The Rabbi's Cat

Let me forewarn you. The Rabbi's Cat, by Joann Sfar, is just one of those novels that you read through once and go, "Wow, that was really good, but what in the HUELL did I just read?" ("Huell" is how you say "hell" after the magnitude of this novel gives you a crippling speech impediment). At the point of writing this blog post, I've read it through once, trying to pay attention to the words and the panels as two combating stories working toward the same ultimate message. The only problem is that every page is so packed with a blend of symbolism, wit, heart-rending sadness, and general good storytelling that it's difficult to comprehend everything being handed to you at once. Even more, to push past the initial whimsy and read this book on a deeper level is a challenge of its own that I'm still trying to surmount. I'd almost dare call this a flaw in the presentation of the book, but the fact is The Rabbi's Cat is a story so multifaceted and welcoming that one could read it at any different stage in their life and take a unique personal experience out of it after each read. Younger readers could certainly relate to Zlabya's "grass is always greener" complex while more seasoned readers can relate to the Rabbi's moral dilemma in finding oneself uprooted and still finding higher ground to resettle on.

The first thing I noticed about this novel is how starkly different the characters

are, but how they all work together as a family to overcome adversity. As in classic novel writing, the cat goes unnamed and thus seems to represent the people of Algeria as a whole, but you get into his head so much more than in a normal short story or textual novel.

Even though the cat doesn't give the whole story, you see through his world view and thus can draw your own conclusions on situations through people's expressions and other contextual clues. Then you have the Rabbi, a holy man who still struggles with his own human characteristics, but ultimately ends up being lovable because he is so perfectly human. We aren't supposed to see that he's perfect, we're supposed to see that he makes mistakes and gets pissed off and smiles just like the rest of us, and this theme of "everyone's still human, no matter what title they're given" gives this book its momentum. Then, his poor, naive daughter who has no idea what she wants out of life but acts completely on opportunity realizes that she'll never be happy until she's happy with herself; this kind of moral is something I wish we saw more of in our little model world we've made up in our brains. Best of all, every side character gives another little perspective, another inherent truth that the cat and rabbi learn from and assimilate into their lives. By the end of the novel, through all the tribulation that the Rabbi has endured in his grand uprooting, he learns a funny lesson. He learns that people just don't know. He doesn't know, and he learned everything he knows from people that don't know, so by proxy, he doesn't freakin' know if what he's been doing this whole time is right. So his answer? Well, may as well keep doing these rituals cause I'm good at them, but get them done fast so he doesn't get yelled at by his apprentice's wives.

I guess the reason I like this book so much is because it speaks to me as a fairy-tale rendition of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Through all the trial and all the worry and everything that we put ourselves through in order to fulfill some book's definition of success, the world's not really gonna change that much. The birds will still chirp before and after we all kill each other in endless wars. The world's still going to turn even if you break a few silly rules, and you're certainly not going to be struck down by a vengeful creator with nothing better to do. Going back to my dubious disclaimer from before, I have only read this book once - these are my initial findings on some Rosetta Stone-magnitude material that's going to probably take me five good readings to get a proper grasp on. But wow, that was really good.

Nervous Conditions, part 1

Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, follows a girl named Tambu. The novel opens with the revolting statement, "I was not sorry when my brother died," and from there on it becomes quite apparent to the reader that Tambu's life is what we would describe as "jacked up." Now, that isn't to say that her life was backwards simply because she grew up in much different conditions - she was relatively happy with her daily routine of working in the fields, carrying water from the river to her family's home, and eating sadza day after day. It's fairer to say that the reason that Tambu's life was so hectic was because of outside pressures that seemed to systematically tear her from her ambitions. She has only one real mission in life, that being to attend school and attain the affluence and knowledge that comes from having a university education. Every step she takes toward realizing this dream, however, she meets resistance in unique, sometimes even disturbing ways.

When you boil everything down, Nervous Conditions is basically about a girl growing up, trying to live her dream of getting an education, seeing the harsh reality of everything that comes with that dream, but still boldly, if not blindly, chasing after that final goal. Think Ziggy Stardust, except without the drug use and if David Bowie lived in a society where he inherently wasn't allowed to succeed at anything. So Tambu tries with all of her might, and with her hard work in conjunction with a great bit of luck, she manages to go under her uncle's wing and attend his private school, and this is where things start getting really strange for Tambu. She's thrust into a world where everything is foreign yet awe-inspiring. This is the part of the book where I really started to feel like I could be in her shoes, that single, defining moment of "Oh my God, I have no idea what I'm doing here." She walks into her uncle's home and is nearly dumbstruck by the sheer amount of technology that she finds; things that we find in nearly every building in America and take complete advantage of, things like running water and ammonia cleaners. But her experience of it, her complete innocence of all things we consider basic amenities and the fact that she was almost floored by them is really an amazing bit of psychology at work. Although her old way of life kept her plenty happy and alive for the first 13 years, it only takes a few short months within this new, coddling environment to make her wish to never go back. This speaks volumes about our society, where we think the next thing Steve Jobs craps out is something we can't live without, yet experiences like Tambu's likely happen every day. And the scariest part is, just like Tambu, we grow so accustomed to this new, easier life that an honest living with stupid things like "manual labor" just seem backwards. It's an important question of whether we are progressing or actively regressing through our dependency on technology, but that's a philosophical question and I'm a physical therapist major. Apples and oranges, you know.

