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Reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells the story of her life to the age of 17. It is a deep look into, not just the circumstances that shaped a woman who would become a gifted and beloved poet, but also into the conditions of life for black Americans in the south.

In her autobiography, Angelou opens up her young life fearlessly, sharing personal details not only of her family and their lives, but her pain, shame and sorrow. At the same time, she paints vivid portraits of Black culture as she experienced it, both negative and positive. We see the grinding poverty and constant threat of white insult and violence in the rural areas, but also the strength of family and community ties. We see ourselves within the rich urban black culture of St. Louis, with its connections to the underworld, and its influence on the life of the city.

Angelou - born Marguerite Johnson - and her brother Bailey were sent to live in Stamps, Arkansas when they were three and four, respectively. Their parents, then living in California, had ended their marriage and neither was in a position to care for the children, so they were put alone on a train with address tags on their wrists and tickets pinned to their clothes and sent home to their paternal grandmother. After several years living in Stamps, they were taken by their father to St Louis, where they lived first with their maternal grandmother, and then with their mother, a woman well connected to the underground gambling scene, and her lover. While there, Angelou was raped by her mother’s lover. The man was convicted, but avoided serving time. When he was found dead not long afterward, Angelou believed he had died because she had lied in court about how often he had touched her, and decided never to speak again to anyone except Bailey lest she kill someone else with her words. Not long afterwards, she and Bailey were sent back to Stamps, Angelou wondering if they had been sent away because of her family’s frustration with her silence.

After several years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother relocated again, this time to San Francisco, where their mother was now living, not that far from their father, still in Los Angeles. It is here that she takes the first steps toward womanhood and independence. School, her first job - as the first black female tram conductress - coming to terms with a father who was too self-absorbed to love her, the growing between her and her brother, her developing sexuality, and, in the final sequence recounted in the book, the birth of her son after a casual sexual interlude undertaken just to see what sex was all about.

Angelou offers loving portraits of those who helped to shape her life, from family to members of the community who introduced her to literature and the power of well-crafted words, to others further outside her circle who, kindly or otherwise, taught her about life beyond her grandmother’s general store (which served both blacks and poor whites) and her mother’s gambling connections. And she connects the events of her life to the condition of blacks in America, showing in a hundred ways, large and small, the strength and resilience of a people oppressed.

Angelou wrote several other autobiographical volumes, something I had not known before, as this volume is the one the everybody talks about. I think I’ll have to find and read the others.
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Zarqa Nawaz is a very funny person. This should not surprise anyone who knows that she is the creator of the Canadian comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, a memoir that begins with her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in Brampton Ontario.

Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.

Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.

At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.

Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.

Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.

In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.
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Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote are performers, long-time creative partners whose shows are a mix of comedy, music and other media. They are also both trans, and it was inevitable that they would eventually develop - with contributions from a new partner, Clyde Petersen, also trans - a performance that came out of their experiences. The show they developed, called Gender Failure, has now become the basis of a book by the same name.

Gender Failure is not an easy book to describe. Its themes, though, are highly relevant to the current revolution in understanding gender. This is an exploration of growing up assigned female when you are not, about feeling a failure at being a girl because you don’t want to do the same things, about feeling vaguely wrong. It’s about slowly working out who you really are and what you want to do about it. It’s about the way society treats people who are gender non-conforming or non-binary or who don’t fit into the two standard boxes for gender identity and presentation. It’s about gender dysphoria, feeling that parts of your body, the parts we associate with gender, aren’t right, aren’t really a part of you the way your foot or your shoulder is. It’s about realising that human experience transcends the so-called gender binary and that locking ourselves into boxes that prescribe not just a binary of genitals and bodies, but of behaviours and identities, limits us all.

As we learn through a series of interwoven autobiographical essays, alternating between the experiences of the two authors around gender, both Coyote and Spoon have tried out several labels, checked out several gender identity boxes, before separately coming to identify as non-binary. Both have at times chosen a style of gender presentation that tends toward masculine. By the photos included in the book, Coyote in particular reads as butch, and acknowledges that this remains a part of their identity. Neither fits exactly into one of those gendered boxes, however, even the expanded set. But society insists that even if you are gender-non-conforming, you have to do it in the right way to get the body you feel you should be in. As Coyote says, taking about their decision to have top surgery:

“In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.”

Spoon comments on their own first realisation of the possibility of not having to identify as male despite rejecting their assigned sex:

“What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.”

By calling the show, and the book, Gender Failure, Coyote and Spoon openup the discussion on gender identity - in discussing their own experiences, initially labeling them as ‘failures’ at being girls, or women, but then also coming to realise that identifying as men is just as inauthentic for them, they call for the question - is it those who do not fit in the boxes who are failures, or is the binary system itself proving to be a failure as more and more people reject its rigidity and limited possibilities. As Spoon comments: “Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.”
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Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, a prominent website created by and for Muslim women, has written a memoir about growing up as an American-born Muslim, the daughter of refugees from Jordan and Palestine, in a post 9/11 world. It’s an account that’s both deeply saddening and angering, and a celebration of the determination of a young woman to survive despite the violence and hatred directed toward all Muslims because of the actions of a radical minority.

The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.

Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.

She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.

It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:

“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.

Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”

Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.

“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the ­Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”

But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.

“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”
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In traditional homes in Afghanistan, it is a misfortune to have no son. So in many such homes, a daughter is chosen, to be a bacha posh, a “girl dressed as a boy,” a surrogate to be the family’s son until, the family hopes, a true son is born. These girls dress as boys, have the freedom of boys, and the privileges - school, involvement in public social life, having jobs, as many young children do in underdeveloped nations. Usually, when a boy is born, or when the bacha posh reaches puberty, she is forcibly pushed back into the restricted sphere of female life, no more freedom of dress and action, no more school. Some resist, refuse to be forced into a female role, despite the disapproval of family and mullahs and society.

Ukmina Manoori, author of I Am a Bacha Posh, is one such person. They write: “This is how I am. This is why I wrote this book. So I could tell the truth about Afghani women.

Because I lived as a man for most of my life, I could do this today. What a paradox! But I was seizing the opportunity. I learned not very long ago that I was the only Afghan to know of such a special fate. In our country, we, the bacha posh, the “women dressed as men,” made ourselves discreet. No one could say how many of us there were. We made the choice in a single moment of our lives not to renounce the freedom that our simple masculine clothes give but to risk our lives every single day. I wanted to write this book before I became an old woman or ill, before I was no longer able to remember my life, my special fate. Everyone wanted to know why some Afghan women made this choice. I think that from reading what I am going to recount of my life, they will understand. I want them to talk about us, the Afghans who fight to no longer be ghosts, to come back to the visible world. To no longer hide ourselves under burqas or men’s clothing.”

In telling their story, Manoori also tells the story of what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan, for every freedom they speak of gaining because they wear men’s clothing is a freedom denied to women. The freedom to go to school, to read, to be literate is one of the key freedoms: “I liked school; I really wanted to know how to read and write. There, I came close to that which separated the men from the women in our country: education. Men have the right to learn. I did not understand why this right was refused to girls, why there were so few schools for them. Later, these boys would become men, and they would make it their duty to prevent women from accessing this knowledge. Why should women learn to read, when it would only pervert their minds? Why would they need to write, if only to tell nonsense? And the Pashtun men argued that they must protect the women, to make them respectable. They prohibited them from showing themselves, especially in public places, like schools.”

By the time that Manoori, now late in their teens, had won their struggle with their family and community, to continue living as a man, the Russian invasion ended any hopes they had entertained for getting a good education and winning respect as a literate, well-employed man. After helping their mother and younger siblings escape into the mountains, Manoori joined the Mujahideen, the guerrilla fighters resisting the Russian forces, despite their qualms over the violence that the Mujahideen often brought against Afghan villagers trying to survive.

By the time the Russians left Afghanistan, Manoori’s father was ill from the privations of living as a refugee, and woukd soon die. Manoori was now the man of the family, respected as one who fought the jihad against the Russians. The family returned to their native village to find their home and farm destroyed. Hard work slowly brought things back, though nowhere near the level of security the family had known before the Russian invasion. But just as the hopes of the family began to grow, the Taliban began its drive to power in Afghanistan. Once more, Manoori was in jeopardy for their choice to live as a man. Under the Taliban, they became a prisoner in their home, unable to go out in case they were seen as a woman, waiting for the knock on the door that meant some neighbour had betrayed their secret. But the knick never came. Only the American bombs, in 2001.

