A Not-so-new Novel

The Golden Ass (Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves)

The Golden Ass is a heady mix of mythology, magic, satire, folksy sex-comedy, autobiography and adventure novel, rolled into one. It is scarcely believable that someone wrote it in the 2nd century CE. It is such a strange concoction that only an extraordinary man could have written it, a man of many parts, a man who has seen and heard many things in many places.

Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, we are told, lived between 124 and around 170 CE, in a Roman province in Algeria. He studied philosophy in Athens and rhetoric in Rome, got initiated into Dionysian mysteries in Asia Minor, worked as a priest in Carthage, got married on the way to Alexandria and successfully defended himself in a lawsuit in Tripoli, Libya. He claims (in the book) that he is related to Plutarch, but all we know is that his rich father, a municipal magistrate, left him a lot of money that he steadily frittered away in travel and studies.

The book is in the form of a first-person narrative, and the hero tells us about his many improbable escapades, including a disastrous experiment with magic that led to him turning into a donkey and finally turning back into a man thanks to the intervention of the Goddess Isis. In between, there are interesting digressions, involving gangs of robbers, pretty girls, a sensational murder trial, tales of infidelity, a very risque account of a woman who fell in love with a donkey, several other capers and misadventures, and the entire detailed mythological legend of Cupid and Psyche (for which story this book is arguably the best source material)

I do not think I have read anything like this, or have ever realized, before I read this, that a novel of this nature could have been written so long ago (it is, indeed, one of the earliest novels ever written). It isn’t a serious account of a man’s life, it has elements of religion involved, yet interspersed with secular elements, and liberal doses of fairy tale magic. It is difficult for me to imagine that the author himself believes in the realism of the central premise – the transformations of a man into an ass and back – but it is as if he is asking the audience to work with him, play along, suspend their disbelief, and accept the premise just for the sake of the tale. That, to me, is a remarkably modern thing to do, and I found myself drawn into the tale, morbidly curious to know what happens next, and how the whole thing would end. He had me on a string alright, this strange Mediterranean man from 19 centuries ago.

The past is a foreign country, said LP Hartley, they do things differently there. Yet, occasionally, we find that some of those distant foreigners, well, they aren’t all that different from us at all.

Out of Africa

African Folktales (Selected and retold by Roger D. Abrahams)

In the book under review, Roger Abrahams, an American folklorist, has selected and retold a number of stories from all over sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first time I’ve ventured into this region, folklore-wise. Now there are two elements that I watch out for, when I read the folklore of a region for the first time (and I have read my fair share of them, over the years). The first element, obviously, is the quality of the stories themselves: are they relatable? Do they hold my attention? Do they say something funny, or shocking, or are they insightful about human nature and the world around us? And the second element is comparative – I look to place the stories in relation to other traditional lore from other cultures: are the stories original to and uniquely definitive of the culture? Or do they closely resemble stories from other cultures, while incorporating some local variations? Can we identify themes that cut across cultures?

In terms of the quality of the stories, I did find a small number that I found as gripping as any other story I’ve read. I also found themes that resonated with a lot of world lore – a sultan who orders all male children in his kingdom put to death, a great sea serpent that demands a virgin sacrifice in exchange for allowing people access to water, a wife who is willing to jump into her husband’s funeral fire, an unwanted child that is set adrift on a river in a basket, a snake that gives a man the magical ability to understand the language of animals, a beautiful woman by a river shore who sets a strange condition while agreeing to marry a man, a condition that he eventually violates with consequences, a son setting out in search of his father… these were old friends of mine, that I had met many times in my wanderings around world folklore, and I shall no doubt meet again, elsewhere.

But I found the majority of the stories too raw, too unsophisticated, too difficult to appreciate. Luckily for me, Abrahams had also prepared his readers for this in his preface, and explained why Western audiences brought up on the Grimm brothers’ collections, or Aesop’s before them (or Indian ones brought up on the Pancatantra or the Jataka tales, or Arab ones on the Alif Laila wa Laila) would struggle to appreciate these stories.

The main difference between the collections named above, and the African tales in Abrahams’ collection, is that the former were written down, while the African story-telling culture is primarily an oral tradition. And when Western folklorists record and transcribe oral performances, they include all the repetitions and hesitations that are part of any oral performance, but omitted from a written story. This makes for awkward reading.

