Togo - Tété-Michel Kpomassie: An African in Greenland

The hopes of finding a treasure like Tété-Michel Kpomassie's book An African in Greenland is exactly the reason I started blogging about different countries in the first place, ie. I wanted to find those books from all around the world that I would otherwise have missed if I had stuck to the mainstream and what's popular in my own society right now.  Born in Togo in 1941, Kpomassie developed an obsession with Greenland and spent years working his way through West Africa and Europe, until he could get the money together to go to Greenland, where he spent a year and a half in the 1970's.  The book is about his journey and is an amazing read, I would recommend it to anyone interested in other cultures and the commonalities of human experience.

An African Travel writer

I've read quite a few travel books in my time and several as research for this blog, however, most travel books I've read have been written from an 'anglo-saxon' point of view.  The term 'anglo-saxon' is used widely by the French to describe British culture, but it goes beyond that and is the only way I can think of describing writers from Australia, the US etc., as well as those from the UK and Ireland - it encompasses cultures which are very different from my own, yet we share a common language and there are certain concepts and moral viewpoints that are understood without footnotes.

Reading Kpomassie's book, I found myself somewhere between the African perspective of the writer (although influenced by the European societies he lived in) and the 'strangeness' of Greenlandic culture.  I could relate to many of Kpomassie's experiences as an 'outsider', having also been in this position, but at the same time, the way he interpreted Greenlandic culture said a lot about his home culture and sometimes there were similarities between Togo and Greenland that I could barely relate to at all. 

Love and hate

I guess by learning about someone else's culture, by default, you will also learn about your own and Kpomassie's experiences followed a rollercoaster of emotions in relation to Greenland; idealising the culture and loving it from a distance, becoming disappointed and hating it during his experience there, then finding a middle ground somewhere, that is neither idealisation or disappointment, neither love nor hate, but acceptance of the culture for what it is.  I've been on the same rollercoaster with Russian culture, much more than any of the other countries (or cultures) I've lived in and, in the same way as Kpomassie felt he was predestined to go to Greenland, I feel I was predestined to go to Russia.

Snake cults and leaving Togo

Kpomassie's story starts off in Togo.  When he was a teenager, he had a terrible accident, encountering a snake on a coconut tree he was climbing, he fell off and injured himself.  It doesn't seem like a coincidence that it was during his convalescence that he found the book about Greenland and started to dream of a land far-away from snakes and the heat of the jungle. 

Kpomassie was born into a Mina tribe, with obscure roots in Benin and a special relationship with snake-worship and the snake priestess of Bé, a village hidden in the depths of the forest.  His father took him to the priestess, who said that he had offended the snakes through violating certain taboos.  She eventually helped bring him back to health and rid him of his 'curse'.  As a token of thanks, his father pledged to send him to the snake cult to be initiated as a priest.  Before his father had the chance to send him to the snake cult, Kpomassie ran away to his aunt in the Ivory Coast, starting a ten-year journey through West Africa and Europe, culminating with his trip to Greenland. 

Greenland - culture shock!

His first experience of Greenland was incredibly disappointing, which isn't surprising, considering how high his expectations were.  He first arrived in K'arkotoq in the south of Greenland and was shocked by the reality of Greenlandic society, which he felt had been degraded and debased by the modern world.  Arriving in the middle of summer, he witnessed the excesses of drinking and promiscuity that Greenlanders are infamous for.  He was disappointed by a society that he felt had lost touch with its traditions and preferred to take the easy option, living off benefit payments from the Danish government.  As summer slid into autumn, with its incredible dreariness and the feeling of 'waiting' that drives native Greenlanders into a kind of hysteria, Kpomassie decided to move further north in search of a more traditional way of life.

Man versus Beast

There's a lot of cultural information in Kpomassie's book, but one of the things that really struck me was the constant butchering of animals throughout the winter, in a desperate bid to stay alive.  Most Greenlanders are not, by tradition, fisherfolk, but hunters.  I found the descriptions of animals being cut into pieces disturbing.  Some parts of the animal are eaten raw and, it seemed, at the end of every 'massacre' there was blood everywhere.  I know this is my cultural prejudice shining through, but I'm not sure how I would cope with all that blood and guts!  Some of the poorer villagers would resort to eating their huskies when times got bad but, despite the fact he got used to most Greenlandic foods (blubber, seal skin and raw intestines), Kpomassie couldn't bring himself to eat dog, as culturally, for his tribe, this is taboo.  He pointed out that a lot of the differences in African tribes were centred on food taboos and I think eating habits (snails, horse meat, haggis) are equally relevant in European societies. 

The Race of an Outsider

Of course, in each village he visited, the sight of an incredibly tall black man getting off the boat excited all kinds of emotions in the locals, from fear to hilarity to desire, but the longer Kpomassie stayed in each place, it seemed to me that the colour of his skin was hardly relevant.  Much more relevant was the fact that he was an outsider and, in the minds of most of the people he met, he was categorised as European, like most of the Qashluna (foreigners) the Greenlanders had encountered.  I'm sure anyone who has spent time living abroad, especially in Asia, will soon realise that, as far as the locals are concerned, there is no great difference between British and American or even British and French.  We're all just farang!  There is a funny scene when Kpomassie meets Robert Mattaaq, an old man from Upernavik, in the north of Greenland - the old man says he has a picture of one of Kpomassie's tribesmen, which he'd cut out from a magazine.  When he eventually finds the cutting and lays it out on the table, Kpomassie's kinsman is Charles de Gaulle!

