Wilfred Thesiger – The Marsh Arabs

Cover of The Marsh Arabs, first edition, 1964, E.P. Dutton & Co.

 

Wilfred Thesiger was truly one who found himself in the wrong century, if not the wrong millennium.  Hounded by the march of progress, the man spent the majority of his life seeking extreme solitudes, in the company of few and with little desire to accomplish more than exist closely to the land as it had been done for aeons before.  He lived for years in the Arabian South, crossing the Empty Quarter with the Rashid, a tribe of Bedouin, and subsequently made his way to the Marshes of Southern Iraq, where he lived, intermittently for years.  In the post-war period of the early nineteen-fifties, when drive-ins and the suburbs changed the landscape of the western world, Thesiger sought other things:

I had left [the Marshes] in the last week of July 1952 and it was now an early afternoon in February.  Seven months later; it seemed longer.  In that time I had crossed high passes through the snows of the Hindu Kush to the cold blue lake of Korombar where the Chitral river rises; I had looked out over Wakand from the Borogil Pass, and seen in the distance a glint that was the Oxus; I had slept on the glaciers at the foot of Tirich Mir, and in the dark, verminous houses among mulberry orchards, where the last of the Black Kafirs lived on the borders of Nuristan.  Now, back once more in Falih’s mudhif on the edge of the Marshes, I felt that I had come home” (p. 141, same edition as noted in the caption).

It was not a lonely life, but isolated and intimate with the land, in part to hunt, in part to explore, in greatest part to be present and to exist in complete conjunction with the environment.  There is something in him that drove him to push himself to the limits of human endurance as a means to be closest to freedom, or what some might consider the sublime, the knife’s edge between terror and ecstasy, horror and the ethereal.   What makes Thesiger such a compelling figure is as well his capacity to write, simply, beautifully, and deeply about his experiences–possibly best found in Arabian Sands–and capture them in photography.  What well may some think of him, his literary and visual arts are something to behold, unique and immortal.

The Usefulness of Novels

Geoff Dyer strikes me as my kind of man–as a writer, I mean, not as what I would define as an archetype of the Man (and by that, I mean the person we look up to in times of distress and need, not the one to whom we pay our taxes and curse when we are in distress and need)– in large part due to the fact that he’s a light and deft writer, and more because what he says rings true with what lies deep in the recesses of my heart:

Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, Edited by Peter Widdowson.  I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on ‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider  on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring  ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’).  I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and became angrier still.  How could it have happened?  How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?  I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any [sic] more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on.  Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off.  Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid.  I threw the book across the room and I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient.  By now I was blazing mad.  I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls.  Then I looked around for the means to destroy this vile, filthy book.  In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.

I burned it in self-defence.  It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.  That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches.  Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch (p.100-101).

Four and half years of study of English literature also made me feel this way; I nearly burned my diploma when I received it in the mail (I had resolutely stayed away from commencement, the only university ceremony family can attend other than a disciplinary hearing) in a fit of anger at the uselessness of receiving one that was written entirely in Latin, and thus useless to all those–myself included–who can’t read Latin.  At the time, it epitomized the feeling of utter self-loathing and disillusionment I had for having studied literature.  Students of literature are asked to study Shakespeare, who Johnson described as having had “small Latin and less Greek,” and the English canon, both which grew out from classical roots, a perversity that astonishes since the overwhelming majority of modern students have no Latin and even less Greek.  At a recent job interview, I was asked to bring in this very diploma as evidence of my education; the interviewers looked at it, looked at one another, looked at me, and we all nodded at one another, uselessly, as it was clear no one at the table had any idea of what was written on it other than my name.

John Irving’s Doctor Larch in The Cider House Rules constantly intones about being ‘useful’, a feature that expresses, or rails against, the author’s constant dread of being the opposite of this.  While literature is eternal–the good stuff, in any case–there is not one writer dead or alive who has not felt the pull of this vicious undertow, which sometimes drives them to self-conscious despair.  Irving has come to terms with his sense of inadequacy by having trained in wrestling his entire life and, in the case of this particular book, by writing for the cause of free-choice and the right to abortion.  The theme of being useful is a cornerstone to The Cider House Rules and it is arguably a background theme to all modern literature.  (Anecdotally, Doctor Larch also remedies the problem of protagonist protégé Homer Wells’ lack of formal medical education by doctoring a fake diploma, which no one bothers to follow-up on because it is so impressive a document.)