Also, oral storytelling in the African context is not just about narration – it is a grand performance that includes singing, dancing and enthusiastic audience participation as integral components – and this is completely lost in a dry, written text. Three, unlike in “modern” cultures, these stories are not merely for entertainment value. Oral story-telling is at the moral centre of an African rural society. They operate like proverbs, Abrahams tells us – they are a means of depersonalizing and universalizing a situation in which many people find themselves – but because it is now happening to a fictitious set of characters, it is easy for the social group to talk about the situation openly, and dissect it from all directions. The intricacy of the plots isn’t important – everyone has an easy familiarity with them, and uses the stories as a basic building block of thought (in a somewhat similar process to how phrases like ‘dog in the manger’, ‘playing Good Samaritan’, or ‘sour grapes’ have passed from a well-known folktale directly into the English language). And that leads us to the most intriguing aspect of the African tale.

The African folktale is open-ended. The central dilemma in the tale doesn’t get resolved once and for all at the end – heroes and heroines don’t live happily ever after (and when they do, you will know that the tale is probably an import from outside Africa). Aesop’s fables and the Pancatantra are designed for passing moral messages, as well – but the morals and insights in them are explicitly pointed out at the end. There is a sense of closure. There is no doubt at all in the reader’s or listener’s mind about what the stories mean, who the bad guys are, and whether they got their just desserts. In the African tale, however, there is plenty of ambiguity on these topics. It ends abruptly and unexpectedly – and the audience is now expected to discuss the story, interpret it, argue and debate right and wrong, and draw lessons for day-to-day life. Oral story-telling is a group performance, merely initiated by the story-teller.

When the Kpelle of Sierra Leone gather together to tell tales like this, the argument that follows the story is pursued by extended analogies with everyday activities. Everyboy tries to put his interpretation of the situation in the best possible light. There is no argument over the facts of the case but over the interpretation. Decision-making becomes ‘something of a corporate process’, Finally this discussion comes to a halt, not because a definitive response is given by someone, but rather because ‘an influential town elder…expresses the concerns of the group’ to which everyone assents because of his eloquent summation.

I found this absolutely fascinating. The Harvard Business school employs nearly identical methods to prepare graduate students to face complex leadership situations. Case studies are debated in the classroom, and the main intention is not to arrive at a ‘correct’ answer, but to foster animated discussion, to make students aware of all aspects of a situation, to drive an appreciation for the existence of other valid points of view than one’s own. It is for less complex training situations that we would employ a more direct method of instruction, where ‘appropriate’ decisions are prescribed and less appropriate ones are explicitly discouraged. Which leads us to a suddenly vertiginious inversion of opinion about African folktales. The Western (or Indian) fables do seem more sophisticated to read than the African ones, on the face of it, but they are actually more basic, more dumbed down and infantile. . It is the African stories, unpolished and incomplete as they may appear, that are meant for a more complex and mature purpose.

Photo 178079624 | African Storyteller © Alexander Mirt | Dreamstime.com

Colonial Adventure

King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard, Rider)

For 400 years, Portuguese traders had been swapping a rumor, and it was revived in 1871 by the German explorer, Karl Mauch: that the rock ruins near the city of Masvingo, that go by the name of ‘Great Zimbabwe“, were built by ancient Phoenicians, that the stone edifice was a replica of the palace of King Solomon, which the Queen of Sheba is said to have visited and described, and that the sprawling quarry beyond the ruins were the mines from which the fabled diamonds and gems of King Solomon were unearthed.

The theory is nonsensical, of course: Great ZImbabwe, and other similar sites, were built by the ancestors of the Shona-speaking people in the 11th century, and a big reason for Mauch’s wild theory gaining currency in “scientific” circles in the 19th century was largely that Europeans were unwilling to believe that Africans could construct something so massive and awe-inspiring.

This is a good introduction to the Rider Haggard novel under consideration, for two reasons. One, because Haggard’s 1885 novel used this exact premise as its backdrop (even though Haggard claimed not to have heard of Mauch’s theory). And two, because Haggard’s book, like Mauch’s theory, has not aged well at all, and for very similar reasons. Its white characters are all uniformly “good” characters, resourceful, rugged, and with hearts of gold. It is very clear from every page that the characters, the author and the intended readers all consider white people superior to Africans in every respect. The black characters, apart from a small number, are untrustworthy, cruel or stupidly superstitious and gullible in their ignorance of ‘white man technology’ (or of common phenomena like solar eclipses). They lack refinement and an evolved value system. Their sole redeeming qualities are their magnificently barbaric strength, and unflinching loyalty to their white ‘superiors’.

Am I overthinking this, and maligning a simple adventure romp that was, after all, dashed off in a matter of weeks by Rider Haggard? To convince you that I am not, listen to this. One of the ‘positive’ black characters is a pathetic girl, who has fallen in love with one of the protagonists in an abjectly slavish and obsequious way. The author hastily makes it clear to us that this was an unnatural, ill-fated love, and sure enough, the girl is killed while attempting to save the life of her beloved. With her dying gasp, she admits that her love was always doomed to failure. But let me quote her verbatim:

“I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.”