With the restoration of democratic rule, Manoori became valuable to the new government. Because they lived as a man, and had been a Mujahideen, they could travel, attend meetings, talk to her fellow Pashtun with some authority - but because they were a woman, they could speak to women directly, work to engage them in the new government, begin the process of bringing the women of rural Afghanistan into public life as citizens. They would later serve their district as an elected representative on the Provincial Council.

In 2006, Manoori fulfilled a promise to their dying father, and made the Hadj, to present themselves before Allah as they were, a woman living as a man, and receive judgement from Him. And their sense was that Allah accepted them as they were.

Manoori writes in a very simple and straight-forward fashion of their experiences, their life as a woman dressed as, acting as, a man in such a male-dominated society. They have suffered much, as have the Afghan people, but express no regret for their choice to live as a man, even though that has meant, in their culture, that they have had no opportunity to take a partner or lover, to have a family. They say they have never felt a need for love, that respect and freedom have been more than enough in their life.

I am reluctant to frame the experiences of a person like Manoori in the terms we use for gender and sexuality in the West. Are they transgender? Non-binary? Asexual? I’m not sure what those concepts might mean to them. But the story of their life, of who they are on their own terms, is a fascinating one, and in their terms Manoori says clearly, “I am a bacha posh.”
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Judy Fong Bates describes her book, The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir as a work of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story, but not necessarily “the” story, of her family’s journey from Kaiping County, in Guangdong Province, southern China, to Canada, their lives in Canada, and the family and homes they left behind in coming to Gam Sum, North America, the Golden Mountain.

Fong Bates’s family is a complex one, with a complicated story of crossing borders - these days, we’d call it a melded family. Her father Fong Wah Yent had married in China, but came to Canada originally as a single man with his brother, leaving his wife and children behind. Though he travelled back to China several times, due to the passage of racist immigration laws, it would be years before he would be legally able to bring any of his family - which had grown to include three sons Hing, Shing, and Doon, and a daughter Jook - to Canada. But before that time, his first wife would die, and he would return to China and remarry, a widow with a daughter of her own, Ming Nee. But his plans to spend the remainder of his life in China ended with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 he returned to Canada, where he was finally able to sponsor his new wife Fong Yet Lan and unmarried children under the age of 21 - Hing and Jook remained in China, Shing, Doon, Ming Nee, and his youngest child - the author, Judy Fong Bates - by his new wife, were allowed to enter the country.

The occasions which prompted Fong Bates to write this memoir were two journeys to China, the first undertaken by the Canadian siblings, Shing, Doon, and Fong Bates herself, accompanied by their spouses, to China, to reconnect with the surviving members of their divided family still living there, the second by Fong Bates and her husband. In the first part to this memoir, Fong Bates intersperses her account of her experience returning after decades to a birthplace she left as a very small child, with her memories and reconstructed stories of her family’s life in Canada. The second part continues to tell her memories of visiting China with her siblings, and of her own childhood in Canada and her parents lives in both countries, but begins to weave into the narrative web elements of her current life as a middle-aged Chinese-Canadian author living in a small town in Ontario with her white husband. Two strands become three, then four as she writes about her second return to China in part three of the book.

Much of the book echoes with the vast differences between Fong Bates’ memories of her parents, and the stories about then that she discovers on her journeys to China. Her memories are of sad, defeated, often bitter, people, unhappy in their marriage, worn down from years of working in their laundry to clean the clothing of people who offered them no respect or understanding. Missing their homeland, their plans for a comfortable life together in China destroyed by the Communist revolution. Cut off from relatives, friends, culture, in a foreign land, sacrificing and denying themselves even the smallest comforts to send money home to numerous relatives struggling to survive under Communist rule. The stories she hears are of a respected, well educated woman, the best school teacher her father’s village had ever known, and a well-loved Gold Mountain visitor, generous, learned, who cared for each other, but were thwarted in their love by her father’s first wife, who refused to allow him to take a second wife into the home.

“The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.”

The Year of Finding Memory is at once an exploration of the universal nature of family histories, with their tensions, secrets, losses, fragmented stories, enduring connections and bitter disappointments, and the particular experiences of Chinese immigrants in North America, a place that seemed so alluring that its name in China meant the Golden Mountain, but which was for so many a daily struggle to survive in the midst of cultural shock and racism that ranged from the thoughtlessly callous to the brutally violent. It tells of families torn apart by ruthless immigration policies, messages of deception concealing from those left behind the difficulties of live in a new country that valued neither the people who came to its shores nor the back-breaking labour they undertook. Of obligations to send money home to those suffering under first the invasion of Imperial Japanese forces and then the Communist regime and the Cultural Revolution, when those who were safe from these horrors, at least, had barely enough to live on themselves. And it tells of the healing and becoming whole that comes of finding unknown family, piecing together the fragments of past lives only partially known and understood.

Fong Bates’s memoir of her families is rich in profound emotional truths but never sentimental or overwrought. She gives us all the facets, fragments, from her own memories and the shared remembrances of others, slowly building pictures of her parents’ lives that hint at the unrealised possibilities taken from them by the forces of history. We watch as the lives of her siblings, cousins, and the extended web of family and neighbours her parents had known in China become as real to her as her own memories, and her own life in a country that is hers as it was never her parents’.

It’s a powerful book, a vital living story, rich and rewarding on many levels.
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Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.
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Up Ghost River: a chief’s journey through the turbulent waters of Native history, Edmund Metatawabin’s memoir, is at once a survivor’s recollection of violence and oppression, and an activist’s declaration of Indigenous resistance and power.

Chief Metatawabin writes with courage and brutal honesty about his life, about the abuse he experienced as a student at a residential school, about the cultural genocide experienced by the Indigenous peoples, about the ways these things affected him, and came close to destroying him and his family. He offers his earliest recollections, before going away to school, about the damage done by oppressive laws that made the exercise of traditional ways a crime, the divisions created by Christian priests and ministers persuading Indigenous people that their culture was sinful and evil, abut the ways that Indigenous people were kept poor, hungry and in debt.

He writes about the almost unthinkable tortures, humiliations, abuses forced on him and others at residential schools, and the psychological damage from years of mistreatment and trauma, the way that pain led him to addiction.

He writes about his struggles to overcome alcoholism, to hel from trauma, finally learning that white men’s treatments in white institutions only perpetuated the damage. He became part of the indigenous healing movement, and began to rediscover self knowledge, and Indigenous pride.

As a chief and activist, he spearheaded court cases against residential schools, began to demand more autonomy for his nation, and supported the recovery of the almost lost traditions of indigenous people, working closely with the Idle No More movement.

These courageous personal accounts are important, both in exposing the history of white abuse, oppression and genocide, and in restoring the hope and the power of indigenous people, through making the truth known. I thank Chief Metatawabin for sharing his story with the world, and I honor him.

“What was accomplished by Idle No More? With Stephen Harper’s parliamentary majority, it was hard for us to stop the Acts from becoming law. And yet, it soon became apparent that the movement was bigger than the original legislation that sparked it. We organized and demonstrated politically and spiritually, championing those aspects of our culture that the residential schools had tried to destroy. At the protests worldwide, we raised our voices and sang to the four directions to show that we are still here. We banged the moosehide drum because it symbolizes the union between the heartbeat of Mother Earth and our people, still beating strong after centuries of oppression. We rose up, strong and united, to return to the Red Road. We took to the streets and retraced the ancient trails. We found our spirits and our voices, and told our stories of renewed pride and strength in powerful traditions. We took a healing journey, as I have been doing ever since I left St. Anne’s. We honoured the memories of our living ghosts.”
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In My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege, a German woman of mixed race, recounts the moment when, browsing in a library, she discovers that her grandfather was a Nazi officer. The book she finds, I Have To Love My Father, Don’t I?, is by Monika Goerth, her biological mother, and the daughter of a concentration camp commandant.

Adopted children who search for their biological parents generally have little idea of what they will find, or how the knowledge they uncover will affect them, but under most circumstances, they at least have made some mental preparation for the process of discovery. In Teege’s case, though, she met her biological mother and grandmother sporadically during her childhood, did not drift out of touch completely with her mother until she was 21. She knew them as people. What she didn’t know was that there was more to learn, or the terrible facts of her mother’s story, or why no one in either her adoptive or biological family had told her about it.

Finding the book is a shock. Reading it and coming to terms with what it means, even more so.