Unfortunately, ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine  per cent of all literature students don’t end up becoming John Irving, and they spend several years or more (or, as in my case, four point five years) struggling to understand how studying advanced literacy is going to make them even remotely as useful as their fellow students, in particular those who have wisely chosen to study subjects that at the very least lead them to sources of professional remuneration other than tips.  What happens to those brilliant students who stick with their studies of literature and go the academic distance?  They usually end up with doctorates in the subject and then, if fortune favours them, teaching the subject to idiot undergraduates; in other words the kind I was, the kind who wrote deliberately vitriolic essays of his professor’s favourite authors and then spent sleepless nights tossing over his mediocre grades.

I recently met a an academic who said that he taught German literature.  I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke.  Rilke!  Oh, it was too much to bear.  You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke!  You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust.  Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.  I was beside myself with indignation.  I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies.  Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books? (p. 101)

Ah, the perennial question asked by the undergraduate: are our teachers failed writers?  Do they spend their entire lives thinking, could I have written For Whom the Bell Tolls had I ditched my studies and gone, instead, to follow the compass bearing of my brass balls and fought with the guerillas in Guatemala, shot at the contras, and killed some certified badasses in the bush?  A few of my professors were American draft dodgers of the Vietnam era, so my hypothesis is unlikely, but the fact remains that there is a tension between the teachers who preach the practice of literary creation but have themselves done little to expand it.

“Now,” then says Dyer, “criticism is an integral part of the literary tradition and academics can sometimes write excellent works of criticism but these are exceptional: the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of books by academics, especially books like that Longman Reader are a crime against literature.  If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals–and in the works themselves.  ‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner (an academic!); the great books add up to a tacit ‘syllabus of enacted criticism’.  This becomes explicit when poets write a poem about some great work of art–Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’–or about another poet: Auden’s elegy for Yeats, Brodsky’s elegy for Auden, Heaney’s elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled ‘Audenesque’).  In such instances the distinction between imaginative and critical writings disappears. (p. 101-102)

Such a position also makes the literary author feels somewhat less useless, it might be added.  In any case, Dyer is in part correct in his position: leave the work of criticism to the professionals.  He also adds that his position is balderdash, “Except that this is nonsense of course.  Scholars live their work too” (p. 102).  To the heart of the matter, Dyer decries critics, excludes from literary discourse, then lets them back in, all to the point of saying, damn, didn’t D.H. Lawrence write so very well: “That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism” (p.103).

Lawrence, to my mind, is among the most tedium-inducing writers I’ve ever read, appealing to those who somehow enjoy seeing life as presented through the anti-rose coloured lens.  Certainly Dyer did manage to decrease my prejudice of the writer to that of guarded suspicion, but I still recall attempting to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover one beautiful summer day by the lake and feeling depressed for the effort.  After suffering through forty pages of liver-like prose, it was banished back deep into the crevice from whence it came, a space between two battered copies of Daphne Du Maurier.

I am thus both an ignorant and useless critic, unfit to write literature–let alone read it appreciatively–and not even useful enough to make D.H. Lawrence more attractive to a biased audience.  So be it: I know my literary position in life and accept it, and I make no apology for being hard on Lawrence based on a partial reading of only one of his works, which is also understood as an overrated novel.  I love the writer not, but I do think Dyer did a bang-up job of selling the unsaleable, and sincerely thank him for helping me to exorcize my demons.

The Myth of Digital Democracy

An essential stat book for the media, political, and blogging spheres of the internet.

Matthew Hindman‘s 2009 book, The Myth of Digitanal Democracy, is a compelling read, if only for the reason that it tackles by way of empirical study the commonly held–and oft repeated–maxim that the internet facilitates the spread of democracy.

In overview, his findings are that the internet’s democratic elements, particularly leading news, political commentary, and influential blog sites all reflect pre-exisiting social relationships and hierarchies present in the physical sphere.  That is to say, that these elements are no more than the internet’s direct reflection of the non-electronic world; the internet in short, does not produce new democractic enhancing, enabling, and promulgating materials, but serves only as a different conveyor of the same intellectual substrate.

The conclusion is on one hand profondly disturbing; gleaning why this is so takes no more than a examination of how facebook functions.

