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 four or more years ago.       

“AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK” by David Diop (First published in French in 2018 with the title “FRERE D’AME” [Soul Brother]. English translation by Anne Moschovakis published 2020); “THE LAST GIFT” by Abdulrazac Gurnah (first published 2011)

            Africa is a huge continent which now produces many writers who have reached international audiences. So I do often feel daunted by my ignorance of African literature. On this blog I have sometimes reviewed books about Africa written by Europeans. But only once have I reviewed on this blog a book by an African, namely Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, and that was written way back in 1958. So I decided to educate myself a bit by reading two more recent works by distinguished African novelists. One writes in French. The other writes in English.

            The Francophone first. David Diop was born in Paris of Senegalese parents and he grew up in Senegal. He is now a professor in a French university, specialising in two subjects: classical French literature and European representations of Africa. Frere d’Ame [Soul Brother] is the more relevant title for his novel, as it concerns, among other things, the strong bonding of two men and the complete disorientation of one when the other dies. Perhaps the Anglophone translator thought Soul Brother sounded too like an African-American phrase, so translator (or publisher) chose to re-name it At Night All Blood is Black, a passing phrase which does occur in the novel.

Some context. The story is set in the First World War, when the French army was hard pressed and France decided to recruit (or dragoon) as many soldiers as possible from France’s African colonies, including Senegal. On the front line, in the trenches, are Senegalese soldiers, suffering frequent bombardments but admired by the French top brass for their sheer ferocity in battle. These African soldiers carry both rifles and machetes when they charge or crawl across no-man’s-land, ready to hack German soldiers apart as often as they shoot them.

Frere d’Ame is narrated throughout by the Senegalese soldier Alfa Ndiaye. From the very first page we are aware that he is suffering long-term trauma. His best friend who came from the same village as he, Mademba Diop, has been mortally wounded by an exploding shell. His guts are hanging out, he is suffering a long, painful death and he repeatedly begs Alfa Ndiaye to shoot him quickly and put him out of his misery. But Alfa Ndiaye cannot bring himself to kill his frere d’ame and Mademba Diop dies in drawn-out agony. This is the trigger that sends Alfa Ndiaye spiralling down through guilt, then grandiose fantasy about himself and ultimately into complete, unhinged madness. In that sense the novel is about a man psychologically crushed and destroyed.

Alfa Ndiaye is already a killer. Now, in a sort of revenge on white people, he becomes even more savage. He not only kills and mutilates German soldiers, but he slices off their hands and takes them back to the French lines as trophies. At first he is admired for this, but gradually the African soldiers come to fear him as a sort sorcerer for the way he seems invulnerable and always comes back alive. And even the French officers who once praised him for his courage, and suggested he could win the Croix de Guerre, are becoming queasy about his methods. Alfa Ndiaye himself comes to believe he is a demi-god; a force of nature.

Alfa Ndiaye’s narration is deliberately repetitive. Again and again he comes back to the slow death of Mademba Diop, an obsession like an insistent drum being sounded. Hammered into us is the understanding that this is the event that changed him. Again and again he introduces events by saying “God’s truth”. Referring to the Germans facing them, he calls them “the enemy of the other side”, which may subtly suggest that he sees “enemies on this side” as well. Only one French soldier actually befriends him, Jean-Baptiste; but Jean-Baptiste goes crazy in battle and is killed, making Alfa Ndiaye even more unhinged. He becomes critical of the French officers who lead them, especially their Captain Armand.

He declares: “What I think is that people don’t want me to think. The unthinkable is what’s hidden in the captain’s words. The captain’s France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them. They need for us to be savage because the enemy is afraid of our machetes… The captain’s France needs our savagery, and because we are obedient, myself and the others, we play the savage. We slash the enemy’s flesh, we maim, we decapitate, we disembowel… the only difference between me [and other Senegalese soldiers] is that I became savage intentionally.” (Chapter 3) Later he describes the officer: “Captain Armand is a small man with matching black eyes drowning in continuous rage. His matching black eyes are full of hate for anything that isn’t war. For the captain life is war … The captain indulges war shamelessly. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers’ lives. The captain is a devourer of souls. I know, I understand that Captain Armand was a demm [demon] , who needed his wife, war, to survive…” (Chapter 13)

Obviously one major thrust of this novel is a critique of the misuse and corruption of Africans by their colonial masters. But, anti-colonial though Frere d’Ame may be, David Diop nowhere suggests that traditional Senegalese life was perfect. As Alfa Ndiaye succumbs to paranoia and madness, a sympathetic French psychiatrist, Dr. Francois, tries to heal him by getting him to draw pictures of home. This sends Alfa Ndiaye into thinking of the good things there, but also the bad – the woman he wanted to marry but who was denied him by tribal codes; the chieftain who was ready to sell out his followers by accepting the French idea of raising cash crops rather than the crops the community relied on; the regular raids by Moors looking for slaves. No people is devoid of sin and fault. As for Alfa Ndiaye, his final actions in this novel are unforgivable. Not just madness, but pure evil has clawed into him.

Interesting to note that in 2018 Frere d’Ame was the winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens – a junior branch of the Prix Goncourt judged by a panel of senior students in French high-schools. And in 2020, the English-language translation At Night All Blood is Black won the Booker International Award.

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A few years later, in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah won an even more prestigious award - the Nobel Prize for Literature.  There are some similarities shared by Abdulrazak Gurnah and David Diop. Not only were both African-born, but both eventually made careers in European universities. However, while David Diop is a French-speaking Senegalese, Abdulrazak Gurnah (whose first language was Swahili) is an English-speaking Tanzanian of Arab descent. He fled from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1968, when he was twenty and Zanzibar was going through a violent revolution. He first taught English and post-colonial literature at a university in Nigeria, and then moved to England where he became a professor at the University of Kent. Abdulrazak Gurnah, so Wikipedia tells me, is a prolific author, having written eleven novels, seven collections of short stories, and many essays of literary criticism. I chose to read one of his less-touted novels, The Last Gift (published 2011).

