Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

     “BEGINNINGS IN AOTEAROA AND ABROAD” by Michael Jackson (published by Ugly Hill Press, distributed by Bateman Books, $NZ 39:90 )

            Michael Jackson – academic, anthropologist, poet and traveller – is now 84 years old. Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is the nearest he has yet come to a full autobiography, although he has dipped into personal things in others of his books. [I admit that back in 2019 I wrote a not-very-positive review on this blog of his The Paper Nautilus,which had many personal asides.]  In his preface to Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad he explains what he means by “beginnings”. In his view, we are always changing. We say goodbye to one phase of our life and a new one emerges – a new beginning. It can simply be growing up, but it can also mean understanding new things, meeting new people or  going to other countries and immersing in different cultures, which is, of course, Jackson’s profession.

            Jackson divides Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad into two halves.

            Part One is headed “A Taranaki Childhood Around 1950”. Born in 1940, Jackson grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank-clerk. The family was not exactly poor but they sometimes had to struggle to make ends meet. Mount Taranaki dominated the countryside. By 1945, the little boy was aware of uncles coming home from war. It was also in 1945 that he first went to school, feeling deprived of his mother. Although he was never good at games and sports, he still pitched in, even if he often found himself practising all on his own. He did begin to understand that there were separate social classes in their small town, with working classes on the other side of the railway track from the side where the Jacksons dwelled. Still when he was very young, he learnt some lessons about farming, which was not his family’s metier. He once fell into a pit if cow dung to the great amusement of farming kids. [Jackson insists that “dung” is really a euphemism and the correct word should be “shit”]. His family did sometimes go on holidays at the beach, but at first he saw the sea as a daunting, frightening thing. [On this I sympathise with him – when I was very young I felt overwhelmed and frightened when I first holidayed at the sea.] He says the experience of the sea at first shook him, and in a way shaped much of his early thinking, as in this reaction: “Was this the first inkling that I could manipulate my dreams and, by extension, use my imagination to gain some mastery over things that threatened to overwhelm me? Certainly, I have never given up on the fantasy that I can travel through time and forewarn my childhood self of the perils lying ahead of him, and perhaps advise him on how to face them. Although most of us are destined to have children of our own and worry about their vulnerability; it is also true that we become the parents of the children we once were, and sometimes wish we could retrospective show them an easier path through life than the one we took so blindly.” (pg. 34).

            Jackson tells us that his parents had different interests. His mother had great fortitude, though she was often sick. One of his most vivid memories is of how onerous it then was for a woman – his mother -  to shoulder all the housework that had to be done before there were refrigerators or washing machines. He remembers his mother boiling clothes in a hopper, wringing clothes by hand and then struggling with a clothes line. Mother was interested in painting and worked in a Toss Woollaston style. His father, as a hobby, was interested in technical things. Jackson says it was “an uneasy relationship between the technical and aesthetic”.

            Together with his older sister Gabrielle, young Jackson slowly came to terms with the presence of Maori in Taranaki and gradually began to understand how nearly all the Maori land had been “confiscated” [i.e. stolen] in the 19^th century. Later, when he got a bicycle, he roved around parts of Taranaki, acquainting himself with Maori settlements and Maori art… perhaps being the origin of his life as an anthropologist.  Countering this, there was the fact that as a youngster he was brought up on English comics and books and often thought of England as the promised land. Like many young people, he did have a sort of religious crisis, wondering if God could help him. Once, when he lost a cricket ball, he asked God to help him find it… and he found it… so maybe God could help him further… though that was not the direction he went. In his solitary rambles, however, he took to admiring plants and trees and the wind and did come close to the quasi-religious attitudes of Wordsworthian romantic poets. But this attitude did not last for his life. He writes: “In the English romantics, I would, years later, discover my spiritual forebears, though I would discover also that nature was a poor substitute for the company of friends, and that the writers who made a religion of nature were often conflicted rather than enviable figures.” (pg. 65) Becoming a young teenager, he also inevitably wondered about sex (the chapter dealing with this is called “Sexual Awakening”) and often heard the more uncouth lads of Inglewood speculating on what “rooting” involved.

            Turning the spotlight away from himself, he considers some of the eccentrics who lived in Inglewood and environs, also noting that the area was known for having a higher rate of murders than most country towns. Two eccentrics behaved in very different ways – one ultimately violent. Their different behaviour led him to wonder if he himself had to “choose between withdrawal and engagement, changing myself or changing the world”. This really leads to crossing into young adulthood. But before he moves into adulthood, he gives some background to his family. His grandfather was the sole police officer of the town, mainly having to deal with rowdy drunks but sometimes dealing with more weighty things. He remembered how, in the First World War, exiles (European foreigners) were targeted by thugs regarding themselves as patriots.

            Jackson did almost broke from his father when he believed that his father was making things hard for his mother. His father had him inducted into the local Masonic Lodge but young Jackson quickly broke from it and in fact denounced Mason-ism. Oddly enough, his father came to agree. All of which brings us to the end of the first part of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad.

Now here is a very odd thing whenever I read an autobiography. I always find that the first part – the childhood and adolescent part – is more vivid and engaging that the second part – the adult part. Could it be that childhood and adolescence are remembered better than adulthood? Are memories branded in our minds when we are seeing things for the first time? And to revert to Wordsworth, “the child is father of the man” – that what happens in childhood is likely to form what we become as adults. I am not here suggesting that the rest of Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad is less interesting than the first part, but I found Michael Jackson’s account of his childhood something I could identify with – and he has great skill in describing his youth, though he does sometimes interpose at length psychological theories he cherishes.