Speaking generally, internet users have an at least cursory understanding of how facebook functions: people we meet in the physical world are befriended on the facebook site.  This ability presupposes, naturally, two common factors between facebook friends: we have both registered for facebook accounts and we have, ideally met at least once, face-to-face (this is not an exclusive rule: some friendships on facebook are like gatecrashers at parties–’nice people, but who are they?’).    More importantly, in Hindman’s terms, when we become facebook friends, we are interlinking accounts and thus our accounts’ pre-existing friends links are exposed to one another and so the friendship web grows.

Indeed, the early history of facebook, as depicted in the 2010 film, The Social Network, explains Hindman’s research unreservedly.  Facebook was initially begun as Harvard undergraduate student-exclusive site, and then was marketed to other Ivy League schools in an effort to interlink nascent elite social networks to one another.  The product, though, was good enough to transcend these lofty beginnings.

Yet, as any one who has used facebook knows, the end result of long-term facebook use is that one ends up with befriending those that we have known as actual friends or more in the physical sphere, and thus facebook serves not to broaden our actual friendship base, but rather to consolidate it.

Transcribed to the broader scale of the internet itself–focused through Hindman’s democratic triumvirate of news, politics, and blogs–the conclusion is sobering, if not depressing.  The forces that exist to sway the world in print media–newspapers, magazines, and books–in politics–the well-educated and wealthy, primarily–and scholars–also well-educated and politically savvy as well as possibly connected individuals–are the same that move the currents of the digital sphere.

With the news and political websites, it isn’t surprising that the authoritative voices in the physical world are mirrored in the digital.  What is disturbing is how blogs, those purported vehicles for the common-man’s opinion, are in fact the very opposite:

In order to be heard in the blogosphere, a citizen has to compete with millions of other voices.  Those who come out on top in this struggle for eyeballs are not middle schoolers blogging about the trials of adolescence, nor are they fictitious collection of pajama-clad amateurs taking on the old media from the comfort of their sofas.  Overwhelmingly, they are well-educated white male professionals.  Nealry all of the bloggers in our census were either educational elites, business elites, technical elites, or traditional journalists.  (p. 128)

Moreover, Hindman points out that bloggers are also dispropotionately lawyers or legal academics.  Case in point is the most recent blog I was introduced to, Kate’s Book Blog, run by a white female Canadian professor of law: in part confirming that those who have a voice of pre-eminence on the internet are merely extending what social-economic privileges they already enjoy.  There is no obvious empowerment of the under-represented and less-heard poor and less-educated.  There is instead a tight weave of professional powerhouse writers and big name media sources.

The census was but one element of Hindman’s total research, and merely served to cap off the programming and mathematics that make up the heart and soul of Hindman’s research.  Empirical data was collected by way of monitoring interlinking, the raw number of links made to a website by way of hyperlinks, using a program of his own devising that followed hyperlinks three websites deep.  He also utilized traffic volume data, as provided by the company Hitwise, which he claims has a transparent and ethical methodology that preserves users’ privacy (testitified to by the fact that Hitwise has survived audits by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, who have validated that they observe their own privacy policies in practice).

The overall picture drawn, unfortunately, is limited to the United States and nothing more; the sensation is of an internet that is in lockstep with the beat of America and nothing else.  There is nothing to say about the world beyond this, and there is little effort to draw a line to it; the internet phenomenon of Howard Dean‘s Democratic Party nomination campaign is examined in an early chapter, but there is scant word on who Dean was, and what his place in American politics was.  This is abook that purports to talk of internet democracy, but remains distinctly parochial in its address, and in this regard, fails mightily.

Transnational democratic effect and the internet however is something worth mentioning.  In recent times, much has been made of Africa’s new high speed internet connections, which some herald as a means to end the economic disparities that afflict the continent, and conjointly, as indicative of the degree of local political freedoms in individual nations.

While it is questionable how better internet connections will improve the issues of drought, crop production, soil erosion, and poverty in Africa as a whole, the upside of broadband is that at the very least, it reduces the prevalence of viruses to root into computers.  Free antimalware and antivirus programs are more easily downloaded than over slow and inconsistent connections.  For those who have worked and lived in the developing world, this is a scourge–though a scourge for the upper-classes who have access to computers, and have the training to understand how to use them.