“I collapse onto our bed and read and read, to the very last page. It is dark when I close the book. Then I sit down at my computer and spend the whole night online, reading everything I can find about Amon Goeth. I feel like I have entered a chamber of horrors. I read about his decimation of the Polish ghettoes, his sadistic murders, the dogs he trained to tear humans apart. It is only now that I realize the magnitude of the crimes Amon Goeth committed. Himmler, Goebbels, Goering—I know who they are. But what exactly Amon Goeth had done, I’d had no idea. Slowly I begin to grasp that the Amon Goeth in the film Schindler’s List is not a fictional character, but a person who actually existed in flesh and blood. A man who killed people by the dozens and, what is more, who enjoyed it. My grandfather. I am the granddaughter of a mass murderer.”

Jennifer Teege’s story is told in two voices. Her own, first person account, is about questions, emotions, reactions. How she entered into a depression, a crisis of identity. How she worried what hidden madness and brutality might lie within her, a legacy of a grandfather she sometimes sees as psychopathic. Her attempts to learn more about her family past, visits to the Polish ghettoes and the camp at Plaszow where her grandfather ordered the deaths of thousands. Her conflicted feelings about her grandmother, who was kind to her in childhood, who lived next to the grounds of the concentration camp with its commandant, who must have seen and heard and known what was happening there. Her questions for her mother, who grew up overshadowed by a father she had never known, by a mother who could not acknowledge her lover’s actions or her own complicity.

Interspersed with these are sections written in the third person, possibly by her co-author Nikola Sellmair. These are sections that talk about the lives of Amon Goeth, his career, his relationships with Oskar Schindler, his trial and execution, that of his lover, Ruth Irene Kalder, who is Teege’s grandmother, that of his daughter, Monika Goeth, Teege’s mother, and that of Teege herself.

It’s a fascinating exploration of how hidden trauma is passed through generations. Teege’s story ends with her revealing her family’s past to the friends she made during four years spent studying and working in Israel, years before she discovered her connection to a noted Nazi war criminal, and finding acceptance and healing there. The ways in which the descendants of the victims and the descendants of the perpetrators both carry wounds is dealt with compassionately, and with unflinching honesty. Her experience of difference as a black woman in a predominantly white society, as a member of a race that her grandfather would have held to be subhuman even as he viewed the primarily Jewish victims in his camp, is an ever-present but backgrounded parallel to the overwhelming awareness of the Holocaust that permeates her narrative.

This is a courageous personal narrative. Teege’s journey to self-acceptance, and to understanding of the ways that the horrors of her grandfather’s actions affected her grandmother, her mother and herself is a moving one, skillfully told in both her own voice and that of her co-author.

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No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters is a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s writings taken largely from her personal blog. I’d read most of them before, having been a follower of that blog from fairly early on. And being of the opinion that anything Le Guin chooses to write about is worth reading, even if it is only what she imagines her cat might like her to write about. Maybe even particularly that.

There will be no more blog posts. But reading them in a concentrated dose, in this volume, is like looking into the wise and imaginative mind of one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, and seeing what she does when she’s at home. Of course there is always the necessary distance between writer and reader. Le Guin knew well she was writing for an audience, even in this blog. But I like to think she knew she was writing for an audience that loved her and wanted to know some of the things about her that she was willing to share.

As Karen Joy Fowler remarks in the Introduction:

“What you will find in these pages here is a more casual Le Guin, a Le Guin at home. Some of the issues that have obsessed her throughout her career—the fatal model of growth capitalism; sisterhood and the ways in which it differs from the male fraternal; the denigration and misunderstandings of genre, science, and belief—continue to appear, but they’ve been sanded back to their absolute essentials. It is particularly pleasurable here to watch the lively way her mind works, and how a posting whose trappings initially seem merely sportive becomes deeply consequential.”

Le Guin’s topics range from the love her cat has of hunting beetles to the magnificent subversiveness inherent in the truth that lies beneath all speculative fiction, that “it doesn’t have to be the way it is.” In some ways, she has personified in her blog one of my favourite aphorisms, the one attributed to the Roman playwright Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) which says “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” All of that which is human, which can be apprehended by a human, is hers to explore and discuss.

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The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, is a collection of writings in response to the racism that is an integral part of North American, white supremacist society. The title is a reference to James Baldwin’s classic writing on the same issues, more than 50 years ago, a reference that Ward makes explicit in her introduction.

“I read Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” while I was in my mid-twenties, and it was a revelation. I’d never read creative nonfiction like Baldwin’s, never encountered this kind of work, work that seemed to see me, to know I needed it. I read it voraciously, desperate for the words on the page. I needed to know that someone else saw the myriad injustices of living while black in this country, that someone so sharp and gifted and human could acknowledge it all, and speak on it again and again. Baldwin was so brutally honest. His prose was frank and elegant in turn, and I returned to him annually after that first impression-forming read. Around a year after Trayvon Martin’s death, a year in which black person after black person died and no one was held accountable, I picked up The Fire Next Time, and I read: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.” It was as if I sat on my porch steps with a wise father, a kind, present uncle, who said this to me. Told me I was worthy of love. Told me I was worth something in the world. Told me I was a human being. I saw Trayvon’s face, and all the words blurred on the page.

It was then that I knew I wanted to call on some of the great thinkers and extraordinary voices of my generation to help me puzzle this out. I knew that a black boy who lives in the hilly deserts of California, who likes to get high with his friends on the weekend and who freezes in a prickly sweat whenever he sees blue lights in his rearview, would need a book like this. A book that would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce, protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America. A book that would gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form, and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to witness, to reckon. A book that a girl in rural Missouri could pick up at her local library and, while reading, encounter a voice that hushed her fears. In the pages she would find a wise aunt, a more present mother, who saw her terror and despair threading their fingers through her hair, and would comfort her. We want to tell her this: You matter. I love you. Please don’t forget it.”

Every piece in this collection is important in what it says, and what it asks the reader to contemplate. These are powerful pieces, poems, personal narratives, essays, examinations, exhortations, accusations, inspirations. They talk about growing up black. About walking while black. About the history of black people. About the deaths of Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and Rekia Boyd, and the Charleston church worshippers and Sandra Bland and too many others. About white rage and black mourning. About knowing your rights, and knowing how to behave when you’re stopped for breathing while black. About being a black parent, knowing what you must say to your black child, in the hopes of keeping them alive. About being black in America.

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Celebrity is a strange thing. Most people whose fame goes far beyond any recognition they might reasonably have attained through their own work in their field, or their actions with their own circle, do so because the media picks them up, enhances who they are or what they do. Zoe Quinn became a celebrity because a bunch of overly privileged manboys decided that she had harshed their gaming mellow and threatened to kill her. Zoe Quinn became a celebrity because of the people who hate her, and remains one because of her response to that, and the people who came to admire her for it.

Crash Override: How Gamergate [Nearly] Destroyed My Life and How We Can Win the Fight against Online Hate is the story of how all that shit went down. It’s also the story of how Quinn survived and went on to found an organisation designed to help others facing the same shit that was thrown at her. And it’s the story of how much more has to change before any real dent can be made in the toxic sludgery that is the natural environment of the Internet abuser.

The first part of the book interweaves a linear account of the early days of the Gamergate assault on Quinn following he revenge post of an abusive ex-lover, with Quinn’s account if growing up poor, nerdy, and queer in a dysfunctional family in small town America. The later part of the book focuses on an exploration of the nature of online harassment, her anti-harassment activism and the tactics adopted by her organisation - also called Crash Override - on behalf of their clients, general advice on what to do if you are being harassed, or expect to be, and thoughts on what our social institutions - such as lawmakers, police, academic researchers, the media, and companies with internet presence - can do to ameliorate the problem.

Quinn earns significant points in my book for pointing out that as bad as the harassment has been for her, a white cis woman, it is worse for trans folk and people of colour, and worst of all for trans women of colour - as it is in life off the net as well. She makes clear the linkages between the reddit and 4chan gamergate abusers, highly sexist denizens of the MRA and ‘manoverse’ netspaces, and the alt-right/white supremacist/fascist community centred on breitbart and similar sites.

And by admitting her own involvement in internet abuse as an insecure teenager with unresolved frustrations, she underscores the point that internet harassment is bullying gone digital, it is a manifestation of something that has been part of human interaction for a very long time, and it will take a cultural seachange to prioritise empathy over dehumanisation.

“We need a culturewide solution because individual change is difficult when online abuse is frequently a group activity. It’s harder to hear the voices of the people you’ve hurt over the dozens of others cheering you on. These mobs spring up partly because a lot of people like teen me don’t have a community anywhere else. Participating in an abuse campaign is something to have in common, with a target to bond over and rally against. The mob is a place to belong and find acceptance; it just happens to be built on someone else’s suffering.”

