Blog Posts

It's Time to Learn More About Russia

12/5/2017

We’re now constantly focused on what’s happening in Washington, but it’s important to understand the rest of the world as well. There are all too many reasons why we should know more about Russia, not least Vladimir Putin’s predilection for backing the right wing in western countries and interfering in our elections.

Why Putin Is Really a Bad Guy

Yes, you know that Putin is dangerous. But how much do you know about him?

To learn more about Putin, I read The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by journalist Masha Gessen, who reported on Russia from the end of the USSR to 2013. This book covers Putin’s life to 2012. I then read The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, her book that covers Russia to 2017, showing the rest of Putin’s regime; the beginning of independent academic inquiry, which he squelched; and the lives of several young people who came of age in the post-Communist years.

Gessen is brilliant, and I am proud to say that she is a lesbian. She was born in Russia, brought by her dissident parents to the United States when she was 11, and in her 20s went back to Russia to report on it, which she did for two decades. She left Russia because she and her partner have three children, one of whom is adopted. In 2013, Russia passed a law saying that the state had the right to take away the adopted children of gay and lesbian parents. Gessen now lives in New York City.

Putin was always a bully. Since he has been in the public eye, he has bragged that he was a “thug” when he was young, beating up other boys when he chose. He joined the KGB, the secret service, where he undoubtedly continued to bully people in a more intimidating way. He wanted to be a spy and was disappointed in being assigned to Dresden, East Germany, where the most he could do was look for dissidents. He was furious when in 1989 a group of civilians tried to break into the KGB office in Dresden where he was stationed. The civilians were persuaded to withdraw. But when the KGB asked the Red Army for help, the army said it could do nothing without orders from Moscow. Moscow was silent, and Putin was enraged that his country seemed impotent.

But how did Putin come to the public eye? He became a deputy to mayor of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). There, Gessen learned, he took millions of dollars’ worth of food that was supposed to go to the hungry city, sold it, and kept the money. That sort of profiteering helped him accumulate a fortune. Some say he is now the world’s richest man.

From that not particularly central post in Russia’s second city, he caught the attention of people like billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who recommended him to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, as a good head for the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. (Khodorovsky later decided to support Putin’s critics, and Putin jailed him – and took over his oil company.)

Yeltsin was democratic by Russian standards. He engaged in electoral politics and supported free speech. But he had alienated the people by letting profiteers become wealthy through taking over businesses that had been state owned in the Soviet Union. He did nothing to ease the sudden loss of people’s life savings when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin also was frequently drunk and disorderly.

The people at the top liked Putin because he seemed rational and compliant. Yeltsin’s alcoholism and sometimes erratic behavior caused him to lose popularity. An election was coming up in 2000, and reformers were going to contest the presidency.

In Russia, the head of the government (it used to be the head of the Communist Party) goes on television on New Year’s Eve to greet the nation. On the cusp of the new millennium, Yeltsin went on TV and resigned, telling people that Putin was their new president, even though there was no legal basis for Yeltsin to hand over his job to his choice of successor. Once Putin held the office, he was poised to win the election in March 2000.

Why did people accept Putin, a man scarcely known at that point? The public had already become disillusioned by the sense of chaos and the collapse of the economy. Moreover, there had been a series of bombings destroying apartment buildings, and the government said the Chechens, who had rebelled against Moscow a few years earlier, were to blame.

Gessen investigated the bombings as much as she could and is convinced that the FSB, not the Chechens, was to blame. The bombings set the stage for people to want a strong leader, and Putin was portrayed as strong.

Many people had lost their life savings under Yeltsin’s move to capitalism, which in turn made many distrust democracy, which has had almost no history in Russia. Rule by a strong man was more familiar.

Gessen suggests that Putin’s rise might have been stage-managed starting years before his presidency.

Analysts in the West and those few independent academics in Russia long believed that Putin was an authoritarian ruler, not a totalitarian one. Authoritarianism could be seen as a political system that controls the public arena but doesn’t care much about people’s lives as long as they are compliant. Totalitarian regimes try to control people’s thoughts as well as the public sector.

In her second book, Gessen says that totalitarianism is authoritarianism plus an ideology. Putin’s regime now has an ideology: supposed support of “traditional values.” The government has conflated homosexuality with pederasty and convinced the population that “western values” like democracy and acceptance of lesbians and gays are destroying the West and have no place in Russia. His government has formed links with right-wing groups in the United States and Europe to promote that ideology.

In the early 1990s, college social science departments, long bastions of Communist ideology that discouraged research, began embracing intellectual inquiry. But that has been squelched in recent years.

Polls by the Levada Institute, an independent organization in Russia, show that in the early 1990s Russians were much more accepting of people who different from them, such as rock enthusiasts and “sexual minorities,” than they are now. When Russians are asked who was the greatest person in history, the choice is often Stalin, with Putin coming in second.

When the Soviet Union had few consumer goods for its citizens, Russians prided themselves on their country’s size and importance in the world. When it lost its empire, Russians felt a sense of loss. For many, their country’s hard-won victory in the Great War (their name for World War II) is still its proudest hour. The government and media focus on nostalgia for those times, so even children today look to the victory over the Nazis as their country’s greatest achievement. Books and movies still celebrate KGB agents as heroes, and young people fall into believing that.

The young people whom Gessen followed through the past two decades have either become protesters or dropped out of society. All were disillusioned and believe that Russia has no future.

The government has not only moved to imprison more dissidents in recent years, but also is clearly behind the murder of some, most notably Boris Nemtsov, the most well known of them. I suspect that dissident Alexei Navalny, who has had acid thrown in his face, won’t live to be old. He plans to run for president in 2018, but is barred because of probably false charges of embezzlement.

I strongly urge you to read Gessen’s books. She also writes for U.S. magazines such as The New Yorker, including articles looking at the Trump administration, which she sees as dangerous.

Gorbachev

One of Russia’s paradoxes is that the people detest their finest leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev: His Life and Times, a new biography by Amherst College political science professor William Taubman, tells the story of Gorbachev’s life from childhood to the present. Taubman was able to interview Gorbachev and many people who have known him.

From childhood on, Gorbachev was the antithesis of Putin. Whereas young Vladimir distinguished himself as someone to fear, young Mikhail distinguished himself by feats of farm labor with his father that gained them both medals. Gorbachev became a popular student leader in school and in the Komsomol (Communist youth group) and loved to act in plays.

At Moscow State University, he met his wife Raisa, a philosophy student who became his closest companion until her death in 1999. The men who worked with and for him often resented his listening to her so much. People made fun of the fact that she often appeared in public with him, which was far different from the position of other Soviet leaders’ wives.

He was known for being incorruptible and for drinking little. His squeaky clean persona contributed as much as his intelligence to his rise in the Communist Party. He believed in Communism and acceded to the Party line.

But when Gorbachev became first secretary of the Supreme Soviet in the 1970s, he was able to take several trips to Western Europe, which transformed him. He visited the Communist parties in Italy and France and saw that they operated within a democratic political system. He wanted democracy for his country and began his transition to a social democrat, though at first he wanted democratic competition to take place inside the Party for a lengthy transition period before other parties were included.

When he became leader of the Communist Party in 1985, he tried to democratize it. His mistake apparently was not realizing that trying to bring democracy to his country before enabling people to purchase more material goods was a recipe for failure. (The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping thought Gorbachev was stupid for putting democracy ahead of economic development.)

One of the first reforms Gorbachev tried was greatly reducing the availability of alcohol because he saw how badly alcoholism affected people’s health and their work. That plan worked as well as Prohibition did in the United States: It made people angry at him.

He made many other mistakes, particularly in trying to keep a balance between old Party hacks who detested him and the reformers who initially supported him, which made it seem that he championed neither.

Though Russians blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book shows that Yeltsin was the one whose moves led to its dissolution.

The book tells how much Gorbachev hated violence. Even when the USSR was losing its grip on Eastern Europe, he refused to resort to it (except for some repression in Lithuania). He was opposed to nuclear weapons, and he, not Ronald Reagan, was the one we have to thank for ending the Cold War. Reagan’s advisers and Bush’s advisers after him had trouble believing that Gorbachev was sincere, but he was.

I came away from the book convinced that Gorbachev was one of the heroes of the 20th century.

Ordinary Russians

I’ve just read Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia, a book by writer Liza Dickey, who traveled across Russia from Vladivostock to Moscow in 1995, 2005, and 2015. She tried to talk with the same people each time.

Of course she found changes. In some places, like Vladivostock, a Pacific Coast city, the people she met were much more affluent in 2015 than they had been 20 years earlier. The young people were health conscious and fashion conscious. But in rural areas like Buryatia (north of Mongolia), once prosperous farmers had lost much of what they had when they bought land after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dickey visited the “Jewish Autonomous Homeland” of Birobidzhan set up by Stalin in the Russian Far East, and learned that by 2015 most of the Jews had gone to Israel. A history of harsh discrimination had made them fearful. There wasn’t a real functioning synagogue in 1995, but there is a large one now, and schools now teach Yiddish and Jewish history. Hebrew is being phased out of secondary schools because teachers see it as the language of those who want to emigrate, but it is taught at the university. Now there are large statues of menorahs and shofars in the streets.

Dickey is intrepid, and I’m proud to say that she’s a lesbian. She worried about disclosing her lesbian identity, but by 2015 she came out to a number of the people she met. Many said, “I’m all right with it, but don’t tell anyone else.”