Sigmoidoscopy

Life in reverse, as it were, is the essence of the gastroenterologist’s m.o. : where the average doctor’s examination begins with the innocent statement, “Open up, and say ‘Aahh’”, the gastro doc says, rather ominously, “Roll over, and try not to squirm”.

Gastro as a word holds some meaning for foodies: gastronome, gastronomique, gastro-pub.  It is a word, in short, that gives grandeur and a very French je ne sais quoi to the proceedings of any culinary event.  And as things would be, so the word also lends velour to the natural course of great meals, the proceedings of which are never too small, too difficult, and too expressive to ignore–at least on the personal level.

“Look, you’re constipated!” said the kind doctor who, just moments previously, had queried me on the book I was reading, Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia.  “There’s something,” she said, “compelling about that title…now please sign here, there’s only a minute–minute–chance of a puncture.”  The assisting nurse then walked in, checked the paperwork I had just signed (and read first), and then said, “isn’t he here just for a flexible sigmoidoscopy, not the full deal?”  My doctor flushed, as did I, and we co-initialed the changes to the document with mutual murmurs of separately embarrassed apology.

This is a tale of terminals: time spent in tropical areas with variable water quality tends to have one visit more than one doctor to assess equally variable, and apparently untraceable, symptoms.  The travel doctor had finally identified the parasite lurking in my bladder; this spelunking doctor was hoping to detect the source of the minute amounts of blood in my stool which I had assured the travel doctor was not due to multiple forgotten instances of anal sex with men.  “Are you sure you’re not gay?” he had asked me several times as non sequiturs throughout my initial visit with him, hoping to catch me off my guard.  “You sure you didn’t have anal sex with any men while you were in East Africa?”

Which brought me to my present: looking at the screen placed conveniently within my view, I could indeed see some muck obstructing the view of what could only be described as a smooth, and surprising clean looking, tunnel.  Here I was worried about bacon fat lining the walls:  ha!  This was the anti-Geiger corridor, all pinkish, healthy and not an alien rib in sight.  Everything looked good, and even better after some generous spritzing of water and light gusts of air that spread the intestinal walls away from the offending muck.  The doc skillfully pushed in and probed and my mind wandered somewhat while one my legs twitched spasmodically.

Earlier, in the narrow waiting lounge, a television was set to a channel that featured nothing but episodes involving cooks, kitchens, and a varying degree of annoying hosts and hostesses.  At first, my book kept me busy: Stark was having a time going without her sugar in her tea, though more importantly her bedouin guides were treating her with respect and she was exploring a region of the Arabian peninsula few westerners had ever visited, let alone a single woman.  I adjusted my double gown–one put on face forward, the other put on face backward, the two acting together to remove the threat of an unfortunate full moon rear and/or full frontal flashing.

Despite this, my eye caught the waiting lounge screen, and I was entranced by Bobby Flay, thunder and lightning throwdown cook, fighting to determine who could make the best friend green tomato BLT (he could, as it turned out, though the incumbent had invented this particular sandwich).  Then, he took on the fried chicken mama, and lost (she deep fried her chicken in canola oil and a half pound of butter).

So, nothing too amiss with this picture: the North American watches the social fruits of his greater continental society.  Yet as the chicken fried and the crowds sank their teeth into the succulent, moist, and buttermilk soaked and battered flesh of the lapin-like bird, several stomachs rumbled.  All of us hospital-gowned folk sitting there in that lounge turned to and fro, silent with our thoughts of the preparation we had gone through to get to this point.  For myself, it had been two days of a gentle laxative–well named Dulcolax–and a day of clear fluids.  Nothing terrible but, still, the sight of all that steaming, butter and oil fried, chicken would have tempted even a vegetarian Jesus.

Fools do things their own way, and often they suffer for their ways.  I had spent the morning hawking purple and white icing cupcakes to fund-raise for epilepsy awareness.  Seeing that I was to be a patient at the same hospital that I am a volunteer, I had thought, why not double up and save myself two trips?

And thus the fate of the time conscious socially conscious.  Few would highlight this procedure as fun; few would indeed dare even say that this was what they would do on their day off from work.  Yet it is what I was doing, and happily so.  Until the cakes were sold, and I was forced to watch Flay throwdowns, towering cakes being built (the winning team was the one that recreated the hanging gardens of Babylon), and then the exquisitely gross products of America’s heartland diners, life lacked some of the levity it so normally possesses.

