Book 55, Paraguay: "Saved by a Poem" by Nestor Amarilla

I was bugged by the fact that I wasn't reading enough plays in this project - after all, I'm a playwright, and I oughta be developing that.

So imagine my delight when I read about Nestor Amarilla, a young Paraguayan playwright (my age!), nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Of course he didn't get it, but damn, I wanted to find out what made this kid so good.


Naturally the library didn't have his book (but they've accepted my suggestion to purchase it), so I ordered a copy via Book Depository, which delivers dirt-cheap books to pretty much any country in the world with zero shipping charges. Only problem is, you go a little crazy waiting for the damn package to arrive...

But truth is, the play's nothing phenomenal. It's a three-hander, set in the boondocks during the Stroessner dictatorship, when a woman named Mariana decides to write a poem in praise of the tyrant in order to win her activist son clemency. It has rather good character dynamics, and you could use it as a great vehicle to talk to kids about power and the business of not speaking truth to it because it already knows the truth and will get you if it realises you know it to. But it's not a shade on Lorca. Sappy dénouement, too. Maybe you have to see it on stage.

It's a short piece, too - the book's a bilingual edition, but I couldn't read the original because it's a mix of Spanish and Guaraní, Paraguay being one of the few countries in South America that's really held on to an indigenous linguistic tradition by virtue of its ethnic composition. Guaraní's an amazing language to try and decipher, though - "The sun is not waiting for me" translates into "Umi ñanáko nachera'ãrõihína".


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Representative quote:
MARIANA: If you don't close your mouth on your own, they will. Why do you wish death so much? Next time you disappear, I am not going to wait with a glass of salt and water anymore. I will just sweep. I will sweep the living room, the kitchen, the front of the house, I will sweep the whole house, and do you know for what? I'll make it ready for your funeral. That's what I'll do.

Next book: José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, from Uruguay.

Book 54, Bolivia: "The Matter of Desire" by Edmundo Paz Soldán

This is a freaking good read. It covers all your bases: literary, political, and semi-historical with a nice dose of mystery. (Did I mention the sex?)


One of the coolest things about the novel is that it's contemporary - it takes place in an age of Internet stock trading and iBooks, where the imaginary Bolivian city of Río Fugitivo is shown to have intimate links with all the other Latin American countries plus the USA.

Even the novel that the characters are obsessed with is named Berkeley, after the branch of UCLA, written by the protagonist Pedro Zabalaga's father, gunned down as a revolutionary hero, leaving a text full of cryptic clues which the scholars and rock groups alike continue to decode and encode through their papers and crosswords and music videos.

Paz Soldán is clearly writing in the shadow of the Latin American Boom (he makes reference to Cortázar and Borges a-plenty), and he's established himself as the leading spokesperson for the McOndo movement (cf. García Márquez's imaginary hick town of Macondo, cf McDonald's) which disregards the magical realist movement in favour of solid descriptions of cosmopolitan city life.

So it's quite different from the other Latin American novels we've read so far: no crazy narrative tricks here: it's a first-person past-tense narrative all the way through - though there are two plot strands in alternating chapters, one describing the Latin American Studies department at Madison University, where Pedro teaches (and sleeps with) well-meaning academically-inclined gringos; the other centred in Río Fugitivo itself where he tries to worm out information about his deceased father from his uncle David and the soon-to-be-extradited drug lord Jaime Villa.

But of course, the crossword clues and Rashomon-esque games of intrigue do monkey their way into the story, so cosmopolitanism schmosmopolitanism; we've got a tale that fits into the Latino tradition anyhow.

Thoroughly recommended! But be warned: there's enough Spanglish in here to frustrate you if you're a non-Hispanophone.