She learned that attitudes toward the United States had hardened by 2015, mirroring the hardening of political relations between the nations after Russia annexed Crimea. Many people said they loved Putin, and they asserted that what Russia does is none of America’s business. They pointed out that Russia has no bases near the United States, but the United States has bases almost surrounding Russia. (They didn’t say that the nations where the bases are located for the most part asked for the bases because they were afraid of Russia, some of them having been occupied by Russia. Dickey didn’t mention that because she didn’t want to get into arguments.) She learned that Russians distrust the United States as much as Americans distrust Russia, although they were willing to make an exception for individual Americans and were friendly to Dickey. People across Russia used the same phrase, claiming that Americans see Russia as a primitive place where “bears run in the streets,” so that must be what their press tells them Americans think.

The Russians also like products from the U.S., though they don’t always know where the products are made. Some Russian friends of Dickey’s were stunned to hear that Coca-Cola was an American brand.

Almost everyone she met said that even though they have far more material goods now, they thought life was better under the Soviet Union because they felt more secure about jobs, education, healthcare, and pensions. One affluent couple who didn’t say life was better then said it was just as good, only different.

The gay men and the one lesbian that Dickey met did not share the nostalgia for the old regime, and neither did the one performer she knows.

I recommend these books to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Russia.

3 Comments

Books of 2016

12/16/2016

1 Comment

It was a terrible year in politics. What an understatement! But 2016 was a good year for books, when I was able to tear myself away from Facebook and the newspapers (not television—leaving that is never difficult for me, and I'll watch less than ever now).
     I read more than sixty books this year, but I won't burden you with details of them all. I'll mention many fine ones, mostly new or newish.

From Saigon to Beijing
     No one of my generation can forget the war in Vietnam, where our country fought an “enemy” that hadn't threatened us in the slightest. The Sympathizer, by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The prize was well deserved. The book's narrator is Vietnamese, the illegitimate son of a priest, who grows up deprived. Not surprisingly, he joins the Communists. He has two close friends from school, one of whom is a more dedicated Communist and the other who abhors Communism. The Party gives the narrator a mission: pretend to support the South Vietnamese government and spy on it. When that government is airlifted from Saigon, he is told to go to the United States and continue spying on South Vietnamese who have gone to live there. The narrator is an intellectual, constantly reexamining his opinions about Vietnam and the United States.
     Another great book by an Asian North American is Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, a Chinese-Canadian. Learned in mathematics and music, she tells about the fate of Chinese musicians who loved western music during the Cultural Revolution, when western music was banned. The characters are complex and the story is compelling.

Today's Wars
     Another mathematician-turned-author, Zia Haider Rahman, wrote an intricate novel, In the Light of What We Know, which looks at his native Bangladesh as well as Britain, the United States, and Afghanistan. This is a tale of corruption, and Rahman knows of what he speaks. He has worked with international organizations, including Transparency International, which fights corruption. His conclusion seems to be that western intervention, even by human rights workers, does more harm than good.
     I also read other books about the ongoing wars in that part of the world. Kim Barker's Taliban Shuffle is a more serious book than the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot would indicate. It tells a great deal about Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, which is crucial to understanding the war. Fariba Nawa, who was born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, went back to the country of her birth and, in Opium Nation, tells how drug trafficking has changed Afghanistan as much as war and how both government and Taliban forces are involved in drug trafficking. Both these authors think that a western withdrawal might be best for Afghanistan.
     But Christina Lamb, a British reporter who spent many years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, produced an even more in-depth study of the war, Farewell Kabul. I strongly recommend reading it to see how Pakistan has manipulated the Taliban and pushed it to continue fighting even when it didn't want to. She believes that westerners should continue to be involved in trying to counter the Taliban and other radical Islamists in that area of the world.
     Socialist feminist Meredith Tax produced a more hopeful book, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, which is about Kurdish women. She recounts how Syria, Iraq, and especially Turkey, have long oppressed the Kurds with pogroms and suppression of their language and culture. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against them. After that, the West began to recognize their oppression, but was reluctant to anger Turkey.
     The Kurd separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan at first called himself a Marxist-Leninist and waged an extremely violent struggle, including killing subordinates who opposed him. But while imprisoned by Turkey he underwent a conversion to anarchism and to the idea that women, not the proletariat, are the leading revolutionary class. As a result of that theory, Kurdish women in the struggle joined the army, including a separate women's army, and now have more power, especially in the region of Rojava in Syria. The “Islamic State” (IS) fights them, and they fight it.
    But the PKK, Ocalan's party, is still carrying out suicide bombings, including one on December 10 outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul that killed 39 people. How admirable is that?
     Tax does not gloss over the possibility that if the Kurds' liberation struggle succeeds, women may no longer hold a high position in their society. That has happened so often after revolutions.
     Then there's the tragedy of Syria. In The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, journalist Janine di Giovanni interviews a wide range of people living in Syria who have been brutalized by Assad's government and paramilitary forces, including women who were raped and tortured in Assad's prisons. She also spoke with people who were brutalized by jihadists opposing Assad, including IS. She found that many people feared Islamist insurgents more than Assad. Christians and other minority religious groups have strongly supported Assad because they fear suppression. She says Syria was a melting pot, like Bosnia, where people of different religions and ethnicities had lived together. And then violence and hatred drove them apart.
     Di Giovanni had started war reporting in Bosnia. She has worked in refugee camps. Somehow she has managed to often witness mass graves and people who had been tortured. She almost despairs over the difficulty of stopping, much less preventing, wars. After years of watching the United Nations and other groups try to end or mitigate the wars in Syria and other countries, she says, “ceasefire is a synonym for buying time to kill more civilians,” as both sides try to get themselves in the most advantageous position before the official start of the ceasefire. She feels that war is simply not worth the cost in human suffering. Reading her book left me with that feeling.
     I also recommend Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer, an upper-middle-class young woman's account of the deterioration of life in Egypt since the Arab Spring; Laila Lashimi's The Moor's Account, a historical novel about an educated man from Morocco who sells himself as a slave to feed his family and winds up dragged through North America in a brutal Spanish expedition to find gold; and Izzeldin Abuelish's autobiography, I Shall Not Hate, the story of a doctor from Gaza who has worked to heal Israelis as well as Palestinians though some of his daughters were killed in their home by an Israeli bombing.

War in Europe
     In trying to understand war, I also read novels about wars in Europe. Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot Not See is a sensitive novel about a blind French girl who tries to fend for herself alone when the Nazis occupy her city. A poor German boy who never wanted to be a soldier is also a major character. It's problematic to feel sympathy for a German soldier in World War II, but this character is punished for opposing brutality as he is forced into the military system because he is brilliant at making mechanical devices.
     After a long period in which few writers dealt with the genocidal war waged by Serbs in the 1990s, more novels about the genocide are being published. Some Croatian fighters also engaged in genocide. Girl at War by Sara Novic is a powerful novel about a Croatian girl's terrifying war experiences. Irish writer Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs takes a traditional Irish theme--a stranger coming to a small town--and turns it to horror because the stranger is a Serb leader guilty of genocide who pretends to be a healer. Horribly, an unhappy Irish woman falls in love with the disguised killer.
     Scottish mystery writer Val McDermid also wrote about the Bosnian War in The Skeleton Road, which focuses on how hard war crimes are to investigate because people try to block information about them. An even finer crime novel about cover-ups of the genocide is Pakistani-Canadian Ausma Zehnat Khan's The Unquiet Dead, which I mentioned last year.
     Not all horror comes in wars. John Vaillant's The Jaguar's Children tells the story of a young Mexican man's tragic attempt to cross the border to the United States because he fears for his life.

U.S. Novelists
     Colson Whitehead's intricate novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award, and it deserved to win. Its chronicle of a young woman's attempt to escape from slavery describes the horrors of the slave system. Whitehead also uses magical realism to make the Underground Railroad an actual railroad and to paint systems of slavery in different states that are not as they actually were but are illustrations of the manifestations that racism can take.
     I read two insightful books by Chickasaw author Linda Hogan. Power is the story of a girl growing up in a tribe in the Florida swamps that mostly escapes the attention of the white world. But a hurricane changes her life. This is a tale of the power and mystery of nature. The Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan's autobiography, tells of learning to survive many heartbreaks, including trying to adopt children who have been abused.
     I also read Raising Ourselves, the autobiography of Alaska Native Velma Wallis, of Gwich'in Athabascan descent. Growing up 200 miles north of Fairbanks, she learned to trap and hunt and moved to a cabin in the wilderness to escape the alcoholism and fatalism in her village and to try to help her mother escape also.
     Elizabeth Strout's novel My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a white woman who comes from extreme poverty. When Lucy was a child, her family lived in a garage. It is hard for her parents to express emotion. Lucy has difficulty navigating a world where people assume that she has had experiences she never had, such as owning a television when she was growing up. In later life, when Lucy is hospitalized and her mother comes to New York City to be with her, communication is strained.
     Nathan Hill's The Nix is an intricately spun tale. It's the story of a boy abandoned by his mother. He becomes an English professor but is so disgusted by students he perceives as banal that he immerses himself in video games. Then a woman is arrested for throwing rocks at a right-wing politician. It turns out that she is his long-lost mother. And that's just the beginning. It's quite a story, but there is a strain of resentment of autonomous women. One '60s radical woman has an unbelievable affair with a policeman whom she begs to be violent with her.
     I also read three Willa Cather novels that I had never read before and like better than some that are more famous. One of Ours is the story of a young Nebraskan man whose struggle to learn reminds me of Jude the Obscure. He winds up in World War I. Song of the Lark, a rare Cather book with a female protagonist, tells about a girl whose life is focused on becoming a great singer. The Professor's House includes a segment about a young man who tries unsuccessfully to negotiate the Washington bureaucracy.