I had to re-read the speech to believe my eyes. We bemoan racism in today’s world – and there is a lot of it – but it is shocking what attitudes existed in the western world just a handful of generations ago.

When, with much effort, one puts aside the racist and paternalistic attitude of the white protagonists, there is still the callous attitude towards wildlife to contend with. The heroes murder dozens of elephants on their way, for ivory and the sheer pleasure of the big game – it must have been considered heroic in Victorian times, or, you know, in Republican states, but a civilized 21st century reader would find it positively revolting. If we somehow manage to look beyond this as well, we get to the novel itself, and it is a pretty standard thrill-a-minute fare. I believe King Solomon’s Mines was one of the most commercially successful novels of the 19th century – the kind of thing that used and created enduring and damaging stereotypes about the colonized people, in the minds of the colonizers and the colonized alike.

I only take heart that in a meta way, the story is more unintentionally consistent with history than it is aware of. No, not in its descriptions of African culture and society. But in the story, white men in search of adventure and treasure penetrate into unknown, hostile terrain, nearly die in the process, but are rescued by local native tribes who have learned to survive in these conditions. The white men then establish themselves in a position of trust and power, using lies, bribes and guns, take sides in local politics, oust rulers they consider ‘bad’ and raise their own puppet to the throne. Finally, having made a lot of money in the bargain, they leave the kingdom and go back to Britain to lead fat, contented lives.

Now that’s pretty accurately representative, I think.

The Great Zimbabwe: Not King Solomon’s, after all

A Tale of two Travelers

The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo, Marco, translated by RE Latham)

Even though Eurasia is a single continental landmass – and a reasonably thickly-populated one at that – the eastern ends of it remained largely secluded from the western ones for most of history. The Arabs, situated advantageously in between, had a vested interest in perpetuating this state of mutual ignorance: their profit margins as middlemen were predicated upon their suppliers and customers never coming face to face. They were helped by political fragmentation – countless shape-shifting kingdoms, petty princelings, religious fanatics and ferocious tribes lay along the way to daunt any potential tourist.

In all the time between the dawn of recorded history and the last decade of the 15th century CE, only two extraordinary men from the western half of the known world managed to reach China and returned to tell the tale. One was Marco Polo, the narrator and hero of the book under review (The Travels), who visited Persia, India, China, Japan and South East Asia. The other was ibn Battuta, whose even more extensive journeys took him from Morocco through Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Persia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, India, China, and back. There were a few others – missionaries, traders, ambassadors – who reached one or the other of these ‘exotic’ destinations before them, but none of them covered as much ground, or left written accounts of their travels that captured the imagination of their home audience.

Roads and transportation technologies remained stagnant since Roman times; human knowledge, nature and endurance limits did not change by much, either. Yet the only two men to clock over 100,000 lifetime kilometers before 1492 did so within a generation of each other – Polo between 1271-95, Battuta between 1326-49. Was this a coincidence?

The short answer is: no. The years between 1206-1368 were the most propitious for travel in all of history until then. The world had in place the largest contiguous land empire in history. It covered parts of Central Europe in the west to the Sea of Japan, from the Arctic steppes to equatorial South East Asia.

It was the age of the Mongols.

Our general impression of the Mongols as barbarian heathen hordes intent on arson, rape and pillage probably comes to us from contemporary Russian and Arab accounts of men who had witnessed their military ruthlessness first-hand. But the Mongols were more than murderous marauders. For 150 years, they kept the peace across a vast and turbulent area; they encouraged trade; they were largely tolerant of Buddhists, Christians, Jews, shamanists and Muslims alike, and for the first time ever, the road from the Black Sea to Cathay was perfectly safe for travelers, whether by day or by night. It was Pax Mongolica that made Marco Polo and ibn Battuta possible.

The Mongol empire in 1294, at its peak
By Ali Zifan – Own work; used orthographic projection from here., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44303908

Just as Battuta returned from his last voyage, the Black Death was wreaking havoc across Eurasia – the same relative ease of trade and travel that made Marco Polo possible helping the rapid spread of the plague (a point that readers in 2020 will appreciate only too painfully). The Mongol empire crumbled. Within decades, the Mings retook China, the Arabs surged back in the Levant, Turkic tribes broke away across Central Asia, the wall between East and West was quickly rebuilt, and the glittering wonders of the “other side” slipped out of sight again.