The Last Gift is set largely in England. Maryam and her much-older husband Abbas live quietly in Norwich. They have two adult children, son Jamal and daughter Hanna. Maryam knows nothing about her ancestry as she was literally a foundling who was passed through a number of unsatisfactory carers before she was adopted by the Mauritian woman Ferooz and her Indian husband Vijay. Maryam’s own ethnicity is unsure. As for Maryam’s husband Abbas, he has never spoken to either wife or children about his own specific origins, only vaguely saying that he came from East Africa. When Maryam first met him and fell in love with him, she knew him – according to his own definition of himself – as a wandering sailor who had seen much of the world. Hanna and Jamal are deprived of any sense of ancestry and forebears, and as they mature into young adulthood, they become more inquisitive. What is played out here is the loss of an essential part of identity. Who are we when we do not know who our people are? Yet at the same time, Hanna and Jamal are (almost) thoroughly British. They have never lived in any country but England, and another stream of ideas has to do with their assimilation.

The crisis which frames the novel comes when Abbas, even though he is only in his early 60s, has a “diabetic crisis”, causing a kind of stroke which makes him bedridden and barely capable of speaking. But in this state, his mind turns back to his early childhood and young manhood in Africa, which he has never disclosed to wife or children. And gradually we learn of the drastic circumstances that made him flee from his country of origin. Given that his backstory is unfolded bit-by-bit through the novel, I will not go into the details. But at the very least I can say that the novel has much to do with the many things that can force somebody to flee from home – refugees become refugees for many and various reasons. Bit-by-bit, too, we learn why Maryam ran away from her foster-parents, Ferooz and Vijay, when she was young; and why she chose never to contact them again.

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah is obviously aware of the pockets of racial prejudice that there are in England, but they are not a major theme in the novel. There’s an unpleasant episode where an Anglo shopkeeper clearly resents selling something to Jamal because of the colour of Jamal’s skin. There’s a very minor subplot about Jamal and his Italian girlfriend befriending and protecting a man of a minor ethnicity, who is being harassed by local teenage Anglo thugs. Most excruciating are the scenes in which Hanna visits the home of her English boyfriend Nick. Nick’s family are rural, Anglican (uncle the local vicar) and apparently welcoming Hannah courteously. But as Nick’s father – a former colonial official – gets further into table-talk, his tone becomes unbearably condescending to Hanna. However, while the faults of England are there to see, Abdulrazak Gurnah does not idealise the country from which Abbas came – ruled by tight codes, tribal, making it difficult for young people to get a good education. As in David Diop’s Frere d’Ame, it is made clear that no people is devoid of sin and fault.

More important to the novel are the ways the younger generation, Hanna and Jamal, are growing away from their parent’s culture. The fact is, both these younger people are working their way into the middle classes. At one point “Abbas nodded slowly and turned back to the muted television, which was showing a nature programme. He too had learned to retreat from Hanna, who had once been so dear to his life. She turned against him after she went to university, not with anger or rudeness, not at first, but with sullen and withdrawn resistance.” (pp.81-82). At another point, Maryam is surprised and a little shocked that Hanna’s boyfriend Nick is making dinner for her. Surely it is women’s work to prepare dinner? Incidentally, apparently as part of the assimilation process, Hanna decides to change her name to Anna.

In this novel, then, we have many ideas presented and discussed. And in a very humane way. The riddle of Abbas’s origins are worked out; and the ancestry of Maryam is more-or-less worked out. This is satisfying to the reader, but even more it confirms the importance of genealogy.

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.

                         

                                                     REPUBLIC ANYONE?

I am writing this brief think-piece on the weekend that a man of German lineage and of no outstanding skills has been crowned King of England. I have, a number of times on this blog, vented my opinions on British monarchy and its relevance to New Zealand (see, for example, the posting Goodbye Queenie ). I don’t wish once again to rake over in detail my objections – they are based mainly on the lunacy of having as our official head-of-state somebody who lives on the other side of the world and who has no hand in how our laws are framed here. In the UK itself there is a rising percentage of people who lean to republicanism, but for the moment the majority still favour a monarchy and they are welcome to it if that is what they want. As far as I can see, the main functions of royalty in Britain now are (a.) to attract tourists’ money by means of pageantry (Royal coronations and weddings, trooping the colours, changing of the guard etc.) (b) to provide gossip for the tabloids, social media, “women’s” magazines etc. and (c) to make anodyne speeches (written for them, of course) in times of stress, or in opening utilities, schools, hospitals etc. On the whole, monarchy in Britain is harmless, though there is the problem of royal privilege allowing members of “the Firm” to avoid the legal consequences of their actions (Prince Andrew is allowed to pay off a woman whom he had allegedly violated with 20,000,000 pounds taken from public taxation) and there is the reality of royalty still holding, rent free, huge estates for their personal profit.

But what about New Zealand? We still have a Governor-General who supposedly represents the British monarch, though for half-a-century now all Governors-General have been New Zealand-born. The G.-G. more-or-less does some of the things the British monarch and his tribe do in the UK. The G.-G signs off laws that have been passed by our unicameral parliament, but this is a mere formality – a G.-G. has never blocked a law from being passed (there would be a huge uproar if he or she did). The process is merely a matter of giving some formality to what has already been written as law. And the G.-G. does the soothing business of making speeches, opening buildings, and bestowing awards and medals on people who have been nominated by a committee.  

I am not ridiculing this function (somebody has to do it) but it would be easy to replace the G.-G. with a president on the Irish lines – that is, a president who does not have executive power to make or guide policy but who acts as head-of-state for formal ceremonies etc. (It is understood that policy is made by the parliamentary majority). This emphatically does NOT mean a president on American or some other republics’ lines – not somebody whose election is a very expensive and contested matter. More than once, I have heard royalists argue that having a monarch is cheap compared with having an elected president whose election is a very expensive and contested matter. But there are many varieties of republic. I am envisaging for New Zealand a republic in which a president is appointed by a bi-partisan panel [or multi-partisan panel, given that more than two parties are represented in our parliament] and who is clearly not an appointee who has previously been involved in politics. In other words a person as “neutral” on political matters as it is possible to be. Ideally, such an appointee would fulfil the role of president for a limited term and would have to have been endorsed by at least three-quarters of the appointing panel.

By the way, the British monarchy does NOT come cheap. It costs the public purse many millions each year in unpaid taxes and unearned revenue – not to mention over-long lists of members of the extended royal tribe who are paid handsomely by royal pensions, even if they undertake none of the duties that the monarch’s immediate family undertake. Even some royalists are pondering whether the monarchy should be “scaled down”.