Children should be seen and heard

He experiences other cultural differences, for example, in the way that children are treated in Greenland.  In Togo, the father is the supreme head of the house and there is a rigid hierarchy through elder sons and half-brothers to the youngest child, who is of least importance in the household, especially when the child is a girl.  In Greenland, on the other hand, adults trust a child's intuition above all else and will rarely reprimand or contradict a child.  In the same way, village elders will rarely contradict the beliefs of younger adults and Kpomassie is surprised to visit an old people's home and learn about the former tradition in Greenland that dictated that old people should walk out into the snow and die when they become too much of a burden on the family.  This is a complete contrast to the position old people hold in his native Togo. 

Tarningerneq and Eklan

One belief that was incredibly similar was the way that both Greenlanders and people in the Mina tribe explain the occurence of dreams.  In both cultures, each human being has a soul which can leave the body and go wandering at night (Tarningerneq in Greenland and Eklan in Togo).  The soul goes on all kinds of adventures, in a parallel universe, as it were and returns to the body in the morning, waking us up when it re-enters.  The adventures of our 'dreaming soul' are only remembered as a dream.  In both Greenland and Togo the wandering of the dreaming soul leaves us susceptible to manipulation and attack by dark forces, such as wizards.  If your soul is killed whilst you are wandering, it is believed that you will never wake up. 

In Greenland, however, there are many more types of souls than the three that the Mina tribe believe in and even inanimate objects have souls in Greenland.  Also landscape features, such as mountains and lakes, have souls, which reminds me of Icelandic, Scottish and Irish traditions, kelpies, underground people and even the Loch Ness monster!  I can understand in a barren landscape like the one in Greenland (or Iceland), where there is immense stillness and a general lack of life, that people will start attributing life to inanimate objects and the landscape itself.  In Africa, where every tree and patch of land is teeming with life, I guess there was enough animism to worry about without assigning life to inanimate objects. 

More of the same

The end of Kpomassie's book left me craving more.  I really believe that interacting with other cultures is an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience and I understand the privileged position I'm in as a Westerner, in that I can travel, explore and learn about other cultures.  But there are lots of Westerners travelling and exploring and learning about other cultures.  It's more interesting to read about cultural interaction between two very different cultures, like those of Greenland and Togo.  I guess on some very basic level, all human cultures share the same obsessions and concerns, certainly we all dream at night of faraway lands and experiences beyond our understanding, however we might want to interpret these in the broad daylight of our home cultures.

Credits:

The copy of An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie that I read was the 2001 reprint as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series, with a foreword by A Alvarez and translation from French by James Kirkup.  Kpomassie wrote the book in 1979 - if you want to buy a copy, you can find it on Amazon (this is the link for UK). 

The image of the book cover was taken by me.

The image of the Huskie puppies was taken by flickruser chrissy575 aka Christine Zenino, who is a freelance travel writer and photographer from Chicago.  You can find out more about Christine's work at the following link. 

Togo - An Introduction to African Linguistics

Apologies to regular readers of this blog, as I walked the West Highland Way in Scotland this month and didn't have any time to blog about Togo.  I thought I would kick off again with one of my favourite subject areas, Linguistics.  I have a degree in Linguistics and find the subject fascinating, although it's been many years since I studied it in a formal way.  As I've been reading about Togo, I've got more and more into the language side of things and the general picture of language in Africa.

The study of Language

I guess Linguistics, like many academic sciences, was born from the great 19th century desire to classify everything and put things, whether species or types of behaviour or languages, into convenient little 'boxes'.  The 20th century seemed to take this to a whole new level, not only wishing to categorise things, but also to minimise the number of categories and draw comparisons between things that are, in my humble opinion, very different.  For example, it still amazes me that we readily accept the term Indo-European and believe that somehow languages such as Icelandic and Hindi belong to the same language family, when it's obvious to anyone that they are incredibly different languages.  If you have a look back on my blogposts about Rajasthan, you'll read about the influence of British Indian orientalists on the concept of an Aryan race that somehow justified the British colonisation of India and I think this can be extended into the field of Linguistics and theory of an Indo-European language family. 

My point is that, far from being a 'black and white' empirical science, the study of Linguistics is very much a product of the culture of the Linguist.  Is an English linguist more likely to gloss over the influence of native British-Celtic languages on the language of the Saxons, Jutes and Angles who made England their home?  Is a Japanese linguist more likely to prefer a theory of Japanese as an 'independent' language, unrelated to Mongolian or the Turkic languages of Siberia and north Asia?  Well, of course they are.  The classification of languages depends a lot on who is classifying them and the culture and generation of the classifier.  It makes Linguistics more exciting in many ways, as I believe each generation needs to make its own contribution to the study of languages, with reference to past theories, but also taking into account historical prejudices.

