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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 183
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - 11:11 pm: | 
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People in Bingerville still remember Celanire after so many years as a kaleidoscope of negative facets, whereas as a rule time tends to soften any bitterness. For them there was no doubt she was the "horse" of an evil spirit who had brought nothing but death, mourning, and desolation. Paradoxically, they also judge her as someone who should have been bound by the rules of society. Men think of her as a dangerous feminist. Yet what exactly do they mean by this word, which has so many significations? They cannot forgive her stand against excision. They swear she made the women rebellious, demanding, and disrespectful of the male species. They are particularly outspoken about the center she created for sheltering women who wanted nothing more to do with suitors or husbands. But despite its grand-sounding name, the Refuge of the Good Shepherd, a rickety wattle hut under a straw roof, the center never filled its function. One year it sheltered a group of wives arbitrarily repudiated by their husbands. Another year, a group of battered women. Around 1905 the mission turned into a native dispensary. Some men go even further and claim that Celanire was a corrupting influence. They expiate on what went on at the Home but have nothing to prove it. The African woman, they say, must be the eternal keeper of traditions. If she prostitutes herself, society is shaken to its foundations. . .
Bingerville is the Ivory Coast city where Celanire's arrival from France in 1901 is preceded by the unexpected death of the director of the Catholic orphanage where she's been assigned to teach. She's then appointed as the new director and proceeds to turn it into a bordello, seducing every man in sight, including tribal chiefs, bureaucrats, their wives, and eventually even the Governor himself, who she marries when his wife dies under mysterious circumstances.
It's a gothic novel, a story of supernatural revenge, and Celanire is a mostly unsympathetic character because she's not really human, she's a conduit for evil spirits. Anyone who crosses her dies (and even some who don't), sometimes by a hellhound or a wild horse. But there is some humor in the fact that she's also a proponent of issues like education for women, lesbianism, founds an ethnographic museum, and turns the Governor into an ardent defender of black cultures.
Two of my favorite sentences in the book are:
"Hakim could smell the sweet baked-bread scent of the ocean."
And in describing the gloomy town:
"The town only came to life at carnival time, but the gaitey didn't suit it. Its smiles looked more like grimaces, its bursts of laughter rang out like moans."
I first heard of Maryse Conde about 2 years ago when someone on another forum recommended "Segu" to me. At the time, I checked the library and found it and 5 other books by her. Anyway, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the biographical information about Ms. Conde posted on this forum a few months ago by West Africa (for instance, that she had taught Caribbean literature at the Sorbonne), so when "Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?" won the recent Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, I decided to check it out. An additional incentive was that at only 232 pages it's a manageable length.
Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? seems a very worthy choice for the award, however, not to be too provocative, but how many people will actually read a gothic novel set in French colonial West Africa and the Caribbean? For instance, I've noticed there isn't a single customer review posted on Amazon.com. It may not be my favorite of all the nominees, but it might be the best-written of the 5. Her style is complex, it's sensual, and highly musical. It's a pleasure for me to read this kind of writing. There are a lot of interesting minor characters, there's local color -- for example, the seedy waterfront bar in Lima, Peru, where the Chinese characters devise their scheme -- and there's some history of the maroons of Guadoloupe known as the Wayanas. So the literary quality is very high, the subject matter is unusual, and after reading it I feel that I may have actually learned something.
It's subtitled "A Fantastical Tale," and it involves voodoo (voudoo, or whatever), although the term is never used. It's simply called "magic," and its practitioners are "mischief makers." In the second section there's some discussion of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," the book which inspired "Papa Doc" (not the Haitian dictator Duvalier, but one of the novel's characters, a medical doctor banished to a penal colony on the island of Cayenne off the coast of Guyana in South America), so is it fair, for instance, to describe this as a "Caribbean 'Frankenstein'" or is that comparison objectionable? (Although I have not read Frankenstein, I suspect that its underlying issues may be entirely different: ". . .a subversive and morbid story warning against the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science.")