Interregnum

Mid-winter at the ol' fashion gas station, Toronto.

 

Lula Cafe, Chicago

Breakfast.

Great food needs no embellishments, it should speak for itself:

http://www.lulacafe.com/

The Horn of Africa

Arriving and departing from Addis Ababa by plane from continental Europe, or in this case, by way of the earthly bridge of Istanbul, was a midnight affair.  The plane rumbled in over the city in the still morning chill of this elevated city as the denizens lie quiet below.  From plane seat to immigration line, stamped and then released into the small crowd of relatives and well-dressed taxi drivers, the unfamiliar traveler emerges and hopes, somehow, that at two in the morning, a likely bed can be easily found.

Fortunately a friend was there to pick me up.  I called using an optimistic taxi driver’s cell phone–the usual impressive affair, bigger screened and far better than my own back home–and then waited.  She arrived and when I tried to pay the driver by way of cash borrowed from my friend, he flatly refused and stalked off, indignant that it came from her.  Perhaps it had to do that she looks Ethiopian; perhaps that she was a woman; perhaps none of these things.  We made our way into the preternatural quiet of Ethiopia’s capital and drove along empty corridors of streets that shone with the orange glow of street lamps and the eyes of resting cattle caught in our headlights.

Addis Ababa at dusk.

That same morning, we were picked up by Zelalem, our driver for the following days.  He loaded a white 60 series Land Cruiser with our things and drove us out of the city.  Unlike Nairobi, which stretches interminably outwards along its congested highways, Addis Ababa is contained and quickly left behind.  Her roads, too, have less cars on them and though the drivers are near equally unrestrained in their risk-taking the experience of driving in Addis is far better, far less hectic, than in Nairobi’s fast-paced, hard-hitting, Mad Max whorehouse of emission-failing Japanese imports, massive diesel trucks en route to East Africa’s interior, and late-model European luxury cars driven by men desperate to please no one.  Nairobi is a man; Addis Ababa, fitting to her name–New Flower, in Amharic–is not, and for this I am thankful.  There is only one Nairobi, and it is enough city for this world.

Descent into the Nile valley.

Yet there is always a catch.  The major roads in Ethiopia are newly tarmacked and improving daily, thanks to the ever constant efforts of chain-smoking Chinese road crews.  The roads are appreciated by all and one, including the cattle.  Cattle obstruct the way at every turn and straight, and any driver needs to know how to read the penchant of goats, zebu, and herders who stake claim to the middle of the two-lane highways across this land.  Villagers stroll along them en masse, and they who apparently care little for oncoming traffic are a brave lot.  Braking hard, swerving, and rapid down-shifting is the way of the Ethiopian driver out of the city.  Averaging seventy kilometers an hour is an honest achievement in this country, seventh largest in Sub-Saharan Africa at slightly over one point one million square kilometers.

With its oil coming over the border from the Sudan, double-trailer loads rumble along the highways in pilgrimage to Addis.  Several days from the Sudan to the western highway that runs across the Nile, then the descent to cross the Blue Nile takes eight hours and the ascent another eight.  After which it will be another three hours across to the capital.

Riding with another Ethiopian driver, he would lift his index finger at a likely villager and point it them sharply and give them a look, as if to say, “Got you!”  In an earlier visit to the country, it had been amazing to see how villagers walking along the road would consistently dare contact with our bus, be it children, elders, or invalids, these last even risking their sole remaining leg to the skill of an often bored and indifferent driver.  Tourist book author Philip Briggs suggests that Ethiopians believe that darting out in front of an on-coming vehicle and escaping contact brings good luck.  This well may be so, given the commitment of most of these individuals.

Visiting an orphanage school in the town of Atsenet Degnet, in Gojam, just west-south-west of Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile, the boys of the orphanage tried their English with me.  When asked about some of their necklaces other than the wooden crosses of the Christian Orthodox Church, I was told that it was to protect against “Buddha”.  Surprised, I asked if this was true, for Ethiopians are a religiously tolerant people.  An older boy, a slim youth with better English assured me that it had nothing to do with the “eastern born religion,” but was indeed called a buddha.  This little cloth bag held a charm–the buddha–to protect against spoonish, or “man-eaters.”