You'll Always Have Shakespeare
     For comfort, I turn to Louise Penny's sensitive but not heartbreaking mysteries, Jo Walton's excellent fantasy about a world based on an attempt to create a world like Plato's Republic (the final novel of the trilogy being Necessity), and Shakespeare.
     Hogarth Press is publishing a series of novels based on Shakespeare's plays. The latest and so far the best is Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, which is based on The Tempest. A theater director forced out of his position by a wicked rival retreats to a remote town where his only companion is his fantasy of his daughter who died. He begins to direct plays in a prison, and builds up to staging his version of The Tempest, with actual revenge included. There's a need to suspend disbelief, but the story is great.
     I am delighted by a new book by a Shakespeare scholar, Andrew Dickon: Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe. Dickon went to Poland, Germany, the United States, India, South Africa, and China to learn how directors and actors in those countries interpret Shakespeare. For instance, the Germans have long called the poet “our Shakespeare” and claim him as really Germanic. In World War I, while England produced Henry V to inspire its soldiers, Germany produced the same play to urge on German soldiers. Dickon searched for missing Nazi era archives of the German Shakespeare Society and learned how it collaborated.
     I also learned, among many other things, that Shakespearean plays like Coriolanus and Cymbeline are far more popular in some other countries than they are in the United States. (I do not recommend Cymbeline unless one wants to see every play that Shakespeare wrote.)
     British imperialist education played a large role in spreading Shakespeare, but Shakespeare has outlasted the empire even as many excellent writers emerge everywhere. Different translations have become adaptations that vary from the original plays. Dickon sees that as a sign of Shakespeare's vitality.
     Read, read, read. If only everyone did.

1 Comment

Hamlet in the Laundry Room; Lancelot in the Living Room

6/28/2016

4 Comments

My life as a writer is full of glamour. While I am moving clothes from the washers to the driers in the basement of my apartment house, I may be thinking about a play I'm writing that's a take-off on Hamlet. How distressed is Ophelia? Darn, this drier isn't working. I have to move my clothes to the next drier. Why did someone leave their clothes in the drier after they were dried? How much did Hamlet care about Ophelia, anyway? His claim that he loved her more than forty thousand brothers is ridiculous.
            Darn, I dropped the pillowcase on the floor. How did Hamlet feel when he learned he'd killed Ophelia's father? Why didn't he tell her he was sorry? Do writers who are famous do their own laundry? I need to add more money to my laundry card.
            Just thinking about my characters and knowing I'm going to write about them makes me happy. There are 35 minutes between the time I get upstairs and the time I have to go back down to get the laundry. I can get some writing done.
            Lancelot sits in my living room. She is a quiet presence. Her demeanor is seldom cheerful. I see her frowning because Guinevere is married to someone else. Lancelot sighs. I sigh with her. I take my dirty dishes to the kitchen and wash them.
            Lancelot is still in the living room when I come back. She feels cramped indoors. So do I, although I can't ride a horse as well as she can, and in fact I'm afraid of horses. But my legs long to go to the river and walk. I need to put at least one headline in my blog so that readers with a short attention span will want to continue reading. That's what the social media teacher says, so here goes.
Lancelot Is Lonely
            How can I describe Lancelot? Does it matter whether she is handsome? She ages. She weeps sometimes when she is alone. Guinevere knows that, and it makes her sad, even though her temperament is not naturally as sad as Lancelot's.
            I wouldn't want to live without Lancelot. I can't. She's part of me.
            She may not be the most contemporary heroine. She may not be struggling with issues like today's racism. But she knows all about war, and she has seen poverty. She has witnessed suffering, and shared in it.
            Unlike me, she has killed. There are circumstances in which I would kill. In self-defense, if the only way to defeat my assailant was to kill him. To protect someone I love whose life was threatened. If I could.
            It's sad that Lancelot has killed, but not that she has the skill to do so.
            I don't have food for dinner. I have to go to the market. I'm lucky to live near a market. I need to make a shopping list. Why do I write fantasy? To escape the ordinary?
            I'm out of paper towels, but I have enough toilet tissue.
            How do I portray a King Arthur who is a good king, but who cares too much about power? Don't all kings – and presidents – care too much about power? Power over others, that is, not empowerment.
            How does power affect those who have it? Can anyone with great power remain a good person?
            Where are the car keys? Is my grocery list complete? Did I forget anything? Do I need more mayonnaise? Which night am I going out to dinner? Tomorrow?
            Lancelot still looks sad.
            Should I work on the Hamlet play, or go back to the Lancelot sequel? What a wonderful choice. But I must work on whichever is closest to being done. Finishing what I start has to be one of my most important values.
            I forgot the laundry. I have to take a detour to the basement. The basement is plain, utilitarian. But what difficulty Lancelot must have had cleaning her menstrual rags without anyone seeing her. No, she probably buried them.
            She's just posing as a man. She doesn't want to have a man's body. How wonderful that she has developed her strength and can defeat evil men.
            I shouldn't have stopped taking karate after a few months. Decades ago. I've been fortunate that I haven't had to defend myself physically.
            A friend of mine in the building was once confronted by a knife-wielding man in this basement, years ago. She was lucky. She got away unscathed. But the man wasn't caught.
            Danger can come at any time. Lancelot knows that.
            I fold my T-shirts and put the polo shirts on clothes hangers. Women must have died from abortions in Lancelot's day, as they still do today. I put the smaller items in a bag. I sling my pants over the arm of the laundry cart, then over my shoulder. I pick up the bag and go upstairs. I lay the pants on a chair and put the bag in the bedroom, then I go downstairs to get the shirts.
            Would Lancelot have joined the feminist movement if she lived today? Guinevere would.
            I carry the rest of the clothes upstairs. Lancelot liked wearing chain mail, but I wouldn't have liked it. I don't have the strength to use the kind of sword she would have used.
            Her sword was not taken from a maiden in a lake. It was just an ordinary sword, but she was extraordinary.
            I'm not Lancelot, but I do wear pants, because I don't want to play the female role. I want to be androgynous.
            Lancelot is still in the living room when I return.
            I guess I'm working on Lancelot today, not Hamlet. Here's a link to my first novel about Lancelot: www.amazon.com/Lancelot-Story-Carol-Anne-Douglas ebook/dp/B017A4L28C/ref=sr_1_1s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467153435&sr=1-1&keywords=
lancelot+her+story

4 Comments

Trying to Learn About Afghanistan

4/22/2016

1 Comment

What do we really know about Afghanistan? Two books I have read recently provide different but complementary views. One is Opium Nation by Fariba Nawa, an Afghan American journalist; the other is Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker, a Euro-American journalist. Both spent years in Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st Century. Taliban Shuffle has been made into a movie and its title has been changed to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Don't judge the book by the movie. The movie is simplistic and includes a man-crazy blonde journalist who wasn't in the book. But the book is worth reading.

Fariba Nawa was born in Afghanistan, but her parents fled to the United States when she was a child. At that time, Russia was fighting to occupy Afghanistan. When her grade school was bombed, her parents had had enough.

But her parents weren't happy in the United States. Her father missed the intellectual life in Afghanistan and the opportunity to practice his profession, which he couldn't do in the United States. Her mother was sad because she missed her family and friends. Fariba missed the people, language, food, and culture of Afghanistan. She liked her American teachers, but not the other students, who were too rude for her.

Nawa was dismayed at the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. reaction, and the sight of her two countries at war. She felt she had to return to Afghanistan. Although her parents weren't happy in the United States, they believed she was foolish to try to go back.

Fariba Nawa went to Afghanistan as a journalist and found it in disarray. Many people, at least at first, were glad to have the Americans come to fight the Taliban.

Nawa complains that Hamid Karzai was chosen as the country's leader by the Americans. She says that a democracy cannot succeed unless it controls its political process. Many Afghans preferred the former king, but the Americans deemed him too old.

She saw that the opium trade was one of Afghanistan's major problems. She took many risks, interviewing people involved in every part of the trade, including drug lords.

Farmers have had little choice but to grow opium since the Russians came and the mujahideen fought them. Trees have been cut down and fields are no longer fertile enough for many other crops. The farmers make what little they can from growing opium, but of course the profits go mostly to others. Drug lords force simple farmers into becoming drug couriers, mostly to Iran, which is combating the spread of opium by jailing and often executing the sometimes hapless couriers.

Opium has become the medium of exchange in Afghanistan. All parties sell it: warlords, the government, the Taliban, and foreigners. Despite their professed enmity, they often sell opium to each other and accept bribes from each other.

Nawa says that when the Taliban cracked down on opium production, they did so only to keep the prices up. When occupiers like Britain and the United States have tried to eradicate opium, they have hurt poor farmers most, not the drug lords. Nawa was overwhelmed by how much opium has affected her country.

Opium was grown traditionally as a medicine and used mostly in moderate quantities, she writes. It was British colonialists, specifically the East India Company, backed by the British government, which started the international opium trade and forced the Chinese to buy large quantities of opium so that the British could have a product to exchange for tea, which they coveted.