A brave, painful and sometimes funny examination of the underside of Internet culture that will probably leave you wondering what would happen if the trollmobs came after you.

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Continuing my latest 'project' - bringing myself up to date on the global AIDS epidemic, the history, the science, and the realities of life with HIV - I picked up a book I'd seen recommended in several articles on AIDS narratives, Helen Epstein's The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight against AIDS in Africa. I was particularly looking forward to comparing Epstein's views with those expressed by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin in Tinderbox, which also addressed the specific issues and conditions surrounding the fight against AIDS in Africa.

Epstein is an American writer and journalist. She is also a molecular biologist and has worked as an independent consultant specialising in public health in developing countries for organisations as diverse as The Rockefeller Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the Population Council. Her career as as a molecular biologist working on the development of an AIDS vaccine took her to Uganda, where she conducted research. Though she was unsuccessful in making any progress on the quest for a vaccine, her experiences in Uganda and later research in other countries served as the basis for this book on AIDS in Africa. The book is partly a personal narrative and partly an exploration of the specific conditions surrounding the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

As Epstein notes in her Preface, the way that the AIDS epidemic has developed in Africa differs in certain key dimensions from its progress in other areas.

"The worldwide AIDS epidemic is ruining families, villages, businesses, and armies and leaving behind an immense sadness that will linger for generations. The situation in East and southern Africa is uniquely severe. In 2005, roughly 40 percent of all those infected with HIV lived in just eleven countries in this region—home to less than 3 percent of the world’s population. In Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, roughly a quarter of adults were infected, a rate ten times higher than anywhere else in the world outside Africa."

Epstein's narrative is an attempt to identify the reasons for the scope of the epidemic in Africa. In terms if the early spread of the disease, and the conditions which facilitated its continued growth and the difficulties in designing effective treatment and education programs, Epstein appears to have come to some of the same conclusions as Timberg and Halperin, particularly on the role that colonialism and globalisation have played in the social disruptions that allowed AIDS to flourish. She says: "... its spread has been worsened by an explosive combination of historically rooted patterns of sexual behavior, the vicissitudes of postcolonial development, and economic globalization that has left millions of African people adrift in an increasingly unequal world. Their poverty and social dislocation have generated an earthquake in gender relations that has created wide-open channels for the spread of HIV."

Further, she suggests - as do Timberg and Halperin - that projects and programs imposed from outside the communities by people with little understanding of African life and society are unlikely to be successful.

"Like many newcomers to Africa, I learned early on that the most successful AIDS projects tended to be conceived and run by Africans themselves or by missionaries and aid workers with long experience in Africa—in other words, by people who really knew the culture."

However, Epstein focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of major differences in the epidemiology of the disease in Africa when compared to other areas where the disease has reached epidemic proportions.

"In other world regions, the AIDS epidemic is largely confined to gay men, intravenous drug users, commercial sex workers, and their sexual partners. But in East and southern Africa, the virus has spread widely in the general population, even among those who have never engaged in what health experts typically consider high-risk behavior and whose spouses have not done so either."

It is these significant differences in the pattern of AIDS epidemiology in Africa that make fighting the disease so much harder. Harm reduction policies that have worked well in other countries have had little success in stemming the rate of new infections, because the behaviours that lead to transmission and the populations affected are not the same as are seen elsewhere. Further, the connection between HIV infection and behaviours often seen as immoral or criminal - prostitution, anal sex, intravenous drug use - tend to convey an attitude of shame, which limits communicators' ability to convey a message if harm reduction behaviour to ordinary people who are not part of a high risk population.

"... in this book, I suggest that outside of Uganda and Kagera, health officials misunderstood the nature of the AIDS epidemic in this region, in particular why the virus was spreading so rapidly in the general population. As a result, the programs they introduced were less effective than they might have been and may have inadvertently reinforced the stigma, shame, and prejudice surrounding the disease.

Much of the stigma and confusion surrounding AIDS has to do with its common association with perceived 'irresponsible' or 'immoral' sexual behavior."

This sense of shame associated with AIDS may well have ben intensified by the cultural influence of colonialism and Western racist attitudes toward Africans. A prevailing racist narrative, traceable to the earliest reports of Europeans visiting sub-Saharan Africa, is that of the hypersexual African. Education and prevention programs designed in the West and imported to Africa were influenced by assumptions that AIDS in Africa was spreading so widely because of extreme promiscuity. Not only did this result in programs that would widely miss their mark, but in sone cases it generated resistance among Africans, highly sensitive to the perceptions of Westerners, leading them to downplay or deny the severity of the epidemic because of its association with sexual immorality. "In a speech given at the University of Fort Hare in 2001, [South African President] Mbeki railed against those who were 'convinced that we are but natural born promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world. They proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.' "

Indeed, Epstein found that in many areas, discussion about AIDS is virtually non-existent, and many people acted as if it was not an issue in their communities. People refuse testing, deny their positive status, pretend that deaths of friends and family are from other causes. In South Africa, where rates of infection are among the highest in the world, an entire multi-million dollar educational and social marketing campaign, called loveLife, and aimed at reducing high-risk practices among youth, rarely if ever mentioned the term AIDS. In many cases, Epstein was told that this silence is due to the fact that AIDS has been presented as a disease of prostitutes and criminals. To admit that you are HIV positive, or that someone in your family is, is to admit gross personal immorality and invite shaming, social isolation, and even violence.

The truth, however, is that in Africa, unlike most other regions, AIDS predominantly affects people in the general heterosexual population, particularly women who have never engaged in what are commonly seen as the high risk behaviours. Many HIV-positive Africans have had few sexual partners, and most of their sexual relationships have been long-term, based on some degree of emotional commitment, and no more prone to unfaithfulness than relationships conducted by Westerners. The difference which increases the risk of infection for heterosexual Africans is a cultural one - in many areas of Africa, the pattern is not one of serial monogamy, but of concurrent polygamous relationships.

"... what many people—from policy-makers, to public health experts, to ordinary African people at risk—did not realize is that most HIV transmission in this region results from normative sexual behavior, practiced by large numbers of people. It’s not that African people have more sexual partners, over a lifetime, than people in Western countries do—in fact, they generally have fewer. However, in many African communities, both men and women are more likely than people in other world regions to have more than one—perhaps two or three—overlapping or “concurrent” long-term partnerships at a time. A man may have two wives, or a wife and girlfriend, and one of those women may have another regular partner, who may in turn have one or more other partners and so on. This “long-term concurrency” differs from the “serial monogamy” more common in western countries, and the casual and commercial “one-off” sexual encounters that occur everywhere. But long-term overlapping relationships are far more dangerous than serial monogamy, because they link people into a giant network that creates a virtual superhighway for HIV.

Concurrent sexual partnerships have strong cultural, social and economic roots in East and Southern Africa, and this has made fighting HIV very difficult. Fifteen years of vigorous condom promotion in many African towns and cities has had little effect on the epidemic, probably because most transmission occurs in long term relationships in which condoms are seldom used. As family planning experts have known for decades, people use condoms mainly in casual and commercial relationships, and inconsistent condom use offers poor protection against either pregnancy or STD transmission in long term relationships. Urging African people to abstain or be faithful has its limitations too, because most people are faithful already, if not to one person, then to two or three. Many of those at highest risk of infection are the faithful partners of men or women with only one other trusted long-term partner; others are in mutually faithful relationships, in which one partner had concurrent partners in the past."

Epstein sees the pattern of multiple concurrent sexual relationships as the primary reason that AIDS in Africa is not primarily a disease of high risk groups, but a disease affecting the general population, most of whom are neither promiscuous nor engaged in what is normally recognised as high risk activities. The reasons for these concurrent relationships vary widely. In some communities, polygamy is still the norm, such that each man has multiple wives. In some cases, if the man is a migrant worker, he may also have a girlfriend in his place of work - and because he cannot financially support both his wives and his girlfriend, she may have a second lover as well. At home, one or more of his wives may have a longterm clandestine relationship with one of the many unmarried young men who cannot yet afford a bride price.

In urban areas, many women engage in transactional relationships - they agree to be someone's girlfriend in return for gifts or some financial support. A young man with some income to spare may have such relationships with several women at the same time. One or more of these young women may have a second lover, either to augment her financial situation or to 'pay back' her first boyfriend for his infidelities.