Which brings us to the Part Two, called “The Startling Unexpectedness of New Beginnings ”.

 

After childhood, in adolescence Jackson was sent to a dull secondary school. He gained some relief in visits to his sister in Wellington and the bohemian crowd she dwelt with. Starting in a new way after some time at university, he travelled for five years. He went to India experiencing a new culture and in London he helped homeless people. He also volunteered for work in the Congo. As a welfare worker in Australia, he was disgusted by the way Aboringinals were being forces into assimilation. What really gave him a new perspective, however, was when he met Petra Hawarden, who became his wife. He says “Just as every beginning is foreshadowed by false starts and tantalising glimpses, so too is love. In my attachment to my mother, or the two teachers at my primary school, or my infatuation with the high school French teacher, or the several short-lived affairs in my early twenties, I can retrospectively trace the lineaments of the love that finally flowered in my relationship with Petra Hawarden. Falling in love is like being born again. Instantly the past is eclipsed by the present, and even the future is not given a second thought. But just as every traveller on the threshold of a new departure may get cold feet, even so romantic love is accompanied by doubt, hesitancy, and a sense of loss.” (pg.122)

There followed when Jackson and his wife Petra lived in various parts of New Zealand. He gives a very affectionate account of husband and wife spending time with Sam Hunt, sometimes sharing Hunt’s shack…. But some years later, he says, Sam Hunt had coarsened as he gained fame:  “I was … dismayed that Sam’s acclaim seemed to encourage in him a vulgar popularism that consisted of trashing married couples and academics…” (pg. 143)

Jackson and his pregnant wife Petra went to Sierra Leone where he blossomed as an anthropologist. Petra had a very hard and painful birth, but their daughter Heidi was born safely. Jackson studied initiation rites. This included clitoridectomy. Jackson sees this as essential to the tribal people in preparing for hardship and becoming stoic. He writes:  “By construing clitoridectomy as ‘genital mutilation’ we lose sight of the transfigurative power of the rite of passage in which girls are prepared for the hardships of childbearing, child-ready, and marriage.”  (pg. 156) Doubtless this was how the tribes saw it, but not everyone will agree. Frankly, I am glad that Jackson notes widely in Sierra Leone now the ritual is no longer practised.

Upon returning to New Zealand he took up a university role. Petra and Jackson sought  a rural house in Manawatu and settled there. He studied with Te Pakaka and made himself more aware of Maori cosmology and Maori beginning beliefs. But Petra was inflicted with cancer. Calming herself, she took to Zen as her health declined. Eventually she died. Like so many in this narrative, there are beginnings – one being Jackson’s turning to Yoga. He discusses how he deals with it and what different perceptions he had. In the longest chapter in the book, called “Epiphany”, he visited a self-sufficient family in a remote part of Coromandel. The visit changed his view of the world – simplicity and fellowship being most important. He returns to overseas research, going back to Sierra Leone which he sees as having declined since her was last there. The visit gives him the opportunity to talk about the slave trade that once sailed from Sierra Leone, with side comments on how former imperial nations still benefit from what was plundered. Later he spends time helping refugees in New Zealand. He marries again to a woman called Emma – yet another beginning in his life… and where his final chapters he has a sense that life is an eternal cycle, and that our true home is the people we love.

For anyone who reads Beginnings in Aotearoa and Abroad will be outraged that I have simplified what Michael Jackson has written. I have given the outward chronicle of his life, with only passing comments on his ideas and theories about the nature of human thought. Often his detailed comments require close scrutiny and can be thorny to read. These things are to be respected… but it is the chronicle that is most readable.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “AUE” by Becky Manawatu. First published in 2019 by Makaro Press

            I am writing this review in 2024. Becky Manawatu’s novel Aue was published in 2019. It rapidly became a bestseller. It won many awards. It is regarded by some as a modern New Zealand classic and it has been reprinted a number of times. So how did I not get around to reading and reviewing this important novel when it was new? Simple. A case of my own stupidity. I requested a copy of Aue from the publishers, and they generously sent one. But by then the novel had been around for months, a horde of reviewers had already had their say, and I thought I was way behind the beat. So I set it aside and I didn’t get around to reading it until recently when I heard the rumour [now confirmed] that Becky Manawatu had written a sequel to Aue. So here I am. Late.

            A couple of obvious things to note. First, Aue is largely a Maori story written by a Maori. I am Pakeha and am therefore not fully attuned to many Maori attitudes and ideas - not that this makes for difficult reading. Second, that title Aue. It is often translated as howling, weeping, crying etc. In this case I see the better translation of Aue would be something like “lament” or even “alas”, because the novel is filled with many lamentations and sorrows for families being broken up, degeneration of some men with violence and drugs, some racism and deaths that should not have happened. Unlike the majority of Maori novels, which tend to be set in the North Island, Aue is set in a small South Island area in Kaikoura. 

 

Becky Manawatu divides her [longish] novel into two halves, the first called “Bird” and the second called “Song” – in the latter of which we are introduced to a voice [or voices?] presented in italics and speaking in a sort of mystic or prophetic way. The many chapters of the novel focus on three sets of people – the young boy Arama, his older brother Taukiri, and Jade [sometimes accompanied by Toko]. I’ll simplify the narrative by dealing with each group in turn.