In relating this anecdote to Yehalem, country representative for Partners in the Horn of Africa, the organization that funded this orphanage, he clarified that a buddha could also ward off the evil-eye, and somewhat embarrassed, dismissed this as a rural superstition, unworthy of further discussion.

On the shore of Lake Abaya.

Ethiopia is overwhelmingly rural, somewhere around eighty-five percent of its population living a pastoral life, and it shouldn’t be surprising that superstitions govern the thoughts of many.  There is no slight in this remark, and it is with the greatest interest that the form of superstitions were observed.  What difference, if any, is there between salt thrown over a shoulder and the belief that one can ward off the evil-eye with a charm?

Upwards on onwards is the standard call for developing nations on the African continent.  For Ethiopia, notorious for its droughts and famines, should be famous instead for its history: lone among all others, it is the one African nation which retained its independence following the 19th century European colonial scramble for new territories.

Despite being a member of the League of Nations, Ethiopia was occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941.  During this period, the Italians were never fully in control of the country and, besieged on all sides, they abandoned position and left the land, their imperial ambitions severely diminished.  In Kenya, there is an underlying sense of insecurity that emerges during discussions of day-to-day life.  Often, there is mention of social, economic, and infrastructure declines both from the pre-colonial and colonial past.  Sometimes even long-term tourists express their dismay at the post-independence status quo: service is no longer so sharp, the poverty more obvious, the perks of a stronger currency no longer enough to purchase, even for a brief time, the similar kind of servitude and gratefulness normally expressed by a conquered people.  The ultimate experience of the safari–going on a journey, in Swahili–is coloured by khakis, well-slung army-green tents, well-draped man-servants, and illustrious cooks which altogether strives to what it was for the white settler, pre-1963 .

Ethiopian pastoral.

Tourism has many positive effects, no doubt, and economically it is something all nations seek to exploit.  However, the form that tourism can take is without doubt sometimes unappealing.  Rapid growth of the tourist sector does not necessarily–or even ever–benefit the poorest citizens, the environment, or those who are but one step removed from the process.  Economic growth without equitable distribution is a clear failure of governmental policy, yet it is one replicated worldwide without fail.

Ethiopia has had few tourists, largely due to internal strife divided between a long-running civil war and periodic famines.  Amartya Sen has described famines as having never occurred in democratic countries, being largely a failure of autocratic governments to address a problem in a timely and responsible manner.  The reasoning is that effective democracies allow citizens to pressure the government into action, desiring re-election; whereas meaningless republics run by autocrats can do as they will.  In the case of Ethiopia’s famines, its most famous occurred in 1973 and then severally through the 1980s.  In these instances, the famines were localized in regions prone to drought and consequent drought failure.  Total domestic food production, though, was sufficient to manage the deficit and at least, avert famine conditions.  What prevented the proper distribution of food from one part of the country to another was that the news of a possible famine were first ignored, and then when famine broke out, this news was denied and then deliberately suppressed by the central government.

Why the deliberate inaction?  What truly motivates the heart of humankind is a great unknown, but at the very least, Sen’s theory can be here confirmed.  In 1973, the government was different from that of the 1980s, the former being run by the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, and the latter by the Darg, a socialist military committee that had ironically risen to power riding the wave of discontent against the Emperor’s abusive indifference to his people’s plight.  In both instances, nothing was done to avert famine and reporters of its progress suppressed.

Images here describe a lush country that is as rich as it seems.  During its two rainy seasons, Ethiopians work the land and then reap a harvest that sustains them, in part mostly, as evidenced by the sight of food relief containers here and there in markets and other instances of re-use.  Food relief, though, is not a straight forward issue. Sen notes that with drought, food prices increase, and it is usually in areas outside of the more heavily drought-afflicted regions that food ends up being sold, particularly in urban zones where there is a greater amount of capital that can afford the elevated cost of staple foods.  Areas that are already poor and vulnerable to any rapid change in the price of staples are thus doubly hit when there is a famine and the market is allowed to control the flow of food around the country.  A government that both denies the existence of famine and does not subsidize the sale of essential food items ensures the harshest of possible outcomes.

This is all history, now, thankfully, and Ethiopia is a country committed to growth under the present government.  Meles Zenawi is now Prime Minister, elected now three times in a row in a process that does no honour to fair elections.  In this position since 1991, Zeles has committed to a process that denies opposition and encourages the consolidation of his party’s powers.