So marvelous were the wonders Marco Polo described on his return to Italy that they nicknamed him il Milione (The Million) – not because he had made much wealth from his expeditions, but because “he talked big” in his book. That said, he seems to have been a rather drab personality, and not a particularly gifted writer (nor indeed was his co-author, Rustichello da Pisa). Polo’s The Travels has very little of the anecdotal charm of ibn Battuta’s Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa ajaib al-asfar (A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling). I mean, just compare the names of the books. I suspect Marco Polo, despite having a keen eye for detail, struggled to grasp the nuances of local culture in many of the places he visited. Perhaps he wasn’t really interested in the human drama, as much as on more mundane facts of political economy. Perhaps, as a Christian in largely pagan Asia, he traveled among people far more different from him in culture and tradition, than Battuta did as a Muslim. Polo’s book reads like a textbook, while Battuta’s reads like a memoir. Here’s a representative sample of Polo’s lukewarm prose:

After leaving the river, the traveler continues westwards for five days, through a country with numerous cities and towns which breed excellent horses. The people live by tilling the soil and rearing animals. They speak a language of their own which is very difficult to understand. At the end of five days he reaches the capital of the kingdom, which is called Yachi, a large and splendid city. Here there are traders and craftsmen in plenty. The inhabitants are of several sorts: there are some who worship Mahomet, some idolators and a few Nestorian Christians. Both wheat and rice are plentiful but wheat-bread is not eaten because in this province, it is unwholesome. The natives eat rice and also make it into a drink with spices, which is very fine and clear and makes a man drunk like wine. For money they use white cowries, i.e., the seashells that are used to make necklaces for dogs. So cowries are the equivalent of 1 saggio of silver…they also have brine wells from which they make salt and that is used for food by all the inhabitants of the country. And I assure you that the king derives great profits from this salt. The men here do not mind if one touches another’s wife, as long as it is with her consent

Battuta, in stark contrast, was a traveler and writer after my own heart. He poured his soul and self into his words: his homesickness, bemusement, disgust, admiration, wonder; where he got ripped off, where the food gave him a queasy stomach. Here he is, describing the first time he got out of Morocco, trekking through the Sahara with a caravan until they arrived in neighboring Tunisia:

So at last we reached the town of Tunis, and the townsfolk came out to welcome the travelers. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly.

Polo never tells us how he feels at any point. Battuta never tells us what the principal exports of a city are. I know which book I found more engrossing.

Yet Marco Polo makes compelling reading too: for the historical significance of what he achieved, and for one more reason.

In today’s world, where every nation takes shrill pride in building walls around itself, I am reminded of the Arabic proverb that Battuta taught me once: that all the strangers in the world are kin to one another.

As a fellow-traveler who lived for decades in a land very different from the one he was born in, Marco Polo is practically family.

The Books of a Mad Naturalist

Golden Bats & Pink Pigeons (Durrell, Gerald)
Fillets of Plaice (Durrell, Gerald)

“The child is mad.”
– Lawrence Durrell, 1931

A study of Gerald Durrell’s life informs me that unlike his more illustrious brother Lawrence, Gerald didn’t love writing, and in fact, wrote only in order to raise funds for his work as a naturalist. This is nowhere apparent from the bubbly, fizzy books that he is known and loved for around the world.

In some ways, Gerald Durrell was to natural history what Jeremy Clarkson is to automobiles. Both combine a deep expertise and passion for their subjects with a penchant for traveling around the world doing crazy things that normal people don’t dream of doing, while keeping up a steady, side-splittingly hilarious banter with a bunch of equally crazy people. For both Clarkson and Durrell, much of the humor is written for a British audience and directed at foreigners with ‘funny’ ways. In a long and chequered career, Clarkson has managed to aggravate Romanians, Mexicans and others, and while I am not aware of any criticism levelled at Durrell on this score, I must admit that I found some of his descriptions of Greeks, Turks, Mauritians and Cameroonians uncomfortably patronizing, but then he was writing in the mid-twentieth century, when attitudes were vastly different, and I suppose we must make allowances for that. In any case, Durrell’s tone is more affectionate than it is mocking, and it is far less racially tinged than in the BBC 1970s sitcom Mind Your Language – a program I enjoyed as a child and find severely shocking as an adult.