Briefly. About the other H/W nominees, all of which I've read except Percival Everett's "American Desert."
I think "The Dew Breaker" is a beautiful novel of interconnected short stories whose literary quality is also very high, and which, of all the finalists, might appeal to the largest cross section of readers, even though its subject matter is actually quite troublesome -- the torture of political dissidents and others by a member of the secret police or Tonton Macoutes.
Another finalist, Zakes Mda's "The Madonna of Excelsior," which uses the plight of mixed-race children in the South African province of the Organge Free State as a metaphor for, among other things, postcolonial power sharing, probably tips over the most sacred cows (as in the example of one black council member's jaw-dropping declaration of an "old love affair" between blacks and Afrikaners!) and carries an obvious message of reconciliation (a manifestation of Archbishop Tutu's much touted "Ubuntu" perhaps?).
Another worthy choice might have been Nuruddin Farah's "Links," a literary thiller which describes a prodigal son's return to war-torn Somalia and sheds some light on what went wrong with the American rescue mission there.
At the opposite extreme, judging by my conversations with readers on another forum, it's possible that
Finally, there's "The Man in My Basement." When I posted the list of Hurston-Wright nominees on another forum last spring I was surprised that people who I wouldn't have expected to read a Walter Mosley book, had read this one. I suspect that a lot of people who would not normally read an Easy Rawlins mystery but had heard good things about Mosley were enticed by its novella length, the advertising hype ("explores vast new worlds of power"), and decided to give it a try. Unfortunately the one comment I remember most is "How could ANYONE consider 'The Man in My Basement' worthy of a literary prize?" I disagree, I just think it belonged in the Contemporary Fiction category. |
Crystal
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 249
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 28, 2005 - 01:29 pm: |
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Thanks for this post Steve. I guess. Every time I read one of your posts I add 2 or 3 more books to my ever growing list. Thank goodness for the library!
I've read several on the H/W list also and would give the nod to The Dew Breaker. Check out American Desert when you get a chance - I think you'll like it. Everett is a strange one and a good writer. I always get a few good laughs with him.
Mosley is a good writer and The Man in My Basement is so different from his Easy Rawlins books I'm not surprised he's gathering new readers with it. I just thought of it as one from his sci-fi category.
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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 190
Registered: 04-2004
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, November 28, 2005 - 11:56 pm: |
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I wouldn't call The Man in My Basement sci-fi, I'd call it a mystery- or suspense-type literary novel. The guy in the basement is an economic hitman (I believe he describes his line of work as "reclamations").
Walter Mosley has been nice enough to answer my questions on 2 different occasions. I submitted one to the New York Times's "Ten Questions for Walter Mosley," on the subject of W.E.B. Du Bois. In his book "What Next?" Mosley says something like "black leaders have always sought answers on an international level," and then he names Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. So I asked if there was any particular reason he ommitted W.E.B. Du Bois, who, having organized the Pan-African Congresses, would seem to be the most obvious choice. Then I got cheeky and asked if he in fact isn't influenced by Du Bois, and I gave some bullshit example from his two political books.
His answer, almost word-for-word was this: "It's true that I don't mention Du Bois. Let me just say that if I've mangaged to say anything at all in my two political monographs, then W.E.B. Du Bois probably said it first because he's one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century."
That made me feel that I should have asked a better question, but actually, I was thinking about a discussion of Du Bois's book on this forum which went nowhere.
Then he answered another of my questions on a USA Today author chat. I threw him a softball concerning his blues novel about Robert "RL" Johnson, and he seemed to appreciate it.
I don't own any Robert Johnson records, but the legend is that he made a deal with the devil at the crossroads. But it was really meant to explain what Son House and others had noted, namely a dramatic improvement in his playing in a relatively short period of time. So instead of saying that he practiced his @ss off, someone came up with the bright idea of a supposed Faustian bargain.
I really don't see the Bert Williams story as a Faustian bargain, but I'm not going to open up that can of worms. His is more of a rags-to-riches story but without the crucial element of the downfall.
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