Nawa went to a Mother's Day event in Afghanistan, and was surprised that the subject that the women discussed was opium. Mothers wept about their sons' addiction.

She met a girl who did everything she could to resist becoming a child bride. Nawa was able to persuade the older man the girl was promised to (a drug lord) to postpone the wedding, but eventually he took the girl away and married her. She was given to him in payment for an opium debt: Her father had been forced to sell it, but he went missing, apparently caught and probably killed. His family couldn't repay the drug lord for the lost opium. Numerous other girls have met similar fates.

When she was in Afghanistan, Nawa met a man who treated her like a person and became a friend. She married him and has been happy with him and her children in a marriage of shared responsibilities. They lived for several years in the United States, where she reported on the U.S. Muslim community, among other things. I particularly remember her writing about progressive mosques, where women have a greater role than the traditional one.

At one point, Nawa brought her father back to Afghanistan to stay with relatives there. He thought he wanted to visit, but he discovered that the intellectual life he remembered had disappeared. The people he knew were either gone or hardened by constant struggle. He decided that life in the United States, though it disappointed him, was better.

Nawa still loves Afghanistan, but she grieves for it and worries about family and friends who still live there. She now is practicing journalism in Turkey.

Through reading Nawa's Facebook posts, I learned about two fine novels about Afghanistan by Nadia Hashimi, an Afghan-American doctor: The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and When the Moon Is Low (see my February 16, 2016 blog). The former book is the story of a girl growing up in a family that raises her as boy. Her story is interwoven with the story of a rebellious great aunt. The contemporary girl reaches puberty and is forced to marry. The book takes us up to present-day Afghanistan and its leaders.

Reading the latter book, the story of a family of Afghan refugees, gives a clear picture of how squalid and brutal life in refugee camps in Greece can be, and of the refugee camp in Calais that the French government recently destroyed (while providing no better place for refugees). I encourage you to read this book and see what life is like for the refugees the European Union seems determined to return to Afghanistan, under the pretense that Afghanistan is safe. According to the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan, 600 civilians were killed and 1,343 were wounded by fighting in the first three months of 2016; more than 80,000 people were displaced just during those months (The New York Times, April 18, 2016). About one-third of those killed and wounded were children, the UN said. The report noted that about 60 percent of the civilian casualties were caused by the Taliban and other insurgents, and 19 percent by the Afghan government (the article didn't say who caused the rest – perhaps it wasn't clear who was responsible).

American War Reporter

Taliban Shuffle describes the experiences of a journalist for the Chicago Tribune who covered India, minimally, and Afghanistan and Pakistan in depth, starting in 2002. Barker apparently had much less close contact than Nawa did with Afghan women; as a war correspondent and political reporter, Barker mostly dealt with men.

At times, she was embedded in U.S. military units. She reported on the soldiers' frustrations, but I'm not sure whether she could see that being embedded in a fighting unit was ethically problematic.
Barker was brave, but she eventually realized that some of her courage was bravado that unnecessarily risked her own life and those of the Afghan men who worked for her. After the United States occupied Afghanistan, almost all the men who could speak English – doctors, engineers, and so on – wound up in jobs serving Americans as interpreters, drivers, guards, and “fixers” (people who found ways for the reporters to interview officials and fighters whom they otherwise had no access to), because they could earn so much more money that way than in their professions. That, in addition to the wars, cost Afghanistan a generation of professionals, Barker reports.

Barker met warlords and high government officials. Her description of then-president Hamid Karzai as ineffectual, and later connected with corrupt officials, is damning – and is omitted from the movie.
Both the book and the movie depict Western reporters and officials in Afghanistan as distanced from the people and steeped in alcohol to cope with the danger. That was all I learned from the movie.

Barker wrote that Pakistan is probably more dangerous than Afghanistan, and that the Pakistani Taliban is fiercer than the Afghan Taliban, and is likely connected with Pakistan's secret service.

Barker developed a sort of friendship with Nawaz Sharif, who was then a deposed prime minister and is now once again the prime minister of Pakistan. He helped her make contacts, but he also seemed bent on making her his mistress.

Barker witnessed the excitement in Pakistan when Benazir Bhutto returned and the chaos after her assassination. Nothing about Pakistan was in the movie - it didn't show her going there at all.

If you read the book, you'll learn as much about Pakistan as about Afghanistan. You'll come to understand, as Barker does, that Pakistan likely supports the Taliban in Afghanistan because India supports the current Afghan government.

Barker didn't decide on her own to leave Afghanistan, as the movie suggests. Instead, a media magnate who took over the Tribune and gutted its news department forced her to come back to the States. (It's grotesque that the movie showed this character as a moderately sympathetic woman instead of the obnoxious man that he was in the book.)

Barker quit her job and went back to Afghanistan on her own, to work on a book. She did finally leave, because she realized that she had become an adrenalin junkie, and needed to reclaim her life. Her personal life was somewhat different from what was portrayed in the movie – she didn't have an affair with the reporter who was kidnapped and certainly didn't blackmail an Afghan official into helping rescue him. But the toll that war reporting took on her personal life was great.

Most Afghans don't have the choice to leave the dangers, and Europe is trying to force those who have left to go back. Westerners who go there can try to recover from the stress. I can only imagine what toll the stress of war has taken on the people of Afghanistan. I should think the whole nation is suffering from PTSD.

It is extremely important to read Afghan women's accounts of their country. But an American woman's perspective also has its place, in showing what the egocentric, ethnocentric American presence there is like.

The U.S. government is still in Afghanistan, so we ought to care about what happens there, to say the least. We should support organizations that are building shelters (Women for Afghan Women) and organizations that are helping the refugees. And we should demand that Western nations like ours provide a decent life for these and other refugees.

1 Comment

Best Books I Read in 2015

2/11/2016

5 Comments

I want to share my favorite books of 2015. They weren't all published last year, but I read them then.

I read a number of books by women from and about Muslim countries so I could understand them better.
Nadia Hashimi, an Afghani-American physician who has visited Afghanistan, wrote a book that tells the story of a family that tries to flee Afghanistan after one of its members has been killed by the Taliban.

When the Moon is Low is narrated by a woman and her son. It tells of her life growing up in Afghanistan and how it became worse and worse. The family finally has little choice but to flee. And then they embark on a dangerous journey to join relatives in England. The book tells everything they go through, from humiliations to physical violence. The family struggles to stay together. A young child becomes ill from the deprivations of the journey. Europeans consider the older boy a threat just because he's an Afghan boy.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

Hashimi also has written an excellent novel about women living in Afghanistan, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell. It's about two related women who both live parts of their lives dressed in male clothing. One is a woman in the early 20th century who loses her family to illness and tries to find a way to survive. The other is a contemporary girl whose family has no son and decides to make her a bacha push, an honorary boy, so she can do things no girl can do, such as go out to buy groceries. She even goes to school. Then she grows older and is forced to marry. This book shows Afghanistan, from an old regime king's harem to the current parliament. It's the Afghanistan we Americans know all too little about.

I also read two books by Elif Shafak, a Turkish writer. I had earlier read and been impressed by The Bastard of Istanbul, a book she wrote that deals with relations between Turks and Armenians. The protagonist is an Armenian-American girl who reads about the early 20th century Turkish genocide of the Armenians, but goes to visit Turkey anyway and finds a surprising welcome in the family of her Turkish stepfather. A Turkish nationalist brought a lawsuit against Shafak for writing the book, but the case was dismissed.

This year I read Shafak's Honor and The Forty Rules of Love. Honor is the story of twin sisters; one stays in Turkey and learns what it is like to be a rare single woman there, while the other goes with her family in London. There are multiple narrators. It's not much of a spoiler to say the son has killed his mother in an "honor" killing because he is one of the narrators, speaking from an English prison. Islamists had egged him on to matricide. The Forty Rules of Love is about the life of the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. I was a little bothered that Shafak insists that Rumi's love for another man couldn't have been physical, but otherwise it's a beautiful story.

I've already blogged about Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie's superb novels Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone (6/20/2015). But they are worth mentioning again. And again. Burnt Shadows begins with the atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki. One of the main characters is Hiroto, a Japanese woman whose body was marked forever by the blast. Her German fiancé, Konrad, a man escaping the war in Europe who found himself in another country at war, is killed in Nagasaki. Disintegrated. Nothing left of him.

For a while, Hiroto works as a translator for the Americans occupying Japan. But when she hears them justify the atomic bomb attacks as “saving American lives” she can't bear to work with them any longer.

Tired of being stigmatized as a bomb survivor in her birth country, Hiroto goes to India and hopes to find a home. She marries a Muslim. Shamsie's description of colonial English life seems on target: balanced, but acute.

India was on the verge of partition (the time when Pakistan split off). Divisions between Hindus and Muslims sharpened and much blood was shed. Even Muslims who had no intention of leaving Delhi found themselves unwelcome there.

Shamsie tells how the characters rebuild their lives after partition. And then she tells of the descendants of the English and Pakistani families, and how they try to make sense of the world. Hiroto's outsider perspective is crucial.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan plays a large part in the story. Shamsie leaves the reader with a devastating picture of Americans.