So, moving on, Tambu also experiences a major dilemma within her relationship with her cousin. As was stated in class, Nervous Conditions can be viewed as a semi-autobiographical novel, with the author's personality fairly evenly split between these two foiling girls, Nyasha and Tambu. While Tambu actively searches for higher meaning through concrete goals and institution, Nyasha actively rejects every goal suggested to her and tries to, more or less, tear everything down and just be her own person at whatever the cost. Tambu studies while Nyasha smokes cigarettes. Tambu goes inside when commanded and Nyasha stays outside and dances in a dress that barely covers her bits and pieces. Apples and oranges. The beautiful thing, though, is the fact that they both see through all the B.S. that their respective families have dumped onto them and find serious comraderie in their personal battles for a life worth fighting for. So even though Nyasha isn't exactly a good influence on Tambu, Tambu would give nearly anything to see Nyasha safe and happy, and this type of symbiotic love is something I think we can all relate to. I'm also excited to see how their relationship grows and mutates into either a huge hindrance or the most crucial step in Tambu's success in school and life in general. Personally, I'd like to see both of them lose the chains that bind them to their families, because that's when their true potential would have to come out.

From the pressure of her parents telling her she will only fail to the shackles that come simply with being a female in patriarchal Zimbabwe, Tambu's struggle is one that all of her followers can relate to, and possibly even to feel humbled by. Nervous Conditions raises many a good question about the implications of introducing technology to people that haven't needed it up until the moment they saw it, and I'm sure I'll be navel-gazing over this one for a while. I guess I have to leave this blog post in a "to be continued" state for now, because at only halfway through, I don't really know where to expect this novel to go next.

Ngugi

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of "Decolonization of the Mind," introduced us to the very relevant idea that under a colonizing power, people aren't really themselves. In order to shed this watered-down formed of humanity, Africans as a whole had to unload the burden of imperfection from their shoulders and take pride in their own lives and the deep roots that their ancestors cultivated for them. Without this spirit, Ngugi commented that blacks in Africa were simply letting themselves become a casualty - a statistic with no name, unless they claimed a name as their own.

The reason I say that Ngugi's theory of decolonization of the mind is so relevant is because his essay and his two short stories, "Wedding at the Cross" and "Minute of Glory," definitely capture the zeitgeist of our generation. I was talking with some of my buddies the other night, and we came to the conclusion that the reason that we and everyone we know is so quick to go out, try every drink and drug in existence, cover ourselves in tattoos, and generally rage to the fullest extent every single day is due to the overwhelming notion that we just might die at any moment.

Now let me take that back a step. "Minute of Glory" and "Wedding at the Cross" both tell two entirely separate stories with vast differences between setting, symbolism and roles of characters, but they do parallel each other in a couple important ways. The first is the fact that the ends of both stories revolve around a forceful decision made at the last moment that alters the protagonist's life forever. While Glory's ending is a bit more depressing, expressing the waste of a perfect opportunity to grow for a single minute of revenge, Ngugi is cunning in telling the reader that decolonizing oneself is not an easy task. This is where the second parallel lies; the decision to decolonize for both heroines involved completely abandoning everything they knew as "safe." For Wanjiru ("Minute of Glory"), she had to make the decision to steal hundreds of dollars, risking her life and livelihood has a barmaid, but the story ended with her martyrdom of her freedom teaching another to find her own way to feel human again and to use Wanjiru's mistakes as a guide - in that way, she lived up to the beauty her name beheld for her. For Miriamu ("Wedding at the Cross"), she had to give up money, her parents, her husband and her whole family in order to go back to the simple life that she first fell in love with. For this sacrifice, she turned away from the cross, yes, but was greeted back into her life of genuine love for her friends and savior by a crowd of people dancing, laughing and singing.