8-year-old Arama is an orphan. Both his parents are dead. His elder brother Taukiri has left him with foster-parents, and then gone away. Young Arama spends much time hoping his brother will come back and trying hard to contact him without success. He is looked after reasonably well and is more-or-less home schooled. Aunty Kat [only very late in the novel we get her full name Kataraina] cares for him. But Uncle Stu – sometimes called a “redneck” so probably Pakeha – is often angry and a bully. Arama makes friends with the country girl Beth, who is the same age as Arama. Beth is in some ways more mature than Arama [fair enough – it is well known that girls mature earlier than boys], but she also introduces him to violent movies like Django Unchained and shows him some of the nastier elements of wild nature. However, most of what they do together is rambling around the rural area with the dog Lupo, or pranks and naughtiness – such as a very mean trick played on their teacher when that have to go to school at last. The best influence on Arama is Tom Aiken, who guides the kids into a more fruitful way of living. All the chapters involving Arama are written in the first person, told by Arama himself, so we get a child’s-eye- view. Becky Manawatu is very skilled in allowing us to see how Arama understands the world, naïve but questioning, often trying to understand what adults really mean and only partly understanding the relationships of adults.

Meanwhile older-brother Taukiri – who also tells his story in the first person - is determined not to come back to his little brother. He leads at first what amounts to a n’er-do-well life, wandering, not settling down. He lives in a car. He values his guitar and tries to make a living as a busker, even if he sometimes almost wrecks the guitar. For a while he has a factory job. Then he falls in with Elliot who knows a lot about illicit drugs. Taukiri doesn’t exactly get hooked, but he lives on the fringes of the drug community. He tries to seduce a number of young women and finally loses his virginity. For a while he busks on Cuba Street (in Wellington) and sometimes jams in a dive where he hears much about gangs and he learns how his father died. He has vague memories of how his (and Arama’s) mother was abducted and killed. Briefly he gets in touch with his kid brother. Tears. A drug-peddler offers to pay him well if he takes a consignment of drugs to a specific place at a specific time. Taukiri misses the target and becomes a marked man. He finally, as punishment, has to face up with an angry befuddled meth-taking gangster called Coon, a king pin of the gang, who is prepared to kill Taukiri

 

Then there are Jade and Toko – and here Becky Manawatu changes the tone considerably. The “Jade and Toko” sections are not only written in the third person, but they are anterior to the stories of Arama and Taukiri. In fact the narrative leaps back twenty-plus years earlier. Jade has experienced rape. She has slept with more than one man. Her parents used drugs. In fact her father Head had led a gang. Jade’s cousin Sav was pregnant but was embedded in the gang led by Coon. “Sav made herself a dodgy appointment when the boys had the run. A big boys’ mission. They were bringing in new shit – even newer to them than meth – and this shit was hard to get. Coon was breaking ground. An entrepreneur. Unlike Head, so stuck in his ways. Jade had encouraged it. ‘You’re gonna be a king.’ But she knew the gang – the game of gang – was already destroying itself. Smack would save them a drawn-out version of the inevitable. Coon would get him and his dumb entourage hooked and bring then down. Meth spurred on their violent tendencies. Heroin. Jade hoped, might just fuck them up, make them broke, maybe even make them dead. Jade saw an end. She and Sav just needed to ride it out.” (Pg 90  - page number quoted from the original publication). Jade wanted to save her cousin Sav by getting her out of the gang. But when Coon finds out that Sav is pregnant, sheer horror follows. Coon, buzzing with drugs, kicks and beats Sav, injects meth into her body and ultimately kills both Sav and the child in her womb. Jade breaks from Coon and his gang… and falls in love with Toko, a gentle man who plays his guitar and fishes. Toko sells his father’s house, buys a fishing boat, becomes a professional fisherman and brings Jade with him. Jade is totally entranced by this virile but gentle man. Her devotion is seen in one sequence after he’s been fishing “And he grabbed her and pulled her to his overalls, and she could smell the fish guts and blood on them, and could feel the dampness – the sweat from his days hard work – through her T-shirt. He smelled so earthy, so dirty, so masculine and good.” (Pg. 170) Their life is idyllic. They have a child. … at which point I halt this synopsis. You already know that both Jade and Toko die – you will discover that they both die by violence.  It is in the “Song” half of the novel that we hear the posthumous voice of Jade speaking to the future.

I confess that while I diligently read Aue, I sometimes found it hard to understand who was related to whom – there are so many people in the novel I left unmentioned. I have also skipped some major sub-plots. One concerns Aunty Kat, who is tired of being abused by Uncle Stu and who runs away from him when he has beaten her once too often and blacked her eye.

What are the main ideas of this novel? Certainly domestic and gang abusiveness are highlighted, Maori (in the gangs) and Pakeha (in the form of redneck Stu). When Aunty Kat runs away from Stu, she is asserting her right not to be abused and understanding that she can do much better on her own. A clearly feminist decision. Also highlighted is the necessity for good family ties – whanau –  which finally bring Taukiri and Arama  together again. Then there is the need for the positive upbringing of children.  Tom Aiken is the character who most mentors Arama, teaching him traditional skills such as trapping and killing eels. Tradition also means honouring one’s forebears. The moment Taukiri has to face up to angry, befuddled, meth-taking gangster Coon, we expect Coon to kill Taukiri. Instead, Coon talks at length, admitting that his life has been pure waste. Then he shoots himself. Moral? Taking hard drugs is a road to nowhere. A form of nihilism. These are hard but true morals.

I could add a few quibbles. Surely some readers of the novel other than I would see the improbability of a young kid (Beth) taking on angry Uncle Stu in a stand-off near the end of the novel, when Stu is recklessly waving firearms around. Maybe too, I could suggest that the reconciliation of some characters towards the end of the tale is a touch too easy. But those are only quibbles. Five years later, Aue still stands up very well. 