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Representative quote:
I walked home to Uncle David's. I felt as if I were walking down the streets of Berkeley, just as Dad had described them, and got lost on Telegraph only to find myself on Unzueta, while geese - six? seven of them? - flew all around me and then all of a sudden there were shots and a salamander was following me and someone was shouting "All dead" and blood was flowing on the floor and a glass eye exploded. Anguish, agony. There was also a desperate sense of unreality. The barely lit streets and I both become ghost-like, suffered from a lack of substance.

Next book: Nestor Amarilla's Saved by a Poem, from Paraguay.

Book 53, Brazil: "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" by João Guimarães Rosa

Yes! I’m finally done with this juggernaut of a novel!

And let me tell you, my friends, it is strange. It’s entirely written without chapters or section breaks, and is entirely narrated in first person by an aged jagunço, a turn-of-the-last-century outlaw soldier, describing his troop’s peregrinations across the state of Minas Gerais (which appears tiny on the map, but in the book appears to have the surface area of, say, the Moon): the eponymous backlands, the sertão, that appear in the Portuguese title, Grande Sertão: Veredas.

We go from stream-of-consciousness babblings about the nature of the devil to memories of guerrilla warfare with rival armed bands, finally coaelescing into a linear narrative which makes up the bulk of the book about fighting alongside his beloved companion-in-arms, Diadorim, and just in case you think there’s an implicitly homoerotic character arc going on I’ll have you know it is explicit, with moony longing for each other carnally (Diadorim is utterly fearless, with a slender body and gorgeous green eyes) while they’re waiting in deserted mansions for the armies to come, only they never actually jump into each other’s tents Brokeback-style: instead, constant craving has always been.

And then four fifths of the way into the book Riobaldo goes to the crossroads, promises his soul to the devil, and is thoroughly put out when the devil doesn’t arrive, but somehow gets into circumstances shortly thereafter which make him the leader of this pack of men’s men, with the confidence and charisma to back him up, with a sack of random homicidal (and equicidal, and canicidal) tendencies to boot.

[SPOILER ALERT!!!!!] And then ninety-nine hundredths of the way into the book, Riobaldo wins the war against Hermogenes, but Diadorim gets killed and guess what? He’s actually a woman. A gorgeous one too.


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Shades of Doña Bárbara: an androgynous female incarnation of the wild Brazilian landscape, not to be fucked with. WTFFFFF???? [SPOILERS END]

So yeah, this is one of those crazy precursors to magical realism, in the same experimental tradition that emerged with Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas through Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. Brazilians be trippin’, man.

Gawd, I miss doing capoeira.

Representative quote: We could hear loud shouts and firing: it was Fafafa and his followers destroying the enemy's vanguard. This had begun in the same instant, but even so I had had time in which to feel ashamed of myself, and to realize that Diadorim was not indispensable to me. And that by his mere presence he was not obeying me. I know: one who loves is always a slave, but he never truly obeys.

Next book: Edmundo Paz Soldán's "The Matter of Desire", from Bolivia.

Beyond Yakko's World

I'm way behind on my reading, so I'd like to entertain you instead with some good ol' fashioned YouTube!

As an overgrown kid of the '90s, I was thrilled when I first encountered the smart-aleck world of Animaniacs, including the following informative song, featuring all the nations of the world to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance:



It's a classic, and the lyrics are easy to find on the Net. Unfortunately, it was out of date even before it was televised in 1993 - no former Soviet states (USSR broke up in 1991), an assumption that the Czech Republic and Slovakia were still united (Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1992), that Yemen was still divided (Aden and Sana unified in 1990) and that Cambodia was still Kampuchea (renamed 1990). And of course the writer assumes that San Juan is a nation and Singapore isn't, and Israel is misspelt on the mad as "Isreal". Great song, very shoddy research.

Sadly, most people doing covers on YouTube today don't bother to correct these glaring inaccuracies. Fortunately, there've been some attempts to update the song, some half-hearted:



And some actually pretty good!



What is fundamentally needed, of course, is a complete reinvention. I've been hunting online for a version I once saw: an alphabetical run-down of the world's nations to the tune of REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It", but I can't track it down. Chaotic, but the video had some pretty good visuals.

