The fury of a celestial crocodile: another heart of darkness in the worst of times.

"A haunting look at the persistence of evil and the power of family love"

Certain tribes in Africa explain eclipses of the sun as the celestial crocodile swallowing the sun. In the words of Peter Godwin, award winning author, journalist and filmmaker born and raised in Zimbabwe “This celestial crocodile, they say, briefly consumes our life-giving star as a warning that he is much displeased with the behavior of man below. It is the very worst of omens.” At the turn of this millennium, two total eclipses occurred within less than two years, something unprecedented “even in the stories handed down through the generations.” People are saying that “the celestial crocodile must be truly furious to be back so soon, threatening us again with perpetual darkness.”
If the sad events of 2008 in Zimbabwe are anything to go by, that celestial crocodile’s fury should be increasing exponentially along with the total collapse of the economy. We are witnessing, from whatever sidelines fate has allocated us, nothing short of total eclipse of a country.
Peter Godwin’s second memoir: “When the crocodile eats the sun” (2006) should carry a health warning: it is extremely disquieting and uncomfortable reading and made all the more disturbing because it is true. Where Conrad’s famous apocalyptic novel of the dark heart of man was the work of a superb imagination, this witness to the horror man is capable of enacting is fact.
There are several reasons I find this an important book. Yes there is the horror of the history it tells and the chaos it records in a country where independent journalism has increasingly become a forbidden activity. This book is also profoundly valuable for its depth of feeling, intelligence, and the terrible beauty of the writing as well. It isn't just that Godwin writes beautifully about terrible things, he writes beautifully about beautiful things too: humanity and love and death and doubt and guilt and responsibility.
On the dust jacket the work is succinctly described as “a family tragedy set against a country’s collapse”.
As far as the reading experience goes, there is something for everyone here. There's romance and tragedy, humour and history. We share intimate details of the relationships between loving but strong willed and independent family members as Godwin explores his family history and his discovery of his father's Jewish ancestry, weaving the thread of exile and belonging into the tale with passages of refreshing candor in a world sometimes tediously full of bluster and posture:
“When I get back to New York I am listless and distracted. In my head, I am still in Africa. I sit online at my computer, following the increasing pace of repression in Zimbabwe and listening to African music, cranked up fat and sweet. Mostly I listen to Oliver Mtukudzi, who last I heard live at the Harare International Festival of the Arts. And I listen to his fellow Zimbabwean, Thomas Mapfumo. The intricate cyclical melodies of his mbiras are almost narcotic in their trance inducing effect – quintessentially African, though they are being played and recorded now in Oregon.
Noone knows exactly how many of us have fled, because few of us emigrate officially. But the numbers are high – between one and two million, mostly black, energetic, educated, experienced people, the leadership cadre of a country – the Katyn cadre. And the irony is that from our exile, we, whom Mugabe has chased away, inadvertently contribute to his survival. The money we send home to our relatives, our hard currency remittances (often multiplied by the black market exchange rate), supports millions of people in Zimbabwe and helps to defer the country’s continuously imminent collapse…….I cannot live the life of an exile, a perpetual sojourner, feeling my past more emphatically than my present, carrying all this sadness within me, this spiritual fracture, unspoken mostly, but always there, an insistent ache. I must become a real immigrant, positive, engaged, hopeful”
The book is sub-titled “A memoir of Africa”. Memories sustain even as they fuel the flame of exiled damnation. Ah yes, we were there once. Inyanga. Dombashawa....a babe carried in arms through Great Zimbabwe grows in a few brief decades to be a strong and limber man climbing spider-like those same forbidden walls, whilst a country turns the torch of hope upon itself and burns.
For the outsider wanting a window of understanding on Zimbabwe and other aspects of contemporary African politics and history, Peter Godwin is a good place to start. For the African, especially if one has ever called beautiful and tormented Zimbabwe home, it is extremely disturbing but also profoundly inspiring to find an intelligent and human voice unafraid to speak out. Peter Godwin provides a voice for our generation of deliberate exiles who wrestle every conscious moment with the consuming business of the remembering and the forgetting of homeland.
“How many generations will it take before the taste of colonialism has been washed from our mouth? I have to live my own life in the meantime. I can’t bear the guilt, the feeling of responsibility. I can’t lug the sins of my forebears on my back wherever I go…I will dispel from my head all the arcane details of this place, the language, the history, the memory. I will turn my back on the land that made me….Africa is for me a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family. A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere – on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility.”

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. His early years are documented in the equally compelling 2004 "Mukiwa: a white boy in Africa". He has studied at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times (London) and BBC TV, reporting from more than sixty-five countries, many of them war torn African states. Since moving to New York he has written for numerous publications, including National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. He also teaches at the New School, a liberal arts, education, social science and humanities university in New York City.

