Literary Safari

Our friend Luis ran in the Rio de Janeiro Marathon today. Early in the morning, we walked the half block over to Ipanema beach where an entire lane of Avenida Atlantica in Ipanema was closed off –as it is every Sunday. That’s where we stood to cheer on hundreds of runners, all sizes and fitness levels. I am so motivated to get into shape in this city.

There was a live band playing covers of popular American tunes on the island between the wide avenue’s lanes.

And, then, there was the postcard view. Maybe this picture speaks the thousand words that I cannot.

Guavas are believed to have originated in Mexico or Brazil. They’re one of my favorite fruits and here in Brazil, goiaba is mixed into everything–drinks, ice-creams, cakes, and breads.

When the Portugese came, they brought their tradition of marmalade making with them. Indigenous guavas were used to make the omnipresent jam that is called goiabada. A slice of this jam with queijo de minas (a kind of cheese) is a perfect combination, and named Romeu e Julieta, after one of literature’s most perfect loves.

I’ve been having many amazing guava-based foods here in Brazil, but Luis’s mom Sylvia’s baked guava souffle was otherworldly. (O, tempt not a desperate man!)

It arrived at the lunch table last Saturday all fluffy and puffy, a pale pink cloud of warm, swirly delight that melted in my mouth. Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast. It was all I could do to not dive into this heavenly pillow.

Sylvia drizzled it with creme de cassis, and served it with vanilla ice-cream. Delicioso! (The ingredients are simple, I’m told: egg whites, fresh guava, cream (and maybe sweet condensed milk?). Whip it all together (a lot) and bake.)

Read Literary Safari’s review of “Child of Dandelions” here.

Literary Safari: As a child growing up in Mombasa, you visited family in Uganda on many occasions. How did your childhood experiences influence or inspire the writing of this novel?

Shenaaz Nanji: I may have learned a little through osmosis. My father, despite his lack of schooling, wrote great articles as editor of a community magazine and signed articles with his initials, K.Z.A. popularly known as Kaza. My older brother, a voracious reader who devoured books, wrote 100 page-stories since he was 12 years old. I used to tag behind him, color his illustrations, read the books he’d recommend. Our best outing was a visit to the used bookstore. (There were no libraries at that time.) Then we’d trade these used books with friends.

When I grew up, Kenya & Uganda and Tanganyika was one region, called the East African Community with a common currency - similar to the states in the U.S.A. Initially, my parents lived in Uganda and then moved to Mombasa where I was born. Every year for two months, the maternal side of my family had a grand re-union - all the siblings gathered in Fort Portal in Uganda where my Bapa managed four farms. In fact the very day Idi Amin took power I was in Kampala and to my embarrassment cheered him at a rally, waving the Uganda flag, not knowing what was to follow.

LS: Were any of the characters in the novel or events inspired by true events?

Nanji: The story is Faction, a mix of facts and fiction. Some characters are real, some fictional. But every event in the story is based on history. We did have a one-eyed, very clever servant, Katana who left and rose to become a prosperous farmer. My Bapa owned farms in Fort Portal, one of which was Kasenda coffee farm. I visited my relatives in Uganda every year. And one of my uncles died mysteriously in the crises. We were told he had committed suicide. At that time there was such a mad rush to leave the country there was no time to investigate who’s and why’s.

LS: What were the challenges of writing this story? Being so close to it, did that make it more difficult or easier?

Nanji: Writing in general is as Sabine discovers like eating a golden ladhoo.

If you eat the sweet, you will regret it. If you don’t eat it, you will also regret it. (page 209)

Earlier versions of the story showed the military regime was wholly responsible for the crises. Later upon reflection, I learned that no one group of people is evil. There were many factors – poverty and class distinction, legacy of the colonial powers who carved up Africa like a pie, some Indians engaged in magendo, corruption, and Indians living in close-knit communities, refusing to integrate with ethnic Africans.

Ah! It would have been a totally different story if I had written it soon after the crises in Africa. Both the geographic distance and time have helped me view things with a different pair of glasses.