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE: When I reviewed Aue, I noted that sometimes I became confused with the relationships of some characters.  Who was related to whom? Among other things, I thought that Taukiti and the boy Arama were both the children of Toko and Jade. In fact Toko and Jade were the parents of Taukiri, but young Arama was the son of  Toko and another woman, Aroha. Pakeha would call them half-brothers. I aplogise for my mistake, and hope I didn't make many more.

 

 

 

 

 

Something Thoughful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                                    MAGGIE SMITH, GONE ALAS

            Maggie Smith died a few weeks ago, aged 89. Many obituaries were duly written, most of them covering briefly her seven decades of work in stage, film and television. It’s regrettable that most younger people connect her only with her journeyman work in the children’s Harry Potter series or the period soap-opera Downton Abbey. These were the least important of her work, performed when she was old and basically playing undemanding, stereotypical characters – but she was a professional and she trooped on.

I remember her for much better things in her earlier work. The brisk, and ultimately deluded, Scottish school-teacher in the 1960s film version of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was one of Maggie Smith’s highlights. It was a very rare occasion when Hollywood for a change got it right and gave her an Academy Award for her performance. Then, years later, when she really was well on her way to old age, there was her eccentric old lady in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing her live performance of the play in London. She was equally good in the 2015 film version of The Lady in the Van even if the film coarsened some of the original scenario.

I could quote many more of her best work, but there is one I remember for all the wrong reasons. Way back in 1965, aged fourteen I saw the film of the English National Theatre Company’s Othello. The film was really the record of a stage play. Laurence Olivier both directed and played Othello. [He played in blackface – probably the last widely-seen blackface Othello, given that blackface performances are now regarded as racist.] Am I allowed to say that I thought Olivier’s performance was over the top, verging on the ham? Desdemona, however, was played by a young and, dare I say, a buxom and very attractive Maggie Smith. I found her very convincing. But – alas – my young self was distracted near the end of the play. Othello had just strangulated and killed Desdemona and was delivering his last solemn words. But in the background I could see Maggie’s bosom still heaving up and down. This was very intriguing for a male teenager and surpassed whatever solemnity I was supposed to be attending. How foolish our young perceptions can be – but it stuck in my mind.

            Okay – I won’t give you any more nostalgia but I will express one gripe. I’ve noticed on You Tube and other platforms there is a game called something like “See Them Now” or some such, in which we are supposed to be appalled by how old film stars and celebrities have aged and no longer look as glamourous as they once did… as if we don’t all age and get wrinkles. There’s nothing wrong with getting old, so I am happy to give you images of happy Maggie Smith young and happy Maggie Smith old.  

 

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“TO THE CITY” by Alexander Christie-Miller (William Collins publishers, $NZ 39:99)

 

            Alexander Christie-Miller is an English journalist who, for seven years, lived in Istanbul and was the Turkey correspondent for The Times of London. He also wrote for Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Atlantic and other publications. He gave very detailed accounts of both the politics and the daily lives of the people of Istanbul. A relatively young man, he married a Turkish woman, but eventually they had to leave the country because politics drove them out. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government was becoming more and more authoritarian. Dissent was being punished. Erdogan and his increasingly Islamist regime jailed, fined or deported journalists who said negative things about the situation.

            To the City deals mainly with three things – the present state of Istanbul and its inhabitants; the current politics of Turkey; and the history of Turkey, especially Istanbul’s history. To the City is subtitled Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul. In his Prologue, Christie-Miller says  “This is a book about the old Byzantine land walls of Istanbul and the people who have lived around them, their history, and their endurance through an era of relentless change”.  He has an interesting and engaging way of presenting his case. He does not deal with one issue a time, but takes us around the ancient gates that encircle the old part of Istanbul. At each gate he talks with locals, then discusses politics, then enlightens us about Turkey’s history. So we go through The Tanners Gate, The Buried Gate, The Gate of the Saints, The Cannon Gate, The Gate of the Riven Tower…. and so forth up to The Rebuilt Gate, The Crooked Gate, The Gate of the Plagues and The Marble Tower which overlooks the Sea of Marmara, all fifteen of them.

            Rather than following Christie-Miller’s itinerary literally, I’ll simplify by breaking up his narrative, dealing one at a time with his three preoccupations.

First, the present state of Istanbul, which now has about 20,000,000 inhabitants. At The Tanners Gate, he notes that dogs [and to a lesser extent cats] run free in the streets near the walls, as they have always been looked after. Admiring this tradition, Christie-Miller joined in and for a couple of years volunteered at a dog shelter. There is still a sense of neighbourhood in the older quarters embracing many ethnicities, but it is rapidly being destroyed now. He speaks, at the Gate of Saints, with a man called Ismet who has been able to regain his house when developers flooded in, demolished houses and built luxury hotels beyond the reach of the poorer locals. Nevertheless there are still many tea-houses for the less well-off. Since it has been grown on a large scale in Turkey, tea has become Turkey’s most-consumed drink, overtaking coffee. Meanwhile, at other gates, we learn that when it comes to municipal plans, Kurds, Roma and members of the Alevi religion [a religion of its own, but with some Muslim tropes] are often moved on to other locations, thus once again breaking up long established neighbourhood and ensuring Muslim dominance. At The Gate of the Dervish Lodge, Christie-Miller hears parallel narratives of a young woman who maintained her religion, but was also addicted to heroin. Istanbul is now one of the major stops for drug-dealers bringing heroin from Asia to Europe and there is widespread addiction in the city. As at The Gate of Saints, the local communities at The Gate of the Dervish Lodge are now threatened with houses being demolished and increasingly, parents are forced to send their children to Islamic schools. At The Gate of the Spring, Christie-Miller talks with a Kurd who worked at the city’s major airport and discovered how callous the staff are in dealing with their workers. It is noted that to re-build Istanbul’s airport, much of the land taken destroyed square miles of forests and wild animals. The airport was opened in 2018. It did prosper, earned much money, and became a major hub between Asia and Europe… but many workers [probably in the hundreds] were killed in the construction. Then, at the Rebuilt Gate, we learn of another problem plaguing modern Istanbul. Obviously the city wants the ancient walls and fortresses to attract tourists and so some are “restored”. But the “restoration” often means cheap material, producing walls nothing like their original form, almost becoming Disneyfied.