The main problem blocking New Zealand’s becoming a republic is, of course, the Treaty of Waitangi and the widespread Maori concept of it – that is, its being seen as a direct contract between the British monarch and the Maori people. As you may have read in my review of Bain Attwood’s A Bloody Difficult Subject, the treaty is best regarded as a “necessary myth”, that is, something that was historically nothing like the way it is now interpreted but which is useful in helping settle and amend Maori grievances. What people mistakenly believe are the rights bestowed by the treaty are in fact rights bestowed by recent legislation made in New Zealand. Even so, this could be a stumbling block on the way to New Zealand’s becoming a republic.

 

Something New

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

 

“RESPIRATOR – A POET LAUREATE COLLECTION, 2019-2022” by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, $NZ35); “SAY I DO THIS – Poems 2018-2022” by C.K.Stead (Auckland University Press, $NZ35); “PAST LIVES” by Leah Dodd (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)

 

David Eggleton is a poet wide in his interests, fecund in his output, imaginative in his conceptions, skilled in both lyricism and satire and always ready to find use for canonical quotations which he alters or turns to his own use. His interests in the Pacific, the sea, animal life, the environment, colonialism and the ills of an industrial society are well known. Often his published poems are better read to an audience than read by a solitary reader. They are ripe for performance, joying in the complexity and sheer fun of sounds. The poems that make up Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, 2019-2022 were written (mainly) in the four years that Eggleton was New Zealand’s poet laureate – years that saw the pandemic (Covid 19 etc) and other woes.

A respirator is something that helps one to breathe. Why is this collection called Respirator? The answer is found in one section of Eggleton’s “Rahui: Lockdown Journal”. After dealing with the restrictions, denials and fears brought on by the pandemic, the final line is “A poem is a kind of respirator” – something that helps us breathe in difficult times. Poetry revives or energises us.

Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection, is divided into seven distinct sections. Pardon me if I walk through this collection section by section. It might seem a very pedestrian thing for a critic of poetry to do, but then the seven sections David Eggleton has devised each pick up a different strain, a different set of preoccupations, from the others. This handsome hardback has on its cover a coloured photograph of a decaying coal truck wheel in the bush [the image, with some variations, is repeated in the black-and-white headings of each section].

This icon is most relevant to the first of the seven sections, which is called CIRCLE, in which Eggleton is most concerned with the continuity of life, the circle of life. In the poem “Tomorrow”, anticipated events repeat themselves, like the eternel retour; or in the slow and repeated growth of trees in “Generations” as “the trees  / are our parents’ parents, diving down / a millennium underground, bent round /and curled in a birth dream, till the years / unfold roots that twist out of rock fissures, / and climb as seedlings, tender, growing…”. But this tale of nature’s creativity has a sour conclusion as the great miracle of nature meets today’s pollution. Many poems in this section are built on imagery of darkness; of things growing or dying in the dark; the untamed swell of an Otago beach (“Otago Eight Bells”) and in “Sawmill Empire”, not a lament but a resigned acknowledgement of the fact that noble trees become human houses, buildings, furniture  etc. Fittingly there are poems on the earthquake destruction of Christchurch, and on windswept valleys; leavened by the jocularity of “The Steepest Street in the World”, surely one poem ripe for public performance. Nature and what we do with it is the key to this section.

The next section RAHUI: LOCKDOWN JOURNAL is a twelve-part journal of having to stay in lockdown during the pandemic. The odour and smoke of bush fires in Oz drifts over us; then there are the first whispers of a virus originating in China. The government has to deal with it. “Jacinda arose with the down-home hippy vibe / of a primmers’s teacher, newly promoted to principal, / guiding toddlers on a bush walk during a storm, / which has suddenly grown very dark and bleak”. One is not quite sure how much Eggleton is satirising or endorsing Jacinda’s work, his tone often being jocular in addressing a difficult time. There are descriptions of deserted town centres once most people are confined indoors. … and lockdown is announced… “It’s closing time in the gardens of the West; / lamplights are burning out all over Europe; / and the virus is a riddle wrapped / in a mystery inside an enigma, / but we are assured that its code can be cracked”. (The metaphors are a bit strained here, but the poet has the fun of mixing together oft-quoted phrases, as he often does.) Easter and Anzac Day are more-or-less cancelled as people stay at home. “To venture forth for fresh air, like a witness, / is to see each person englobed in amber, on their own island, / or else in lockstep with a significant other, / or with well-exercised dogs; / and ten closer, half turned away, apprehensive, / to make a wide berth, give you the swerve like a fata morgana…” And it is in this context that Eggleton declares “A poem is a kind of respirator”

Despite being called PANDEMIC, the third section is only in part concerned with the literal pandemic. There is a poem about a rugby match, “Team Spirit,” where Eggleton enjoys playing with copious alliteration (“rains ravish ravines” etc.). The poem called “Pandemic” sees Covid as inciting a change in the country’s mood. It incites “Pandemonium. Pandemonium” and fear and anxiety when “We stay home, we stay quiet in our lanes, / lit by reflections of approaching flames. / Though clouds of uncertainty flocculate, / we know that a needle can inoculate.” “Autumn Almanac” is halfway to being rap – an almost surreal collage of events, personalities and fears; and similar is “The Tongue Trumpet”. A sequence called “A Poem for Waitangi Day” is largely satirical about the way the day is honoured, ending “… let the glacial attitudes of the Pakeha / melt like snow creatures, or ice crystals, / in the eerie green faery mist / of patupaiarehe, amid chants of atua; / then bring out the chart of Te Tiriti o Watangi, / document stained with blood and squid-ink. / A flying canoe ghostly in the sky paddles / over the whole fished up archipelago, / guided by Kupe, whose pointing finger / shines with shark oil as the stars rise.” This satire is followed by others -  on such things as robot-controlled artificial friendships on-line; and radio news with its bogus urgency. The pandemic triggers many uncertainties.