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Read an interview with author Shenaaz Nanji here. 

In 1972, military ruler General Idi Amin gave all 80,000 Asian Indians living in the Uganda 90 days to pack up and leave the country. As the BBC reported on August 7, 1972, “Asians, who are the backbone of the Ugandan economy, have been living in the country for more than a century. But resentment against them has been building up within Uganda’s black majority. General Amin has called the Asians “bloodsuckers” and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth.”

In her first young adult novel Child of Dandelions (Front Street, 2008), Canadian author Shenaaz Nanji sheds much needed light on the upheaval of Asian Indians in Uganda. The protagonist of Child of Dandelions is fifteen year old Sabine, a girl whose comfortable life is torn asunder on August 6, 1972, the day that Idi Amin issues his expulsion order for all Indians in Uganda. Shaken by the protests she encounters while window shopping in Little India, Sabine turns to her parents for protection as the 90 day countdown begins.

Her mother is eager to leave Uganda, but Sabine’s father, a wealthy Ismaeli businessman and landowner, is determined to stay:

“Nonsense!” Papa laughed his conch-shell laugh, and her little brother echoed it. … “We are even more Ugandan than the ethnic Africans. Not only were we born here, but we chose to be Ugandan citizens when other Indians remained British…

Sabine agrees with her father. Her family is different after all. She is not like the other Indians. Her best friend Zena is African. They’ve grown up together like “twin beans of one coffee flower” and Zena is just like her sister, even if others don’t see it that way.

Narmin …Nasrin … Sabine’s hands clenched at the names of her classmates. They were prissy prunes. She’d had a big fight with them after they called Zena goli. Mixing her African and Indian friends was like mixing oil with water.

As the 90 day countdown continues, however, the growing chants of “Muhindi, nenda nyumbani! Indian, go home” drown out Sabine’s optimism. Amidst reports of violent attacks against Indian families, the mysterious disappearance of her favorite uncle, and strained relations between her and Zena (whose uncle is a general and crony of Idi Amin), Sabine’s bubble bursts and she is forced to reexamine her understandings of race and class. (more…)

I originally published this post at Sepia Mutiny. Click here to read the thread of comments it generated.

For those of us who are so wishing that the public’s fascination with arranged marriages was over, well … it’s not. Back in 2005, there was a lot of buzz [including here] around financial writer Anita Jain’s New York magazine article “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” So much so that she got a book deal out of it.

Next month, her memoir Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India will be published in the UK, US, and India by Bloomsbury. The book is being pitched as a “witty, confessional memoir” that simultaneously records Jain’s romantic quest and the story of “a country modernizing at breakneck speed.” The big question it asks: Is the new urban Indian culture in which she’s searching for a husband really all that different from America? Has globalization changed the face of arranged marriage

I want to groan, but I’m trying to be openminded and wait till I’ve actually read the book. I can’t help it though. The red flags go up in my mind when I hear about another arranged marriage book. And, now, this one combines that with another buzz word “globalization.” Is this the chick lit version of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”?

[Below the fold, glimpses of an excerpt which appeared at the Guardian last weekend.]
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When summer rolls around, I find myself asking friends more than ever, “What are you reading right now?”

Meena recently forwarded me this list of “1,000 Books You Must Read Before You Die” culled from editor Peter Boxall’s 2006 book of the same name. It’s organized by century — pre-1700s to 2000’s — and was compiled with the help of over 100 literary critics worldwide.

As I skimmed my list, all I could think was “Wowie, I sure have my work cut out for me!”

If the list of 1,001 leaves you feeling overwhelmed too, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books  might be an easier starting point. Editor J. Peter Zane asked 125 writers to “provide a list, ranked, in order, of what you consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time.”  Authors featured include Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Alexander McCall Smith, Russell Banks, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Gordon, Michael Chabon, and Carl Hiaasen.

