Book review 08/04/2022: Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home

It is hard to know where to start with this sublime book. It is world-building of the highest order, with a supreme ethical core, a collage of diverse voices, a kind and generous anthropological underpinning and, woven into it with a deft and light hand, Le Guin's own steel and compassionate pacifism.

I had to get into this and accept it for what it is. Years ago, I started reading it 'for the plot' (Peter Brooks' [book:Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative|54514]). This was an enterprise doomed to failure, and I gave up after a few pages. I was left intimidated by this 500+ page compendium of stories, poems, recipes, song lyrics, charts, maps, lists, musings, footnotes, glossaries, play scripts, ethnographer's notes, marginal doodles, in-page drawings, and just general non-novel-ness and not-conforming-to-any-genre-known-to-me'ness. I am so glad I gave it another go. I finished it some months ago and it still lives within me.

There is a story that holds the book together, the closest we come to a 'novel'. It is the memoir of an old woman who tells of a time in her youth that saw the rise of what we might call a military autocracy, although she does not call it thus but speaks of the soldiers as the Condor People. For this world is set not a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ([book:Star Wars: Illustrated Script|21023557],) but ( Read more... )

. The reveal of the setting came as a complete surprise to me, almost a shock. I did not believe it for a while. Le Guin weaves it in, effortlessly, as a part of the people's world, and seen with their worldview. And it's not shown to us until about 200 pages in. Then other hints accrue. It's absolutely extraordinary, how this is done.

The most astounding and impressive thing is the tight, tight world view. There is not a step out of line. No matter what the people of this world (focusing on the Kesh of the Valley but taking into account their neighbours of other regions) encounter, they see it through their culture. This is so profoundly imagined. It makes us all 'dream a little bigger' ([book:Inception: The Shooting Script|8565270]). At the same time, there is a gentle 'other voice': our voice, from our own time and culture which sometimes intrudes, mocks, questions, gets frustrated.

Is it a utopia? It is, of sorts. But ultimately, it is just people. They live in a post-/non-industrial society -- but not quite. They live in a peaceful, tribal way -- but not quite. They are certainly open to ways of living their sexualities than we are now -- and 150% kudos to Le Guin who wrote this in 1985 before queer theory or #metoo or gay marriage.

To me, the most moving story was the one that thematises war. This is the story of 'A War with the Pig People' (129-134). Why do the two sets of people suddenly decide to wage war? Who knows? The reasons are so negligible. The people who participate are all men, and in this Le Guin is once again so, so astute. They butcher each other, and then it's over, and still: why and wherefore? It is the most understated piece of pacifist writing, and I love it with all my heart. What is marvellous about this world, too, is how these young men's military activities are uncouth, clumsy, tolerated but seen as immature by their communities.

The more militant society of the Condor People is also framed in similar terms but it is more destructive, and there are some wonderful passages of writing about the experience of women in such a society: cloistered, voiceless, illiterate, but (because this is Le Guin) never without agency, never without individuality, never without their own webs of malice and kindness.

My paragraphs might make it seem as if this book is about war and toxic masculinities but that is just a small part which looms large because I am writing this review during a time of war in the Ukraine (and elsewhere). Mostly, we read about the medicinal properties of various herbs, about the organisation of the village into Lodges and Houses, about the respect accorded to plants and non-human animals, about someone's child dying, about someone being jealous, about someone travelling to solve a supply chain problem, about a young boy's marvel at riding on a train (yes, there is a train).

The writing is absolutely beautiful. Bless you, Ursula Le Guin, rest in the peace that you so powerfully evoke.

Crossposted to Goodreads (picturetalk321).

Book review 08/04/2022: Téte-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland

This is a very moving book, first published in France in 1981. It is the memoir of Tété-Michel Kpomassie from Togo who, aged 16, comes across a book on Eskimos [sic] and develops a yearning for Greenland. He works various odd jobs, moves across various borders and countries (including Senegal, France, Germany [where he lived for several months in Bonn, with two ladies he met on a train], and Denmark) until, eight years later, he does actually arrive in Greenland.