All this might lead some readers to assume that Christie-Miller is reporting only negative things. After all, doesn’t every city in the world rebuild and demolish? But in many cases the re-builders of Istanbul are focused on destroying communities, driving out people of different ethnicities and ensuring that only expensive apartments become available. As for  Christie-Miller, he reports many happy things – the resilience of those who refused to be moved; the good spirits of so many people he had talked with or interviewed; the sense of solidarity, even if it was being attacked… and the tea houses. Poorer people are not tyrants and good for them.

Next, the ancient history of Istanbul – and note it is mainly ancient. At the Buried Gate, Christie-Miller comments on remains of the huge cannon that was ordered by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, who ultimately smashed his way into old Constantinople at the beginning of the 15^th century AD. At this point Christie-Miller gives a brief outline of the origins of the city and how it fared over the centuries. First there was a small port which was part of the Roman Empire. Then the Roman Emperor Constantine made it his capitol and it was given his name. Then the Roman Empire split into two, with one capitol in Rome and one in Constantinople. Then the “barbarians” gradually overtook Western Europe and the Western Roman Empire basically disappeared. Rome no longer had an emperor although the Catholic faith endured and spread. But Constantinople still regarded itself as the Roman Empire, though we now call it the Byzantine Empire. A major split of Christian faith came in the early 11^th century when pope and patriarch had different interpretations of the faith, and Constantinople no longer regarded the pope as their leader. Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic were now separate. Christie-Miller makes it clear that for a number of centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a major force, governing vast lands. But at the Golden Gate, Christie-Miller gives a very detailed account of the decline and fall of Constantinople and its empire. Gradually the Byzantines lost their territories as Arab Muslims from the south and Turks and Seljuks [who had converted to Islam] from the east pushed further and further into the Byzantine Empire until there was little more of it left than Constantinople itself. Constantinople had been overrun before (when marauding Crusaders ran riot through the city) and the Turks had twice failed to take the city as it was protected by its great walls and towers. But finally, in 1453, Mehmet II and his cannons broke in, massive slaughter followed, and old Constantinople was no more. In the West, the city was still called Constantinople until the 20^th century, when the city became universally know as Istanbul. At the Prophesied Gate, Christie-Miller gives a very detailed account of the tactics that were used by each side when the city was taken. And of course the Christian churches were converted into mosques, including the great Hagia Sophia which is now surrounded by Muslim minarets, and with its Christian icons and images now removed.

And so to what I think is Christie-Miller’s most important preoccupation -  the current politics of Turkey. In the early 20^th century, Turkey had lost much of its power, and was “the sick man of Europe”. In the First World War, Ottoman Turkey lost its hold on Arabia and the Middle East. Turkey’s rulers also understood that it had many Turkish citizens who were not ethnically Turks, some of whom [especially the Kurds] wanted to break away from Turkey. But, in the middle of the First World War, it was the Armenians who were targeted as “the enemy within”. Up to 1,500,000 Armenians were killed by the Turks in what is now understood to be a genocide. To this very day, Turks claim that this never happened – Erdogan insists that it never happened and journalists are forbidden to say otherwise. The era of the Ottomans was over in 1923 where a revolution, headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, turned Turkey into a republic. Ataturk insisted that the new state would be secular – that is, there would be no established religion, even if most of the country was Muslim. Among other things, the Hagia Sophia became a museum, no longer used as a mosque. Ataturk was, however, domineering in many ways. Indeed it was he who began the process of moving people away from long-established neighbourhoods in Istanbul, although not on the same scale as has happened in more recent times… and he had firm views on the minor ethnicities within Turkey. He died in 1938.

Turkey was neutral in the Second World War, but from the 1950s on, there were many tensions with regard to the minor ethnicities. At the Gate of the Spring, Christie-Miller talks to a Greek journalist who recalls the great pogrom in the 1950s, where thousands of Greeks were driven out of the country. In the Cold War, Turkey sided with the West, joining NATO and for some years allowing American nuclear missiles to be based in Turkey (they were removed in a deal when Khrushchev said he would remove his missiles from Cuba if the USA would remove theirs from Turkey). But there was much unrest in Turkey. There were clashes and riots between leftists and ultranationalists. Paramilitary forces were formed, assassinations brought down members of parliament, there was violence on a large scale. In 1980 there was a military coup d’etat and a period of huge repression – newspapers shut down, protests forbidden, radio and TV censored.

The most worrying problem remained the status of the minor ethnicities. The Kurds made up one fifth of the population, and wanted to create their own country. Some Kurdish activists modelled themselves on the Communists and formed their own party, the PKK. The violence of the PKK matched the violence of the Turkish army. Many people died. Christie-Miller’s narrative is seeded with stories he was told of the PKK’s threats. At the Cannon Gate, a young man who had been a primary school teacher told him that he had been driven out of his town by the threats of Kurdish activists.