Greenberg and the classification of African languages

The American linguist, Greenberg, is probably the greatest figure in African linguistics and developed a classification that is, more or less, universally accepted.  He divided African languages into the following sub-categories:

Afro-Asiatic - previously this was called Hamito-Semitic, after Noah's sons, Ham and Sham - Ham being African, Sham being the Middle Eastern one.  Arabic is, by far, the most prominent of the languages in this language 'family', but it also includes Hebrew, Maltese and African languages such as Somali and Hausa.  It's a controversial grouping in many ways, as it links up language speakers who are incredibly diverse in terms of their ethnicity, religions and cultures.  What I like about this grouping is that it recognises a shared history between the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa.

Chari-Nile languages - this family contains lots of relatively small languages from the Nile valley, reaching into the Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Chad.  It's the language of the Nubians and the Masai people of Kenya. 

Niger-Congo - this is the biggest language family in Africa and covers most of the African languages that you will be aware of, probably the most famous being Swahili.  The family is further divided into branches, which are pretty much geographical and spread all the way from the Atlantic languages (eg. Wolof, Fulani) in Senegal to the massive Bantu family (eg. Zulu, Sesotho, Xhosa) spreading all the way down to the southern end of Africa. 

Khoi-san - are the languages of the Bush people in southern Africa, which have defied classification by linguists, but have been happily grouped together as a language family.  This family includes Hottentot or Nama and San, which is the language of the bushmen of Namibia and Botswana.  The Khoi-san languages are famous for their clicking sounds, some of which have been 'borrowed' into neighbouring Bantu languages.

Austronesian - interestingly on Madagascar, they speak a language which belongs to the Austronesian family and is much closer to Malay or Bahasa Indonesia, than to anything which is spoken on the African continent.

Indo-European - European languages, such as English and French, are spoken everywhere in Africa, however Afrikaans, which comes from the Dutch settlers on the Cape, is considered to be a 'native' Indo-European language. 

Lazy linguistics?

As far as I can see, lumping the vast majority of African languages into one convenient family 'Niger-Congo' smacks of incredibly lazy linguistics and I call for someone to do a little bit more work on the classification of African languages.  Interestingly, if you compare this to the work that has been done on Native American or Australian languages, there has been no attempt to lump all of these into one language family but, rather, recognition of the diversity of languages and the need for separate classifications.  I think it will take an African-born linguist to open up the subject properly and give us a new classification for the 21st century. 

Linguistic policy in Africa

With over 2,000 languages, Africa is incredibly diverse.  What's more, levels of bi-tri-multilingualism exist on a scale that we in Europe can only ever dream of.  When I lived in Uzbekistan, my students switched from English to Russian to Tajik to Uzbek with relative ease and, in an increasingly competitive global economy, I think proficiency in languages will be something akin to a commodity in this new century.  In Africa, French and English still prevail and are official languages in most African countries.  At another level though, there are many alternative lingua francas and Arabic, Hausa, Swahili, Igbo, Yoruba and Amharic are also spoken by millions of people as a second or third language. 

Language in Togo

Togo is a good example of how language works in Africa and this is partly why I became so aware of the general situation.  A country of five million people, Togo has more than thirty native languages.  French is the official language, the written language and language of education but, since independence, both Ewe and Kabiye have risen to prominence, being the two native languages with most speakers.  There is a real north-south divide in Togo and, although most languages, fall into the Niger-Congo family, the southern languages, including Ewe, are loosely connected to the coastal Kwa languages of Ghana and Benin (eg Akan, Fon and Ga).  The nothern languages, including Kabiye, are related to other inland languages of the Volta river such as More and Gurma, the languages of Burkina Faso.

Of course, when the European colonial powers were dividing up the map of Africa in Berlin in 1884, language didn't always come into it and, to be honest, the complexity of how languages are spread around West Africa would defy any attempts to create nations out of the main languages (something that was enforced, to an extent, in Europe).  Initially, most Ewe speakers ended up in the same country, German Togoland, but the further sub-division of Togoland, means that Ewe speakers are now in two different countries, with approximately 2 million speakers of Ewe in Togo and 2 millon in Ghana. Of course, language is a continuum and doesn't really recognise political boundaries.  I think this is less obvious to a European, where French is spoken in France, Italian in Italy - the reality being that French and Italian are in a continuum of dialects that flow from one country into another and don't just change on the border!

I would love to see the result of having had European languages classified by Africans in the 19th century and whether they would have come to the conclusion that we all basically sound the same, or whether they would have found immense differences and classified European languages in a radically different way. 

Credits:

A lot of my research for this blog was done on the web, through Wikipedia and other sources, however I also referred to Kenneth Katzner's book The Languages of the World (the 2003 edition published by Routledge). 

Both maps are from Wikimedia Commons and are being shared using the Creative Commons License. 

The Linguistic map was uploaded by wikiuser Seb az86556 - you can see the original and other maps by Seb at the following URL http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Seb_az86556

The map of the Ewe and other Gbe languages was uploaded by Mark Dingemanse who works for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and is based in the Netherlands.  Mark's website and blog are great sources for those of you interested in learning more about African linguistics.  His page on Wikimedia Commons also has some interesting facts about African languages.