So back to everyone dying. To elaborate on what I said before, the reason we said everyone in our generation's willing to live so heavily for the day boils down to the fact that we've been conditioned to be afraid. Look at it this way: the president in office when I was born was banging his aides, the president after that started a war that's seen many of our friends and family off to the afterlife, and our current president promised us something new and frankly, I'm getting desensitized by the whole ordeal. The World Trade Center was hit by terrorists and thousands of innocent lives were lost in a single horrific event when I was in fourth grade, just barely getting a grasp on the world. Now, our privacy is slowly slipping out from under us and the world seems to be edging closer and closer to either nuclear war or natural cataclysm. We're simply all nervous wrecks, so Ngugi's works can teach us all a valuable lesson: Know yourself, know your strengths and especially your weaknesses, and never settle for a life living down on your knees. He leaves us with a powerful warning too; this huge responsibility can be squandered in a single act of revenge. Keep one last thing in mind though. At the end of "Wedding at the Cross," when Miriamu cast aside her false life and lived as free as the spirit she contained, she was greeted by a chorus of dancing and singing, and her captors could do nothing but watch and weep.

Nadine Gordimer

In her works, Nadine Gordimer gives a harsh view into the world of Apartheid-era South Africa and all of the backwards realities that come with it. She not only gave light to the patronizing racism that seemed to permeate every otherwise rational person that appeared in her tales, but the sheer wall that being anything less than a white, middle-to-upper class male presented all around you. Her empathetic use of character, as a white woman writing these stories, truly puts the reader directly in the shoes of someone struggling just to make ends meet in a world that keeps crumbling under its own weight. Most disturbing, though, is the fact that she tends to use nameless characters to represent a whole rather than a single scenario - the true horror of Apartheid doesn't become so apparent until you realize that no one was safe from it, not even those who thought they had all the power.

The most striking story, in my opinion, was "Six Feet of the Country." To me, it's easy to make deep parallels between Apartheid and the United States pre-civil rights movement. In a nutshell: white people were in control and veritably drunk with power, everyone else pretty much bowed to them, then a bunch of oppressed people and some of the free ones spoke up, blood was spilled, laws were signed and now the problem's on the long road to being solved. I guess it didn't occur to me until our discussion of "Six Feet" that Apartheid was swallowing the nation whole. Those with no power were too frightened to do anything but submit, and those with power were too blind (and too busy mocking those with no power, the poor devils) to see that they were being slowly choked to death right next to their complacent brothers. But even deeper, there was certainly an issue with sexism - a common theme in both "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants" and "Amnesty" was that even given some semblence of power, as in the case of "Good Climate", women were largely treated as pawns in the man's game of power struggle. You may be able to help run a gas station or teach children and help maintain a farm, but it's the men who are in control. They're the ones fighting for freedom, making the money, taking your purity then going right back out on the warpath. And what if you were a good, intelligent woman like in "Amnesty" or "Six Feet"? Well, you got to take care of everyone and get called ignorant for doing so. Not a huge payoff. The other facet of Gordimer's works that make them so genius are her metaphors. Every one of her stories spins a binding tale, but even the smallest shrug of the shoulders represents something monumental in the struggle with Apartheid. All of her stories have a common theme of powerlessness, but she takes an interesting turn and chooses to represent this crushing feeling in the interactions of her characters. A good example of this is in "Good Climate", when the nameless con-man seems to drift in and out of the narrator's life, only stopping to have a drink with her, take advantage of her to make her feel young once more, and then walk out the front door just like that with a bit of "borrowed" cash. Even more striking is a quote from "Six Feet", when Petrus "just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do everything; if they don't, it is because they won't." This heartless man of a narrator will barely pick up the phone to help a man that's relying on him to see a dead relative rest in peace, and yet even he knows, however sarcastically, that he has no power in the large scope of things.

Apartheid was an all-encompassing evil that no one in South Africa was unaffected by. It brought out the worst in people, and yet it brought out some beautiful, poignant works that we can still study and feel that same terrible feeling in the pit of our stomach that these very men and women dealt with for decades. In that respect, I learned a lot from Nadine Gordimer, and would definitely read more of her works. To be put in the shoes of these three flawed but very human narrators and glimpse at what the world was like in Apartheid-era South Africa is jarring, to say the least; it leaves a strange, empty feeling that there's only worse things deeper down, but you have to keep digging. It's cliche, but to say we should be grateful for the lives we live today is a vast understatement, and so I guess the only thing left to do is keep digging and hope we learn something on the other side.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe, author of the texts "An Image of Africa," "Girls at War," and "The Madman" which we studied in class, opened his readers' eyes to the vast ignorance that the self-deluded European world holds toward African history, particularly in reference to authentic African literature. That is, Achebe explores the fundamental struggle for Africans to create a history of literature in a world that still believes most Africans are heathens that speak in grunts and stab pigs all day. More importantly, he also writes with a razor-sharp political edge, commenting on the pointlessness of writing down your history and culture (or even living) when one sheepishly accepts another's history and culture as his own. His works are not particularly happy tales, but the stories they weave and the genuine outrage that each one perpetuates directly from Achebe's hand is striking, especially to a member of one raised in said self-deluded European world.