 

Erdogan had been mayor of Istanbul before he became president. Turkey is on a tectonic plate, especially felt in Anatolia. There was a major earthquake in 1999, but the government was unable to help those who had suffered or lost their homes. Erdogan was severely criticised for his poor handling the situation, and there were once again major riots and protests. At first, the West endorsed Erdogan’s regime. He was the head of a secular state; he had adopted the neo-liberal code of a free market, the U.S.A. saw him as somebody who would be able to master a moderate form of Islam different from the more fanaticism of Islamism. Christie-Miller speaks with a man from Anatolia who saw his mother die painfully because there were limited hospitals to help in his region. He was delighted when Erdogan’s AS Party took power with its neo-liberalism and its promises of an improved health system. But his delight faded away as the Erdogan regime gradually moved in a different direction. In 2016, there was a failed coup against Erdogan. It was easily quelled and there were torture and death for those who had taken part. It had been inspired by the rival authoritarian Gulen Movement, which looked to a more enforced type of Islam. Bit by bit, Erdogan adopted a similar agenda. He encouraged Islamic schools which preached against secularism. Parents were encouraged to send their children to such schools, including the Alevi people who were not really Muslim. In 2020, now turning away from the secular state upon which the Turkish republic had been formed, Erdogan made the Hagia Sophia once again a mosque.

At the Gate of Plagues, Christie-Miller interviews many people who have suffered under the new authoritarian regime. Their complaints are many. During the months when Covid struck, young Islamist men were ostensibly made an auxiliary of the police, ensuring that Covid didn’t spread and people stayed inside. In fact they became bullies, beating up secular or non-Muslim people as they pleased. More people were pushed out of their locality and forced into inadequate small apartments. The huge drug-trade (especially heroin) could be seen on every corner. Nepotism determined who could or could not find places in the universities… and once again, when another major earthquake struck in 2023, Erdogan offered only very limited relief. Fittingly, the final chapter considers the foul pollution of the Sea of Marmara, which used to be teeming with edible fish but which now is a health hazard.

In his conclusion, Christie-Miller reverts to his account of the taking of the city of Constantinople by the Turks, but suggesting that modern Istanbul will one day collapse as old Constantinople did. The cycle of history does not allow great cities to last for ever. Turkey, in its many contradictions, on-going strife with large minority peoples, and severe authoritarianism, is increasingly unstable.

Is Christie-Miller a pessimist? Is he belittling Turkey and the Turks? Far from it. He knows the Turks intimately, has lived with many Turkish friends and has enjoyed their discussions and pastimes. He never belittles the way people live. But the current state of Turkish politics is ominous and the rolling-back of the secular state to favour Islamism is daunting.

A couple of footnotes:  First, when I taught in high-school, I sometimes guided a team to take part in the mock United Nations in which teenagers were assigned countries and debated as if they were diplomats. One year, the team I trained was assigned Turkey, so my team pronounced all the good things about Turkey… and that year, a nice Turkish woman from the Turkish consulate came to listen. I had a nice chat with her when the kids weren’t debating, but when I [foolishly] mentioned the Armenian genocide, she bristled and insisted that it had never happened. Some years later, a young Turkish man visited the school where I taught, and in the common room he began to argue [not with me] that the Armenian genocide had never happened. I prudently kept my mouth shut. The fact is, in Turkey now it is forbidden to face up to this atrocity, even though it happened over a century ago.

Second, when Erdogan in 2020 made the Hagia Sophia once again a mosque, he was basically doing what Putin has done. Here is Putin, atheist, former KGB man, who suddenly cuddles up to the Russian Orthodox Church, ostentatiously letting himself be seen at religious ceremonies, making the church a means of rebuilding the old Russian Empire. So too, Erdogan turns his back on the secular state because he sees that Islamism will help boost him. So on comes his ostentatious worship at the Hagia Sophia. And don’t get me started on Mr Modi in India who wants a Hindu-only country. How similar tyrants are.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“MEMED , MY HAWK” by Yashar Kemal [birth name Kemak Sadik Gokcell].  First published in Turkish in 1955 as Ince Memed ; translated into English by Edouard Roditi and published in 1961 as Memed, My Hawk

            Readers of this blog will be aware that my “Something Old’s” are often books that I take off my shelves and read because I have a very large library and too many books that I haven’t got around to reading. Some book-spines look at me reproachfully, asking me when I am going to read them. Case in point – Yashar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk has been looking at me sternly for decades. So recently I finally took off the shelf my paperback copy of Memed, My Hawk and read – with great pleasure as it happened, because it moves at a galloping pace. Also, of course, it was related to Turkey, and I had just finished reading Alexander Christie-Miller's account of modern Turkey To the City.

            I’ll reverse my standard habit of first giving you a detailed synopsis, and will instead deal first with the novel’s author. Yashar Kemal (1923-2015) was born in Anatolia, the central part of Turkey near the Taurus mountains. Unlike most Anatolians in the village where he grew up, his family were partly Kurdish by ancestry. As a result, in later life Kemal championed the idea that the Kurdish province should become an autonomous state. The Turkish government were angered by this and he was often threatened with jail or having his books supressed. His first two novels were confiscated and destroyed. For a couple of years he took refuge in Sweden. Some of Kemal’s grandparents had taken to banditry in the early part of the twentieth century, and bandits often became folk-heroes, lauded by the peasants for fighting against the oppressive landlords who ruled them. Yashar Kemal was very left-wing. For many years he was a member of the semi-legal Turkish Communist Party, but he resigned from the party in 1968 when the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia. He remained a fervent socialist. In all, he wrote 17 novels, many of them based on rural and folklore themes. But it was only Memed, My Hawk that gained international fame. On the basis of Memed, My Hawk, Kemal was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was passed over. Nevertheless, he received many international awards. Despite his criticisms of the Turkish government, when he died he was given what amounted to a state funeral and was officially praised as one of Turkey’s greatest writers. After reading his best-known novel Memed, My Hawk, I was surprised to discover the Kemal wrote three more novels about the bandit Memed, but they seem to have not gained the traction of the first Memed novel.