Togo - the Village of Waiting

The first book I've read about life in Togo is ex-Peace Corps volunteer George Packer's The Village of Waiting.

A frank, vivid account of contemporary African life

During my time in Central Asia, I became friends with several Peace Corps volunteers and have, since then, really admired the fortitude of the volunteers and their determination to learn something about this amazing world of ours, rather than live in the bubble of 'the West'.  I'm sure lots of Peace Corps volunteers have written books about their eye-opening experiences, living in countries, like Togo, that are otherwise forgotten about and misunderstood by the rest of the world.  I really enjoyed reading Packer's book and it was, as the subtitle says, an incredibly frank and vivid account of life in Africa, as he experienced it.

What I liked about Packer's book is that he didn't romanticise his experience in Africa, nor did he shy away from being brutally honest about his experiences in the Togolese village of Lavié.  He also didn't get bogged down in more 'challenging' aspects of his life in Togo, nor was the book a list of grievances about the inadequacies of the Togolese government or the society around him. 

Customs and traditions

 

As can be expected, Packer mentions some of the customs and traditions of the Ewé tribespeople and I found these very interesting, for example:

- the fact that it's customary in Ewé tribes to keep the chief's death a secret for one year.  Even if everyone knows that he is dead, they go on talking about him, as though he is still alive.

- He also mentions a pretty horrible tradition that, when a newborn baby dies, one of its hands is cut off before it's buried, to prevent it from crawling back into its mother's womb and starting the life/death cycle all over again.

Packer writes about animism and the villagers' fear of the forest, about the evil spirit Sakpaté and how it's taboo to say his name aloud at night.  Packer comes to the conclusion that the villagers belief in animism is a logical by-product of the lack of electricity in Lavié.  In the dark night of the forest, one can fantasise about the vulnerability of humans in a world ruled by supernatural forces.  It reminds me of something I read somewhere that pointed out how ghost stories died in England with the invention of the electric bulb.  Shadowy corners and creaky floorboards seem less threatening in the glare of artificial light. 

An African Bildung

Like a lot of Peace Corps volunteers, Packer ends up in the village school teaching English.  He makes some important points about the history of European-style education in Togo, starting with the German missionaries and their desire to educate the Togolese well enough, so they could read the Bible, but not well enough to think for themselves or became anything other than labourers in their Müsterkolonie.  The French took over with their model of education, establishing a bureaucratic system of formation that continues to hinder the development of Togo, well into the 20th century. 

I've never been to Africa and can't claim any expertise on the subject, but I can see the logic in Packer's argument that a European educational system is one steeped in failure for African students.  The entire system served to make the European colonisers feel superior and helped them impose their culture on their African 'subjects'.  Rather than breaking with an unnatural, European education system on gaining independence from France, Togo, like many other African nations, continued to use this system as a tool to control and contain the various different tribes making up their country.  It makes as little sense now, as it ever did and, from Packer's experiences, it's obvious that an African child, especially a girl, has the odds stacked against her.  Even if he/she does get an education, it will prove useless in a country that toes the line, idealogically and intellectually.

Le petit nordiste and Authenticity

Like far too many countries that I've blogged about, Togo lived for many years under the shadow of one man, Gnassingbé Eyadéma.  Elevated to the status of demi-God, after surviving a plane crash in Sarakawa, Eyadéma maintained a stranglehold on Togolese politics that lasted 38 years and is continued today, in many ways, by the current Togolese leader, also Eyadéma's son, Faure Gnassingbé.  Eyadéma was very much an opportunist, having fought for the French in Algeria in the 1960's, he was one of the many disgruntled soldiers from the northern Kabye tribe, dubbed les petits nordistes by Togo's first president Sylvanus Olympio.  In the first coup d'etat of the newly independent African nations, Eyadéma dramatically deposed (and apparantly murdered) Olympio, eventually replacing him as President of Togo.

Eyadéma believed his aircrash to have been a ploy by the French to get rid of him and he emerged from the ashes of the crash with a renewed determination to legitimise his authority and suppress any opposition to his regime.  He introduced a period of Africanisation, called Authenticity, banning the use of (French) Christian names amongst other things.  Interestingly, despite his criticisms of the Togolese regime, Packer does mention the fact that Eyadéma didn't really have the resources, as President of such a small country, to engage in excessive repression as was so common elsewhere in Africa, like Idi Amin's regime in Uganda, or the Apartheid regime in South Africa.  He points out that the Togolese regime, although inwardly oppressive, didn't really engage in the wider politics of West Africa and was only ever vaguely supportive of the leftist politics of its neighbours, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta). 

Reverse Culture Shock

Something I could really relate to in Packer's story was the intense reverse culture shock he felt coming back to the West.  I imagine most of us don't really realise what we're taking on when we decide to live in another country, especially one with extreme poverty and daily hardship.  Nor do we expect the infectious joy of life lived in a way that doesn't revolve around greed and money-making.  It's obvious that Packer really came to feel part of the community that he lived with, so much so that, when he went to Barcelona for a Christmas break, he felt displaced and could relate more to the Africans he met there, than the European culture so similar to his own.  It was also interesting when he went to visit the north of Togo, a region that is very culturally and ethnically different than Lavie, he also felt a kind of 'culture shock' and the unfamiliarity of a different people than the ones he was living with.