The best candidate we've got right now is this very entertaining cover, which of course doesn't include non-UN states like Taiwan or the Vatican or Bermuda, but is nonetheless very pleasing to the ear:



Being from a small country, I aspire towards the ultimate Platonic ideal of a truly comprehensive song that encompasses the entire globe. Any suggestions?

The 100 Greatest Books in the History of Literature

I'm afraid I'm not yet done with Brazil. I had a change of heart, you see: Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed was returning to the roots of Western philosophy for its essay and telling me very little about the nation itself.


After a few pages, I began to think, yeah, maybe an epic novel would be better. And what better epic novel could I pick than João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, aka The Devil to Pay in the Backlands?

Don't worry if you've never heard of this before. I hadn't either, till I started snooping around. However, you should know that the book appears on this amazing list of the 100 Greatest Books in World Literature, compiled by the Norwegian Book Clubs through a poll of 100 great world authors, many of them Nobel Laureates:

http://www.bokklubben.no/SamboWeb/side.do?dokId=65500&klubbid=WB

There's loads of other lists like this, but they're extremely Anglo-Americentric: Time Magazine has one, and so do Guardian and Modern Library. Goodreads has one that's topped by Stephenie Meyer, for gods' sake. (See what I did with that apostrophe there? Heheh. Animist pride.)

Anyhoo, I'm trying to read Boal while I'm indoors and Guimarães Rosa while I'm outdoors, plus I've a bunch of deadlines coming up, so things are going a little slowly.

And what the hell; while I'm here I'll advertise an event I have coming up. I'll be speaking on a panel at the Singapore launch of Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit From Singapore.

It was put together for Spotlight Singapore, an event that's currently going on in Cape Town, South Africa. Haven't seen it yet, but the tone seems to be human rights-based (at a government-sponsored event, no less!). Both editor Gwee Li Sui and publisher Ethos Books have been involved in activism and commentary, btw. I'm stoked.

Launch of "Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit From Singapore"
Friday 26 March, 11am-12pm
Living Room, Level Two, Arts House

For my other gigs, click here. For more book commentaries, wait a week and I'll see what I can do. :)

Book 52, French Guiana: "Pigments - Névralgies" by Léon-Gontran Damas

Confession time: I didn't understand most of this book. I took French a long time ago, and while I can still read fiction, the surreal poetry of the Négritude movement is a little beyond me.

However, I had the hubris to go out and order a copy of this book via the French department of Kinokuniya bookstore, based on the premise that it's probably good for my brain to read other languages a little more often. Cost me $22.50 in SGD - not bad for an esoteric classic, hein?

And Pigments is actually okay - I used it as casual toilet reading, since the poems are short and a lot of it's about being a black and angry colonial intellectual in 1930s Paris. Loads of stuff about Antillean rhythms and "masques africaines" alongside mentions of Gauloises and the Le Monument aux Morts; civilisation and its discontents. Even some urgent pleas about what Herr Hitler's doing to les juifs en Allemagne, because he can tell that kind of politics don't look good.

Névraglies (trans. = neuralgias) is another story - longer poems, quite a few of them love/sex pieces, but far less political (even though it was published in 1966, a plenty political time as well), so it's harder to figure out the context of these pieces, or really what's going on, given my limited vocabulary. Less of that vivid, obvious imagery I liked so much in the previous section:

But oh, it's good to read. The delicious legato of the French language combined with Damas's magic rhythms: ostinatos of brevity and repetition, odd flourishes of concrete poetry as lines don't cross the page but tumble down it - and then those vivid, visceral images that I don't know how to process: flesh, blood, curtains - although flipping through the book again, there's an awful lot of pieces overloaded with abstract nouns instead. No wonder I'm so confused.