            So to the inevitable synopsis. Memed, My Hawk is set in the 1920s and 1930s, when Yashar Kemal would have been a little boy. Despite the fact that the Sultan and Ottomans had been overthrown in 1922 and Turkey was now a republic, the conditions for the peasants were still basically feudal. They were serfs. Landlords controlled vast swathes of land and had the right to tax and punish their serfs. The official police always sided with the landlords. In this context, bandits were the only force that could outfox the landlords and sometimes relieve the peasants – not that all bandits, hiding in the mountains, were so charitable. Some were just out for plunder.

The novel opens with Memed, a very young boy, running away from his master, the landlord Abdi Agha who controls five villages. Abdi Agha has regularly beaten the boy and forced him to do heavy work. The boy first appears to us covered in blood from the slashing thistles he has had to run through in his escape. Thistles become a motif in this novel, representing the barriers to progress. Memed is taken in by a sympathetic family and for a while recuperates and is able to work less strenuously as a goatherd. But Abdi Agha catches up with him, forces him back to day-long work in the fields, and punishes him by allowing him and his mother to have only starvation rations…. but some villagers surreptitiously feed them. There is at least some solidarity in the crowd.

Reaching adolescence, Memed falls in love with the girl Hatche and the feeling is mutual. The trouble is, Hatche is betrothed to Abdi Agha’s nephew. So Memed and Hatche decide to elope and run away to the mountains. But they are chased through the forest by Abdi Agha’s gang, including his angry nephew. Memed has firearms. He shoots and kills the nephew and just misses Abdi Agha, grazing him. But the landlord is able to capture Hatche and has her dragged back to the village where, by the perjury of some of the village, she is accused of having attempted to kill Abdi Agha and she is thrown into jail. Meanwhile Memed, who is still deeply in love with her, is now 18 years old.

Memed decides to join a bandit group in the mountains -  the gang of “Mad” Durdu, noted for his ruthlessness but also sometimes provisioning desperate peasants. At first Memed admires him, and joins him in a long [and detailed] battle with the pursuing police. Durdu seems invulnerable, managing to escape from any ambush. But Memed is disgusted when Durdu accepts food and hospitality from a nomadic tribe… and then proceeds to rob them at rifle-point of all their money, their clothes and their bedding. This is not a bandit who cares for the poor.

Memed  leaves Durdu’s band, joins up with two comrades, Jabbar and Sergeant Rejep, and now tries to act in the interests of the peasants… which means he will not hold up poor travellers who are in need,  but he will at last catch up with Abdi Agha and he will free Hatche. He makes a raid on Abdi Agha and believes he has killed Abdi Agha in a fire he has set… but he hasn’t. Abdi Agha goes for help to a far more powerful landlord than he, Ali Safa Bey, and now Memed is chased through the forest and mountains by police, Ali Safa Bey’s forces and the fickle. There are many skirmishes. He becomes legendary for his ability to escape capture. At one point, Memed is able to slip into his village of origin and advise the peasants that they should take over all the fields and burn down the thistle bushes that are hindering their agriculture. He is able at last to spring both Hatche and her mother from jail and finds an apparently impregnable hide-out in the highest mountains. When finally he is trapped, and after Hatche’s tragic death, Memed is able to talk his way out of it and make his case. Then he once again slips away and ends up as a legend.

Now stop being appalled, please. I know from my brief and inadequate synopsis, in which I have ignored many characters in the novel,  you may be thinking that this is merely an action story, more-or-less a Turkish cowboy tale. Not a bit of it. First, please note that Memed is a character who grows and develops. Yashar Kemal carefully presents him in a calculated sequence. First, the intimidated child. Then the adolescent who falls in love. Then the young man who can take on the responsibility of eloping. Then the fighter who becomes a bandit for the sake of being a bandit. Then developing a conscience and realising that the violence he uses has to have a purpose – benefitting other people, especially the down-trodden. Seen in this perspective, the novel has been interpreted as a Bildungsroman. At the same time, of course, Yashar Kemal is telling a socialist story. If the peasantry are not able to free themselves from servitude, then they have to be guided by some strong and charismatic person who can do extraordinary things – like Memed telling them to burn the thistle bushes and take over the land. The dominance of a charismatic leader has often led to misery in real history, but at least it takes a specific person to spark off a revolution. Note that in Memed, My Hawk we are often shown peasants who are fickle in their allegiance – sometimes admiring Memed and sometimes changing heart when the landlords persuade them. They need real guidance. This at least is Yashar Kemal’s collectivist idea.

At the same time, in writing about serfs and peasants Yashar Kemal deliberately uses a style, half epic and half folklore. The skirmishes and fights are presented as heroic, like Homer, like theThousand and One Nights, wherein Memed is sometimes able to shoot apparently endless ammunition, toss hand-grenades with ease. and when surrounded he can still escape. When he and Hatche and Hatche’s mother take refuge in a convenient cave on a snowy mountain, which has mats to sit on and a baby to nurse, we are in the land of fable. Yet, in the passages set in the villages, we have downright peasant dialogue, reminding me of such peasant novels as Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine or Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and many others. Novels of earthy things and painful things, regardless of the nation.