I experienced something similar, returning to Uzbekistan after a week in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, everything in Uzbekistan suddenly felt so familiar and it really felt as though I was coming home. 

The Cicada's Life

An overarching theme of Packer's book is the wasted lives of some of the people he met in Togo.  He writes three really touching portraits towards the end of the book, about three different men he had become friends with and how they had each failed to acheive their full potential, in a country that, despite being their country of birth, was holding them back in so many ways.  It's the travesty of an intellectual mind, in a regime that cared little for independent thinking.  The concept of the Cicada's life for an intellectual in an oppressive regime is based on the premise that if you want to live happily, you need to live hidden. 

The significance of the title of Packer's book was not lost on me.  Amongst the joy and horror of life in the village, he also explores the monotony of life for the villagers, which is a constant round of toil and hardship, interrupted by occasional funerals which, far from being mournful, acted as a good excuse for a knees-up. 

The Ewe word for tomorrow is etso, which is the same as the word for yesterday or any day which is not today.  Other words I learned from Packer's book were: yovo, kazoo, baché, prestidigitation, kapok, iroko.

Image credits:

The image of the book cover was taken by me.

The photos of Togo were taken in 1984, around the same time that George Packer was living there, and have been provided copyright free by flickuser Paul-W - thanks Paul for sharing these images using the Creative Commons License. 

Togo - Woezo!

It's more than 3,000 miles (or 5,000 kilometres) from the Saudi capital to Lome, the capital of my next country, Togo!  I'm quite excited to be blogging about Togo as it's a country I know practically nothing about.  Until I started researching this blog, I didn't even know what the capital of Togo was and I would have been hard pushed to pick out the Togolese flag from the range of similar flags of West African nations.

I've just started learning about Togo and I know now that it is a small slither of a country sandwiched between Ghana and Benin.  Togo is approximately the same size as Croatia, less than half the size of England and slightly smaller than West Virginia.  It has a population of over 6 million people and is made up of various different tribes and languages, the main one being the Ewe people of the south coast (including the capital). 

Something that fascinates me about Togo is that it was colonised by (the newly unified) Germany during 'the Scramble for Africa', one of two German colonies in West Africa (the other one being Cameroon).  Germany's colonial ambitions came to end after the First World War and the German Togoland was divided between Britain and France, British Togoland being incorporated into their neighbouring colony in Ghana, French Togoland becoming an autonomous country within French West Africa.  I'm not sure how much of a legacy the Germans left behind, as French is now the lingua franca, as in most of West Africa.  It's something I'm interested in exploring. 

I've got a couple of books lined up, have already spotted a Togolese dish I want to cook and I've started listening to some Togolese music.  So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride - the video I'm posting is from YouTube and fascinates me, just watching the coast glide past, you get a sense of what life is like in downtown Lome.  The artist is called Yawo and I really like the song Mi La Woe, which translates something like 'let's keep pulling together'.



Image credits:

The map of Togo is from Wikipedia, but originally came from the CIA's World Factbook and is in the public domain. 

Happy birthday Blog!

It's exactly a year since I started this blog - 13 countries later, with 80 blogposts by yours truly and almost 2,000 unique visits from all over the world!  I've had the first 12 countries printed up in book form, as I feel like it's a great reference for myself and a proud reminder of all the blogging I've done in the past year - I must have written a novel's-worth by now! 

To celebrate one year of Learning about the World, I thought I would use this blogpost to remind myself (and you, my loyal readers) of the things that I have read, cooked, listened to and watched with the express purpose of increasing my understanding of this amazing world we live in :-)

In the past year, I've read 23 books related to my blog.  They were:

The President by Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala)
An Insular Possession by Timonthy Mo (Hong Kong)
Independent People by Halldor Laxness (Iceland)

History of Jamaica by Clinton V Black (Jamaica)

The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J Maarten Troost (Kiribati)

Singing Away the Hunger by Mpho 'M'atsepo Nthunya (Lesotho)
Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia by Louisa Waugh (Mongolia)
A Heart of Stone by Renate Dorrestein (Netherlands)

Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton (Netherlands)
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (Oklahoma)
House Made of Dawn by N Scott Momaday (Oklahoma)
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (Oklahoma)
(part of) I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay)

At the Tomb of the inflatible Pig by John Gimlette (Paraguay)
Remembering Babylon by David Malouf (Queensland)
A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley (Queensland)
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton (Queensland)
Desert Places by Robyn Davidson (Rajasthan)
A Princess Remembers by Gayatri Devi (Rajasthan)
Hinduism: A very short Introduction by Kim Knott (Rajasthan)
Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif (Saudi Arabia)

(part of) Islam: A very short Introduction by Malise Ruthven (Saudi Arabia)
Arabia through the Looking Glass by Johnathan Raban (Saudi Arabia)