The next section is a thing unto itself, a bull-rush through a number of New Zealand’s literary sacred bulls. The title OLD SCHOOL TIES is deliberately a pun. This is not the old school ties of poncey schools; but the ties the poet has with old school (or at any rate older school) writers. The section begins with great affection, nostalgia and respect for Hone Tuwhare and his habits. But this is followed by a very rude (and very funny) poem “Dear Reader”, which is a blast at C.K.Stead who, for his fastidious way of criticising others and in effect belittling them, is designated as  “The drive-by, take-down guy, with silver hatchets / and bloody scalps stacked in the trophy cabinet”. “Sargeson Towers” is a panorama of Auckland’s North Shore bohemianism in the 1950s, with all the poets and scribblers of the time named, but with A.R.D.Fairburn taking over. In part a work of nostalgia, but perhaps with a mild undertone of mockery at these old school geezers and at the restrictions that were in place in the 1950s. “On First Looking Into James K Baxter’s Collected Letters” reads mainly as contempt for a mood that faded into inanity in the 1960s. The 1960s were Eggleton’s teenage years, so he gives his own loose and engaging memories of being a teenager in Auckland in the 1960s and its now-passe ideas in “Sounds of the Sixties”. “Seven Old Bastards of Auckland” begins like Baudelaire but becomes a right chastising of the old booze-and-chunder culture that was still around in the 1960s. And there are poems about teenage smoking, and war movies they saw as teenagers and memories of Auckland’s west-coast beaches. To conclude this section there is one of Eggleton’s “list” poems and one of his master works, “The Great New Zealand Novel”, a wonderful run through New Zealand novels and types of novels and pretentiousness in novels and yet coming to a positive conclusion about the value of New Zealand novels. Very heartening for avid readers.

A very different world is found in the fifth section THE DEATH OF KAPENE KUKE, where Eggleton moves into the Pacific and its culture. “The Death of Kapene Kuke” is an anti-colonial revisionist account of the death of Captain Cook, as  “Cook brought capitalism and Adam Smith’s saws, / rather than reciprocity and sharing of gifts, / and he was not the great white god Lono, / but one speared through and smoked till flesh seared off, / as the rain dogs ran with the grey rain gods.” When he moves into poems about Honolulu, Waikiki and other locations, the poet poised between lyricism and anger at their degradation. The most poignant poem in this mode is “Lifting the Island” where idealised views and daydreams of the island have been washed away; where “The beachcomber who once sailed the seven seas, / goes from bin to bin with freestyle hands, / grave as a mandarin in abstract thought. / Ripe stink of garbage …/ He wears nothing but faded and ripped shorts….. / The old gods are curios, remade in the bar / as the grinning wooden handles of beer taps.” There is a degree of ambiguity in Eggleton’s approach in some poems in this section. He is lyrical about the waves and mountains of the islands and the ways of life that once were. But he is uneasily aware that he himself is part of the tourist influx and therefore implicit in the degradation of culture he sees. He is angry about colonialism and yet is part of the process. This is he honesty of his presentation.

            Yet the next section, WHALE SONG is far more straightforward and lyrical in describing joyfully the many types of whale that swim and wander in the Pacific– a pure delight in their diversity. Take for one example “Orcas”, which begins “Hail to the Orca, carnivore, apex predator. / We are the killer whales from Antarctica. / We like it cold because then we go fast, / Under the icebergs, beneath polar winds. / Listen to the icepack grind; listen to gales moan. / Hail to the orca, carnivore, apex predator….” and continuing into their habits and lives. There are also poems about the traditional (pre-colonial) connections of whales with human beings as in the poem “Whale Road” where “The Whales are wayfinders for our vaka, / the whales are wayfinders for our life raft, / for our dinghy, for our yacht, for our ferry, for our peace ship, / for our trawler, for our migrant boat, for our cruise ship, / for our container ship, for our oil tanker, for our naval ship - / and underneath them all, the holy holy holy whale swims.” BUT, as the poem “Endangered Ocean Blues” makes clear, all the varieties of whale are now threatened with extinction. And the last whale-poem “Whale Psalm” sees the threatened whale as facing destruction in the same way that human beings are destroying themselves in wars and other human conflicts. The whale is the calm sanity that human beings require for their souls’ salvation. These whale poems are straightforward in their limpid language. Without suggesting they are only for children, I hope that some enterprising teachers introduce these whale poems to their pupils.

And so to the seventh and final section THE WALL, which is the most consistently  satirical in terms of social issues. “Deepwater Horizon” has a go at offshore oil-drilling. “The End of History” mocks Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism losing its hold, liberal democracy was the only way forward – but alas, as all historians know, history never ends, and Eggleton concludes his poem with “The blow-up globe was punctured and hissed / with escaping breath as another dream / began to count down to lift-off; / and then we were stuck in the 1990s, / with a long night coming on, / and very few left to sing revolution’s song.”  Do I question some of Eggleton’s prosody? Sometimes. Especially when he is being satirical, his exuberance runs away with him, and the point of a poem gets lost (see “The Wall” and especially Gorgon,  where his rhymes and word-play become the whole course of the poem.) On the other hand there are more focused poems like “My Phone” – an sort of incantation perhaps best read to an audience – which is a witty smack at those little electronic beasts we now all carry with us. And the surprising “Ode to Iggy Pop” does bash out some sort of dignity from the alternative musician, be he “Protested specimen in witness protection, / he’s a smorgasbord, a feast, torso all jelly, / tongue like a gherkin, eyes like pickled onion. / Going to see the man known as Iggy Pop, / in a world where corporates quarry rock, / guitars going for it and drummer’s mighty hammer, / Iggy revs that tongue to slobber and stammer. / He’s the passenger who will ride and ride.” “Homage to Fahrenheit 451” is a blast against the digitisation of books, the removing books from libraries, the philistinism with regard to books and how the ancient of books are no longer nurtured. As I’ve already remarked, Eggleton has a proclivity for producing his own versions of canonical phrases. Thus in “Homage to Fahrenheit 451”, we get “Books are noble animals but have to be put down, / because about suffering they are never wrong”. For the record, the final poem in this collection, “What the Future Holds” is a kind of raising-hands-in-surrender at the future with a que sera sera what-the-hell vibe. There are only so many problems that a poet can address. Or ameliorate.