Just a few things to round off my chatter. First,  the novel’s title is not explained until very late in the novel, when an old man called Osman says that Memed reminds him of his faithful hawk, which never stole from people. He begins to call Memed “Memed , my hawk”, the sign of a righteous man. Second, in 1987 Peter Ustinov – best known in his comic roles – directed and performed in a film version of Memed, My Hawk with an all-English cast. It bombed and has been widely panned. Third, this matter of the word “peasant”. It seems to upset some people who think it is an insult. Rightly speaking “peasant” simply means a person who works the land but does not own it. Once, on this blog, I mentioned that the Red Army in the Second World War was largely made up of peasants. A reader rebuked me for using such a degrading word. He seemed to be even more annoyed when I pointed out that the U.S.S.R. proudly claimed its society was made up of three classes: Peasants, Workers and Intellectuals.

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                      TURNING HISTORY UPSIDE-DOWN

            When you read a novel set in the past, you can nearly always be sure that history will somehow be distorted – to a smaller or greater extent. When you see a film set in the past, ditto. But it is very rare for a novel or film to turn history completely upside-down, that is, to present what exactly did not happen.

            Let me give two New Zealand examples.

Back in 2017, a novel called The March of the Foxgloves was published. It was written by Karyn Hay. Most of it was set in New Zealand in the year 1893. Its main character was a very hedonistic woman who revelled in parties and free sex and who spouted ideas which, frankly, sounded more like one version of feminism in the 2010s rather than a woman of 1893. This is one of the great traps of supposedly “historical” novels – too often writers put into the mouths of their characters concepts that are anachronistic. As the story went, the hedonistic, partying woman wanted liberation. A great petition was being circulated asking for women’s suffrage, but the hedonist could not sign it because she was not a New Zealand citizen. By chance her landlady was a crabby, puritanical church-going woman who hated alcohol, disapproved of wild partying and certainly did not approve of the new-fangled petition. So bravely the hedonist crept out and signed the petition in her landlady’s name… and women won the suffrage that year.

Which of course brings up the completely upside-down version of history. There might have been a [very] few pleasure-seeking women who signed the petition, but as I wrote when I reviewed this novel for Landfall-on-Line “the backbone of the New Zealand women’s suffrage movement was an organisation of church-going Protestant ladies called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The main impulse of the WCTU (including Kate Sheppard) was to give women the political power to oppose the demon drink and other such filthy male habits. In other words the likes of [the novel’s landlady] would have been the very people who signed the suffrage petition enthusiastically and helped the WCTU with its campaigning.” So the novel turns history upside-down.

More recently, I saw a film that encouraged another major fib. This was the film We Were Dangerous which I could criticise in many ways. It is supposedly set in 1954 on an off-shore New Zealand island dedicated to the rehabilitation of delinquent girls. I’ll skip over the film’s unreal, neatly brushed-up delinquent girls, who all look as if they come from polite middle-class homes and from a hairdresser. The film seems to be inspired by recent revelations about the abuse of children, adolescents and others in care in both state and faith-based institutions. The domineering woman in charge of this off-shore jail is apparently either a Catholic nun or a former nun – there is a brief flashback of her attacking another nun. Apparently the only lessons she teaches are religious and Biblical lessons. We do not see the girls having any other sorts of classroom instruction. All this is improbable.

But where it literally turns into the reverse of historical reality, we have a doctor coming to the prison and persuading the nun that she should understand the benefits of eugenics. For those of you who have forgotten, eugenics was the malign movement in the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, which sought to have only perfectly-formed people. Others should not be allowed to exist. The chronically ill, the deformed, the lame, the mentally impaired and the feeble-minded should be either sterilised or disposed of in some other way. This movement was not a small cult. It was mainstream – doctors and public figures went along with eugenics and thousands were (unwillingly) sterilised in European countries, the U.S.A. , Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Doctors knew what was right, didn’t they? It was only when Nazi Germany took eugenics a little step further – not only sterilising the feeble and ill, but also killing them -  that gradually eugenics lost its lustre.

So how is all this related to the film We Were Dangerous? The domineering nun goes along with the doctor in having a girl sterilised. To make it clear, there is a shot of the doctor coming out of the make-do surgery with blood on his apron, after the girl has been howling off screen. At which point I have to note that if there was one organisation that was fervently opposed to eugenics it was the Catholic church. Any bishop, priest, sister or nun would have regarded eugenics as sinful, and preached thus. Now it could be that in this film the domineering woman was not meant to be a real nun. After all, she doesn’t wear a nun’s habit. But all the iconography in her classroom is clearly Catholic – crucifixes, holy pictures etc. – which can only make viewers see her as a nun. Casting a nun as a champion of eugenics is as ridiculous as believing that hedonistic women won women’s suffrage.

Footnote: If you have the time, look up on-line the “Black Sheep” series. It includes an episode called “Eugenics: the story of a bad idea” which deals with how eugenics affected New Zealand. It shows how, right up to the 1950s, doctors still sterilised women who were regarded as delinquent or were feeble minded. Some women were sterilised on the premise that they were just being injected to stabilise their periods. Only at the end, the podcast briefly mentions that some people stood against eugenics – the nun Mother Aubert and some members of the young Labour Party who understood that sterilisation was often targeted at working-class women. BTW, this posting is not an apologia for the Catholic church. Like state and other and religious denominations, some Catholic institutions were guilty of  abuse in care.