I learned to cook a variety of international meals, some of them I've made several times since:

Tapado (Guatemala)
Sweet and Sour Pork Hong Kong style (Hong Kong)
Liffrarbuff and Plokkfiskur (Iceland)
Jerk Chicken (Jamaica)
Palu Sami (Kiribati)
Chakalaka and Pap (Lesotho)
Tsuivan (Mongolia)
Stamppot and Limburg Beef Stew with Apples (Netherlands)

Cornbread, Choctaw Catfish and Fried Okra (Oklahoma)
Sopa paraguayana and Zoo-Tosopy (Paraguay)
Kangaroo Fillets with Mushroom sauce (Queensland)
Daal Baati (Rajasthan)
Chicken Kabsa (Saudi Arabia)

I watched 15 movies:

Reykjavik 101 (Iceland)
Noi Albinoi (Iceland)
Dancehall Queen (Jamaica)
Turkish Delight (Netherlands)
The Fourth Man (Netherlands)
Dances with Wolves (Oklahoma)
Gunfight at the OK Corral (Oklahoma)

Oklahoma! (Oklahoma)
A Man called Horse (Oklahoma)
The Mission (Paraguay)
Swimming Upstream (Queensland)
Praise (Queensland)
Dor (Rajasthan)

Jodhaa Akbar (Rajasthan)
Lawrence of Arabia (Saudi Arabia)

I listened to all kinds of music - some of my favourites were:

Sigur Ros (Iceland)
Phyllis Dillon (Jamaica)
Egschiglen (Mongolia)

Bettie Serveert (Netherlands)
Woody Guthrie (Oklahoma)
Eric Bogle (Queensland)
Jagjit Singh (Rajasthan)
Mohammed Abdu (Saudi Arabia)

One of the reasons I started this blog was so I would read, watch, listen to and taste things that I wouldn't otherwise have read, watched, listened to or tasted.  One year down the line, I feel incredibly enriched by the cultural experiences I've had through my 'armchair' travelling - I look forward to the next year and all the learning it will bring.

In the languages of some of the countries I've blogged about:

Happy Birthday!  Feliz cumpleaños! Sun yat fai lok! Til hamingju með afmælið! Letsatsi le monate la tswalo! Tєрсєн єдрийн баяр хvргэе! Vy-Apave Nde Arambotyre! जन्मदिन पर हार्दिक शुभकामनाएं! Janam ghaanth ri badhai, khoob jeeyo! كل عام وأنتم بخير!

Saudi Arabia - مع السلامة

One way of saying goodbye in Saudi Arabia is ma'a as salama or مع السلامة which means 'go with safety' according to Wiktionary, said by the person who is staying to the one who is leaving.  It looks like I'm the one who's staying and I'm afraid it's time to say goodbye to Saudi Arabia!  I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of Saudi Arabian culture, nor have I had time this month to really do it justice.  I've learned a lot more about Saudi Arabia than I had time to blog about. 

I've also kept an eye on the English language and Saudi-based Arab News website - well worth a visit, if you want to get an insight into life in the Kingdom.  The news has been full of Saudi Arabia's response to the flooding in Pakistan on one hand, contrasted with the very disturbing reports in the Twittersphere about the abuse of a Filipino maid by her Saudi employers.  I was also surprised to read a report in the Arabic language Al-Riyadh (الرياض‎) newspaper, about the moral degradation of Saudi society, because of all the (straight) couples kissing in public.  Just today the Pink News has published a story about a gay Saudi diplomat, who claims he will be killed if he is sent home.

Some of the other things I've learned about Saudi Arabia are:

- It's almost ten times the size of the UK, with half the population.

- Saudi Arabia isn't just about deserts, it also has lush coastal areas on the Red Sea and fertile mountain resorts such as Abha. 

- The Rub al Khali or 'the Empty Quarter' is one of the most hostile landscapes known to man.

- Less than 2% of Saudi Arabia's land is arable. 

- According to The Economist's 2008 Democracy Index Saudi Arabia is the seventh most authoratitative country in the world.  I think I was more surprised to find out that Uzbekistan, a country I've lived in, came fourth in that index!

- Saudi Arabia didn't abolish slavery until 1962.

- Riyadh means 'the Gardens'

- 12 million Brazilians are of Arab origin.

- Non-muslims are not allowed to visit the holy cities of Medina and Mecca.

- Jeddah is the most multi-cultural and 'open' city in Saudi Arabia.

- Houses in Jeddah's Al-Balad district are made from coral, from the Red Sea.

- The religious police are called matawwa.

- Saudi Arabia has one of the highest road death rates in the world.

- Asir, now a province in the south-west of Saudi Arabia, was an independent kingdom until 1922.  It contains Saudi Arabia's highest mountain, Jebel Sawdah, which is 2910 metres tall.

- Wild baboons live in Asir region.

- The Farasan Islands, which are in the Red Sea, could become a major draw for tourists, if Saudi Arabia ever relaxes its strict visa requirements.

- Saudi Arabia is one of the richest regions in the world for Rock Art, with over 2,000 sites. 