I know. I know. I’ve tracked my way through Respirator – A Poet Laureate Collection like a bibliographer dutifully classifying and ticketing the contents. Sorry, but I found no better way to express my enjoyment at the variety of tones and issues addressed in David Eggleton’s production. It’s solid, thoughtful, funny, insightful, sombre and very, very readable. Okay, I carp at Eggleton’s occasional letting his verbal exuberance run away with him (also known as losing the plot). But what do you expect? Perfection?

 

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            By pure chance (no kidding) the next collection of poems to come to my attention was C.K.Stead’s latest collection Say I Do This – Poems 2018-2022. Now in his 91st year, Stead has produced 17 collections of poetry in a long career, as well as a having published a “Collected Poems” (not to mention his many novels, short stories, memoirs and essays). In an end-note he says that he was going to call this collection Last Poems, in the knowledge that he will not be with us for much longer; but he changed his mind after recalling a passage from Allen Curnow that “so long as there’s a next, there’s no last.” So Say I Do This it became, dedicated to his wife Kay. Stead has a very simple way of categorising poems in this collection. They are “Home”, poems set in New Zealand; “Away”, poems built on his time overseas or imaginary places overseas; and “Friends’, being concerned with people he knows or has known. It is no irreverence to say these are the poems of a very old man, and his ideas are mainly based on past experience.

In the Home section, the opening poem “To be continued perhaps” is a poem of resignation – enjoying the dying of the light without worrying too much how the world is going on. “Tohunga Crescent” laments the fact that his across-the-road neighbours, Allen Curnow and his wife, are no longer around, and the neighbourhood is degenerating. “Ode to Autumn” tells us that “I lead a life of quiet medication / longing for foreign shores, adventure and death” and “After surgery” tells us that “Death will be not unwelcome though I’d hoped / for a friendlier exit” before he hears the chimes at midnight and babbles o’ green fields as he recalls childhood memories. His address to his wife “Birthday Tercets for Kay” speculates among other things on how they will die. Some neighbourhood poems have a certain degree of soulfulness, such as “To ‘Amnesia, Muse of Deletions’ ” with its closing line “do the dead forget their friends?”; or the long memoir “Mary” where a neighbour’s death ends with speculation on Nature hailing her. “Haiku: Audiology” is about decaying hearing and the sound illusions such as “cicada / tinnitus making each day / ‘one summer’ ”. Yes, these are certainly an old man’s poetry, but they are neither self-pitying nor regretful. Stead shows great interest in, and clearly enjoys, the flora and fauna around him with a number of poems about the birds in his locality and their ways. “Pastoral Kaiwaka, 1941”, one of his retro poems apparently rooted in childhood, is a genuinely witty take on life as was, with a neat dose of anthropomorphism put to good use.

The great farewell to Home is “Poem in October”, borrowing one of Dylan Thomas’s titles and changing Thomas’s opening line “It was my thirtieth year to heaven” to “It was my ninetieth year to heaven” as he farewells the city and flowers and small delights and acknowledges that death is commonplace anyway, concluding that he will say “Kia ora for having me. Stay safe. Go well” as he goes – a purely banal statement but then maybe death itself is banal. (Personally I prefer Henry James’ designation of death as “The Distinguished Thing”.)

In the Away section, the poems about overseas seem more in the nature of distant memories reconstructed rather than more directly recalled – thus his vignettes of Menton. And many poems set elsewhere are historical or legendary places which – presumably – Stead has not stayed in, as in “The Death of Orpheus” about the mythical demi-god,  or “October 16 1817, Angostura 5pm” a tragic anecdote from the era of Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation. Likewise the poem “Impromptu: Afghanistan”, which chastises the U.S.A. for creating pointless chaos in Asia, ending with the statement “America we love you / (sometimes) but / why so daft, so thick / so unwilling to learn?” Four “Psalms of Judas” and a poem called “The Challenge”, about the recent burning of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, function as proof that Stead is still a convinced atheist, with much contempt for religion, especially Christianity.

Finally the section called Friends, which is as much about acquaintances or in some cases anecdotes about once-met strangers. There are some heartfelt farewells to the dead (“A Sonnet for Peter Wells”). The poem for Kevin Ireland is a blokey thing remembering the ingredients of a dinner as taught them by Frank Sargeson. Another poem to Kevin Ireland gives a more detailed account of their long friendship. The poem to Fleur Adcock hails her for bringing to Stead’s attention poem-worthy things in nature. The poem to John Berryman considers Berryman’s suicide, implying that all things (and people) pass like the animals now becoming extinct. Some poems require more personal knowledge to fully understand what is being said – that is, they rely on things that could be decoded only by an in-group. In “A Sonnet ending on a note of uncertainty”, concerning Seamus Heaney, is Stead implying that he does not approve of Heaney’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? It seems so. The poem on Keri Hulme is again very questioning, with Stead (correctly, I think) again raising that matter of violence directed against children in The Bone People. Iris (an anecdote about Iris Murdoch) seems light common-room chatter. But there are more deeply felt poems about the dead or the very old.

There you once again have from me a description and cataloguing of a collection of poetry rather than a real critique. What can I say? Say I Do This is Stead as we already know him – sometimes combative, often ticking off the foolishness of the world, but in this case being aware that he has already strutted and fretted his hour on the stage. One thing is very certain – save perhaps for the odd in-joke, Stead writes clearly, only rarely dealing in ambiguity and never dabbling in wilful obscurity. From that perspective, this is a very rewarding collection.

 

 *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

            Turning from the work of two very experienced and older poets, I come to the debut collection of a younger poet. Leah Dodd has hitherto appeared only in smaller poetry publications. Her style is very free verse and most of her poems are presented in loose fragments scattered randomly across the page. Sometimes it is hard to see the reason for the separation of words in this way. Most titles are presented in lower case and one of two  poems are unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness, as in the poem “spawning season”. Some poems begin with an idea but then wander off in other directions like a stream getting lost, as in “ilovekeats69”.

