The Obama gift shop

Is it just me, or is there something a bit tone-deaf about the products on sale at the Obama campaign’s online shop?

Along with the Obama golf balls, there are Obama golf towels and divot replacement tools. There are Obama grilling aprons and spatulas for the barbecue, and tumblers and martini glasses for the party at the country club.

Martini glasses? Really?

On the other hand, I like the in-your-face Made in America mug and the Cats for Obama cat collar. If Dudley were willing to tolerate a collar (he’s not), we might consider it. 

An interview with Dany Laferrière

I don’t often interview someone, but last Friday I was given the opportunity to see the Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière discuss Hurricane Katrina and Hollywood disaster movies at a panel discussion at NYU, and to talk with him afterwards.

By the time the event ended, around ten o’clock, Laferrière was hungry for dinner but willing for the moment to have some coffee. We walked to Au Bon Pain, only to be thrown out (they were about to close). We went next to a pizza parlor, where they had no coffee and we settled for bottled water.

With the help of our gracious interpreter, Isabelle Dupuis, the interview somehow came out all right.

The November issue of Words Without Borders, dedicated to Writing from the Caribbean, also features an excerpt from Laferrière’s latest book The World Is Moving Around Me, about his experience during the Haitian earthquake of 2010. The single paragraph called “A Man in Mourning” is a heartbreaking story in itself. 

Mugabe gets the band back together

One of the best reasons to travel, I think, is that you come to care about the rest of the world. I visited Malawi, Zimbabwe, Nepal, and Haiti when each of them was relatively peaceful and prosperous, and so their subsequent disasters have hit me harder than they would have otherwise.

Peter Godwin, whose Rhodesian childhood was recounted in his memoir Mukiwa, returned to Zimbabwe in 2008, when Robert Mugabe—already the oldest national leader in the world—had just lost the presidential election and was expected to step down. The country’s economy had been devastated to the point where you needed a brick of currency to buy a cup of coffee. In 1990, when I spent six months in Zimbabwe, the highest note in circulation was for twenty dollars. In 2008, the government was printing trillion-dollar notes.

As Godwin describes, the result was that even urban dwellers were turning to subsistence agriculture, growing corn on the median strips of highways, cooking over wood fires in houses that no longer had gas and electricity, and showing up at the office smelling of woodsmoke. But worst of all, and the focus of this book, was the reign of terror that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party unleashed to stop political change.

As far as I can tell, there is no one Godwin met during his travels through Zimbabwe that I met myself when I was there. Yet in a way I feel I know them. The names are the names of people I met—Lovemore, Trymore, Tapiwa, Chenjerai, Tichaona—or they have a familiar Zimbabwean flavor. I knew a government official named Devious; Godwin met a man named Obvious. There are young women with old-fashioned English names, and a little girl named Pestilence—a sign that the Shona care more about the sound of English names than the exact meaning.

Conversational habits take me back too: the soft handclap greeting of rural women, the interjection “shame,” scraps of remembered Shona like makorokoto (congratulations) and pamusoroi (excuse me), and the ingrained use of “too” to mean “very.” “There are too many animals here,” says a senator of the opposition MDC party. “Leopard and kudu, mambas and puff adders.”

The places are familiar too. Living in Eastlea and working at a government office on Herbert Chitepo Avenue, I used to see the Meikles and Monomatapa hotels, the national art museum and the US embassy practically every day. I visited Cecil Rhodes’ grave (where Godwin’s eccentric sister claims to have had sex) and climbed dwalas like the ones he mentions: humped granite hills sometimes called whalebacks.

The truth about Mugabe should have been clear at least since the early 1980s, not long after he took power as the leader of an independent Zimbabwe. That’s when he unleashed the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, with the aim of crushing the opposition ZAPU party. Godwin puts the death toll at 20,000 civilians, or about 1% of the country’s population.

Yet because Mugabe was a plausible, well-spoken man with a business suit and several college degrees, many people resisted the idea that he was a killer and a dictator. Foreign investors were pleased that he didn’t nationalize their businesses, as he was expected to do. Progressives were pleased that he supported the ANC and put money into health and education.

I didn’t change my mind about Mugabe until 1990. It was an election year, and members of the ZANU-PF Youth League broke up rallies of the opposition Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) and attacked its candidates. ZUM’s vice presidential candidate was shot and wounded, other candidates were killed, and several critics of the government died in convenient car accidents, sometimes by colliding with armored vehicles belonging to the army.

One sign of how bad things became in Zimbabwe is that Godwin doesn’t even mention the election violence of 1990. But he does note that to carry out the postelection attacks of 2008, Mugabe got his old band back together.

The pace of violence picks up around the country as Operation Ngatipedzenavo—“Let Us Finish Them Off”—gets under way. Mugabe’s election strategy has been completely militarized. The securocrats have taken over the day-to-day running of the campaign. The team that Mugabe has put in charge of the operation is led by the Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai, working with Air Marshal Perence Shiri and General Constantine Chiwenga, out of Joint Operations Command. It’s the same dream team that carried out the Matabeleland massacres twenty-five years before, when Perence “Black Jesus” Shiri commanded the North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, alongside Chiwenga, under the then Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai. They are all architects of a previous genocide.