A God in Every Stone provides an equally devastating picture of the English. The story begins on the eve of World War I. Major characters are a young Englishwoman who wants to be an archaeologist, a Turkish archaeologist, an Indian Muslim who fights with the English forces in Europe, and his younger brother. All are moving characters with lives full of pain. The book looks back to the ancient history of what is now Pakistan, especially Peshawar, and at what Peshawar has become: a refuge for Afghans fleeing their country and a point from which they launch attacks into it. She rejects stereotypes of Pashtuns, both Pakistanis and Afghans, as violent. She tells about the nonviolent movement among the Pashtuns that paralleled Gandhi's.

One character asks another, “And what do I need to know?” The other replies, “How to remove your blindfold and see your place in the world.” Shamsie demands that we all remove our blindfolds.

Rafia Zakaria's The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan is a novel-like memoir. Zakaria looks at political developments in Pakistan, particularly in Karachi, including discrimination against Muslims who came from India after partition. She also tells the moving story of her aunt, whose heart was broken when her husband took a second wife. It was uncommon for men to marry more than one woman in Pakistan's early days, but it became common as Islamization took more and more rights away from women.

Nazila Fathi, an Iranian journalist, wrote The Lonely War, a book explaining contemporary Iran. Her description of the uprising against the shah and the fundamentalist revolution startled me as I realized how much they resembled the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Intellectuals and members of the previous ruling class lost their jobs. Many were jailed. Many were killed. Moderates were purged. A new class rose up and gained education. Fathi says that Iran has an extensive new middle class that doesn't like fundamentalism but doesn't want to take risks to rock the boat. She faced danger for reporting and had to move abroad to keep out of prison.

Kader Abdolah, an Iranian man who also has to live abroad, participated in the overthrow of the shah and the subsequent revolution. His novel The King is about a nineteenth century shah, but the hero is his vizier, who tried to modernize Persia (the country still had that name then) by developing modern communications, transportation, and education. The shah had let the British exploit the country's resources without getting Persia anything in return except monies paid to himself. Russia and France also were poised to exploit Persia. Again, I was struck by the resemblance to China's struggles for modernization in that century—and by the similarity of the ways of living in the palace, with absolute rule and hundreds of concubines, with eunuchs to tend them. I learned that the progressives were able to enlist the mullahs to play a progressive role.

Ausmat Zehanat Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian, has written a mystery that is far more than a mystery: The Unquiet Dead. She tells the story of the horrific massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in the 1990s, and how many Serbs managed to escape punishment, some migrating to other countries, such as Canada. Really, Muslims have a great many reasons to be angry at the West. Her description of how Dutch UN peacemakers let massacres occur is particularly horrifying.

I also read Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, a nonfiction book based on interviews with a Palestinian man whose family was forced out of its home in Israel and the Jewish Israeli woman whose family moved into his family's house. On meeting him, she tried to be his friend. The book seems to be a balanced account, or as balanced as anything could be, under the circumstances.

I can't tell about my 2015 reading without mentioning Peggy Faw Gish's eye-opening books on Iraq, Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Darkness and Walking Through Fire, books telling about her work as a Christian Peace Team member witnessing the second Iraq war and the U.S.-led occupation. I blogged about these books earlier (2/16/2015). They discuss how American peacemakers tried to prevent violence and worked on developing teams of Iraqi peacemakers. The books are unsettling in just the right way. They should move us to question everything.

Speaking of questioning everything, long-time radical feminist Kathleen Barry's book Unmaking War: Remaking Men questions war itself and urges men not to let themselves be brutalized and used as cannon fodder. I also wrote a blog about this book (4/19/2015).

Jenny Nordberg, an American journalist, wrote The Underground Girls of Kabul, which tells about girls in Afghanistan whose families raise them as boys so that there is at least an honorary boy in the family. There is a belief that having a bacha push, an honorary boy, will help the mother conceive a "real" boy. But those girls generally have to go on to arranged marriages. Nordberg tells about the lives of some of them, including one woman who became a parliamentary deputy (whose salary enabled her husband to take a second wife) and one lucky woman who manages to continue living in disguise.

There are many tragedies in the world, and the situation of North Koreans is among the worst. In her memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, Yeonmi Park tells of her life of oppression and starvation in North Korea. Her family could see a Chinese city across the river that was lit by electricity, a scarce community in North Korea. They heard that the Chinese had three meals of rice a day, which Yeonmi could scarcely believe. Like many others, Yeonmi and her mother escaped to China. But, also like many others, they discovered that the smugglers who "helped" them were human traffickers. They were prostituted for years, but finally managed to escape to South Korea via a grueling journey to Outer Mongolia. Then South Koreans looked down on them because they were so much less educated than South Koreans. But Yeonmi was brilliant and managed to learn English and many other things besides. She now lives in the United States. I was privileged to hear her read in person from her book and was glad to see that she can sometimes laugh as well as cry.

Nigerian writer Chinole Okparantha has written what is probably the first novel about being a lesbian in Nigeria, Under the Udala Tree. An Igbo who lived through the Biafra war, the narrator learns that she is attracted to girls. And that being lesbian or gay in Nigeria can be just as deadly as war.

Ghana Must Go, a novel by Nigeria writer Taiye Selasi, is the story of a Nigerian-Ghanaian family trying to live in the United States. They face discrimination, but the experiences some of the children have when they are sent to live with relatives in Ghana are even worse.

Just after the Charleston massacre last June, I read Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings, a novel about the abolitionist Grimke sisters and a fictional slave their family owned. I hadn't realized that Sarah and Angelina Grimke came from Charleston. They had great struggles as women. In the story, Sarah is denied the right to read her father's books and is not allowed to free Handful, the slave her parents give her. But the Grimke sisters' sufferings appear as nothing compared with Handful's, though Handful and her mother find ways to resist. The book also portrays Denmark Vesey, the leader of a rebellion, and the devastating white oppression, including rounding up black people in Mother Emmanuel AME Church.

Lynn Kantor's Her Own Vietnam is a novel about a young American nurse who joins the Army during the Vietnam War and is sent to tend soldiers on the front. The life is horrible and damages her. Kantor says the nurses' stories have not been told.

I did read some fantasy last year. Jo Walton's The Just City fascinated me. It's the story of what would happen if the Greek gods allowed philosophers to build a city based on Plato's Republic. If you recall, Plato's Republic categorizes people into gold, silver, and bronze categories and assigns them to work based on that. It also reduces sexual interactions to one-night stands with partners selected by the city's guardians. But in Walton's novel Socrates comes along and is a gadfly. It's astonishing that Plato ever thought Socrates would approve of such a city.

Nicola Griffith's Hild, the story of a Saxon girl living in the time when the Saxons were taking Britain from the Britons (ancestors of today's Welsh), is an interesting historical novel with some lesbian undertones, but a great deal of plotting and fighting. Hild has visions that bring her power in a society where women have little. Though there is some sex between women, I would not call this a lesbian book. The women who engage in sex apparently prefer men.

Jacqueline Winspear, who has written many fine mysteries about World War I, wrote a moving non-mystery novel about it, The Care and Management of Lies. It was especially striking to read about how pacifism was a crime.

I read all I can about Shakespeare. Tina Packer, a long-time Shakespearean scholar, director, and actor, wrote Women of Will, an excellent book about Shakespeare's female characters and how they differed at different points of his life. Packer suggests that they shaped Shakespeare as well as being shaped by him.

I also have great admiration for Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, who wrote Contested Will, a book showing that questioning whether Shakespeare really wrote his plays did not begin until the 19th century, more than 200 years after he died. I recently read his The Year of Lear, a book describing the political situation in England in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Shapiro points out that the Gunpowder Plot, in which some Catholics tried to blow up King James I, his family, and all of Parliament, had just happened at the end of 1605. It was an anxious time, similar to the post-September 11, 2001 United States. Therefore, Shapiro says, plays about overthrowing monarchs felt relevant, perhaps excruciatingly relevant. Discrimination against Catholics increased after the plot, as discrimination against Muslims increased in the United States.

I read other books last year, but I recommend all of these. Happy reading to any who choose to read them.

5 Comments

Why I Wrote LANCELOT: HER STORY

12/16/2015

3 Comments

I wrote my novel Lancelot: Her Story for many reasons. The first is love for the Arthurian legends, especially the story of love between a married woman and another man. Real love, not just adultery, in an age when women couldn't even dream of divorce.

I was such a pious Catholic girl that I couldn't believe that Guinevere and Lancelot actually committed adultery. I thought they just had a pure and hopeless love. I was privileged to see Camelot on Broadway, with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. It was enchanting, but I complained to adults afterwards that it was wrong because it showed Lancelot and Guinevere as committing adultery, which they wouldn't have. (It was also hard to believe, beautiful songs notwithstanding, that any woman would choose Robert Goulet over Richard Burton.)

Guinevere's trapped situation always pained me. Perhaps that was a pre-feminist reaction.

Later, when I first started writing about Lancelot, I had dreams about Lancelot's misery at loving a woman who had to have sex with her husband. I was Lancelot, in the next room, and I was miserable.

I was also struck by the idea that Arthur, even though he was king, had to allow his wife to be burned at the stake. Really? Various books' attempts to justify that seemed strained at the very least.

Then when I was a freshman in college, I read a story in which Lancelot was a woman. That story struck me deeply at the time. Many years later, I tried to find the story, but I didn't remember the title or the author. All my attempts to find it failed. I learned who the authorities on contemporary Arthurian fiction were, and none of them knew. So I wrote my own version.

Lancelot is so courteous, so deeply concerned about women, so faithful to Guinevere, that it made sense to me that Lancelot would be a woman.

