Well-thumbed; JW.

Brilliant. 

Lyrical. Witty. Authentic. Eye-opening. 

Shining a light on what she writes, why she writes & how she writes. 

Intertextual; a love of literature. 

Life in Accrington I'd known about & likewise of her time in Oxford due to ground covered in Oranges. But the breakdown? Writing her way out of it; figuring through. That particular chapter, The Night Sea Voyage, came up like a sharp left turn for the reader. 

Moving. Engaging. The recriminatory conversational creature. Courageous. 

The adoption papers trail; making the novel more than ever into a compelling page-turner. 

There were so many lines too, thoughts & themes which I wanted to savour. As the above photo shows, the closer I moved towards the ending, the more I felt struck by & wanted to revisit. 

______________________

.. In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
  It is probably why I write as I do - collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin . . . 

[41]

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

... Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle & an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn't a method; it's me.   [...]
 Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as a memory and warning.
  The Passion: 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.'
  Written on the Body: 'Why is the measure of love loss?'
  The PowerBook: 'To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.'   [156]

...  Then a string of lines start replaying in my head - lines from my own books - 'I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.' 'Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I've been looking for us both all my life . . . '
  I have written love narratives and loss narratives - stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now - the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.   [160]

. . .

On text memorised,

I had lines inside me - a string of guiding lights. I had language.

[9]

4. THE TROUBLE WITH A BOOK . . .

At home one of the six books was unexpected: a copy of Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory. It was a beautiful edition with pictures, and it had belonged to a bohemian, educated uncle   [...]
I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances.  [...]
Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost it turned away from something I couldn’t even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance . . .

[37-8]

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.
A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. 

[40]

I looked out and it didn’t look like a mirror or a world. It was the place I was, not the place where I would be. The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away.  [...]
‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own.’ 

[43]

5. AT HOME

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. 

  There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know this from the chilly nights on the doorstep.

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

  On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
  The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside of me now offered a rescue rope.   
[...]  
  But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world - proper and splendid.   

[163]

It was a rope slung across space. It was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and I believe it was an even bet which way it went. It was the loss of everything through the fierce and unseen return of the lost loss. The door into the dark room had swung open.   [...]

  The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen.

  But I was alive.

  And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the broken pieces of my mind. 

[169]

14. THIS APPOINTMENT TAKES PLACE IN THE PAST

.. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn't believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated .. 

[185]

15. THE WOUND

  All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to my identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar. 

[223]

Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. 

Vintage: London, 2012

The day I cared again

What is the what - Dave Eggers

Growing up in the eighties was confusing at times. I think maybe the most difficult question I asked my parents concerned South Africa, and maybe more importantly the UN. If so many people are being forced to live in poorer circumstances, how can the world just stand by and watch? Why does the UN even exist if we cannot help?

In the nineties, the Netherlands were blessed with some great new comedic talent. One particular group, de Vliegende Panters captured the apparent apathy through a song called Sarajewo (rather freely translated):

I count the bodies, and the sun, it burns
I see intestines, an appendix - no!
A rectum! - Ah yes, a rectum - no!
Sorry, it is the twelve finger... duodenum
- I see intestines everywhere
spread out in the streets
with all the hatred
of all the Hutsies - no! The Tutus!
They were the Hutsus and the Footsies
- On Mururoa, or no, Ruanda,
In Ruanda... in Madurodam.

Oh the misery, on this hump of clay, we're so involved
with all the hatred - I could cry! We're so righteous,
so righteous in Sarajewo, or no, Ruanda, and
Chechnya, and idunno! Sarajewo, or no, Ruanda, and
Babangida, and idunno! And
All will die.

And finally, in the noughties, I reached that stage. So many conflicts, so little we can do! With all the politics and history involved, it even seemed to difficult to form an opinion on any of the situations. As a result, I became indifferent. It was easy enough to get rid of any guilt, paying a small contribution to the WWF. I even - after a healthy glass of wine, and courtesy of a tearjerking Annie Lennox song - donated a more considerable amound to Children in need, or some other BBC show. The fact that I forgot what it was for is testament to the situation I was in.

But not now. Thanks to Valentino Achak Deng.

With so many conflicts, so many disadvantaged, so many children underfed and dying of various illnesses and accidents, there are bound to plentiful harrowing stories to inform the masses. The media just pick what they want to hear - Lions? Great! More explosions! You lost your parents, your family? Sure... - and often do more harm than good. At least, all the stories seem to merge into one, and it is repeated in every conflict. Apparently, all I needed was to hear one person's story, from the beginning, with no added sugar.