First and foremost, I want to address how hard Achebe's works made me look in the mirror and realize that I am exactly the dumb-ass, preconceived notion-filled fool that "imagines he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things" that he wrote about. It's kind of startling to think that you have a few things figured out in this world, but then you read "An Image of Africa". Then you realize that instead of taking an hour to read a book about other cultures, meet new people, or brush up on another language, I would probably use that hour to play Killzone 3. I am a younger version of the old man at the beginning of his speech. It makes me feel better to say I'm simply a victim of circumstance.

With that kick to the ribs out of the way, I thoroughly enjoyed Achebe's works. "An Image of Africa", full of tearing sarcasm and coarse language, is a testament to the power of objective readership. In my opinion, an abridged version of this speech should be stapled to anything that identifies itself as "news" or "current events." He is venomous in his attack on Heart of Darkness, and for good reason - why should one man's opinion be passed off as fact, ever? Heart of Darkness was simply a conduit for his heartfelt rage toward all things passed off as fact simply because they were written to be interpreted that way, and that burden weighs down on all of us. Our nation has a known phenomenon called the "media bias," stories that involve tragedy on someone else's part get better ratings, and let's be totally honest, we're all pretty much okay with it.

Furthermore, "Girls at War" and "The Madman" gave vivid insight to just how backwards colonized Africa was. The former begs harsh philosophical questions about what truly dictates "good" or "bad" in a time when being blown up by a mid-afternoon air raid is a legitimate concern and the latter explored the effects of labeling and left the protagonist a hollow shell of a man by the end of the story. What Achebe was addressing in all of these stories is the effect of "colonization of the mind" and its many methods of destroying humanity. Of course, this is all an allusion to the white Europeans and Africans making black Africans feel like animals, but the most disturbing part is the fact that it worked. Whites felt as if they were somehow more than human in a world where the elements or disease will take your fragile life all the same, and in "Girls at War," Achebe showed that even the most strong-willed of people will revert back to their animal instincts of hoarding, fornication, and simply looking out for oneself only when survival is the name of the game. So what's the answer?

Don't play the game. Just go crazy. Do things the way that you want to see them done and dedicate your life to seeing that they get done.

Simple, but very, very relevant. Hmmm.

The Stranglehold of English Lit.

Felix Mnthali's "The Stranglehold of English Lit." is a brief but poignant rant which begs the question: why, to get higher education as an African, must one learn about everything except the proud culture, specifically the writings, of their own people? Mnthali is tinged over the fact that this education is wasted reading works of English "literature," which intensively explore stupid made-up problems that plague the lives of stupid made-up people that were made up by spoiled rich people in the first place. Furthermore, of these stories "that made Jane Austen's people wealthy beyond compare", many were about slave owners. Yet no mention of the lives or plight of slaves is given, or if it is, it's very, very understated.

Now, this is a broad generalization, but it gives rise to my own set of questions. First off, Mnthali gives special attention to the author Jane Austen. Having read exactly none of her works, my first question is what was the impact of her books, and why does this infuriate Mnthali so much? I'm assuming that it's mainly because the "problems" of her novels look like a scraped knee compared to the gaping wound of denied freedoms and opportunities that all Africans endure on a daily basis. And, after reading "Creating Space for a Hundred Flowers to Bloom," was this lack of African literature to study created by the British mandating that the brunt of African education be based on British ways? Or was it due to the sheer lack of African literature that existed at the time due to the fact that written African culture was still sort of in its infancy? Finally, is this still the case today? I can't imagine that in today's knowledge-driven world, a nation like England would enforce their old ideas and literature on Africa with no room to expand using their own language and culture as fertile ground.

Speaking professionally, this poem has little bearing or effect on my life. I'm currently going to school to get a degree in physical therapy, so unless I get into a deep philosophical debate with one of my patients about the power of language and its inherent ability to control the speaker unless specific steps are taken to control the language, it's a moot point for me. Academically, however, the poem raises a real concern, especially when considering the problem of getting true, grassroots African literature in a culture where written language hasn't been valued until the past century or two. All in all, I liked the emotion (see: rage) behind the poem and the general theme of burning everything down to build anew. I'd definitely like to see more work from Mnthali, especially if it holds the same fire that "The Stranglehold of English Lit." does.

PS: Sorry for the novel.