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And sleepy! Was attending the Singapore Biennale opening today, as well as the opening of Michael Corbidge's show Jus, plus teaching at NTU, then came home to behold the tsunami footage in Japan and helped my mother to rework her Blackberry message to the Tokyo branch of her company in perfect English - nothing compared to what some of you do for a living, but it tires me out.

I think I'll accept my French poetry in translation from now on.

Representative quote:

LA COMPLAINTE DU NÈGRE

Ils me l'ont rendue
la vie
plus lourde et lasse

Mes aujourd'hui ont chacun sur mon jadis
de gros yeux qui roulent de rancœur
de honte

Les jours inexorablement
tristes
jamais n'ont cessé d'être
à la mémoire
de ce que fut
ma vie tronquée

Va encore
mon hébétude
du temps jadis
de coups de corde noueux
de corps calcinés
de chair morte
de tisons
de fer rouge
de bras brisés
sous le fouet qui se déchaîne
sous le fouet qui fait marcher la plantation
et s'abreuver de sang de mon sang de sang la sucrerie
et la bouffarde d commandeur crâner au ciel.

Next book: Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, from Brazil.

Book 51, Suriname: “Oroonoko” by Aphra Behn

I tried at first to get find some indigenous Dutch writing from Suriname. No dice! So instead, let’s use an early modern colonial text that’s hot in the fields of women’s and cultural studies.


(I may in fact have read this before and forgotten most of it. I was reading a number of androgynous 17th century gals in college for my own edification: Margaret Cavendish, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Catalina de Erauso, Madame de La Fayette.)

Frankly, this book’s bloody strange. A novella written before the age of the novel; a first-person narrator who describes the horrors of slavery and understands nothing about it; even the sexes of the tigers slain by Oroonoko change sex mid-paragraph – these are what the academics call slippages, signals of the competing agendas in Behn’s 77-page yarn.

A guide for the perplexed: Oroonoko is a prince royal of Coramantien, a trading post in what is present-day Ghana. Because Behn knows next to nothing about Africa, the details of his heroic life here are based on medieval romances a la Orlando Furioso: i.e. they bear utterly no resemblance to historical/anthropological fact.

However, he gets captured as a slave and sent to Suriname – and here’s where things get truly interested. Behn had actually lived in this territory with her former husband, so she can describe the native and colonial habits and flora and fauna with some accuracy – there’s even mentions of Inca-style quipus among the indigenous tribes, and a sequence describing an electric eel.

Behn arranges her tale so neither Oroonoko nor his beloved consort Imoinda have to suffer the back-breaking work of enslaved labourers: the European townspeople actually take to them kindly instead upon discovering their noble origins, inviting them regularly for coffee and discoursing with them on Ancient Roman history (I do not kid: there’s a section where they discuss Hannibal).

But certain details are precisely the things you couldn’t make up: the proud scarification marks on the Africans, the imposition of slave-names, the refusal to convert to Christianity, the automatic assumption that any child of an enslaved woman must also be a slave, the escape into the mountains, the savage tortures and executions that awaited those captured.

Behn – and even Oroonoko himself – are pretty cool with the institution of slavery for lesser mortals. He even offers his sympathetic master 300 slaves of his own in return for his manumission. But the horrors of the tragic ending – seriously, it’s grosser than the way Beowulf amputates Grendel – ultimately prove how the author understood something terribly wrong with this institution that allowed us to dehumanise others, to claim men as objects regardless of their dignity.

Puzzling book. Man, we’re dealing with a craploud of books about slavery, aren’t we? Mary Prince, Cambridge, the Arrivants, and then this.


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Representative quote:

And why, said he, my dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be the slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we by the chance of war become their slaves? This would not anger a noble heart, this would not animate a soldier’s soul. No, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools and cowards and the support of rogues, runagades that have abandoned their own countries for raping, murders, theft and villainies.

Next book: Léon-Gontran Damas’s "Pigments – Névralgies", from French Guiana.