And that, I promise, is the end of my dyspeptic grumbles because I quickly discovered that Leah Dodd is a very astute observer of the scene, witty  - sometimes hilarious – and not falling into traps of self-pity. Sure, there are poems about break-ups, but the poem “summer” suggests a kind of taking-it-on-the-chin when a breakup has happened. Other poems imply a desire for a partner, but they are treated with irony and in terms of fantasy, as in  “the only way out of my student loan is to marry ex-FRIENDS star Matthew Perry” where, in her dreams, she is considering dating a Hollywood star after a breakup. Similarly, and equally ironically “marry me (on Runescape)” is also a fantasy about hooking up with someone. Even more irony dominates “Tips for lockdown wellness”, seeking a fantasy protective figure but in this case a tiger! Irony is one of Dodd’s main weapons even outside breakup situations, as when the poem “revolution” proposes that bats should replace people for our own good

Sometimes Dodd, a young woman, easily recalls childhood or teenage situations, as in “Mt Eden 2005”, concerned with painful ways of removing pimples. “When you want to be a mermaid so bad it hurts” perhaps (but only perhaps) suggests that a young girl’s daydreams cannot ever really by fulfilled. And “masterclass” is the mixed memories of learning the piano. (The blurb tells me that Leah Dodd is a classically-trained pianist, though an end-note says that this poem is also inspired by Pink Floyd.) “Memphis Belle” is a memoir of being billeted in a less-then-desirable motel while taking part in a high school Shakespeare fest; and “guided hypnosis” is cooling off after a party.

An almost surreal poem “I am the ghost of the IKEA futon couch” is an anthropomorphic account of furniture becoming a box of memories – probably the most fully imaginative of Dodd’s poems in this collection. Dodd touches on conservation and the environment in “0800 SEE ORCA” lamenting the orca’s death, but conservation is not one of her major concerns. Observing the local scene is. Scattered through this collection there are four “bus poems”, which are literally about riding on the bus in parts of Wellington but which involve daydreams, reveries and memories during the ride

Which brings me to the most poignant of her poems - and the least ironical. The poem “clot” appears to be a poem about an early miscarriage. But one of her best poems, “tether”, about looking after a baby, understands both how difficult it is and yet how compelling: “he’ll cry if I leave.  Little limpet / but oh, I love the closeness.  It slips / so quickly  once we were connected / by a vein and two arteries    ever since / we drift.   I take these gifts with grace”.  “clucky” is also about baby. It is implied in “muscle memory” that she is raising the child alone. And in “gig people” about behaviour of crowd at rock concert “we joke about the baby being home on his own / to three different people”. (I hope she really was joking.) “Last Call Nigel” observes the baby developing into toddler-hood. And in “stone fruit” “he is laid down, tucked in, / his lamp switched off / and curtains drawn to block / morning light / and he sleeps ? little prince, / the one who wasn’t planned / but wasn’t unexpected.”

The nature of society and trends are examined. “Patched gang members in the Maori Affairs Committee Room, 1979” is  really a poem about the disjunction of Maori street culture and highbrow Pakeha culture with lines like “the council blasts Debussy / and Mozart loud / outside the library / where brown kids linger / and drink and fight / like white culture down the throat.” “West Coast School of Rock”, opens “It was a time of Empire Records and The Runaways / black miniskirts and steel-capped boots / gigs at an emptied warehouse / where kids learnt riffs and / soaked their black tees with sweat”. It reads like reportage with punchlines suggesting a self-destructive fad. Is the style intended to be deadpan? I leave you to judge.

            And so to what will be the piece de resistance for many readers. This is the outrageously funny “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now”, with a list of all the most barmy suggestions of what she would do. Food turns up in a number of her poems, “cow fund” being a fantasia about raising a cow to be able to produce expensive cheese. But “the things I would do for a Pizza Hut Classic Cheese right now” tops all the others.

            A short judgement? This is a fully formed collection from a poet who has a keen eye and an engaging style. One of the year’s best.

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 four or more years ago.  

“KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER” by Sigrid Undset (trilogy first published 1920 – 1922; two different English language translations, the better being the translation by Tina Nunnally) 

            About six months ago I posted on this blog a piece called Book Awards, in which I made comments on how the Nobel Prize for literature was decided. In passing I wrote that in the early years of the awards, there was an over-representation of Scandinavian authors, many of whom are now forgotten. But I mentioned two Scandinavian authors who richly deserved their prizes and who are still read widely, not only in their own countries. They were the prolific Swedish author Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940: Nobel laureate 1909) and the equally prolific Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949: Nobel laureate 1928).

            Selma Lagerlof I first met as a child when one of my elder brothers gave me as a Christmas present (an English translation of) Selma Lagerlof’s famous children’s book Nils Holgersson, rendered into English as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, about a boy shrunk to tiny size by malicious goblins, and then flying all over Sweden on the back of wild geese. I think I was in my twenties when I read Lagerlof’s novel for adults Gosta Berlings Saga (The Story of Gosta Berling), a very rambling and eventful tale of a defrocked clergyman and his romantic attachments. The fact is, I read it only because I was at that time (and still am) fascinated by silent movies, and I’d read that the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller had made a film version of Gosta Berlings Saga in 1924 (it starred Lars Hanson and a pudgy young woman, making her first notable appearance, Greta Garbo). And that, dear readers, has been my complete engagement with the works of Selma Lagerlof.

            More recently, though, I became immersed in the work of Sigrid Undset by reading what is still her most popular work, her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter. Apparently an English-language translation of Kristin Lavransdatter was published in the late 1920s, but it was universally panned as a botched job. In the 1990s there appeared Tina Nunnally’s new translation, which was highly praised. It was the Tina Nunnally version that I read.

             A few words first about Sigrid Undset. Her parents were Danes but they moved to Norway when Sigrid was 2, where she lived for most of her life in what was then called Kristiania (it reverted to its ancient name Oslo in 1925). She was always interested in Scandinavia’s Middle Ages and as a young woman she wrote a novel with a medieval setting; but it was rejected by publishers. So she set about writing novels with contemporary Norwegian settings. They were severely realist in style and they focused on women, often very frank (for their times) about sexual relationships and adultery, and frequently advocating women’s emancipation. But the idea of the Middle Ages still attracted her. She married a man considerably older than she and raised three children, but the marriage broke up. By the 1920s, having established herself as novelist and earning a reasonable income, she turned at last to writing on medieval themes. The trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter was published between 1920 and 1922 and it was this work that persuaded the Nobel committee to award her the Nobel Prize in 1928. It was also in the 1920s that she made a major decision. Her parents were nominally Lutheran but were in effect atheist. Sigrid turned to Catholicism, disgusted with the formality and tepid faith offered by the Lutheran church of Norway, and perturbed by what she saw as the disintegration of society in the aftermath of the war (what we now call the First World War). At the age of 42 she was received into the Catholic Church, to the consternation of some of her readers, and remained a devotee thereafter. In the 1930s, she wrote frequently against Hitler and his regime, so during the 2^nd World War, with Norway occupied by the Nazis, she took refuge first in neutral Sweden and then in the USA. She returned to Norway in 1945 and died there three years later.

