Tuesday, April 10, 2012

How Zakes Mda became a vegetarian

Having spent some time in Zimbabwe, I can attest that Southern Africans are devoted meat eaters. Novelist Zakes Mda is an exception. Late in his rambling memoir Sometimes There Is a Void, he explains how this came to be.

I have always been inclined towards vegetarianism even as I devoured huge chunks of pork. I have always felt bad for the animals I was eating but did not have the courage to do anything about it....

It is only on a subsequent visit to South Africa that something that happens that forces us to think twice about eating meat. Gugu has moved to Twin Oaks, a townhouse complex in Randpark Ridge. I buy a plump duck that I first steam for her. I then bake it after basting it in a mixture of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, white pepper, soy sauce and honey. After I have done the job it looks really good and we are looking forward to eating it. Just as we are preparing to serve the meal we hear some quacking sounds outside. When we open the door there is a mother duck and her ducklings standing on the doorstep looking at us admonishingly. We quickly close the door.

“There’s no way I can eat this meat now,” I say.

“Nor me,” says Gugu.

We dump that whole duck into the dustbin. From that day we stop eating meat altogether.

Jenn and I have been semi-vegetarians for several years—though unlike Mda, we do eat fish and crustaceans. Our habit was confirmed one chilly day when we visited the farmer’s market in Union Square and noticed a couple of lambs in a small pen. They were dressed in little sweaters and were nuzzling each other companionably.

“What do you do with them?” a customer asked.

“Well, you could keep them as pets,” the farmer replied. “Or you could eat them!” he said brightly.

(I see from Jenn’s blog that the lambs weren’t wearing sweaters. They were actually wrapped in a blanket. Just one example of the many tricks your memory can play.)

Monday, April 02, 2012

Coming soon: African Lives

Follow the book on Twitter at @AfricanLives!

I am delighted to announce that my next book, African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies, will be published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in the spring of 2013.

African Lives is a pan-African collection of autobiographical writings by Africans of various ethnic groups, from Ibn Battuta and St. Augustine (born to a Roman father and Berber father in North Africa) to Zakes Mda and Binyavanga Wainaina. The book is organized by geographical region.

The table of contents has not yet been finalized, but these are just a few of the books I plan to draw from:

• The Dark Child by Camara Laye (Guinea)
• Algerian White by Assia Djebar (Algeria)
• Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (Sierra Leone)
• An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (Togo)
• Unbowed by Wangari Maathai (Kenya)
• An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina (Rwanda)
• Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya)

African Lives should be a useful resource for classes in African history, culture, and literature, but I’m hoping the dramatic true-life stories I’ve collected will also find a wider audience.

If you know of someone who should know about this book, or if you have some last-minute suggestions for work I should include, please let me know!

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Celebrations of Curious Characters

If you’ve been reading something disturbing, I can recommend Ricky Jay’s new collection Celebrations of Curious Characters as an antidote.

For years I’ve enjoyed Ricky Jay’s hooded gaze and gravelly voice on FlashForward, Deadwood, The X-Files, House of Games, and elsewhere, but he is also an entertaining author, with a predilection for the sort of twenty-dollar words you might hear from a 19th century pitchman. (This way to the egress!)

Based on a series of four-minute public radio features, these are tales of magicians, con men, astonishing calculators and linguists, and people who can dress rats in riding silks and jodhpurs and train them to ride on catback (and train the cats to put up with it). The stories are accompanied by vintage prints, engravings, and handbills from Ricky Jay’s own collection.

There are also some good jokes.

Some years ago I portrayed an Israeli Mossad agent in the film Homicide, and the director, David Mamet, asked me to speak a few lines in Hebrew. I studied assiduously and proudly played my part. The movie later screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and I asked David about the audience reaction to my part of the dialogue. “Oh they loved it,” he said. “They all wanted to know what language you were speaking.”

Friday, March 16, 2012

The Red Market

The Red Market is well summarized by its subtitle: “On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers.” It is one of the most fascinating and appalling books I’ve read in a long time.

Despite its clean writing and constant revelations, The Red Market has pages I could hardly look at (for instance, those describing how organs are harvested from Falun Gong members in China). It’s a fairly short book, which is just as well for most readers, but the author’s list of what he didn’t cover makes it clear that it could have been much longer.

As I began to contemplate putting all of my research into one book, I realized that there were more criminal red markets than I could ever hope to cover. I’ve left out landmark cases of morgue thefts across the United States, where funeral parlors sold the bodies they were entrusted to take care of to tissue-supply companies. The desecrated corpses were carved into surgical grafs and replacement tendons. I’ve ignored scandals around traveling museum exhibitions, where plastinated bodies of executed prisoners have been put on display. Likewise I’ve only briefly mentioned a report than more than one hundred thousand pituitary glands were stolen in England to produce human growth hormone. I make no mention of a recent report of Bolivian serial murderers who sold the fat of their victims to European beauty-supply companies that produce up-market facial creams. And every day the list grows. From the mid-1990s to 2000 the Israeli military harvested the corneas of Palestinian militants killed in combat. And deeper in history, at the turn of the nineteenth century a booming market for shrunken heads in Europe sparked tribal wars in South America. Providing an exhaustive account of every red market is beyond my abilities.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Montague Summers on werewolves and cars

On the recommendation of Glenn Danzig, I checked out The Werewolf by Montague Summers from the library (reprinted by Dover as The Werewolf in Lore and Legend).

The first thing that struck me about the book was its antique language and its erudition. “It would have been only too simple a matter, “writes Summers on the first page of his introduction, “ if I had desired, to farse and bombast my notes with scores upon scores of further references...” His book is plentifully footnoted, chockablock with Latin, Greek, and old French, and peppered with obscure or antiquated words including (in the first few pages alone) mournival, prolusion, zetetic, catena, somatist, and expiscate.

The second thing, remarkable for a book first published in 1933, is the author’s firm belief in the reality of werewolves and witches, and his brusque dismissal of those who question their existence.

From whatever cause this shape-shifting may arise, it is very certain by the common consent of all antiquity and all history, by the testimony of learned men, by experience and first-hand witness, that werewolfism which involves some change of form from man to animal is a very real and a very terrible thing.

And again…

No thinking person can deny that these witches in the form of cats suck the blood of children and overlook them, and indeed not unseldom kill them by diabolical agency.

But although Summers is quite solemn about the enduring threat of werewolves and witchcraft, what really seems to upset him is the internal combustion engine.

To-day the risks are no less than in ancient times, the British and Anglo-Saxon periods, although truly the perils are of a different kind. From one end of our island to another the roads are packed and ploughed by mechanical conveyances of the ugliest and most vicious pattern, swift engines of death and destruction, goaded to a maniac speed amid stench unutterable and the din of devils.

When we see London, despoiled of all her beauty, her nakedness uncovered, throwing out hideous suburban tentacles for miles after mile on all sides, it is impossible to realize that between the tenth and twelfth centuries there came up wellnigh to her gates, but a few fair meadows and open pasture lands intervening, vast forests in whose depths dwelt the stag, and the wild-boar and the bull.