The book has four parts. The first part relates the (to me, and maybe to all European readers) improbably and astounding story of how Kpomassie as a teenager disturbed a python, having climbed to the top of a palm tree where the snake had its nest. The python slithered across him; the boy thumped it on its head; the python started back up the tree to get to its babies; the boy, in a sheer panic, jumped off the tree, lay in a coma and smashed various bones. His father took him to a nearby village, part of a python's cult, where the boy was cured by, among other things, having a python rubbed against his body. The father then offered the boy to the snake cult. It is this, the prospect of becoming a member of this cult, that propels the young Kpomassie to run away from his home and wend his way towards Greenland.

Part two begins Kpomassie's account of his life in Greenland. Part three is about the winter months in the Arctic circle where the sun is never seen. Part four concludes with his time in Upernavik, with the eccentric Robert Mattaaq and his family, during the endlessly sunny summer months.

Kpomassie's voice is just wonderful. He comes across as a curious, friendly man who is also a very young man (24 when he arrives in Greenland). He likes to hang out with male friends. He also has affairs with various women along the way. I found this a bit alienating at first, but then I realised several things: one was my own prejudice along the lines of 'but one mustn't have sex with the natives!' Kpomassie is not a coloniser; he is not there, exploiting people. Nor is he an ethnographer, with an equally othering gaze but expected to remain 'objective' and not become personally involved. He does become personally involved, never more so when he gets into a fist fight with a jealous Inuit man. He is a young man, a tourist, a traveller, who sees and treats the people he meets on an equal footing, and that includes being attracted to some of the women. So the aspect that at first took me aback ended up making me reflect on my own biases and on the whole framework of 'travel to a foreign land'.

What drew me into buying this book in the first place was the surprising juxtaposition of African traveller and Greenland. I share this surprise with many others, judging from foreword, blurb and reviews -- and it is another bias check because why should not an African travel to the Arctic? Indeed, an African American was part of the party that reached the North Pole in 1907-09. Why should it be only white people who go travelling? Of course, in the majority, it often has been which is another important historical point to keep in mind when thinking about colonialism.

Because so much of the travel to 'native peoples' has been, and arguably continues to be, informed by colonialism. Kpomassie comes from a country, Togo, that was a French colony until 1960, i.e. his parents' generation all grew up under colonial rule. The author's book is written in French, the coloniser's language. So when he comes to Greenland, he comes as a formerly colonised person to stay with people who are currently colonial subjects. The coloniser in Greenland is Denmark.

Absolutely fascinating to me was the relay of meanings from coloniser to stranger to foreigner to white man. Tucked away in the glossary is this gem: 'Qashluna [Inuit] usually translated as "white man", but also applied to Kpomassie, so more correctly "foreigner" (300). The Greenlanders are initially completely fascinated by Kpomassie's otherness. But they have no term, racist or otherwise, for a Black man or an African. (Only once does Kpomassie hear a racial slur, part of the fistfight episode I mentioned above.). So they call this man who is different from them by the term they do have for a different person from elsewhere: qashluna, which they otherwise use to label Danes. So the Black, formerly colonised African is called by the same term as the white European coloniser. This disturbance of the force (the force of Black/White racialised thinking in the Euro-American sphere) was absolutely eye-opening to me.

Very interesting to me was also how the main point of fascination for the Inuit (at least as described by Kpomassie) was initially not so much the colour of his skin but his height. He is quite tall, anyway, but in the context of the mostly short Inuit, his height really stood out.

Kpomassie tells his story with a lovely, engaging voice. He describes marvellous things, and the passages of nature descriptions are particularly beautiful. He describes mores that are interesting to him, and now and again compares them to mores familiar to him from his home. Again, there is a welcome disjuncture to my Euro-centric outlook: what Kpomassie finds familiar and what he finds strange are only partially those things that I would find familiar or strange. He also describes mores that alienate him, particularly the constant drunkenness and the lack of initiative among some people. He does not overstate his but it does come through his text: these failings are ultimately due to the colonial administration, for example, Denmark's policy to consolidate bureaucracy by having everybody live in consolidated villages and moving people from other, especially non-coastal small dwellings, to towns built by the Danes.

Kpomassie himself is very educated and speaks and writes at least seven languages. Some of the people he encounters are also multi-lingual, and they just take this for granted. Fie, fie on the Anglosphere.

Format: creamy pages, nicely designed. Beautifully translated by James Kirkup. Pointless introduction by A. Alvarez. I pondered the photographs inserted half-way through often.

Crossposted to Goodreads (picturetalk321).