            Set in the 14^th century, Kristin Lavransdatter combines three of Undset’s major preoccupations. First is the status of women, which she’d written about in her contemporary novels. Kristin Lavransdatter [her name could be translated as Christine, Laurence’s daughter] is a very assertive woman, and the trilogy traces her whole life from adolescence to her mature adulthood with her final decision about the way of life that would be most desirable for her. Second, the nature of the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, scrupulously re-created in her prose  - apparently it was her ability to bring to life those ancient times that was most admired by the Nobel committee and won her the prize. And third, religion, with 14^th century Scandinavia having only recently adopted Christianity and still having pockets of the older paganism.

            The first of the three novels The Wreath (Kransen in the original) opens on Kristin’s childhood. Her parents are the formidable Lavrans Bjorgulfson and his wife Ragnfrid Ivasdatter who own the manor at Jorungaard. All Kristin’s brothers died in early childhood and her sister Ulvhild, injured in an accident, later dies. So, ignoring her little sister,  Kristin is the apple of her father’s eye and he hopes to marry her off profitably to a suitable suitor. But the adolescent Kristin is courted by two young men, Arne and the priest’s son Bentein, whose feeling for Kristin are so intense that they kill each other in a brawl. Violent times! Lavrans, to Kristin’s despair, arranges for Kristin to be betrothed to a proper gentleman, Simon Andresson, whom she does not love and says so. To cool her heels, her father sends her as a pensioner to a convent to improve her education and prepare her for marriage. Instead she meets and falls in love with Erlend Nikulausson, very much her elder. Erland has a very bad reputation, having had an adulterous affair with a woman called Eline and having had two children with her. Kristin often rendezvous with Erlend (sometimes in the town brothel!) and in due course is pregnant. The man who is officially betrothed to her, Simon Andresson, confronts her and, in a gentlemanly fashion, breaks off their engagement. Erlend tries to win favour with Kristin’s father Lavrans. In secret Kristin visits Erlend at the home of Erlend’s aunt Lady Aashild. Eline, the woman whom Erlend cast off, visits Kristin and attempts to poison her. In a scuffle, Eline dies. The matter is hushed up by Erlend and his influential relatives. Despite Erlend’s scandalous reputation, Erlend gradually wins the favour of Lavrans, especially when Erlend manfully helps to fight the flames that are devouring a burning church. And so Kristin and Elend are married.

            Are you reeling from all the Scandinavian names I have packed into this synopsis of the first novel of Sigrid Undset’s trilogy? I had to pick my way through them carefully myself. The title of this novel The Wreath refers to the wreath that is placed on the bride’s head when she is married (like the veil in other European countries). This novel represents the first stages of Kristin’s maturation, from childhood and unmarried adolescence to marriage. As my synopsis alone makes clear, Kristin is a very wilful young woman, rejecting her father’s choice of spouse, fornicating with a man with a scandalous reputation and in effect rebelling against the patriarchal norms of her time, when a father virtually owned a daughter. In a way, though the novel is set in a very credibly-presented medieval world, Sigrid Undset is continuing to explore the themes she addressed in her earlier contemporary novels, broaching women’s emancipation. It is possible, too, that in having Kristin marrying an older man, Undset was inspired by her own marriage [which had fallen apart]. Yet the raw violence of the Middle Ages is also there (note the brawls, sudden deaths and fights etc,). It is also made clear, in the last pages of The Wreath, that Kristin’s rebelliousness has something to do with her parents’ relationship. Kristin’s mother Ragnfrid resents Lavrans’ great affection for their daughter. She broods, she has a cold heart and it is made clear that she married Lavrans only when she couldn’t marry another man whom she loved. A thwarted woman of the sort her daughter chooses not to be.

            The second novel of the trilogy The Wife (Husfrue in the original) chronicles Kristin’s life as a married woman. Brought up to finer things in Lavrans’ home, she has to adjust to Erlend’s much rougher and rugged estate Husaby. [The early botched translation titled this novel The Mistress of Husaby.] She has difficulties with disobedient servants who do not respect her but, even as she swells with her first child, she proves to be an efficient mistress of the estate. She gains some spiritual comfort from the priest Gunnilf, Erlend’s civilised brother. She goes through the pains of childbirth when he first child Niculaus (pet name Naakkve) is born. She goes on a pilgrimage to expiate her disobedience to her father and to thank God for her safe birth. She is rewarded with her first visionary experience – she has a vision of the saintly Brother Edvin who had once counselled her. The years pass by at Husaby. Erlend, true to form, is often neglectful and roguish, away for months at a time fighting small wars with encroaching Finns. But nearly every year, Kristin presents him with a child, to the total of seven. Kristin gains the confidence of Erlend’s bastard son Orm, though she has a more difficult time with Erlend’s bastard daughter Margret. When Kristin’s father Lavrans dies, she visits his estate Jorundgaard; and once again she feels the guilt of disobedience to her father while taking stock of her not-very-satisfactory marriage. Lavrans, with his patriarchal righteousness, was a man of firmer morality that her impulsive husband. For example, when Erlend finds a suitor sleeping with his bastard daughter Margret, he chops off the man’s hand and then forces him to marry Margret on pain of death. Lavrans would never have done that. On the whole, this second novel is the book of Kristin’s trial – constantly, she is forced to contrast her household at Husaby with the more orderly values in which she was bred. She feels a pang when her much younger sister Ramborg marries Simon Andresson, the man whom her father had chosen to be her spouse. In political matters Erlend becomes involved in a plot to create a king for Norway separate from the king of Sweden (in the 14^th century the two countries were ruled as one). Erlend is convicted of treason and tortured to extract information on his fellow conspirators; but he steadfastly refuses to name names, displaying a residue of knightly-warrior honour, even though he was trapped because he dallied sexually with a woman (the Lady Suvvina) who reported his plans. It is Simon Andresson, the suitor she rejected, who answers Kristin’s appeal and persuades the king to release Erlend – though Erlend’s penalty is to have all his estates stripped from him.