The second reason that I wrote the story is that I have been and am deeply distressed by the wars my country has entered into in my lifetime. I wanted to write about war, and show that even in those much-glorified tales of King Arthur, soldiers did terrible things and were damaged by them. They are not “we few, we happy few,” as Henry V says in the bombastic speech Shakespeare gives him. If soldiers have any sensitivity, they are traumatized.

I thought of that particularly at a time when more and more women were entering the military and fighting in distant wars. That made it important for me to write about a woman warrior who didn't just feel that her fighting was saintly, like Joan of Arc, even though she was fighting a people who were attacking her people.

War is always a tragedy, even if it is necessary. I'm not sure whether I should put “necessary” in quotes, because governments always justify war as necessary. But sometimes it is. Yet even if a war like World War II was necessary, some of the means used in it were not. I think particularly of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think it is always right to question the means.

In this book, I especially wanted to show how limited options are for women in a society where even the most privileged are controlled by men. And although the primary characters are Lancelot and Guinevere, I try to show that less privileged women suffer more.

Those are serious reasons, but I also longed to write a story that will entertain readers. I have written many essays, but I believe that fiction is more profound because it shows a fuller picture of the world, of people in their daily lives. And despite the serious themes, I also hope that I interspersed a fair amount of humor, because that is also part of life. And to say that people, both women and men, can love even in this imperfect world. Love exists. It must.

3 Comments

Pondering Camelot

10/2/2015

3 Comments

What does Camelot mean to you? A musical with haunting lyrics? The administration of President John F. Kennedy? Monte Python's vicious rabbit?

The chances are that your attitude toward kingship affects how you perceive the Arthurian legends. Are kings romantic figures to you? Does the idea of benevolent power attract you? Do you see the past as romantic?

What do the Arthurian legends mean to a feminist? Can we rewrite the tales to make the women stronger or more positive? Traditionally, Guinevere was a passive character who was rescued by others. And Arthur's sisters (sometimes aunts) Morgan and Morgause have usually been portrayed as villains. Women were threats to the male code of chivalry (an invention of an age long after the presumed King Arthur lived). Does recreating the women as main characters change the message? Or is writing about kings, queens, and warriors a hopelessly Eurocentric, classist mode of writing? Perhaps, but some of us are drawn to it nevertheless. If we include characters who are not royalty or knights, we can perhaps broaden the tale.

I have lived in Camelot, and not just King Arthur's. For me, the women's liberation movement was my own Camelot, my own company of equals. Yes, my friends from that era mostly remain, but many of our institutions have vanished. It was when I saw that happening that I began to read about and dream about Camelot. Not exclusively, of course. I keep up with contemporary feminism. But I remember the days when it was new and we felt we could do anything. And so I have written my own Arthurian novel, to be mentioned later in this article.

I don't think you have to be nostalgic for unlikely pasts to enjoy the Arthurian legends. You could use them to dissect the past and dissent from it. Or to create a model of a past that you know is fantasy as a way of examining the present or providing ideas about the future.

Arthurian literature has a long history. The earliest mention of Arthur is in the Annales Cambriae (a compilation of Welsh sources) entry for 537 C.E., which mentions “the strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.” Despite the mention of the 5th century date in the text, the earliest version of the Annales has been dated as produced in the 10th century or later.

Geoffrey of Monmoth, who lived in the 12th century, was perhaps the earliest writer who created a story about a possibly mythical King Arthur. But Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of England) and Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin) outline the story with some of the characters later ages have learned. Medraut (Mordred) becomes the villain who slew Arthur. Characters from Geoffrey's tale include Merlin, the hero Gawain(e) (generally Arthur's nephew), and Morgan, a sorceress. And Arthur was given a wife, her name some version of Guinevere (at first Gwenhwyfar).

The English legends were so popular that Chretien de Troyes moved into the territory and inserted a French character, Lancelot, who became extremely popular and appears in most subsequent versions of the legend. Chretien also created the character Perceval.

The Cistercian monastic order made the tale more religious by inventing the character Galahad, the perfect knight, and the concept of the Holy Grail.

Sir Thomas Malory, a 15th century knight, wrote while he was in prison what became the most famous version, Le Morte d'Artur (The Death of Arthur), with all the familiar characters. He portrayed Arthur as cursed because he was seduced by one of his sisters, whom he did not know was his sister. Women become prominent as villains, as does Mordred, who becomes the son of the incestuous pairing.

In the nineteenth century, Alfred, Lord Tennyson created his poetic version, The Idylls of the King. The Arthurian Age became even more popular and the Pre-Raphaelites used its themes in painting. Weary of their enthusiasm, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Aurora Leigh:

I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing-oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive I' the ditch there, — 'twere excusable,
But of some black chief, half-knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen.

The poet’s pithy criticism is well taken, especially if we think she is calling Guinevere “half chattel and half queen,” but many of us have continued to write and read fiction and poetry loosely based on earlier myths.

Concern about the fate of his country in the mid-20th century led the English writer T.H. White to write The Once and Future King (written in segments that were later put together). This became the most popular rendition of Arthurian tales in that century. Arthur grows from a little boy who learns how to become a good king by being transformed by Merlin into different animals. But actual kingship breaks his heart and leads to war, which Merlin had warned against. This book was the inspiration for the musical “Camelot,” which was only loosely based on it. (In White's book, Lancelot is ugly and ashamed of his looks, not much like Robert Goulet.)

Many other contemporary writers have devised their own versions of the story. By far the most famous is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which makes Arthur's sister Morgaine the heroine. In most tellings she is Morgan Le Fay, a villain who seeks to destroy Arthur. But Bradley made her a devout pagan and used her books to reclaim paganism as perhaps better than Christianity.

Numerous other writers have tried, like Bradley, to place the tales in an early period, around 500 C.E., rather than in the late medieval period that Malory and White chose. Castles and knights-- Norman concepts--are anachronisms in Arthurian literature.

Rosemary Sutcliff wrote Sword at Sunset, a book set in the early period that feels authentic, though it has too many battles for my taste. Its Arthur and Guinevere are real and sad.

Other writers have centered on women, usually Guinevere. One of my favorites is Gyan, in Kim Headlee's Dawnflight, who is a Pict and a fighter in her own right.

I also particularly like Gillian Bradshaw's tales. Hawk of May is from the point of view of Gwalchai, an early name for Gawaine, who is seeking to escape from the evil magical world of his mother. Kingdom of Summer is from the point of view of his servant. In Winter's Shadow is a believable book from Guinevere's point of view.

One ambitious version, which sadly is out of print, is Fay Sampson's five volume series, Daughter of Tintagel, which tells the story from five different points of view, including Morgan's (before Bradley) and a blacksmith's. The first volume is Wise Woman's Telling. Warning: The series is very hard to find.

I also am fond of Sharan Newman's three-volume tale based on Guinevere, which is as gentle and warm as any Arthurian book can be.

There are other books from Morgan's point of view, and some from Mordred's. One unusual and charming book is The Idylls of the Queen, Phyllis Ann Karr's book in which Guinevere is accused of murder and Cai the seneschal, Arthur's foster brother who is usually portrayed as so sarcastic as to be unlovable, tries to find out who really committed the murder and to save Guinevere.

These are only the versions that I particularly like. There are many others, of course, including numerous male-centered ones.

And here is mine: Lancelot: Her Story

As you might have guessed, in my own version, Lancelot is a woman. Lancelot: Her Story, the first of two volumes, will soon be published. My story poses the questions:

How does the concept of Lancelot as a woman in disguise change the Arthurian dynamic? Will Camelot be a dream come true for her, or a nightmare? Or both? What will Guinevere mean to her? What will war mean to her? How will Lancelot and Guinevere manage to survive in a patriarchal world? I hope you will want to read my books and find out. The first volume follows Lancelot from the time she is a 10-year-old girl named Anna.

You can subscribe to my RSS feed to get an email when Lancelot: Her Story goes on sale, both in print and as an e-book. There will be various book launch events, both virtual (on this blog as well as other blogs and websites) and actual (in the DC area and in Florida).

3 Comments

Growing Into Nature

8/24/2015

1 Comment

Nature grows into you, if you let it. If you grow into nature. Of course people are a part of nature, perhaps too large a part. We are terrans, of this earth.

But I long to be part of the mountains. Let my wrinkles be ridges, my hair the grasses.

Glacier-carved mountains are still more magical than volcanically created ones, though many have been born of fire, then shaped by ice and water.

I am watching green water edge into the blue, and wondering how the light decides to make the difference. Perhaps the blue reflects the sky and the green reflects the trees, but it is not always so.

I sit on the edge of Lake MacDonald in Glacier National Park. MacDonald is a prosaic name for what the tribes called the sacred dancing water. Salish-Kootenai, Flathead, and Blackfeet used to live at least part of the year in what is now the park. As some wise white writers have begun to realize, it is strange that we assume a park is perfectly natural without the people who first lived here.

I've read about the restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, and had the privilege of seeing some of them. I have seen wolves running across a sagebrush plain. I have seen wolves waiting until grizzlies have eaten their fill of a wolf-killed elk, then moving into claim their share of it after the grizzlies leave. Yes, those are magical sights.

Many people worked hard to make the restoration possible, and to study the wolves, often in temperatures far below zero. They rejoice that the natural ecosystem has been restored. But the native people have not. They live outside the park, in reservations and towns.