As finale, especially for my East African King of (many)Hearts (doesn't this man look a lot like your father as a younger man?)and just to set a little stalking tail tip twitching cat amongst the Madison pigeons and the Happy Valley set, let me allow Peter the last word:

"It's always instructive to observe the life cycle of the First World aid worker. A wary enthusiasm blooms into an almost messianic sense of what might be possible. Then, as they bump up against the local cultural limits of acceptable change, comes the inevitable disappointment, which can harden into cynicism and even racism, until they are no better than the resident whites they have initially disparaged. Even those...who have learned the language and done thorough research, often have their faith eroded by the vagaries of Africa, which can start to look horribly like irrationality to the northern eye."

The tragedy of forced relocation: that distant faraway look (book review)

After 17 years in the United States, Ethiopian refugee Sepha Stephanos is proprietor of a struggling grocery store in a struggling African-American neighbourhood in Washington DC. His store clientele consists largely of prostitutes and light-fingered school children. His only friends are fellow African immigrants, Joe, the Congolese waiter and Ken the Kenyan engineer with whom he shares alienation, a favourite game of African revolutionary trivia and a bitter nostalgia for their home continent.

The loneliness and displacement common to all immigrants is brought starkly home to Sepha when he befriends white academic Judith, and Naomi, her bi-racial daughter, who represent the beginnings of urban renewal in the neighbourhood – a renewal which sees the old tenants displaced and further marginalized.

This is a first novel of great dignity and restraint: a poignant examination of issues of poverty, immigration, what it means to lose a family and a country, and what it takes to create home. The beautiful things that Heaven bears also opens a window on recent Ethiopian history.

Published in the UK as Children of the revolution, this novel has already begun garnering awards with the Guardian First book prize of 2007, and, amongst others, nominations for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction (to be announced April 2008) and the Prix Femina Etranger in France. The US National Book Foundation also placed Mengestu in their "5 under 35" authors in 2007.

Watch this man's pen. It is loaded with intelligence, passion and talent. Natural mastery of the storytelling craft is coming through loud and clear


There is a simple and startling power to the phrase: going back home. There’s an implied contradiction, a sense of moving forward and backward at the same time, but there’s no tension in the phrase. Instead, the contradiction gives in to something else: an understanding, perhaps, that what you are returning to can never be the same as what you left. I understand now that distant faraway look I’ve seen in other immigrants when they talk about returning to wherever it was they came from.
The beautiful things that heaven bears - page 174

Born in Ethiopia, Dinaw Mengestu immigrated to the U.S. in '80 at the age of 2 years, joining his father, who fled their native country during the Red Terror or Qey Shibir, a violent political campaign 1977-78 which saw many casualties in a suppressed rebellion. It was 25 years before he set foot in his own country again. He graduated from Columbia University's MFA fiction program and interned at The New Yorker. A Visiting Writer at his Georgetown alma mater, Mengestu has written a firsthand account of the situation in Darfur for RollingStone and draws on his background to tell a story of the African immigrant experience in his debut novel, Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.


How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopia again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was here, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt that I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went.
The beautiful things that Heaven bears – page 175

So long and thanks for all the fish

Okay we hope the dolphins are not departing though the canary is flying home free.

In my day, way back in the proverbial dim and distant past, any self respecting student would have recognized the phrase. But then in those days one hitch-hiked for real and a trip down the road seemed intergalactic. And jasmine never smelled so sweet in spring. Ah jasmine! the scent of nostalgia! the scent of my student days in the City of Saints on the southern tip of an ancient continent....ten years later Douglas Adams wrote the book.

And yes, in those days we had to learn how to list our sources. Correctly according to punctuation and convention. Not available to us was the easy web site which translates all. It always did strike rebellion in my soul that I should be marked down for bibliographic citation reasons when the content was brilliant. Yes m'lord I plead bias: but we are talking student here: long haired, barefoot and bent on balking at convention.

I still became a librarian. Not for love of punctuation and the cataloguing rules set in stone handed down from Dewey's mound. But for love of books and people and the ideas within the twain. And yes, some of you might have noticedd, I learned to tie my hair up and wear shoes. I plead fifth amendment on the balking at convention question.

Recently in (email of course) conversation with My Hope for the Future of American Librarianship, the topic of her cataloguing module, at Library School in some Other state, came up. She was cross-eyed and headachy, slogging through the old manual version. "But they tell us that once we've signed off on the course we never need to think of it again. All is copy cataloguing now"

'Tis true and as many of these sites for student show: we CAN improve upon the tedium of (student) life without compromising the learning curve. Ah sweet liberation! Just watch those cuba libres now, lest they become mentirita.

It is really an asset for librarians to know about these sites too. Bookmark them now, provide links on the webpages. These are USEFUL spelled out in caps and lights.

So from another land, with jasmine budding, promising ending's new beginnings: so long and thanks for all the fish. Now is the time to speak of Africa and golden joys. Or, as Ted Hughes once put it:
"To hatch a crow, a black rainbow/bent in emptiness/ over emptiness/but flying"

Hasta luego, amigo. Con amore vivande.

Designer socialism: the quickie wiki

The notion of impromtu collaborative creation has not been unknown in this ohana. Even to the extent of playing a (minor) starring role as indicated in the profile.

Wikis are a wonderland for those not attached to the status quo (watch out they can change in a moment), and those who dream of giving birth before the posterchild of liberation. Here is designer socialism at its best. The people's voice truly counting. Just watch for falling coconuts. Things are not always what they seem.