I was particularly interested in the Top Ten fiction picks of the (handful of) multicultural authors featured in this anthology.  What books have influenced their work over the years?  A look at Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, and Chitra Divakaruni’s picks follows, below the fold.

I’m going to pick up a book from each of these lists — most likely something I’ve never heard of — and try to get to it this summer. What about you? What are you reading this summer?

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What’s the difference between writing for print and writing for the web? Required reading for all bloggers and online content developers is Michael Agger’s piece “Lazy Bastards: How we read online” at Slate.

“It’s a jungle out there,” Agger says, examining the ideas of Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

Nielsen, however, believes that blogs are “good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easier to write. But they don’t build sustainable value.” (Mmm… I’m not so sure about that and neither is Agger.)

I paired my reading of this piece with editor Sarah Boxer’s history of “Blogs” in the New York Review of Books. She’s the editor of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (Vintage, 2008) which features excerpts from 27 literary blogs.

Boxer tells us that there are 100 million blogs in the world.

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references—doesn’t sit happily in a book. Yes, I’m talking about bloggy writing itself.

But, sometimes blogs can sit happily in print. You’ll know what I mean if you get your hands on the quarterly magazine Artful Blogging. It features full-color photos of visually inspiring (women-run) blogs from all over the world alongside posts by their creators on the impact on blogging on bloggers’ lives, and a look at what makes a great banner. The newsstand price is $14.95, but I got my copy of the summer 2008 issue for $2 from one of those Broadway book vendors.

If you’re interested in being featured in an upcoming issue of Artful Blogging, write about your blog-inspired transformation in your own blog, and e-mail the link to Staci Dumoski, Managing Editor at sdumoski at stampington.com.

On Father’s Day, I offer up a short tribute to my Papa (1947-2001), a short piece I originally began in response to NPR’s “This I Believe” call for essays.

One day, soon after my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I placed a blank notebook in front of him. “Papa,” I said, “Do you want to write together?”

We sat down at the beige marble table in our dining room and wrote for 20 minutes. We used Claire Fontaine notebooks, made in France. Their smooth Gingham covers and blank pages, which I had discovered at a crammed West Village stationary shop soon after Papa’s diagnosis, ached to be pressed with a pen.

I began a fictional account of my grandfather’s first journey from India to Ghana in 1932. Papa about how he was rescued from a fire when he was an infant and me about my grandfather’s migration from India to Ghana in 1932. Afterwards, we read our words to each other.

In that half hour, I felt closer to my father than ever before.

I hoped Papa would initiate another writing session with me, but he did not. I kept filling up one Claire Fontaine notebook after another anyway. My words ran quickly across the lines, rubbing shoulders with big, fat tears. When they met on the page, they bled into each other—as if to let me know that it wasn’t what I was writing that mattered so much as the fact that I was writing at all. Each word that poured out of me was a breath—a wish, a prayer, an offering, a release.

My writing had become my life jacket. It was helping me float above the choppy currents surrounding my father’s inevitable decline.

After Papa passed away, I took on the mountainous task of sifting through the papers in his basement home office. There, I found unsent letters to former business partners, stacks of yellow legal pads filled with pages of poetically phrased to-do lists, and a few Claire Fontaine notebooks filled with an almost illegible scrawl. The first page read:

My dear daughter said writing my thoughts every morning is a good thing to do. It opens up the creative impulses in you … So I have started …

A detailed chronicle of my father’s struggle with his illness followed. I flipped to his last entry. Undated, it seemed to have been written a few weeks before he passed away:

It’s 5:30 pm but it’s already dark outside. Fall is here and winter not too far away. Seems the same way with my life. I am in the fall of my life and the winter seems to be around the corner. I wonder if it will be a short winter. …

Writing, I discovered, had also been my father’s buoy when his world seemed to be caving in on him, when he couldn’t breathe anymore.

I am my father’s daughter in more ways than one. Whenever a shadow falls upon my day, I imagine him reaching for his pen during the autumn of his life. That image inspires me to pull out my own notebook and get my pen moving. Writing, I know, will always be my savior and my friend.