Surely anyone who sees this land must love it, especially since most of us see it in relative comfort, walking only when we choose to for pleasure. Even as such a one, I claim a love for nature. I want to learn the names of all the wildflowers in each park I visit and to see as many birds and mammals as possible.

I am overjoyed to dedicate a day to looking for a mountain goat. In the summer, when I visit the parks, their coats look shabby because layers of winter hair are shedding. But the kids' coats are sleek because they have not yet undergone winter.

How beautifully each animal has evolved to fit its ecological niche. The wonder of an animal that can climb stone walls that seem almost sheer. The wonder of an animal that can build dams.

The wonder of birds flying. I am watching barn swallows cross high over the lake on their quest for insects, then return to the roof where they nest.

True, I want only a modified wildness, a safe wildness, though that is an oxymoron and nothing can be entirely safe. I know that Eden is a dream, paradise is a wish. But this is the paradise I wish for. Yes, there are car jams and insect bites. Yes, sometimes rain falls when I wish it wouldn't. Worse, the heat is increasing. This summer has been incredibly hot for Glacier National Park. Its glaciers are melting. This summer, instead of the 60 and 70 degree weather I remember, the sun beats down in the high 80s. How much destruction we are wreaking on this beautiful place. But we can still enjoy the beauty and try to preserve it.

Firs and cedars line the lake. I can see some stands of burned trees from earlier fires. A few days ago, the sky was filled with smoke from fires in eastern Washington State. Firefighters are quelling a fire in Glacier, near St. Mary's Lake.

The green part of the water has turned almost black at shadows creep over the mountains. The swallows are chirping.

Most of the mountains here are too steep for me to climb, but I can watch them and cherish them. Yet walking a trail is special love, a sacred journey in which feet worship the paths, while I delight at pink elephants' head and blue gentian.

Now I look to the glacial cirques – oh, other visitors just pointed out a beaver swimming past and a flock of cedar waxwings hawking for insects. I am grateful that nature can be shared.

The lake is darker now. The water reflects the cliffs. Or did the cliffs always live in the lake, the water showing them only at special times?

In the splash of a beaver's tail, in the flutter of bird wings, there is the world.

How I admire and envy the young woman rangers, who have grown up in a world where it seemed natural to them to find a career in which they can spend their days showing visitors bear-clawed trees and explaining the lives of bighorn sheep. But I too am privileged. While I enjoy a walk in the woods, I remember how many women in the world will never have this pleasure. Indeed, in some countries, women must risk rape and capture when they go to bring water for their families.

I am in the forest, and I am unbelievably lucky.

If I go too long without seeing mountains, I feel like a lynx without snowshoe hares. Lynxes cannot get enough nourishment on a diet of squirrels and voles. They will pad through the spruce trees, and find hares or perhaps die.

I have never seen a lynx, but I am glad that they live in the northern forests. I do not have to see them to appreciate them.

What are the creatures to each other, those that do not see each other as enemies or food? What does a mountain goat think of a bighorn sheep? Does it see the sheep as a clumsy competitor that cannot climb as high? Does it dislike the sheep's smell? Does it think that the rams' horns are garish?

And does the sheep see the goat as pathetic because its horns are small? Does it believe the leaping goats on the highest crags are showing off? Does it envy them?

And what do the sharp-hooved animals think of the marmots? Do they see marmots as clowns? Do they heed the marmots' whistles of danger?

Let me think of marmots and mountain goats. Let me pause from thinking of the Islamic State and of stubborn members of Congress. Let me live in the mountains for at least a few weeks of the year.

1 Comment

Read Kamila Shamsie!

6/30/2015

1 Comment

Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie is one of the finest writers alive today. I've read her work before, but I've just read two of her more recent novels, and want to tell others about them.

Shamsie was born and raised in Pakistan, and now lives in London. Her novels are mostly set in Pakistan. They have a wide range of well-drawn characters.

Pakistan is a pivotal country. Created in 1947 to be an Islamic nation by leaders who rejected Gandhi's vision of a united, diverse India, it was born in a bloody war between former neighbors. The country sits in crucial area – next to Afghanistan – and is the way station for many of its refugees. Pakistan has lived with military dictatorships and unstable elected regimes, fluctuating between the two since it was created. Many women are educated, but women have far fewer legal right than men. And Pakistan developed nuclear weapons because India did. No one can afford to be ignorant about Pakistan.

Years ago I discovered Shamsie's Broken Verses (Bloomsbury, 2005). It is still one of my favorite contemporary novels. Few writers can convincingly portray a poet who really sounds like a poet. In a novel of love and Pakistani progressive politics, Shamsie accomplishes that feat. Her characters face murder, exile, and abandonment. The book asks the question: What is betrayal? Perhaps all of her novels ask that question.

Recently I read Burnt Shadows (Picador, 2009) and A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014). Both novels are excellent. I'll try to give an idea of them without spoilers.

Burnt Shadows begins with the atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki. (Why don't more Americans write about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? But the term “war crimes” is seldom used by victors. One of her characters says that when Eisenhower was president, he deplored the bombing. Few of us remember that.) One of the main characters is Hiroto, a Japanese woman whose body was marked forever by the blast. Her German fiance, Konrad, a man escaping the war in Europe who found himself in another country at war, is killed in Nagasaki. Disintegrated. Nothing left of him.

For a while, Hiroto works as a translator for the Americans occupying Japan. But when she hears them justify the atomic bomb attacks as “saving American lives” she can't bear to work with them any longer.

Konrad had a sister in India. Tired of being stigmatized as bomb survivor in her birth country, Hiroto goes to India and hopes to find a home. Konrad's sister, Elizabeth, is married to a British official, James. Sajjad, a Pakistani Muslim who had been Konrad's friend, works for James, who dangles the possibility of letting Sajjad into his law practice. Shamsie's description of colonial English life seems on target: balanced, but acute.

India was on the verge of partition, when Pakistan split off. Divisions between Hindus and Muslims sharpened and much blood was shed. Even Muslims who had no intention of leaving Delhi found themselves unwelcome there.

Shamsie tells how the characters rebuild their lives after partition. And then she tells of the descendants of the English and Pakistani families, and how they try to make sense of the world. Hiroto's outsider perspective is crucial.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan plays a large part in the story. Shamsie leaves the reader with a devastating picture of Americans.

A God in Every Stone provides an equally devastating picture of the English. The story begins on the eve of World War I. Major characters are a young Englishwoman who wants to be an archaeologist, a Turkish archaeologist, an Indian Muslim who fights with the English forces in Europe, and his younger brother. All are moving characters with lives full of pain. The book looks back to the ancient history of what is now Pakistan, especially Peshawar, and at what Peshawar has become: a refuge for Afghans fleeing their country and a point from which they launch attacks into it. She rejects stereotypes of Pashtuns, both Pakistanis and Afghans.

One character asks another, “And what do I need to know?” The other replies, “How to remove your blindfold and see your place in the world.” Shamsie demands that we all remove our blindfolds.

Shamsie is honest, but not brutal. She cares about all her characters. Reading her books has expanded my horizons, and I think they would expand anyone's. If I could nominate anyone for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I would nominate her.

I wrote most of this before Shamsie's provocative article that said publishers should focus on women writers in 2018 appeared in the Guardian (“Let's Have a Year of Publishing Only Women: A Provocation” 5 June 2015). I am delighted that she has issued this challenge to confront biases against women writers.

Addendum: For anyone wanting a readable nonfiction account of women's situation in Pakistan, I recommend Rafia Zakaria's The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press, 2015). Zakaria looks at political developments, particularly in Karachi, including discrimination against Muslims who came from India. She also tells the moving story of her aunt, whose heart was broken when her husband took a second wife. It was uncommon for men to marry more than one woman in Pakistan's early days, but it became common as Islamization took more and more rights away from women.

1 Comment

Can We Unmake War?

4/9/2015

5 Comments

What is the basis of war and how can we unmake it? That is the most important question facing humankind.

            In Unmaking War Remaking Men, long-time feminist writer Kathleen Barry tackles that question. I'm deeply impressed by the book. (Phoenix Rising Press of Santa Rosa, 2011.)
            Empathy is the basis of our shared human condition, Barry writes. If we see an accident in which someone is killed or about to be killed, we normally react with empathy. Some of us rush to try to save the person, and most others feel for the person and hope she will survive. If she doesn't, we grieve, at least briefly.
            War is about snuffing out the capacity for empathy, both in those who do the killing and in their compatriots at home who become inured to hearing about it.
            Almost all societies teach men that they are expendable, Barry says. From childhood, they are taught that they must be willing to let themselves die as well as kill in war. That is why boys are exposed to violence and hazing at an early age. That is why they are taught to suppress their feelings. They must be ready to have their capacity to think and feel for themselves extinguished, as much as possible, by the army or militia of their nation or group.
            Barry points out that The 1949 Geneva Convention on on war violates the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration says that “everyone has that right to life, liberty and security of person.” But the Geneva Convention says that only those “persons taking no part in the hostilities . . . shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.” It is by no means true that nations adhere to that provision and treat persons taking no part in hostilities humanely. But even under the Geneva Convention, persons who take part in the hostilities are seen as having no human rights. Combatants are expendable, Barry notes. Men are taught to accept being expendable.
            Men are taught that they must be expendable to protect women and children. But the brutalization soldiers and other combatants undergo both in training and in combat leads them to have hatred and contempt for the people who do not undergo the same brutalization. Combatants and future combatants have their identities stripped away as much as possible. They are taught to identify primarily with their own unit and to see civilians as feminized. Combatants are taught that they must accept being sacrificed.
            They go through training killing targets that resemble human beings. When they make their first actual kill, other combatants pat them on the back and welcome them to the club to negate their natural feelings of guilt and shame.
            Kathleen Barry has spent a great deal of time talking with veterans and reading their accounts of what war feels like. She respects the men who learn to empathize with the people they have made war against – an experience they often have after they come home, Barry says.
            She tells about studies saying that only 20 percent of the U.S. soldiers in World War II actually fired their guns. After the military learned that, it worked hard to raise that ratio, and has raised it greatly through increased training in dehumanizing the people whom the soldiers are killing. The training also dehumanizes the soldiers by making their reactions automatic. The military developed sanitized language like “clearing” a house or an area, which means destroying it. Barry quotes soldiers who participated in night raids on homes in Afghanistan and Iraq as saying that they seldom found evidence that the homeowners actually had been attacking U.S. troops, but nonetheless the soldiers looted and destroyed the homes and often took away the men and boys and locked them up. Even when the soldiers found no evidence, they assumed that the homeowners were lying. The soldiers came to believe that all Iraqis or even all Arabs were liars.

