This is Not About Toto's Africa

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had been on my "to read" list for at least two years and I'd heard nothing but glowing reviews, so imagine my chagrin when I realized I wasn't digging the main character, Ifemelu. Otherwise, the writing was excellent, the story was wide yet detailed with interesting framing and compelling secondary characters. I had to Wikipedia the book to make sure it was independent from "Dear White People" because many of the same points spring up (blogs, racial critiques & racism, Ivy League schools, hair, etc). I spent a lot of this book questioning if I disliked it because I'm a WASPy American and I just didn't "get it" -- also possible, although I was concurrently reading Yaa Ngasi's Homegoing and loving that book, so ... different strokes for different folks?

Homegoing lacked the literal confrontation of Americanah's blog post excerpts and had less fleshed-out characters in favor of a poetic magical-realism vibe that spanned hundreds of years. I couldn't believe this was Ngasi's first novel and can't wait to read more from her. The novel follows two branches of the same family who lose their history because of slave trade. The separate threads continue in Africa vs America until the two re-tie at the conclusion; in general, this is also the plot of Americanah. Ngasi and Adichie are both writing about black identity (loss of, discovery of), but their styles are quite different.

While I thought both books had unwavering focus on the black/African experience, I felt at several points in Americanah that Ifemelu was completely consumed by thinking about her blackness, constantly, to the detriment of more fully realizing her character in the book. Part of this could be that Ifemelu is occasionally (but not exclusively) the author's mouthpiece, and commentary sections that could've been written by the author-as-omniscient-narrator were instead framed as Ifemelu's thoughts and blog entries. Anyway, she was just straight up mean to her closest friends and family and that part of her character never improved. A morality tale this was not. Better summary here.

However, this interview with Adichie was illuminating:

"I think we often expect female characters to be easily likeable, in a way we don't expect male characters to be," the author explains. "Do we expect to like Nabokov's or Roth's characters? No. We expect them to be interesting. And I wanted Ifemelu to be that kind of character, where sometimes you want to smack her and sometimes you want to hold her close. Because I think that's human."

I was immediately reminded of how much I COULD NOT STAND the main character Coleman Silk from Roth's The Human Stain. Interesting? Yes. Did he make that novel excruciatingly frustrating to read? Yes. Was he also a huge dick to his family? Oh yeah. Same deal with Humbert in Lolita and, I fear, whatever the hell is going on in Pale Fire. Look, I understand the naturalism of having your "protagonist" be someone with human faults but I'm also trying to get through a 500-page journey with them. Be kind, I beg of you.

Fav quotes from Homegoing:

"Weakness is treated someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves." (p38)

"How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it -- not apart from it, but inside of it." (p295)

Bottom line: Both excellent reads about racial identity and separation.

The Half-Year of Paul Bowles

I wanted to title this entry "Bowles Movements" but found it too punny, even for me. Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993 by Paul Bowles is a series of essays I wanted to read before jetting off to Seville & Marrakesh in late November, and somehow it took me the ENTIRE five to six months before my trip to accomplish this. As in, the back cover was finally reached with mere days until departure. Not that the book was boring -- dense, and a lot of repetition. And then within the 12 days I was on vacation, I plowed through all of Philip Roth's The Human Stain (no notes; liked it but left it in the Marrakesh riad). Suffice to say it's been an atypical year of reading.

First, I thought Bowles was British but he's American. Second, his essays tend to have more humility than the other, actually British Paul (Theroux; see Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar) and are a solid mix of introspection and description. "Now that in theory anyone can go anywhere, the travel book serves a different purpose; emphasis has shifted from the place to the effect of the place upon the person ... the story of what happened to one person in a particular place" (p.239-40). Generally, his essays strike a balance between introspection and expert witness, and he often acknowledges his otherness in Morocco. He reminded me of Peter Matthiessen -- same generation, also American, also enthralled with solitude and natural spaces ("the sublime" as per Alain de Botton):

"Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price." (p.90; on the Sahara)

Yours truly, from the top of Ait Ben Haddou.

This quote really resonated with me at Ait Ben Haddou (above), which is a medieval-era fortress between the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains / Marrakesh. You stand at the top by the ruins of an old granary and the wind is coming at you in huge constant gusts and all you can see in any direction is mountains and desert forever, and you think about how for hundreds and hundreds of years this was a caravan stop and how many other people saw this before you and how many other people will see it after you. It's not even a National Park or anything: it just IS, along with the Berbers in their isolated rural villages. 

The middle and late essays in the series wax nostalgic as the initial impression of Morocco is changed by politics, technology and the slow march of time. What used to be authentic and inaccessible is now for tourism. This wasn't the foremost thought in my mind when I visited because the first experience tends to scream "HEY YOU'RE NOT IN AMERICA ANYMORE!" a la Bangkok and, I assume, any other major non-Western hub city. The appreciation/nostalgia for layers of a particular place require getting over the initial culture shock, which is difficult on a four-day jaunt. Bowles lived in Morocco for decades; you may as well as a lifelong New Yorker about the differences between the 1970s and today.

Not in America anymore; Jemaa el Fna at sunset, photo by yours truly.

Two favorite parting quotes:

"When you ask a question of a Singhalese who does not know English, he is likely to react in a most curious fashion. First he looks swiftly at you, then he looks away, his features retreating into an expression of pleasant contemplation, as if your voice were an agreeable but distant memory that he had just recalled and thought worthwhile to savor briefly." (p.52)

"Now, after traveling around the country, I know approximately as little as I did on my first arrival. However, I've seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning." (p.207, and the most important thing)

Bowles recorded rural Moroccan music for the Library of Congress in the late 1950s, including this one of Reh dial Beni Bouhiya:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXjwYA7X-8

Other references for future exploration:
Charles Flandrau, Viva Mexico!
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday
Peter Mayne, The Alleys of Marrakesh

Bottom line, worth picking an essay or three from the bunch otherwise you'll spend six months of your life reading this collection. Relevant reading for before/after traveling to Morocco. I'll be back for the Sahara some day.