Until recently, education programs focused on the kinds of high risk behaviours identified as key means of transmission in other regions, and did not discuss concurrent relationships as a risk. Further, prevention education focused on condom use. But because these programs did not take into account the realities of sexual behaviour in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa, such programs did little to reduce harm in the relationships most likely to spread infection.

"The condom campaigns were intended to encourage frank discussion about sex among normally reticent African populations and reach out to high-risk populations with the message that casual sex was nothing to worry about as long as condoms were used. But it is possible to imagine how they might have had the opposite effect. By associating AIDS with beer drinking, premarital sex, prostitution, and—in the case of the boxing glove and basketball ads—womanizing and rape, the lusty condom ads might well have clashed disastrously with local sensibilities concerning decency and self-respect and further inflamed the prejudice, denial, and rumormongering that have featured so strongly in the AIDS epidemic, and in virtually all epidemics since biblical times. 'The campaigns were totally wrong,' said Nkosazana Ngcobo, who works with a South African organization that helps orphans. 'The message was you had to be a prostitute or a truck driver to get AIDS.' "

One thing that runs through many of these patterns of concurrency is the role played by poverty, particularly among women, and by the concentration of work for men in geographically distant areas, which results in partners being separated for long periods of time and thus seeking out secondary relationships for comfort. Epstein does not hesitate to place much of the blame for these economic inequities and dislocations on colonialism, globalisation, and the policies of Western development and investment organisations such as the World Bank:

"The reasons why sexual behavior had been so slow to change in response to HIV in many developing countries were complex and mysterious. ... It is also possible that people in communities that have been broken by war, migration, and continuing economic hardship will be slow to take HIV awareness messages seriously. It is also possible that improving the social conditions that make the poor vulnerable to HIV is difficult when their fate is sometimes in the hands of remote economists, officials, and businessmen."

In the first section of the book, Epstein reports on the reasons she sees behind the rapid spread of AIDS in most of sub-Saharan Africa. She then turns, however, to look at one area where infection rates declined, without significant access to Western AIDS programs or anti-viral pharmaceuticals. Initially, the spread of HIV infection in Uganda and the adjacent Kagera region of Tanzania was rapid, fueled by border conflicts between Uganda and Tanzania in the 1970s, which resulted in mass movements of soldiers and civilians, and attendant prostitution. But by the late 1980s, the prevalence of AIDS had fallen dramatically, even as it was rising in surrounding regions.

The phenomenon has been studied and many explanations have been put forward for this drop; Epstein attributes it at least in part to something she calls 'collective efficacy':

"It seemed to me that what mattered most was something for which public health experts had no name or program. It was something like “collective efficacy”—the ability of people to join together and help one another. Felton Earls, the sociologist who coined the term, was trying to explain varying crime rates in American cities, but the phenomenon is present everywhere there is a spirit of collective action and mutual aid, a spirit that is impossible to measure or quantify, but that is rooted in a sense of compassion and common humanity.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, while people in most African countries were ignoring the AIDS crisis, hundreds of tiny community-based AIDS groups sprang up throughout Uganda and Kagera to comfort the sick, care for orphans, warn people about the dangers of casual sex, and address the particular vulnerability of women and girls to infection. Yoweri Museveni’s government developed its own vigorous prevention campaigns and the World Health Organization provided funding, but much also came from the pockets of the poor themselves. Their compassion and hard work brought the disease into the open, got people talking about the epidemic, reduced AIDS-related stigma and denial, and led to a profound shift in sexual norms. This process was very African, but it was similar in many respects to the compassionate, vocal, and angry response to AIDS among gay men in Western countries during the 1980s, when HIV incidence in this group also fell steeply."

Epstein also notes that "... the people in this region understood earlier than others that in this part of Africa, AIDS was not just a disease of prostitutes, truck drivers and other stigmatized high-risk groups." The post-Amin government of Yoweri Museveni undertook a serious education campaign that featured frank talk about sex and popularised the slogans "Love Carefully" and "Zero Grazing" - encouraging a reduction in concurrent relationships. A strong feminist movement brought about legal and social changes that empowered women to assume greater personal autonomy in sexual relationships. But at the time, Western AIDS workers and researchers dismissed all this.

"Through the 1980s and 1990s, officials from the World Health Organization, USAID, and other development agencies largely dismissed Uganda’s AIDS programs. 'It seemed like chaos,' Gary Slutkin, a WHO official who worked in Uganda in the late 1980s, told me much later. 'For many of my colleagues, the problem was there was no theory behind Uganda’s approach.' Public health programs were supposed to be “rational,” “budgeted,” and targeted at those groups thought to be most at risk. They were not supposed to be a free-for-all. But what WHO officials did not understand at the time was that there was a theory. It just wasn’t their theory. The intimate, personalized nature of Uganda’s early AIDS campaigns—the open discussions led by government field workers and in small groups of women and churchgoers, the compassionate work of the home-based care volunteers, the courage and strength of the women’s-rights activists—helped people see AIDS not as a disease spread by disreputable high-risk groups or 'others' but as a shared calamity affecting everyone."

In recent years, the frank campaigns based on reduction of partners have disappeared. In their place, abstinence-only programs operated by evangelical Christian organisations and funded by a US government opposed to any other preventative approaches have become standard. Shame and stigma are increasingly directed toward 'immoral' AIDS sufferers. And the prevalence of AIDS in Uganda is no longer falling.

Epstein concludes her book with an examination of the kinds of locally designed and operated programs that may help to alleviate suffering and change behaviours, and how these are often undermined by programs designed and funded by Western organisations. Ultimately, she says, there is a place for both, but each must be allowed to do what it is best suited for.

"The failure of so many donor programs has left many with the mistaken impression that when it comes to behavior change, “nothing works”. But a growing number of initiatives ... are working, sometimes with words alone.

However, words alone are not enough. The billion-dollar aid agencies such as USAID, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation must continue to make condoms and counseling and testing services as widely available as possible, and should also continue to extend the offer of AIDS treatment to all who need it. But they should be aware that these programs, though vitally important, are unlikely to bring the epidemic under control on their own. They also need to do more to support programs that promote a sense of solidarity among all those who care about the disease. Too many donor programs have divided people—rich from poor, old from young, HIV positive from HIV negative, “moral” from “immoral.” Microfinance programs, home-based care and orphan programs, women’s rights programs and other initiatives that are truly locally conceived and controlled need to be expanded. This must be done carefully and in good faith; episodic, self-serving efforts to boomerang funds back to donor agencies themselves can be worse than useless, as can opportunistic “projects” spontaneously generated in response to new donor funds.

The African AIDS epidemic is partly a consequence of patterns of sexual networking that have evolved in response to the insecurity of living in a rapidly globalizing world that is leaving the continent behind. Therefore, the industrialized countries should also reexamine their policies in trade and foreign investment so that African nations can compete on fairer terms in the global economy."

Epstein's familiarity with Africa, gained through years of research into public health issues in multiple areas if the continent, makes this book an invaluable resource tor understanding what has gone wrong with the fight against AIDS in Africa, and what can be done to set it right.

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How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France is at once a personal recollection and a journalistic history of the AIDS epidemic in the US and the struggles of gay activists to force government and institutions to mobilise efforts and resources to combat the disease.

France, a journalist and gay man who lived through and reported on the issues as they happened, deftly portrays both the sluggish and at times callous response from the medical establishment and government agencies and officials, and the dedication and unrelenting activism of the gay community. His scope covers both the events and the people involved in identifying and fighting the disease from its earliest days, presenting vibrant portraits of the doctors, patients and activists as he unfolds the story of the epidemic's growth.

France's book looks at the work of doctors outside the establishment agencies - the CDC and the NIH - who, often gay themselves, or working with predominantly gay men in their practices, saw the early signs of the epidemic. Even before the first cases of Kaposi's sarcoma and PCP, doctors were noticing unique health concerns among gay men. One such doctor, Joe Sonnabend, who volunteered at the Gay Men's Health Project as well as having a private practice which was centred on treatment if venereal diseases, had seen anomalous medical problems in gay men for years prior to the outbreaks of KS and PCP - and suspected that it was connected to sexual activity.

"Unusual cases of protozoan infestations of the gastrointestinal tracts of gay men had risen 7,000 percent in the previous six years and were now so common that a new diagnosis was officially coined, gay bowel syndrome, recognized by the McGraw-Hill manual Colorectal Surgery, an industry standard, and the Centers for Disease Control alike. There appeared to be concomitant epidemics of cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus, and a bizarre incidence rate of lymphadenopathy—knobby and swollen lymph nodes, which one would expect to encounter infrequently. Sonnabend diagnosed lymphadenopathy in 40 percent of his patients, a consequence, he believed, of the body’s reaction to various other venereal infections. That same causal link could also have explained the simultaneous preponderance of enlarged spleens, low white blood cell counts, and low blood platelets."