Author Haruki Murakami spoke to me today through the  (June 9 &16) “The Fiction Issue” of The New Yorker, where he describes his decision to trade his life as the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo for that of a full-time writer. He was 33 at the time. I turned 34 today.

In “The Running Novelist” he writes:

It was the season opener, and the Swallows were taking on the Hiroshipma Carp. … The lead-off batter for the swallows was Dave Hilton, a young American player who was new to the team. Hilton got a hit down the left-field line. The crack of bat meeting ball echoed through the stadium. Hilton easily rounded first and pulled up to second. And it was at just that moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel. I still remember the wide-open sky, the fel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.

I didn’t have any ambition to be a “novelist.” I just had the strong desire to write a novel. I had no concrete image of what I wanted to write about–just the conviction that I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. …

Is there a word for that feeling that overcomes you when a piece of writing so distinctly, so personally speaks to you? I want to know that word and I so wish I could use it today.

It may just be a coincidence that I read this piece on the morning of my 34th birthday, or maybe it’s what Carl Jung called ’synchronicity.’ I’m just about the age that Murakami was when he decided to walk his different road, and I’ve just started walking mine. I officially went “freelance” a few weeks ago to make official room (and no more excuses) for my own writing.

Ever since I made my decision, people have been asking me, “Are you working on a novel?”

“No,” I answer, not sure how much to elaborate. It’s been scary to say that you don’t have one particular project in mind. Until I read Mr. Murukami’s words. Though I don’t yet possess that single “concrete image” of what I will write yet, I have arrived at the moment where I know that I must make the time to find it. That conviction has come alive in me.

There was another aspect to Murukami’s piece which also spoke to me: his reflection on the place of physical activity, namely running, in his writing life. (He is the author of a memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, forthcoming this August from Random House. The book details his journey to becoming a marathon runner.) (more…)

If you’ve ever traveled to Boston, Baltimore, or Washington DC aboard the cheap Chinatown bus, you’ll want to check out yesterday’s NYT. “Dreams and Desperation on Forsyth Street” examines a small corner of Chinatown–Forsysth St. and East Broadway–the throbbing heart of the long-distance bus economy. The Chinatown bus depot is a “bubbling cauldron of ambition, creativity and competition — the New York immigrant experience boiled down to its essentials, ” writes Saki Knafo. And, now, it’s in danger of being shut down.

In the piece, Knafo sensitively portrayed the challenges and dreams of immigrants, shedding light on larger issues by simply focusing on one small city block. Her interview with a 43 year old ticket vendor Lin Ah-jioa especially stood out to me.

Ms. Lin works 13 out of 14 days and shares an apartment with her husband and daughter and four other people, including her uncle. In a narrow passageway with “grease-spattered walls” Knafo notices hundreds of tiny Chinese characters. These letters, it turns out, are poems that Ms. Lin’s uncle writes. Here’s one of those poems:

In the morning I go to the restaurant to work.
I come back to my bed in the evening.
My sweet dream has come true: I have turned into a ghost.

This image of a wall lined with calligraphy reminded me of Angel Island, the San Francisco island immigration station where hundreds of poems were carved into the walls by detained immigrant laborers from China from 1910 to 1940. These poems were discovered in 1970 and the site where they were recorded is a national historical landmark. [related article]

One example:

“I wish I could travel on a cloud far away, reunite with my wife and son. When the moonlight shines on me alone, the night seems even longer.”

Click on the image below to find out more about Angel Island poetry.

I’ve been on Poetry Friday hiatus for the past couple of months (though I was doing a South Asian themed series for adults at Sepia Mutiny). Today: poetic justice and Robert Frost, plus a giveaway of “Voice of the Poet: Robert Frost” audio CD and book (Random House). A full round up is at Snoring Scholar.

In the news this week was a story about a group of underage teens from Vermont who threw a party of drunken proportions at a farmhouse in Rimington. The farmhouse turned out to be none other than Robert Frost’s summer writing haven (which now belongs to Middlebury College).