Another organization funded by Partners in the Horn of Africa is called Afro-Ethiopian Integrated Development, based in Bahar Dar, major town found on the southern shores of Lake Tana.  It was founded by the droll, energized, and indefatigable Shimate Ezezen, who still runs it today, with the help of his wife and son.  A secondary school teacher by profession, Shimate has served two terms in prison; as he put it, every time there’s a change in government, he goes to jail.  Unembittered by the years in jail, Shimate used the political connections forged within to help the greater community when he was released.  I played chess with his friends at the local social club and was soundly defeated, afterwards advised by Shimate to practice somewhat more, and left to reflect on the innate character that makes some greater than others.

Shimate, on left, with a foster parent, in the family's home.

Shimate’s organization targets orphans in the community surrounding Bahar Dar.  He first contacts the local schools and asks for the names of orphans in most need from their teachers.  Once identified, the orphans are contacted and the process begins.  A family member is assigned as a foster parent (usually a grandparent, uncle, aunt, or other close relative), and this one is given a monthly allowance of 165 birr (~ ten US dollars) that is meant to cover food and cleaning products for the orphan.  The children are also provided with clothing for school and school bags, as necessary.  The trade-off for the children is the expectation that they excel at their studies.  If they are able to make it to university, then the organization funds their studies and provides them with a living allowance, and so forth, until they graduate at the highest possible level.

Should the child not make it beyond secondary school, then it is here that the programme ends: they are now like any other Ethiopian at this point, more or less, educated to their potential and so left to navigate the road of life on their own.

Ushered out by the sounds of the social club staff stacking chairs and shooting bursts of steam out of the espresso machine, Shimate walked me back in the evening dusk.   I remarked on the elegant spiraling beauty of the mosque outlined near my hotel.  “Do they make so much noise in your country?” he asked me, incredulous.  “Not so much,” I answered truthfully, for this one’s muezzin was broadcast very loudly, awakening most of the neighbourhood each morning.  “Is it really necessary for them to impose this on us?  Do we impose our observances on them?  Isn’t it presumptuous?”  I laughed and agreed that it was perhaps unfair, and we moved onto the discussion of Marx and Engels, Smith and Mills and others, most of whom Shimate had read while imprisoned.

Islamic pastoral, central Ethiopia. Photo by Jane Doe.

“Allah ou Akbar – everything hangs on that: the magic of this Name is enough to transform empty interiors into space, and this divine largesse, through being inscribed on tombs with chalk or shouted from the top of minarets, becomes the true property of everyone” – The Way of the World, Nicholas Bouvier, p. 295.

Waterton Lakes National Park

Plains meet mountain chain, south-western Alberta, 2009.

“However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.  Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.  If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we would know the mind of God.”

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 10th Anniversary edition, p.191.

Montreal – Montréal

Mid-winter afternoon, 2009, on the eponymous Mont-Royal park, around which spreads the city of Montreal.

 

“In Montreal, easily the most prescient of hockey towns, everybody you meet these days is down on the game.  ‘There was a time, not so long ago,’ a sportswriter told me, ‘when if I walked into the Press Club with two tickets for a game, I was immediately surrounded, I was going to make enemies, everybody wanted them.  Now I walk in with two tickets and I can’t even find a taker.’

The players, they say, are fat, indolent, and overpaid.  Frenetic expansion, obviously fed by avarice rather than regard for tradition, has all but ruined a fine institution.  The season is horrendously long and the present playoff system an unacceptable joke.  Come mid-May the Stanley Cup finals have usually yet to begin.  And yet–and yet–Saturday night is still ‘Hockey Night in Canada.’  Diminished or not, les Canadiens sont là.  And so am I, my eyes fixed on the television set.

The legendary Canadiens.”

Mordecai Richler, The Fall of the Montreal Canadiens, in Home Sweet Home, p. 184.

Nicholas Bouvier

Gojam region, Ethiopia, September, 2010, at the end of the short rains.

“Why add stale words to fresh things that can get along perfectly well without them?  It’s as though one were a shopkeeper, this urge to get something out of everything, not to let anything go … and even though you’re painfully aware of that, you keep on taking the trouble, coaxing, struggling against the vast, insistent chilling effect of life.”

Nicholas Bouvier, The Way of the World, p. 299, translation by Robyn Marsack.