- Saudi Arabia has a UNESCO world heritage site at Mada'in Saleh.

- Matthew Shepard's parents (the young man who was brutally murdered in a homophobic attack in Wyoming in 1998) lived in Dhahran and worked for the major oil corporation Aramco.

- Education isn't compulsory in the Kingdom and an estimated 39% of Saudi children don't attend school.

- Women are not allowed to practise law in Saudi Arabia.

- During Soviet times a quota of 20 Muslims were allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia from the USSR every year to perform the Hajj. 

- Winston's Hiccup or Churchill's sneeze is an anecdotal explanation of the sharp corner in the border between Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

- Folk beliefs claim that Eve is buried in Jeddah (جدّة‎) and that the name of the city comes from the Arabic word for grand-mother, which is jaddah (جدة)

I'm a big fan of Arabian music, although I'm more familiar with Arabesque singers of Turkey, than Saudi singers.  Arabian music has to be the definition of exotic for most western Europeans and, as I've been researching this blog, I've been listening to some of Saudi's greatest singers.

I'm going to leave you with one of my favourites - Mohammed Abdu.  Abdu grew up in Saudi Arabia's smallest province, Jizan and was orphaned at a very early age.  He's now a Saudi institution, but I like this video because it shows him at a time when he was still very young and had all the energy and passion of someone following his dream. 

Image credits:

The award-winning image of the Empty Quarter was taken by flickruser IrenicRhonda aka Rhonda Surman who is originally from High Wycombe, but now lives in the Highlands of Scotland.  You can see more of Rhonda's photos at http://www.flickr.com/people/irenicrhonda/

The picture of the Kaaba in Mecca was taken by flickruser Ammar Abd Rabbo

The photo of the Mada'in Saleh UNESCO site was provided by flickuser Omar A.

Thanks to Rhonda, Ammar and Omar for sharing your images with us, using the Creative Commons License.

Saudi Arabia - Cities of Salt

Abdelrahman Munif

As part of my learning about Saudi Arabia, I read the epic Cities of Salt (Al-tin) by Abdelrahman Munif.  Munif was a Saudi citizen who was brought up in Amman, Jordan and, despite being one of the foremost writers in Arabic in the late 20th-century, doesn't seem to be terribly well-known in the West.  He was well-educated, having studied at the Sorbonne, as well as the University of Belgrade and spent many years living in both Iraq and Syria.  Many of his books are banned in Saudi Arabia (no surprise there) and Munif, who died in 2004, criticised modern Arab states, like Saudi Arabia and parodied their ruling classes in his writing.  He was once a member of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party and was stripped of his Saudi citizenship because of his political beliefs. 

Post-colonial literature

When I was in university in Dublin, I studied courses in post-colonial literature and I could see Cities of Salt fitting into a post-colonial literature course quite easily.  It has been compared to Chinua Acebe's book, Things Fall Apart, which I've also read and there are definitely parallels between the arrival of the British in Nigeria in the late 19th-century and the arrival of the Americans in the Gulf in the 1930's.

Wadi al-Uyoun

The book starts in a wadi called al-Uyoun, which is somewhere in Arabia, before the arrival of the Americans and their mysterious pursuit of water and eventually oil.  The people of the wadi are described as almost child-like in their innocence and there is a strong sense of centuries of unbroken tradition, as the famous orchards and water of the wadi serve as a much-needed respite to caravans crossing the hostile landscape of the Arabian peninsula.  The caravans in their turn bring news of faraway places, much sought-after tools and products that the villagers receive in return for their hospitality.  The arrival of the caravans in Wadi al-Uyoun is a time of a great joy, but also a time of sadness, as it often takes some of the wadi's young men with it, as they leave to see the world and seek their fortunes. 

Miteb al-Hathal

One of the things about this novel that I found most difficult to understand was the constant change in narrative.  I think this might be a particularly Arabic form of story-telling, but the novel moves from one narrator to another, leaving lots of characters at a dead end, no longer to be heard or seen of again. 

The story first unfolds through the eyes of one of the wadi's elders, Miteb al-Hathal and, unlike many of the other narrators in the book, Miteb's spirit pervades the entire novel, so that he is still hovering over the events that happen towards the end of the book.  When the Americans first arrive in the wadi, it's almost as though they've landed in a spaceship, such is the wonder and fear experienced by the villagers.  Unlike his peer Ibn Rashed, who welcomes the arrival of the Americans, Miteb is filled with a sense of dread, as he observes these newcomers and tries to figure out the significance of their sudden appearance in the wadi.  At first, he's seen as an old fool, but eventually, as the Americans come more and more often and their behaviour becomes more and more intrusive, the villagers turn to Miteb for leadership.  But by then it's too late and the famous orchards of the wadi are pulled down around their ears and the villagers are forcibly moved on.

Ibn Rashed

Ibn Rashed is Miteb's rival and, whereas Miteb represents a mindset that is naive, sincere and incorruptible, Rashed sees an opportunity to make his fame and fortune, regardless of the impact it has on his society and its traditions.  He's seen as a traitor by many people, but there's also a sense that he is a pragmatist, realising that there is little he or anyone in the wadi can do to stop the advance of a new era. 