It is human to be flawed and to err. So there's unreliability built in. But, as stated elsewhere recently in this blog: life without adventure is no life at all. Similarly: where's all the certainty in this world anyway? Ponder Galileo a moment.

Wikis can't be beat for that quick collaborative conversation too. As pointed out by the Hawaiian native who recently proposed marriage to me on the Wiki Wiki bus between arrivals and departures in Honolulu airport, there's always the option to get off the bus. Embrace a whole new future. And him.

Anyone who has ever traveled, will know that sometimes going home is a long lonely ride. La Tia Catrina will attest to that. The wiki wiki proposals of collaboration make it all that much more meaningful, introducing the secret knowledge of joy. It doesn't hurt to learn a smattering of another language and culture either.

At play in the fields of KRL

Ah! the safety of the sandbox! One is free to create without consequence. Castles of sand in all their majesty.

Often the best of times is had when one is liberated from consequence. The success of the "beta is forever" thing lies in the liberation of the creativity of the sandbox to be The Thing. Creating the castle for the tides to wash away in the morning.

And not a bad thing either. After all: what's new about this? The old Chinaman has been murmuring down the ages: change is the only certainty. And that other wise easterner sitting under his bodhi tree, didn't he say something important about impermanence?

It's a world cafe out there, rhythmic with conversation. Get with the groove. Hop into the great big sandbox. Let loose: PLAY. http://www.theworldcafe.com/

Facebook faceoff

So pull up a virtual stool and lean an elbow on the virtual bar counter. Welcome to Facebook. The cyber pub. The illusion of socializing. Weeellll....yes maybe it is connecting. Networking. The place to be to see and be seen they tell me.

It feels to me like there's something missing. Like the connection still isn't really being made and it is 2 in the morning and I am still sitting alone in bed, awake in the coldest hours, trawling applications, passing the time without the warmth and the hazy smokiness (yes I date from an era when smoking was still allowed in a pub....) and without the cocooning noise of the old fashioned barroom scene.....

Somewhere, somehow, too, I have this sneaky little feeling that handing out good karma at the click of a button is not really going to have the same effect as yoga and meditation, Tibetan Prayer Wheels notwithstanding.

Yes I know perhaps in the bar of old, connection was also an illusion lubricated by libations various. But it felt like human connection. And play at times was....well....uh shall we say wild? Certainly a lot different from taking little online movie quizzes. Or just remember those lazy endless days dreaming in a Mexico street side pub, the light suffused with the clear orange of fresh made el jugo de zanahoria.....

On the other hand everyone these days seems to be applauding the use of Facebook or Myspace for promoting their cause. The place to see and be seen indeed. They say.

Maybe I just never was very good at being in the right place at the right time. My drummer's always been a whole lot of beats short of the octave. Or whatever. How about another jugo de zanahoria?

For an interesting angle on the pros and cons of Facebook in the context of human rights activism and free speech follow this link:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/02/08/pros-and-cons-of-facebook-activism/

This one's a keeper: my library Valentine

I'd been flirting around with LibraryThing a while before we finally embraced. Oh I think it was at a Librarian's meeting a good few years ago when first we locked eyes. In a small mention in a typically full agenda, Peggy did the across-the-room gestures.

"This might be an interesting one to know," she says.

I flick a glance and think "Hmmmm....could be good.....later alligator"

Months pass, as they have a way of doing in these kind of affairs. LibraryThing and I both mature, living active lives, going through developmental changes. We begin to be in the same place at the same time more often. I find myself thinking of LibraryThing more often. I reach out. Make tentative commitments. Set up an account. Catalogue a few books. It is still an on again off again thing. We go for months not connecting. I am neglectful. LibraryThing is faithful and patient.

I begin to make mention of this new interest to family and friends. When I do the introductions to my son, his response is so positive that I begin to realise well....maybe I should admit it: LibraryThing and I have a thing going. So to speak.

A few months later the Reader's Advisors of Puget Sound (aka RAPS) decide we need an online presence. We pick LibraryThing as a great way to share our book picks. Now I know LibraryThing and I are an item. Oh yeah, there are still relatively luke warm receptions at staff meetings various where I do the introductions. These cannot deter us now. LibraryThing and I have gone to far to be parted by those who have only just read about it.

Yes: LibraryThing is such a keeper, it is even beginning to edge out my old Book of Books: the scrapbooked, coffeee spilled mottled black Mead composition book in which I make notes about the books I read.

Sometimes effort looses out to easy. Even in my life.

And BTW: the past and present tense mixture is deliberate in this one. Fault me on my murmuring heart, but never my grammar. Love never leaves, is always present in a way, often tense, and sometimes passes unnoticed, sneaking up on us from another time and place.

The melancholic Canadian puts it so much better: "I am not the one who loves – It's Love that seizes me! When hatred with his package comes, You forbid delivery...."

http://www.musicsonglyrics.com/L/leonardcohenlyrics/leonardcohenyouhavelovedenoughlyrics.htm