            Barry focuses especially on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Her initial reaction to the horror of the September 11, 2001 attacks was, in addition to grief, a hope that Americans would then understand what it was like to be bombed and would empathize with all people in other countries who undergo bombing. I had hoped the same, as I wrote in “A World Where Justice Brings Peace” (September 11, 2001: Feminist Responses, edited by Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Spinifex Press, 2002) . Sadly, we were mistaken. President George W. Bush and other leaders instead immediately reacted with talk of revenge and retaliation against a nation that did not actually carry out the attack. And the American people accepted that response.
            Perhaps after that it was easy, only a step to attacking a nation on the unproved claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Barry describes Bush and Cheney as psychopathic leaders, and surely lying one's way into mass killing seems at least like sociopathic behavior. She points out the horror that at a 2004 Gridiron dinner Bush poked fun at his big lie about weapons of mass destruction, enacting a skit in which he looked under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office and said, “Those weapons of mass destruction must be here somewhere.” Then he looked to the corner of the room and said, “No weapons here.” Top reporters and editors howled with laughter.
            That occasion is the only one in which Barry notes the media's part in the war. I understand that was not the focus of her book, but we should hold the media accountable for its role in accepting the nation's wars with scant and weak criticism.
            Barry of course also sees Osama bin Laden as a psychopath. She deplores the fact that psychopathic leaders of one nation or group can lead to the rise of psychopathic leaders in opposing nations or groups. She is not a complete pacifist. She questions responding to attacks by waging war on whole nations rather than trying to target the individuals responsible.
            She also questions definitions of terrorism that define as terrorist only subnational groups rather than nations. She says the U.S.-led killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is terrorism. She deplores our reluctance to hold our leaders accountable for war crimes, for massive killing of civilians.
            She also discusses the history of Israel and calls Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert war criminals for attacks that killed thousands of people in Lebanon. The response to Hizbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 should not have been to kill thousands of people, she says. She charges Israeli leaders with manipulating the fear of Israelis traumatized by the Holocaust.
            When she visited Ireland, a man who learned of her Irish background showed how deeply angry he was at the British for centuries of suppression and starvation the Irish had faced. He said the British are the cruelest people in the world, and certainly Britain has a great deal to answer for because of its policies of colonization. She realized how each people who has suffered feels that its own suffering is the worst and its own oppressor is the worst.
            Barry writes about her own suffering as a rape victim to say how deep trauma is, and how isolating. She contends that it is mistaken to say the terrible suffering of any group – Jews in the Holocaust, Blacks subjected to slavery, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines exterminated – is the worst ever. They are all the worst, she says. We need to empathize with all suffering, not focus on our own to the point that we minimize the sufferings of others and might even perpetuate more suffering.
            Barry says that core masculinity, masculinity in the sense of being taught not to feel, not to empathize, to try to become inured to the possibility of dying and killing, is causing devastation. She praises men, such as anti-war veterans, who try to work to change those patterns.
            She also says that women also must stop accepting the idea that the men in their lives have to be sacrificed in war. She tells of Palestinian mothers of suicide bombers whom other Palestinians order to hide their grief over their sons' death because their sons are martyrs. That is similar to the story that all governments tell the families of dead soldiers: That they should be proud that their sons died.
            Some veterans do not want to be thanked for what they have done, Barry says. Some find it terrible to be thanked for what they have had to do.
            She finds it amazing, as I do, that Bush and Cheney and other leaders failed to see that invading and occupying countries would lead their peoples to fight back. Who could not understand that people who lost much of their electricity, clean water, and basic supplies for years on end, as Iraqis did, would be angry? Who could not understand that men whose homes were invaded would be humiliated and would join groups that fight against the country that did that to them? Who could fail to understand that the invasion of Iraq would displace millions of people and lead to more and more killing? Kathleen Barry understands that. I foresaw it. Why couldn't our elected officials?
            Barry points out that women are in many ways victims of war. One in 10 Iraq women is a widow, most of them war widows, most of them living in poverty. Women in countries affected by war face rape by men in the invading army as well as men of their own nationality when the legal system breaks down. Large numbers of women in the U.S. military have been raped by their fellow soldiers who resent them for being there, thus taking away the significance of the sacrifice that is supposed to make a man a real man. And there is impunity for those rapes, merely a slap on the wrist in almost all cases.
            Barry looked at Costa Rica, a country that has renounced war and has no military, to see whether the situation of women is better there. She learned that 50 percent of women have experienced violence from their families or loved ones. So she acknowledges that preparation to be expendable in war is not the only way of learning core masculinity, or learning to violently subordinate women. But she says that Costa Rica is trying, and cites a 1996 Costa Rican law saying that anyone who uses psychological or physical violence against a relative can be ejected from the home and barred from raising children. She says that at the time of her writing, there had been 7,000 actions involving domestic violence.
            Barry says that soldiers should be trained to be more like firefighters. They should be trained to respond to a situation in the way that saves the most people and minimizes damage, not just to shoot anything that moves.

            When, since World War II, has any war made a country a better place?

            Barry said she initially had hopes for President Obama, and she does see him as better than the second President Bush. However, she was greatly disappointed that President Obama expanded the number of soldiers in Afghanistan. And I was greatly disappointed when he supported an attack on Libya. Can anyone honestly say that Libya is a better place since Qaddafi was overthrown? Why must we assume that dictators will be followed by democracy? It seems that seldom happens.
            I agree with almost all of what Barry says. She strongly supports removing all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible. Polls say that is what most Iraqis have wanted for many years. Almost no one wants to live under occupation by another country.
            I do want Americans to stop killing, as much as possible. But I question her belief that people in Afghanistan will be better off when American soldiers leave. I wonder when she says there are only a few hundred or a few thousand Taliban and they can't do much. I opposed the war in Afghanistan. I certainly don't think our country attacked Afghanistan to help the women. But I seriously doubt that women will be better off when U.S. troops leave. They would have been better off, certainly, if we had never interfered by supporting warlords and Islamists after the Russians occupied the country. We never should have been involved. All I can think to do is to support groups like Women for Afghan Women that, at great personal risk, provide shelters and lobby for legal changes. They face overwhelming opposition, and I think that even more women will die in the future. I don't believe things will be better for women in Afghanistan for a very long time.
            Of course Barry's book was written before the Islamic State emerged. I could understand any government trying to stop that group, even though all the governments opposing it are themselves responsible for a great deal of suffering. I fear that George W. Bush's Iraq war so destabilized and devastated the area and angered so many people that the damage can never be undone.
            Barry points out how horrifying the concept of preventative war is. She notes that the Geneva Conventions accept the idea of preemptive war if a nation is in immediate danger of attack, and she also accepts that. But preventative war, war simply to ensure that a nation that poses no immediate threat never will have the capacity to attack another, is a different matter entirely. That was Bush's justification in Iraq, and has been the justification for many other wars. The concept is dangerous and wrong, as Barry says.
            She believes that the ultimate solution to war is the end of nation states and the creation of a truly multinational force to be used only in situations such as genocide. I admire her optimism. I wish that were possible, but I doubt it. I can't imagine any of the governments that have veto power in the United Nations supporting it. Putin's attacks on the Ukraine have only made it clearer that the nations with arms will never give them up. The U.S. and Russia will not significantly reduce their nuclear stockpiles. We can, should, and must work against war, but it is late in the game to end it. I hope that I am too pessimistic. I hope that she is right and the work of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans Against War, Women in Black, and Code Pink is leading the way to a new world.

            Kathleen Barry has spent much time and energy studying history and learning from people who have actually experienced war. I am grateful for her doing that painful work. I encourage people who read her book to also read Peggy Faw Gish's accounts of being a peace worker in Iraq: a Journey of Hope and Peace and Walking Through Fire: Iraqis' Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation, which I also reviewed in my blog (“The Heartbreak of Iraq and the Story of One Peace Worker,” 2/16/2015.)

5 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

It's Time to Learn More About Russia

Books of 2016

Hamlet in the Laundry Room; Lancelot in the Living Room

Trying to Learn About Afghanistan

Best Books I Read in 2015

Why I Wrote LANCELOT: HER STORY

Pondering Camelot

Growing Into Nature

Read Kamila Shamsie!

Can We Unmake War?

Author

Archives

Categories