It was Sonnabend who would use his previous research experience with interferon and immune system function to provide the first evidence suggesting that there was an infection agent behind the unusual symptoms and diseases now being seen across the country. Ironically, Sonnabend would go on to advocate the position that it was promiscuous sex, especially receptive anal sex, that weakened the immune system and allowed that rapid development of opportunistic diseases.

France details the early confusion over the cause of AIDS, and the difficulties that proponents of both the over-taxed immune system theory and the unknown infectious agent theory faced when they made the obvious recommendations that reducing the number of partners, making choices about which sex acts one engaged in, and using condoms - the beginning of the 'safer sex' approach to limiting the spread of the disease - might increase one's chances of avoiding the disease. Sexual liberation had become too ingrained as both a way of life and a symbol of gay liberation for this approach to be accepted for the first few years of the epidemic. It wasn't until the summer of 1983 - two years after the KS clusters began appearing - that activists in both New York and San Francisco published safer sex guides that finally brought about voluntary changes in sexual behaviour in the gay communities of America.

Focusing primarily on the personalities, organisations, and actions of New Yorkers, France recounts the events that led to the formation of such organisations as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, GLAAD, the Lavender Hill Mob, PWA Coalition, AmFAR and ACT UP. His narrative follows the work of the key activists involved in these organisations, their lives, conflicts, and in many cases their illnesses - the pressures of living with AIDS and their intense desire to live, even for just a few more years, being for many the driving force behind their activism.

One of the major threads that runs throughout France's narrative is the struggle for action on drug research, clinical trials, and inexpensive means of production and distribution. The primary government agency with responsibility for pharmaceutical development was the NIAID - the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the NIH network - and it had prioritised AZT treatment over other possible treatments, including approaches that sought to extend life by preventing or treating the main opportunistic diseases that people with AIDS were actually dying from. They refused to run trials on the effectiveness of such prophylactic measures as Bactrim for PCP. When trials on new drugs were run, recruitment of test subjects was strangely difficult to manage despite the vast numbers of PWA desperate to try anything that might help them - partly due to extremely strict conditions of qualification, and partly due to virtually non-existent attempts at outreach to the community for trial subjects. Another key issue for activists was the requirement by the FDA for formal double-blind trials with a control group given placebos. Given the extreme fatality rates for AIDS, in situations where a drug had demonstrated effectiveness in patient settings, this could mean the deaths of most of the control group during the course of the trial. But the FDA refused to accept 'lesser' evidence of effectiveness. Another area of activists' attention was the fight to get the cost of drugs such as AZT - at one point one of the most expensive drug available - reduced.

The story of AIDS activism is also the story of a hew kind of relationship between the medical ad pharmaceutical industry and the people it supposedly serves. By educating themselves and agitating for representation in decision-making in both the regulatory and corporate arms of the industry, activists not only pushed forward research that led to effective and sustainable treatments for AIDS, but established a model for other communities bound by the fight against other diseases.

France's book sweeps one up into the struggle, humanises the participants, and, ending as it does with the introduction of the first generation of protease inhibitor drugs that gave those who survived the early years a real future, leaves one wondering, what comes next. It's a fascinating and compelling book.

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Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral History, edited by American/Ojibwe scholar Anton Treuer, is a collection of cultural narratives, tales and remembrances recorded by Treuer in conversation with Ojibwe elders. The collected narratives of the elders he spoke with are presented in both Ojibwe and in English translation. Treuer's intent in publishing these narratives is not just to preserve the legacy of the elders, but to offer material that will serve the vital project of preserving the language itself. As he says in the Introduction to the volume,

" 'We’re not losing our language, our language is losing us,' says White Earth elder Joe Auginaush. I have been both haunted and driven by that thought for many years now. The current peril faced by the Ojibwe (Chippewa) language is a matter of a declining number of speakers and a people who have lost their way, rather than a language that is lost or dying. The Ojibwe language, spoken by as many as 60,000 Anishinaabe people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, is alive. The grammar, syntax, and structure of the language are complete. The oral tradition and history of the Ojibwe are still with us. Yet in many areas fluency rates have plummeted to unprecedented and unsustainable levels. Especially in the United States, most speakers are more than forty-five years of age. In some places, the fluency rate is as low as one percent. As the population of fluent speakers ages and eventually leaves, there is no doubt that the Ojibwe language will lose its carriers. We are not losing our language. Our language is losing us."

Preserved in the collected oral histories of the elders interviewed by Treuer are the memories of traditional ways of life, seasonal activities, and aspects of those ceremonies which may be written down or shared with those not Ojibwe (Treuer makes it clear that he has published nothing that can only be transmitted orally, or only within the Ojibwe people). The personal histories also speak of transitions to other ways of living and their consequences.

Some elders directly address their concerns about the lost of their language and of their traditional spiritual knowledge and traditions. Among the elders Treuer interviewed are those who are Drum keepers, entitled to teach about and conduct Drum ceremony, which is central to Ojibwe religious practice. Although direct information about the ceremonies is part of the knowledge that may not be written, only transmitted orally, those who are Drum keepers, who 'carry a drum' or who 'carry a pipe' talk about the importance of preserving Indigenous religion as another vital aspect of their culture and way of life.

A valuable contribution to the attempt tp preserve Indigenous languages and to record the memories of a people to whom the memories of elders are a vital element of cultural transmission, an element that has been severely undermined by colonialism and forced assimilation.

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Unsettling Canada - A National Wake-Up Call sounded like something I'd want/need to read from the minute I heard about it. A collaboration between two First Nations leaders, Arthur Manuel - a vocal Indigenous rights activist from the Secwepemc Nation - and Grand Chief Ron Derrickson - a Syilx (Okanagan) businessmen, it is touted by the publishers as bringing "a fresh perspective and new ideas to Canada’s most glaring piece of unfinished business: the place of Indigenous peoples within the country’s political and economic space."

Much of the writing on Indigenous rights and
Indigenous activism in Canada is not accessible to someone like me, who can pretty much only read ebooks. (I can read a physical, bound book, but only very slowly, stopping the minute my breathing begins to be affected, which in practice means three or four paragraphs a day, and that means only one or two such books a year, so I pick only the most important books to be read in this manner.) So I was delighted to find an ebook copy of this available from the library.

The book is written from Manuel's voice, wth advice and input from Derrickson. He begins with a rumination on the land of his peoples, what settler-colonialists have called the B.C. Interior, and on his work with the Global Indigenous People's Caucus - in particular, the presentation of a statement on the 'doctrine of discovery' to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The doctrine of discovery is a poisonous piece of European colonialist legalism which says that a European sailing along the coast of the land and seeing the rivers flowing down from the interior had, by virtue of their 'discovery' of evidence of that land, more right to it in law (European-derived settler law, of course) than those peoples whose ancestors have lived on, gained nourishment from and stewardship to, for generations.

It's a law that has no justice or even sense of reality behind it. It can only exist if you pretend that Indigenous people never did. Yet it is the basis by which most of the land of the American continents were taken from the people inhabiting those continents, and it lies at the root of land claim discussions even to this day.

Manuel goes on to speak briefly about his family - George Manuel, his father, was a noted Indigenous activist but not very present during Manuel's early life - and his youth, which included time in residential schools due to his mother's long hospitalisation and his father's absences.

These two strands - the history of Indigenous land claims, and his father's legacy of activism, come together in the narrative of Indigenous resistance to the Trudeau government's Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy - the 1969 White Paper.

"Ironically, the impetus for unity [among Indigenous activists and organisations], and what finally put my father into the leadership of the National Indian Brotherhood, was provided by the Trudeau government's Indian Affairs minister Jean Chrétien. In June 1969, Chrétien unveiled a legislative time bomb that was designed not only to destroy any hope of recognition of Aboriginal title and rights in Canada, but also to terminate Canada's treaties with Indian nations. ...

The statement sparked an epic battle that did not end in 1970 when the Indian Association of Alberta presented its counterproposal in the Red Paper. In many important ways it was the opening shot in the current battle for our land and our historic rights against a policy designed to terminate our title to our Indigenous territories and our rights as Indigenous peoples. The White Paper of 1969 is where our struggle begins."

