England, she
goes from being a young girl to
an old woman, from a free person
to a slave and to a free
woman again – and the mascot
of the abolitionists. And in the
course of this life, loses first her
parents, then her children and
her husband.
Here I am, a broken-down old
black woman who has crossed more
water than I care to remember, and
walked more leagues than a work
horse, and the only things I dream of
are the things I can’t have – children
and grandchildren to love, and parents
to take care of me.
The story of Aminata Diallo
is the story of one of the darkest
chapters in history. Of millions
sold into slavery and lives
of unspeakable hardship. And
yet, what comes across is a sense
of the ability of the human spirit
to transcend the unbearable.
Aminata Diallo is like that
other ultimate survivor, Scarlett
O’Hara, who deals with unimaginable
grief by shutting her mind
to her immediate surroundings
and focussing on putting one
foot in front of the other.
The Book of Negroes was selected
last month as the winner
of Canada Reads, and has also
won the Rogers Writer’s Trust
Fiction prize in 2007 and the
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
in 2006.
Walks with
Babur
The Places In Between
By Rory Stewart
The most remarkable
travelogue I’ve read in
a long, long time.
In fact, categorizing this
book as a travelogue confines
it to one genre when it is also a
commentary on Afghanistan’s
history, its current politics and
local dialects, grounded in
Stewart’s deep understanding
of the region.
For one, the man walks – yes
walks – every step of the way.
When he is forced to take a
short ride for the comfort of
the escort that is thrust upon
him by the local government
for a stretch of the journey, he
retraces his steps the next day.
The epic walk begins in
2002, just after Stewart completes
the 16-month-long walk
across Iran, Pakistan, India and
Nepal, walking 20 to 25 miles a
day. He had wanted to walk
across Afghanistan, but the
Taliban refused to allow him in.
He returns, six weeks after
their departure. And one of his
first tasks is to find himself a
walking stick.
I had carried the ideal walking
stick through Pakistan. It was five
feet long and made of polished bamboo
with an iron top and bottom...it
was called a dang.
Stewart’s attempts to replace
his dang are comic; his assessment
of the status of his military
escort, astute.
In a webbing pouch he carried a
military radio, his link to headquarters;
a pen, suggesting he was literate;
a packet of pills, showing he
could afford antibiotics; and a roll
of pink toilet paper, a more subtle
status indicator.
Over the weeks, he meets
good people, and the not-sogood.
Those that welcome him
into their hovels and those that
refuse him shelter. He records
his impressions in a journal, and
sketches his hosts.
“Where,” asked the fat old man,
“is the Koh-i-Noor diamond the English
stole from Afghanistan? When
are you going to give it back?
“W hen I was in the Indian
Punjab, people asked me to give it
back to them,” I said.
“But you took it from us.”
Following in Mughal emperor
Babur’s footsteps as he is,
Stewart quotes extensively from
the royal diary, written in the
1500s.
His own diary records “Facts
about places I could rarely find on
maps. I had made sketches of medieval
mosques, accounts of previous
visitors, lists of people’s possessions
and their incomes, copies of feudal
genealogies, and diagrams of arrowmaking
or weaving. I had recorded
claims about recent killings, descriptions
of possible neolithic burial mounds and
short biographies. I had speculated on
pre-Islamic or pre-Hindu religions suggested
by a burial practice or a carving
on a stone pillar.”
The descriptions of the
landscape are other-worldly.
Tall bushes resembling dogwood
stood along the Hari Rud. Their
branches were orange and yellow, and
they rose out of the river like strands
of flame. There were silver-trunked
willows, too, with dark brown buds
and a few pale gold leaves that clattered
like cicada wings in the freezing
wind. As the snow melted in
the sun, the Hari Rud became at first
a clear turquoise ice sheet and then a
torrent of black-blue water.
In one village Stewart is offered
an ancient, toothless old
dog with a stiff leg. He names
him Babur and decides to take
him back with him to Scotland.
From Babur the emperor,
Stewart learns that Every good
and evil that exists, if you mark it
well, is for a blessing.
From Babur the dog, he
learns what it is to love unconditionally.
The man who challenged
the authority of aggressive
soldiers and looked unfriendly
villagers in the eye,
breaks down and cries at the
loss of his dog.
Rory Stewart was awarded
the Order of the British Empire
for his foreign service. He
now lives in Kabul where he has
established the Turquoise
Mountain Foundation to help
rejuvenate local arts.