A gecko found only on Snake Island, Mauritius – and discovered and named after Gerald Durrell. Nactus serpensinsulas durelli, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The Book of History Lessons

‘Lessons’ of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (May, Ernest)

“Santayana’s aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it”
– Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

When I became old enough to read the papers and learn about the world, it had already been in the icy grip of the Cold War for 35 years. Many of the men and women who reported or analyzed events in the media had never known a different state of affairs in their lifetimes. It was like a primordial tussle between the forces of Good and Evil. If you were on one of the two sides, you automatically knew that the other was Evil, that it was deeply immoral not to resist them, that your eventual prevalence in the struggle was pre-ordained and inevitable, and that the world would come to an end when this happened. But if your country, like mine, did not belong to either of the colliding worlds, but to a ‘third’ world, instead, over by the sidelines, your Cold War experience would have been different from the American or Russian one. Some of us painted it in ‘Good v Evil’ colors as well, but were deeply divided about which one was which, and we felt it would go on forever, like a metaphor for the human condition, the spinning yin and yang of life, symbols of the perpetual dilemmas that rage perennially in our mind. There was a certain epic timelessness about it all, a lack of understanding of the processes of political change, a denial of the very possibility of change, which was ultimately a negation of history. Small wonder, that soon after the War ended, someone who should have known better actually wrote a triumphant book called ‘The End of History‘.

It is this distortion of history that is the subject of May’s book, and to his great credit, he wrote it, not after the end of the War, but in 1973, right in the thick of battle. With the benefit of hindsight, and the perspective that comes from distance from both Washington and Moscow, it is easier for us to piece together the causes and consequences of the war, but such a narrative would not differ in substance from May’s.

Foreign Policy in the absence of History: Cartoon courtesy Filip Spagnoli (http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com)

The Book about the Beautiful Game

The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey, ed.)

My obsession with soccer comes into bloom only once every four years, but when it does blossom, for a brief period – in the months of June and July of even-numbered non-leap years, like clockwork – it overshadows everything else in my life. And then, one day,  it ends, and always as anticlimax, leaving me with a vast, empty hopelessness, irrespective of who has won. Immediately thereafter, my mania begins to flag, and gradually, over the next few days, it wilts and withers away into nothingness, but it doesn’t die; it merely waits with a sly, subterranean patience for four long years to pass, and then, when the time is ripe, and there is that familiar expectant buzz in the air, the buds of excitement poke out overground again.

It was during the last great flowering, during Germany 2006, that I had acquired this book, because it looked interesting and unconventional, but mainly because The Season was in full swing. Reading lists being what they are, the book then lay unread and half-buried on my “Miscellaneous” shelf, being hard to categorize into a genre, until I remembered its existence during South Africa 2010, started reading it just after Spain beat Paraguay to clinch the last semifinal slot, and finished it last night, hours before Spain meets Netherlands to decide the champion.

The Book of Shame and Righteous Anger

The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, Frantz)

Robert Clive and family, with their Ayah (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Wikimedia Commons)

Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed
– Jean Paul Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon died of leukemia in 1961, at the age of 36. In an abbreviated but brilliant life, he blazed like a furious flash of lightning across the stormiest night sky in Africa’s history, illuminating, in the process, the murky conscience of the world for all to see. His Wikipedia entry says he “is perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of de-colonization and the psychopathology of colonization“. Having read The Wretched of the Earth, I have reason to believe the truth in that statement, and can now comprehend how Steve Biko, or Malcolm X, or Che Guevera, all spiritual sons of Fanon, must have felt as they read this book, how they must have burned with anger and bellowed in defiance against injustice and oppression. Theirs were the claps of thunder that we heard immediately after, and the ferocious forest fires that raged for years thereafter, the smoking embers of which we call the world we walk on today.

The Not So Modern Novels

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt (Mahfouz, Naguib)

Pharaoh Ahmose I, fighting the Hyksos (Source: IrishOriginsofCivilization.com)

It is pertinent to note that Mahfouz was a young man when he wrote these novels (Khufu’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia and Thebes at War), between 1938 and 1944, and that he went on to write 40 more, including the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, and the far more sophisticated (as a historical novel) Akhenaten, reviewed earlier here, en route to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Perhaps Three Novels of Ancient Egypt was the experimental flexing of newfound literary muscles, the means by which a young author discovered the extent of his own powers as a writer.

The Book that Dwells on the Truth

One of the ‘invisible cities’ that Calvino describes in his book of the same name is located on the shores of an ocean, at the edge of a vast desert. It is shaped, he tells us, in a curious way. Travellers approaching it by land think it is shaped like a ship; sailors steaming into its harbour swear it looks like a camel. Perhaps Naguib Mahfouz can be described similarly. He is, after all, the best-known Egyptian writer in the west, and as he is also the only one I’ve read, he symbolizes Egypt, to me, in all its exotic mystique. But equally, if this book is anything to go by, he must simultaneously represent Western thought to his Egyptian audience. For Akhenaten is the product of the 20th century West, as much as it is of Egypt.

Bust of Akhenaten, Cairo Museum, Source: Wikimedia Commons