From Vermont’s WCAX TV News:

On December 28, about two dozen young people trashed a summer home that [Robert] Frost visited for decades to write and reflect. A quiet farm house in Ripton on a road not taken by most. An ideal spot for an out-of-the-way illegal drinking party where kids wouldn’t get caught. Or so they thought.

Broken windows, furniture, and dishes littered the home. The partying vandals discharged a fire extinguisher, vomited and urinated on rugs. Nearly $11,000 in damage left behind.

28 people were charged, all but two of them teenagers. [full story]

So, what was the punishment meted out to these “delinquents”? County State Attorney John Quinn decided on “poetic justice” — a two-session poetry class with Frost biographer Jay Pirini which is intended to “show the vandals the error of their ways and the redemptive power of poetry.”

“I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was, and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience,” said Addison County State’s Attorney John Quinn. [see full Boston Globe article]

Chances are they’ll be reading this poem:

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

Read the full text of this poem at Bartleby.

If you want in on Literary Safari’s giveaway of the CD of Robert Frost reading his own poetry, which is part of Random House Audio’s “The Voice of the Poet” series, just put your name down in the comments section and we’ll do a random drawing by next Friday, June 13.

Trailers for books are pretty commonplace nowadays, but bestselling author Robin Cook (mastermind of the medical thriller) and former Disney head Michael Eisner have cooked up (no pun intended!) an online plot that takes this concept a step further: href=”http://www.foreignbody.tv/”>Foreign Body, a “50 episode exotic thriller” (each two-minute episode can be watched for free on your computer or downloaded to your cell phone) that’s essentially serving as a prequel and promo for Cook’s forthcoming novel of the same title, which will be published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in August.

A doctor by training, Cook began writing medical thrillers 36 years ago, and has made his name with books such as Terminal, Shock, Seizure, and his most popular Coma , which was published in 1977.

In recent years, he began noticing that his readers weren’t getting any younger. “The trouble is, now there are so many other things trying to get people’s attention – in particular, the younger people — and rather than try and fight it, you really have to kind of use it,” Cook told NPR’s Nate DiMeo. [see full NPR story ] last week.

To the rescue is this low-budget ($500,000 budget) “exotic thriller” which zig zags from Malibu, California to New Delhi, India and has at its heart a plot of intrigue and drama about outsourcing—of the medical kind. That is, the growing industry of medical tourism in India, which brought over 500,000 foreign patients to India for medical care in 2005. (Estimates project medical tourism could bring India as much as $2.2 billion per by 2012, but will those numbers be dented by this series/book’s look into the “dark side of medical tourism”?).

The story:

A group of dangerous Indian beauties, brimming with hope and desire are brought to the sunny shores of Southern California and are promised the American dream. They are taken in by a group of young, cutthroat medical entrepreneurs who hope to train them and cultivate their nursing skills for their own mysterious ends. The women soon become seduced by the brash and ambitious charmer who lords over them, but for him, his lust for the one, mysterious, unattainable beauty threatens to unravel the very conspiracy he built. But who is seducing whom and what exactly are the women really being trained to do? With freedoms in America they could never imagine, the girls discover they just might get what they want, no matter the consequences or the risks involved.

If you’re rolling your eyes or arching your eyebrows already, don’t stop. The first episode has a bunch of bikini-clad Indian nurses frolicking in the Southern California beach and the second or third episode has a scene where a US-based entrepreneur is interviewing candidates to come to the US. The opening scene has a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.

I started watching the series as soon as I heard the NPR story on its launch date. My impression so far: Think Baywatch meets ER meets Zee TV drama meets daytime soap with a twist of “here’s another reason to vilify globalization and outsourcing” thrown in. Of course, I don’t know how this will end, but it’s leading up to a novel about a “sinister, multilayered conspiracy of global proportions” so, need I really say anymore?

You can watch a compilation of week one’s episodes at Sepia Mutiny, where this post was originally published.