Valentino Achak Deng (Achak) is a refugee from Sudan, and even though he only arrived in Atlanta in 2001, his story is about a conflict long before Darfur arrived on our radar. Like Iraq, Sudan is the result of a colonial mishap, where at the end of the British reign, lines were drawn in the wrong places. Like Iraq, it is too difficult a story to tell in a book review, and even Achak cannot paint the full picture in his 500-page life story.

Achak met with Dave Eggers (from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) through his contact from the Lost Boys refugee program. He had a story to tell, but needed someone to write it in a more consistent and narrative fashion. The collaboration has worked out for the best. Eggers surprisingely managed something more coherent than his heartbreaking work, linking Achak's observations and experiences in Sudan with his modern life as a relocated refugee in the US.

The backdrop shows us how Achak is attacked in his own home in Atlanta, and how he's dealt with by the burglars, the police, and the hospital. He comes to the realization that after a few years in the States, he still depends on other people, and he has never managed to give them something in return, other than failure and misery.

In the mean time, Achak tells his story. To the burglar's child, to the police officer, to the hospital administrator, to the people visiting the gym where he works, to us. The first part of his story he tells us how he grew up in Marial Bai, Southern Sudan (near Darfur), where Arabs and Dinka, Achak's people, seemingly lived in harmony. As the government grows more and more corrupt, and the Dinka feel more and more marginalised, clashes are inevitable. Eventually the government incites hatred amongst local Arab tribes and supports them to pillage Dinka villages, including Marial Bai. Achak spends most of the attack hiding in a tree, but ends up having to run for his life, not knowing what happened to his friends and family. This is in the early to late eighties.

It's an incredible story. And it does involves lions, crocodiles, helicopter attacks, explosions. But most life and death situations are about perseverence. If you give up, you die. If you sit yourself down, rest against a tree, close your eyes, you're gone. The large line of boys travelling through Southern Sudan, including Achak, will pass. Boys die every day, most of them exhausted, underfed, leaning against a tree.

It's a never ending story. The Lost Boys will reach Ethiopia, and with the experience of burying his friends, Achak becomes a burial boy at the camp - a rather safe job compared with the water boys who need to fear the crocodiles and the wood boys who need to fear any wild animal that might prey on them. Knowing the leader of his line of boys, Achak manages to get into school, and get some form of education. But Ethiopia has its own share of problems, and the local people don't particularly enjoy having to share their land with thousands of refugees. When the Sudanese are forced to leave - the UN officials left as soon as the first shots were fired between Ethiopian and Eritrean forces - they are followed by a barrage of gunfire and mortars, and again Achak runs.

It's a change of focus. Along with the many miles on foot, we learn with Achak while his world grows bigger each day. He hears of Ethiopia, he sees a white man, who must be God, but is only an Englishman. He ends up in Kakuma, where he becomes close friends with a Japanese aid worker, who Achak feels shouldn't be there. No one should be leaving family and friends and safety behind to live in dire circumstances in Kakuma, or any refugee camp. Ideally. The two end up leading a drama group that is allowed to go to Nairobi, a city with buildings of three stories and higher. With a mall. With his girfriend, they find what surely must be the best shop in the mall, with all the lights, which ends up a grocery store.

Telling someone your story, fictionalised as it may be, might be the most powerful tool we have - why else should we know how to speak?

I am alive and you are alive so we must fill te air with our words (...) All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

The historical setting, the age resemblance, knowing that whilst I was on holiday in Portugal when Diana died in Paris, when Achak was in Nairobi confused how the whole city could be in mourning over one person he'd never seen. Knowing I was on my way to my journalism class as Achak was on board of his flight, ready to leave for the US, whilst airplanes became weapons and destroyed the Twin Towers. I always cared about the lives of my friends, but this book has turned my indifference back into care, and although this is only one man's voice, I will remember his story as I hear about the many conflicts that may come.

The small print

Plot: I guess I'm grading whether someone's life is worth reading. But it depends on how it's written, and even though it is presented a novel, it is with such honesty, and with such care for putting it in perspective, that it can measure up with the best. *****

Fun: Right. How can reading about a teenager fighting for his life through the deserts of Southern Sudan, seeing his friends die left and right be fun?! Well, read this book. There's a lot of wit in the presentation, and since for most of the book, Achak is only a child, we learn about the war from a child's point of view, giving at times comic relief to a harsh situation. ****

Novelty: There must be more books by or about refugees. There should be more. But I haven't read them. And I doubt they are all as carefully constructed as this. *****