When The Fear was first published, its subtitle was “The Last Days of Robert Mugabe.” Now its subtitle is the less optimistic “Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.”

Open City by Teju Cole

There’s a lot to say about Teju Cole’s absorbing, maddening, largely plotless novel Open City. Its protagonist Julius, a Nigerian-German medical student with a specialty in psychiatry, is touchy, moody, and self-absorbed, yet sometimes capable of tender concern, as in his meetings with a former professor who is now dying. 

As well-informed and opinionated in art, history, and classical music as he is in medicine, he can be unbelievably pretentious. Watching a group of Chinese dancers and musicians in a park, “I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch’s pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir’s opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music.” Yet, noticing that many of the dancers wore red or pink, “I could not remember if red was lucky in Chinese culture.”

Among the many oddly detailed digressions in the novel are several pages about bedbugs, and a discussion—which actually concludes the book—of the numbers of birds that have died by flying into the Statue of Liberty. The very last sentence, in fact, tells us that 175 wrens were killed on the night of October 13, 1888.

As more than one reviewer has noted, Teju Cole’s book is reminiscent of W.G. Sebald in the way it dispenses with conventional plot and apparently treads the boundaries of fiction and autobiography. (Cole’s first novel Every Day is for the Thief, so far published only in Nigeria, includes black and white photos, as Sebald does in books like The Rings of Saturn.)

What holds the book together is the brooding, fussy, melancholy voice of its know-it-all narrator. (As if in reaction to his show of erudition, a reader of my library copy of Open City inked out the “m” in “whom” in the first line of page 154, where it is used incorrectly.)

The author’s nerve is impressive, as in a passage on page 146 that echoes the famous conclusion of the James Joyce story “The Dead.” A couple of pages later, a descent by plane into New York reminds Julius of the scale model of the city in the Queens Museum of Art.

I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equally strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.

Then it came to me: I was remembering something I had seen about a year earlier: the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art. The model had been built for the World’s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city. The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges’s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map. The map proved so unwieldy that it was eventually folded up and left to rot in the desert....

On the day I had seen the Panorama, I had been impressed by the many fine details it presented: the rivulets of roads snaking across a velvety Central Park, the boomerang of the Bronx curving up to the north, the elegant beige spire of the Empire State Building, the white tablets of the Brooklyn piers, and the pair of gray blocks on the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high, representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed.

More on Malcolm

As with Saul Bellow’s letters, there was much more to say about Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X than I was able to fit in a 750-word review. Below are some observations that didn’t make the final cut.

I meant to say something, too, about the strange fate that caused Malcolm’s life to be bracketed by the firebombing of his home by white supremacists when he was a child, and a second firebombing, apparently by the Nation of Islam, a few days before he was killed.

****************

Anyone seeking to retell the life story of Malcolm X must reckon with the Autobiography. The book was a true collaboration, based on about fifty in-depth interviews and completed before its subject’s death. In itself, and as the basis for Spike Lee’s 1992 movie, it has shaped the public image of Malcolm X, an image that has inspired generations of activists and people of color.

As it turns out, the prolific scholar and author Manning Marable has few bones to pick with the Autobiography. The Autobiography was a story of transformation and redemption, and Marable notes the way in which Malcolm X and Haley heightened the drama of the transformation by exaggerating Malcolm’s criminal career in the years when he was known as Detroit Red. But at the same time that Malcolm was making himself look worse than he was in ways that reinforced his myth, he was skipping or disguising matters that wouldn’t serve him as well. Marable shows, for instance, how Malcolm transferred his relationship with a wealthy and somewhat kinky white man in Boston onto another character in his story.

Malcolm’s sexist attitudes also come through more clearly in Marable’s book than in the Autobiography. “You gave that message to a woman!” he shouted to his right-hand man, James 67X, on the last day of his life. “You should know better than that!” The woman he was referring to was his wife Betty....

One scene that seemed sheer Hollywood when dramatized in Spike Lee’s movie turns out to be perfectly true: Malcolm had summoned Fruit of Islam enforcers to stand vigil at a Harlem police station where a Nation member had been taken after a brutal beating by police. Watching Malcolm dismiss his troops, soon followed by a crowd of four thousand Harlemites, a police officer said, ‘No one man should have that much power.” ...

In the epilogue to his biography, Marable contrasts Malcolm X to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man he met only once, for about a minute, in the halls of Congress. King, according to Marable, “wanted to convince white Americans that ‘race doesn’t matter’ — in other words, the physical and color differences that appear to distinguish blacks from whites should be meaningless in the application of justice and equal rights.”

In striking contrast, Malcolm perceived himself first and foremost as a black man, a person of African descent who happened to be a United States citizen. This was a crucial difference from King and other civil rights leaders. When he was a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm saw himself as a member of the tribe of Shabazz, the fictive Asian black clan invented by W.D. Fard. But by the final phases of his career, and especially in 1964-65, Malcolm linked his black consciousness to the ideological imperative of self-determination, the concept that all people have a natural right to decide for themselves their own destiny.