After the destruction of the wadi, Miteb disappears into the desert, to become a haunting ghost-like figure, who only re-appears at moments of extreme tension.  Ibn Rashed, on the other hand, becomes a very real figure, employing the bedouin to work on the construction of a new American city in a (fictional) location on the Persian Gulf, called Harran.  I suspect Harran may be based on Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia, as it fits the period and the pattern of growth of that city. 

There are also some really funny bits in the description of this culture clash, as Ibn Rashed observes the Americans' strange exercises, which they do every morning, stretching out their arms and legs and bending their bodies in a way that seems incredibly strange as a form of prayer ritual!  Their is also the shock that the young bedouin men get, when they reach Harran and see the sea for the first time ever - it's a landscape that they just can't get their heads around, or begin to understand.  Although, Ibn Rashed reigns supreme throughout a large part of the novel, like most middle-men, he eventually becomes irrelevant, as Harran grows and prospers and a more traditional set of Arabian entrepreneurs takes notice and moves in, leaving Ibn Rashed to die a broken and irrelevant man. 

The role of the Emir
 
Munif makes an important comment about the role of the Emir in all of this.  When the Americans first arrive in Wadi al-Uyoun, it is under the protection of the Emir.  This is challenged by Miteb, but he is told in no uncertain terms that the Emir has taken the side of the Americans and will crush any of his subjects/kinsmen who object.  A new Emir comes into power during the development of Harran and is painted as a much more sympathetic character, albeit one who is completely enthralled by the presence of the Americans.  The new Emir becomes obsessed with the gadgets that the Americans bring him, such as the telescope and the radio.  I see the telescope as an important symbol of the Emir's impotency as he increasingly becomes a remote observer of the changes that are happening in his country.  As the novel progresses, there is an increasing sense of distance between the Emir and his subjects.  In true, autocratic style, the novel is only brought to an end by the Emir's death. 

The relentless march of progress

Towards the end of the novel there are a series of stories about the various different characters who show up in Harran.  The lorry-drivers, who gain our sympathy in their attempts to establish their business of transporting people from the older population centre of Ujra, to the new city of opportunities and wealth, Harran.  Eventually they are put out of business by bigger and faster lorries and even these, within a short period of time, are put out of business by a fleet of brand new passenger buses that ply the Ujra-Harran route. 

Likewise, the traditional healer Muffadi is side-lined, scorned and eventually scape-goated, after the arrival of a (supposedly) Western-qualified doctor, Subhi al-Mahmilji.  Muffadi becomes an incredibly important character towards the end of the novel - his demise coincides with the arrival of the first soldiers in Harran and the unleashing of their harsh regime, torturing and eventually killing Muffadi.  His death finally unites the workers and the inhabitants of Harran, as they go into open revolt against the Americans and the Emir, leaving an inconclusive end of the book. 

Other themes

There are many other themes in the novel, including the poignant story of Umm Khosh, an older woman in Wadi al-Uyoun whose son left with a travelling caravan, as many of the other local boys did, but failed to return, or even send her a message to let her know he was alive.  It's a theme of grief and madness and it was really touching how the villagers rallied around her and tried to shield her from the worst excesses of her insanity. 

There are the over-arching themes or separation and the loss of a traditional way of life.  Miteb's family is left scattered and defenseless, when he disappears into the desert.  We can take this literally, of course, but I think Miteb also symbolises the loss of a traditional way of life.  He becomes a ghost, a shadow that fades in the glaring sun of the desert, but reappears at night to comfort the bedouin and terrify the Emir and the Americans.

There is the theme of sex.  When a ship laden with scantily-clad women arrives in the American part of Harran, it throws the entire community into disarray.  The men become restless and unsettled, unable to concentrate on their work, or look at women in the same way again.  It's an insignificant and (seemingly) innocuous event, as far as the Americans are concerned, but it has a profound affect on the community in Harran and challenges their moral standards in a way that highlights the most negative aspects of cultural interaction. 

The Americans are keen to study bedouin culture and learn Arabic, so they come around with little leather-bound notebooks, asking questions that are incredibly inappropriate and rousing the suspicions of the local people.  This raises an interesting theme of the importance of the written word to Arabian culture.  The Americans' note-taking is seen as a kind of sorcery, even the leather covers are compared to the leather amulets that people wear to ward off evil.  Also, as far as the local people are concerned, there is only one book of importance, which is the Qu'ran - they can't understand why anyone would want to write words which are not somehow related to the Qu'ran and, in a sense, words themselves and the act of writing are given a religious significance that I'm sure the Americans would never have suspected. 

Cities of Salt is a long read and a sometimes difficult one, but it's an incredibly important book that touches on many themes of relevance to readers in the Arab world and deserves greater recognition by readers in the West.

Image credits

The photo of the book cover was taken by me - this is the copy of Cities of Salt that I read.

The beautiful photo of the desert in Saudi Arabia was taken by flickruser OrangeSmell aka Arnaud Desbordes, who is from Poitiers in France.  Thanks Arnaud for sharing this image with us, using the Creative Commons License.