The White Paper, in essence, sought to end all concept of Indigenous nations, abrogate all treaties, eliminate the concept of sovereign lands held in common by an indigenous nation, and force full and complete assimilation - ending by cultural genocide the disappearing of the Indigenous peoples that no previous strategy had quite managed to accomplish.

Resistance to the White Paper was strong. Indigenous leaders formally rejected the government's position, declaring that nothing was possible without the recognition of the sovereignty of Indigenous people and a willingness to negotiate based on the principle that "only Aboriginals and Aboriginal organizations should be given the resources and responsibility to determine their own priorities and future development." But although the paper was withdrawn, the positions it espoused have continued to resurface, recycled and repackaged, in government negotiations with Indigenous peoples to this day.

In 1973, however, a Supreme Court decision gave Indigenous peoples a tool for fighting the White paper proposals. In a 3-3 decision in the Calder case, the Supreme Court declined to set aside the provisions of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which stated that Indigenous peoples living on unceded land - which at that time included most of what is now Canada - had sovereign rights to that land, which could not be set aside by government fiat, but only surrendered via treaty. While a contested victory, and one that was less useful for many nations who had been tricked into giving up more rights than intended in colonial treaty negotiations, this decision still established the legal concept of the sovereignty of Indigenous nations which would eventually lead to more fruitful legal arguments.

Balancing between historical, academic perspectives and personal recollection, Manuel traces the story of the struggles of Indigenous peoples to reclaim their rights and build a new partnership with Canada over the past 50 years. As he examines the history of court arguments and governmental negotiations over issues of sovereignty, land claims, and other key points of dispute between Canada's Indigenous Nations and the Canadian federal and provincial governments, Manuel clearly and concisely explains the legal concepts involved at each stage. In so doing, he weaves a chilling narrative of repeated attempts to, quite literally, extinguish the rights, and the existence, of the original landholders in the interests of corporate exploitation and gain - a neo-colonialist project that would finish off what settler colonialism began.

Events that for many white Canadians passed by without any comprehension of what they meant to Indigenous peoples - the James Bay hydroelectric project, the repatriation of the constitution, the Oka crisis, Elijah Harper's lone stand against the Meech Lake Accord, the Nisga'a Treaty, the Canada-US softwood lumber disputes, the Sun Peaks protests, to name a few - are placed in a coherent context of colonial oppression and Indigenous resistance.

Manuel also places the struggle of Indigenous peoples in Canada within an international context, that of the "Fourth World" - defined as "Indigenous nations trapped within states in the First, Second and Third Worlds." He recounts his father George Manuel's role in the creation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, which led to the establishment in 2002 of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - a document fiercely opposed and flagrantly ignored by Canada and the other major colonial nations, Australia, New Zealand and The United States.

What makes this book so important - and so accessible - is the insider perspective that Manuel brings to the narrative. He and members of his family were intimately involved with many of the key actions and negotiations; his personal knowledge of the dealings behind the scenes fleshes out his factual accounting of the events he witnessed and participated in. Manuel's personal lived experience makes this more than just a relating of legal points and bureaucratic counters, it allows the reader to feel the profound injustices faced by Indigenous peoples in their struggle to preserve their rights and their identities and their fierce determination to succeed.

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Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Robert Silverberg, is one of the nominees for the 2017 Hugo awards in the Related Works category. It is a collection of interviews on a variety of subjects conducted by Zinos-Amaro with legendary sf writer Robert Silverberg.

In the Preface, Zinos-Amaro tells us that he became a devoted fan of Silverberg's work when he was still a teenager, an admiration that led to correspondence, then friendship, then a collaboration of sorts, in which Zinos-Amaro completed an unfinished novella by Silverberg, When the Blue Shift Comes. This long association, Zinos-Amaro suggests, was invaluable in helping him frame the interviews, based on his knowledge of Silverberg the writer snd Silverberg the man.

"Thus, while it is true in a literal sense that the conversations comprising Traveler of Worlds unfolded over four weekends in 2015, they were informed and shaped by years of deep, abiding curiosity about Silverberg’s art and life, his experiences, his attitudes and beliefs."

Each of the seven interviews is directed around a theme, but conducted with sufficient flexibility to embrace a variety of related thoughts. The first interview, titled "The Vividness of Landscape," explores Silverbergc's experiences as a world traveller, and how these influenced his work.

The next interview, "Aesthetics," which is one of the largest sections of the book, looks at Silverberg's ideas about writing as an artform - influences, theories, approaches to the structure and realisation of story, craft and technique - and art in general, from painting to opera, landscaping to film. The interview also devotes considerable time to Silverberg's assessment of many of the great writers of literature, including a longish discourse on various translations of Verne's works.

"In the Continuum" is a discussion of day-to day life for Silverberg, retired writer. In talking about his daily activities - professional, personal, and those shared with his wife Karen - Silverberg seems very conscious of the differences in his activities and schedules as a younger man, as someone still actively writing fiction as his job, and what he does now. At one point, he says: "Getting yourself to old age involves excusing yourself from a lot of things you once did. Saying, “I don’t need to do this,” or “I can’t do this, so don’t fool yourself into trying.” One by one, you let go of a lot of things that you formerly did. Or if you’re wise you do, instead of frantically running after them." This section also explores Silverberg's political views. He identifies himself as fiscally conservative - in the traditional sense, he accepts the idea that there should be some taxes, some regulation and some social network for the poor and disadvantaged - and socially libertarian, in that he rejects government intervention in non-economic matters. He has tended to support Republican politicians and expressed criticism of both Obama and Hilary Clinton. I wish I knew what he thinks of Trump.

The next section, "Enwonderment" takes its title from a word coined by Silverberg, who explains: "There are words like “empowerment” that are bandied about very freely, especially here in California. Enlightenment is also frequently heard. As well as I can remember this, I thought I would create “enwonderment” as a kind of analogous noun that explains what science fiction is supposed to do." In this section, Zinos-Amaro inquires about what things in his life have given Silverberg a sense of wonder, from his horticultural hobby to new developments in science, to, of course, science fiction and fantasy.

In "Libraries," Zinos-Amaro talks to Silverberg about libraries - the public and school libraries he frequented as a child and adolescent, the Columbia University library, the various international libraries he has visited as an adult, and his own personal library, which he began to seriously cultivate when as a working writer he had less time to spend doing reading and research outside his home. "So all through, from the Schenectady Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library to my various school libraries—and I always took advantage of those—to the wonderfully sheltering high school library with the red leather banquettes, where I’d sit near a stained-glass window high above the quadrangle, to Columbia, libraries were always important to me. But when I became a professional writer I needed the time to work. I couldn’t spend my time commuting to libraries, especially as I got more and more remote from the nearest good library. I lived in Upper Manhattan, near Columbia, but I no longer had the stack pass, because I was no longer a student. Then I moved to a suburb where there was no library."

In the section titled "Potpourri," Zinos-Amaro poses Silverberg some questions submitted by fans as beginning points of conversation. A question about whether there is, or ever will be, a complete bibliography of all Silverberg's works in all genres, under all pseudonyms, leads to an anecdote about being investigated by the FBI for writing pornography. Silverberg also talks about what he considers to be good and bad writing, with examples from Thomas Hardy, Hemingway and Graham Green.

The final interview, "After the Myths Went Home," is devoted to Silverberg's responses to a question about "your perspective on age, and on what it’s like to look back on a professional writing career that’s lasted over six decades." The book concludes with a brief essay from Silverberg's wife, Karen Haber, about her life with Silverberg.

I enjoyed reading the interviews, seeing Silverberg's responses to some of Zinos-Amaro's questions, and came out with a sense of the man behind the books, although with a somewhat disjointed idea of the shape of his life. Worth reading for anyone who has enjoyed the works, and is curious about the man.


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I was pretty sure that I was going to both enjoy and be enlightened by Trevor Noah's Born a Crime from the first few pages, which were fill of witty, pithy, yet accurate and often poignant observations such as these:

"The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all."

"The Zulu went to war with the white man. The Xhosa played chess with the white man. For a long time neither was particularly successful, and each blamed the other for a problem neither had created. Bitterness festered. For decades those feelings were held in check by a common enemy. Then apartheid fell, Mandela walked free, and black South Africa went to war with itself."

"Like indigenous peoples around the world, black South Africans adopted the religion of our colonizers. By “adopt” I mean it was forced on us. The white man was quite stern with the native. 'You need to pray to Jesus,' he said. "Jesus will save you.' To which the native replied, 'Well, we do need to be saved—saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this Jesus thing a shot.' "

"For a long time I didn’t understand why so many black people had abandoned their indigenous faith for Christianity. But the more we went to church and the longer I sat in those pews the more I learned about how Christianity works: If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense."

