Welcome to my blog which this
week begins with thinking about voices. I read in a book; ‘he could no longer
remember his grandfather’s voice.’ Immediately
I realized that this was true of me. My grandparents were a trinity; grandpa,
grandma, and her sister, Auntie Bobbie. In my mind I can sort of see their
faces and bodies: grandpa, slightly bent at the shoulders, white hair, glasses,
maybe on his bike coming back from the allotment to his bungalow, grey
trousers, sports type jacket. Grandma, even whiter hair, dressed in blue, sitting
in an armchair sewing. Auntie Bobbie in brown, fiddling with her hearing aid,
always up for a game of cards or a story. How I loved them.
I can almost hear them talking now. It is near
bedtime and I’m having my supper of chocolate biscuit and ribena after a game
of solo whist. Maybe grandpa has read something in his paper, the Daily
Express, because he is grumbling about the stupidity of people. Grandma gently
hushes him and smiles at me. Auntie Bobbie talks back to him and then he
hurrumphs at her and she slyly grins at me while pretending to be reprimanded.
Grandpa had lived through two
world wars but the stories he told were of playing cricket, hockey and football
with the Maharajas of old India. He used to play cricket with me, bowling
overstiffarm with a good spin on the ball. As I think of him now, patiently
indulging me, I find I’m rent with sobbing, sorrow and guilt. I was such a
wretchedly ungrateful child, always in a temper about something, never
realising how graced I was. Too late now, too late now.
My
parents too, where have their voices gone? I fear that if they and my
grandparents were talking in the next room I wouldn’t know it was them. Those
voices that soothed my nights, that led me through my days, that taught me and
cared for me, that gave me safety – where are they now?
***
Last
night I went to a watch a band play in a muddy field, less than a mile away.
June 30th turned into July 1st as the rain fell. No doubt
when the organisers planned the gig, they were imagining a summer’s night revelry
beneath the filling moon. No such luck. Instead, wellies and jumpers were
required; such is England in the summertime. Fortunately the band was very very
good – on the other hand I would think that because two of them are my
children. As usual, I was a bit embarrassed to dance, not only in front of my
kids but in front of the youth of my town, but their music is so bouncy and
uninhibited it would be churlish not to respond. There are times when I find
myself dancing next to a beautiful woman who is smiling at me and for a moment
I think is she flirting with me but then I recall I’m almost 60 years ago and I
move away.
***
Short
Stories Review.
Unlike
my daughter, I find writing book/story reviews very difficult. She recently
asked me to review with her the five entrants for an African short story
competition. Although I write the occasional short story, I rarely read them,
partly I think because I hate getting engrossed in a tale that
suddenly finishes on me. When I wrote my most recent story, now called ‘Barmi’,
I noticed that while relating one small incident, a story can, almost
accidentally it would seem, embrace a much larger theme.
La sale de Depart
The
first time I read this story, I realised that I had lost interest half-way
through because there are so many small incidental details that I failed to
gather the main plot which was about a
man who been sent away from Senegal to America as a young child to better
himself. When I reread the story, I saw it was both universal and particular;
universal in that it made me think of Irish emigrants returning to Ireland from
America, Indians returning to India from the UK and even Chinese workers
returning to the country from the city; and particular because the distance
between the two main characters, Ubou and Fatima, is so painfully unbridgeable.
It was strange because although I didn’t find the story gripping or emotionally
involving, by the end of it I felt I had learned something about the human
condition.
Love on
Trial by S. Kenani
This is
an excellent story, written lightly but saying so much about Malawi,
homophobia, Christian hypocrisy and the ironies of life. It begins with an old
man who likes his drink stumbling into a toilet where he witnesses a homosexual
act. At first it seems a parochial
matter of none but prurient local interest but as the old man keeps repeating
the story to whoever will buy him a drink, the tale spreads and becomes a national,
and international, issue.
The first
victim of the old man’s gossip is the young man, Christopher. He acts with an
extraordinary dignity that almost turns the tide in his favour. In fact he
becomes a martyr, not by aggressively promoting his point of view but by simply
telling his truth. From the perspective of 2012 Britain, it is quite difficult
to have any sympathy at all for the narrow-minded bigots who ultimately cause
all the trouble and suffering, and yet that battle isn’t over here either.
Urban
Zoning by Billy Kahora.
I hated
this story both times that I read it and yet it certainly isn’t a bad story. From
the beginning I didn’t like either the main character or his milieu. He is a
drunkard who uses alcohol to get into ‘the zone’. The description of the zone,
and how it gets into it and maintains it, will be familiar to many drug
addicts. The zone he gets into, however, is an unpleasant and uncaring, as he
seems is be.
I think
what disturbed me most was the language of disrespect that runs through the
culture of Ken and his friends. I don’t know why but it feels like the language
and attitudes are copied from America, and this jars. On the other hand, the
writer is Kenyan and knows better than me how his people talk to one another.
Having
described Ken’s habits and lifestyle, the author then tells us of an incident
of abuse that Ken suffered as a boy and that is enough to explain his
subsequent behaviour and lack of feeling. Whether Ken is meant to represent
Kenya and the abuse that country suffered from the whites, I’m not sure, nor
was I clear on the corruption that was going on at the bank where he worked
which may have been obvious to a knowing reader but not to me.
The
story finishes: ‘They both laughed from deep within their bellies, that
laughter of Kenyan men that comes from a special knowledge. The laughter was a
language in itself, used to climb from a quiet national desperation’. I guess I
didn’t understand what they were laughing at.
Bombay’s
Republic by Rotimi Babatunde
I loved
this story. I read it first and then last, both times swept up in its
matter-of-fact telling of a most amazing tale in which Colour Sergeant Bombay, who
went to war ‘as a man and came back as a spotted leopard’, discovered that
everything and anything was possible and that his ‘discoveries of the possible
would come faster than the leeches in Burma’s crepuscular jungles.’
The
language of the story is perfect, the sentences rounded, the rhythm consistent,
the vocabulary extensive but not showy, the similes and metaphors delicate and
penetrating, the mood both ironic and poignantly tragic. Bombay witnesses man at his most desperate;
he observes, learns, is amazed and ultimately changed.
From
this story, I learned nothing in particular about Africa or Africans but
everything about the human experience of war.
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