Noah's book is part autobiography, part South African history, and part social and political commentary, wrapped up in just enough wit and comedic structure and timing to make it flow smoothly and swiftly, until all of a sudden you're brought up short with a 'wtf?' feeling as you realise the full meaning of what you've just read.

I've had a lot of respect for Noah's presence on TV as a successor to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. I now also have a lot of respect for him as an author - and as a man who lived through South Africa's troubled post-apartheid times and saw truths so clearly.

His account of his childhood, growing up as a child of mixed race, is lightly told, but horrifying. Under the segregation laws of South Africa, it was illegal for white people to have sex with non-white people; as a child of such a union, Noah was, as the title of the book says, 'born a crime.' His parents were not married - that would have been impossible - nor did they live together. Though his mother lived - quietly, secretly, illegally - in Johannesburg near his father's apartment, Noah could only spend time with his father in private.

"Where most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d have to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens, a zoo, a giant chessboard with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us. We were in the park, he was walking a good bit away from us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started looking. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him."

But it wasn't just his father who could not acknowledge him publicly. His mother, a dark-skinned Xhosa woman, could not be seen with a 'coloured' - the South African classification for person of mixed race - child without everyone knowing she had committed the crime of sleeping with a white man.

"It was illegal to be mixed (to have a black parent and a white parent), but it was not illegal to be colored (to have two parents who were both colored). So my mom moved me around the world as a colored child. She found a crèche in a colored area where she could leave me while she was at work. There was a colored woman named Queen who lived in our block of flats. When we wanted to go out to the park, my mom would invite her to go with us. Queen would walk next to me and act like she was my mother, and my mother would walk a few steps behind, like she was the maid working for the colored woman. I’ve got dozens of pictures of me walking with this woman who looks like me but who isn’t my mother. And the black woman standing behind us who looks like she’s photobombing the picture, that’s my mom. When we didn’t have a colored woman to walk with us, my mom would risk walking me on her own. She would hold my hand or carry me, but if the police showed up she would have to drop me and pretend I wasn’t hers, like I was a bag of weed."

It was just as much a problem when his mother took him to visit his black relatives in Soweto. A coloured child in a black township was just as much a threat to his family as a coloured child in a white city.

"My gran still tells the story of when I was three years old and, fed up with being a prisoner, I dug a hole under the gate in the driveway, wriggled through, and ran off. Everyone panicked. A search party went out and tracked me down. I had no idea how much danger I was putting everyone in. The family could have been deported, my gran could have been arrested, my mom might have gone to prison, and I probably would have been packed off to a home for colored kids. So I was kept inside."

Noah's memories of his childhood make one thing perfectly clear - that he attributes much of his own character to his mother's independence and choices to live as far as she could outside the legal and social limitations imposed by South African apartheid.

"My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. Growing up in Soweto, our dream was to put another room on our house. Maybe have a driveway. Maybe, someday, a cast-iron gate at the end of the driveway. Because that is all we knew. But the highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will."

Noah completed the book prior to his becoming an American TV host, and the book itself contains very little about his professional life, or how he made the transition from a teenaged boy hustling pirated CDs to get by, to a well-known and admired comedian and TV personality. Perhaps that's for another book.

This one is the narrative of a mixed race child growing up in one of the most oppressive and racist societies in the world, and surviving. And it's well worth reading.

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I must confess that I had not, until now, read any of Carrie Fisher's memoirs or novels (at least some if which, I understand, are semi-autobiographical in nature). I am not an avid consumer of biographies or personal narratives of popular entertainment figures unless they have some other element to recommend them - a commitment to political action, say, or an unusual life experience, a career that contains some piece of work that affected me deeply or a particular gift for their craft.

However, the confluence of Fisher's untimely death and the publication of a memoir focused on her experiences filming Star Wars and inhabiting the very public image of Princess Leia impelled me to read Princess Diarist.

Fisher's style is light and easy to read without sacrificing perception or wit, and I thought that sections of the book that were taken from her original diaries, while overwrought in that "young woman on the threshold of everything" way that many of us probably remember all too well, contained flashes of her mature gift and showed some degree of insight and introspection amidst the angst.

I found her general observations on being trapped in an iconic role more interesting than all the business about her affair with Harrison Ford - unfortunately, there is much more of the latter than there is of the former. But then, I read bios of Laurence Olivier for insight into his acting process, not his relationship with Vivien Leigh. I'm odd that way.

It is, despite Fisher's light touch in the sections written by her mature self, a sad book, and one that bears witness to the utter wrongness of the sexual politics of the time (not that it's all that much better now). The early diaries reveal an intelligent, talented and witty young woman who cannot find a way to respect herself. The present day matter that bookends those diaries is a strange mix - wise and a little world-weary in speaking about the nature of celebrity, but oddly lacking in a feminist perspective on her younger self's issues with self-esteem, body image and sexual experiences.

The older Fisher, looking back, tells a disturbing story of the young Fisher and the start of her relationship with Harrison Ford without batting an eye. She recounts being the only woman at a party full of older men, being pressured into drinking far more than she is used to. As she becomes more and more inebriated, the men around her speak about her as a piece of meat, reducing her to an available sexual orifice - a scenario that screams prelude to gang rape. And when Ford intervenes, one breathes relief for only the minute it takes to read on about how he bustles her into a cab and has sex with her in the back seat. And this is the beginning of the affair that generates so much pain for her that it oozes off the pages of her younger self's diaries and poems. One wishes for the older Fisher to present some insight into this dynamic, but the closest she comes to this is to say:

"If Harrison was unable to see that I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven) then he wasn’t as smart as I thought he was—as I knew he was. So I loved him and he allowed it. That’s as close a reckoning as I can muster four decades later."

I will always treasure the character Fisher created for us, both in the first Star Wars trilogy and in her return to the role some 40 years later, but her recollections and musings on the circumstances surrounding that creation saddened me more than anything else.

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For those who don't know (and until I read a passing comment on the Internet about her and the book she'd just written, I didn't), Lindy West is a feminist, fat acceptance movement activist. That was quite enough for me to be interested in her book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman.

Shrill is, like Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist or Laurie Penny's Unspeakable Things, a heady combination of personal narrative, political analysis and call-to-arms.

She talks with humour and honesty about growing up as a shy, overweight child, about reaching menache in a culture that seeks to ignore the biological processes of female bodies, about living as a fat woman, about struggling to come to self acceptance and to raise the consciousness of colleagues in the media about the effects of public fat-shaming.

She writes matter-of-factly about her abortion, and I recognised some of my own reactions on having mine. It was no horrible tragedy, no wrenching drama, simply a thing that I chose to have because I was not interested in having a child. What she says about the right to abortion, to control one's body, is short and exactly on the mark.

"The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies."

West writes movingly about the psychological consequences of the violent and obscene harassment - often minimised as "trolling" - of women on the Internet. She pulls no punches - she calls it what it is, abuse directed at the marginalised inhabitants of the net:

"Why is invasive, relentless abuse—that disproportionately affects marginalized people who have already faced additional obstacles just to establish themselves in this field—something we should all have to live with just to do our jobs? Six years later, this is still a question I’ve yet to have answered."

One of many interrelated topics she addresses is the idea of socially responsible comedy - comedy that does not make marginalised people, be they women, people with a disability or a socially awkward disease such as herpes, or any other marked status, the punchline of the joke.

"When I looked at the pantheon of comedy gods (Bill Hicks, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld), the alt-comedy demigods (Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Marc Maron, Dave Attell, Bill Burr), and even that little roster of 2005 Seattle comics I rattled off in the previous chapter, I couldn’t escape the question: If that’s who drafted our comedy constitution, why should I assume that my best interests are represented? That is a bunch of dudes. Of course there are exceptions—maybe Joan Rivers got to propose a bylaw or two—but you can’t tell me there’s no gender bias in an industry where “women aren’t funny” is widely accepted as conventional wisdom."

She pays particular attention to the phenomenon of the rape joke.

"Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial. Comedians regularly retort that no one complains when they joke about murder or other crimes in their acts, citing that as a double standard. Well, fortunately, there is no cultural narrative casting doubt on the existence and prevalence of murder and pressuring people not to report it."

I enjoyed reading West's lived experiences - some of which, in certain ways, seemed similar to some of mine - and her strong, bold voice. Not shrill, Lindy, though frightened misogynist men might label it so. Just strong, and true.

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