            Perhaps some readers, reading this second novel, might think that Sigrid Undset is reneging on her critique of patriarchal control of women that was expressed in the first novel The Wreath. But this is not the case. Undset is expressing the painful fact that what we most desire when we are young may lead to something more imperfect than we expected; and thus it is in Kristin’s relationship with her husband.

            The third and final part of the trilogy The Cross (Korset in the original) shows Kristin, now in early middle age, seeing her elders dropping away. With both her parents dead, Kristin and Erlend move into Lavrans’ estate Jorundgaard, with their household. They are now in close proximity to Kirstin’s sister Ramborg and her husband Simon Andresson. It is clear that there is now much mutual admiration between Kristin and Simon as when, for example, Kristin saves Ramborg’s ailing child by using folklore medicine. Erlend understands his moral debt to Simon; but he feels it as a burden. Ramborg resents her husband’s admiration of Kristin. But Simon, the gentleman, understands that he can never love Kristin as he did in his youth. Things gradually become even more fractious between Kristin and Erlend. When, for the last of many times, she criticises his selfish and negligent ways, he walks out on her and chooses to live as a semi-hermit in a house that has been deserted by his aunt. When Simon Andresson dies of a fever, Kristin discovers that Simon’s marriage to Ramborg was never harmonious either. Now subject to scorn because her husband has deserted her, Kristin is left to rear her growing children at  Jorundgaard. One spring, she attempts to effect a reconciliation with Erlend, visits his den, and is so strongly still physically attracted to him that she becomes pregnant; but Erlend refuses to return to her household. The child is born. Kristin names the child Erlend (even though it is the custom not to name a child after a living forebear). But the newborn is sickly and soon dies. A fantastic rumour arises that the child was the product of “incest” [meaning in this case having sexual intercourse with a household servant, Kristin’s steward Ulf Haldorsson]. Kristin is even brought before the bishops’ visiting court. Kristin’s sons seek out Erlend who, typically, defends his wife’s honour by getting into a brawl and being killed. But at least Kristin has been exonerated. Now into middle age, Kristin lives with, and for, her sons. Two of her sons train for  the monastery, but she is not sure they are up for it. Her younger sons seek more adventurous lives further afield. Her son Gaute is gradually becoming the master of the estate. By force, Gaute carries off a nobleman’s daughter, Jofrid, has a child by her, and manages to get her family’s consent to marry her. As Kristin judges it, clearly Jorundgaard once again has a capable and determined master and mistress.

            Widowed, single, in her forties, Kristin sets out on another pilgrimage. Again, she encounters the spiritual guidance of Erlend’s brother Gunnulf. Kristin enters a convent and becomes a nun, living a pious and devoted life. The plague known as the Black Dead strikes. In a country which still has a lingering paganism, some people attempt to ward off the plague by long-abandoned remedies, such as child sacrifice. Kristin saves a child from human sacrifice and arranges for the Christian burial of the child’s deceased mother. Then she dies, , realizing the justice and mercy of God in tempering and shaping such an act.

            Summing up this whole trilogy, I would call it a long historical saga, spanning Norwegian life from about 1300 to 1349, but it is a domestic saga, a family story, not a pageant of battles, sieges and what have you. Politics and historical circumstances come to the fore only when Erlend becomes involved in a conspiracy, a very small part of the trilogy. Part of the trilogy’s purpose is to show the pride of the old Norwegian warrior-gentry caste, but also noting its inadequacy as a moral code. Taking more central themes of the novel are the immense importance of marriage settlements and inheritance, and the struggles of Scandinavian Christianity against the real possibility of the survival of paganism. More important than all this, however, is the moral development of Kristin herself. No matter how accurate its historical details are,  Kristin Lavransdatter is centrally a psychological work rather than an historical work, showing a woman’s mental growth from adolescence to her death aged about 50; her responsibilities as mother and lady of the manor; her strong influence by her father; the difficulties of matrimony with a reckless and irresponsible spouse who only late in his life proves his moral worth; and finally discovering a way of finding peace of mind.

Some modern readers might carp at Kristin’s finally becoming a nun. (She does so in her 40s – about the same age as a Sigrid Undset was when she became a Catholic – there is clearly some sort of autobiography in this trilogy). But if you are sceptic, a little research might show you that convent life was one of the few places in medieval life where women could run their own affairs and not always be under the surveillance of men. In their own ways, and in very different eras, both Kristin and Sigrid Undset are expressing a form of women’s emancipation.

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.

                                                   STUDIES SAY THAT…

Recently, a woman of my ken rejoiced in showing me the results of “studies” which said that boys grew up to be more balanced, more civil and more mature as human beings if they had at least one sister. This greatly amused me, in part because the woman in question herself has sons but no daughters. I also thought with amusement of cases where boys with sisters developed into anything other than civil. Branwell Bronte had three talented scribbling sisters, but that didn’t stop him from becoming a drunken, self-destructive sot.

There is the (probably distant) possibility that the “studies” in question had some merit. Maybe it’s true that boys brought up with sisters get attuned to the opposite sex and learn how to behave themselves in ways they wouldn’t know if they mixed only with the fellers… but most likely that would be true only in some cultures and in some social classes. There are cultures in which young women are regarded by their brothers as slaveys and irritants.

More than anything, though, I was annoyed by that vague and ambiguous term “studies”. Have you not heard it often in advertisements on television, where we are told that “studies” (or sometimes “research”) shows that “our” toothpaste is better than the rest? “Studies prove that Dizzo-Whizzo toothpaste removes all plaque, makes teeth brighter and whiter, heals cavities and brings a true smile on your face!!!”

At which point sentient viewers (if they have not muted the ads, as I usually do) might ask some obvious questions.

What “studies”?

Who sponsored and paid for the research, if indeed there really was any research?

Was the research commissioned by a subsidiary of the toothpaste company, with a foregone outcome expected?

Was the research disinterested? (i.e. impartial).

If scientific matters were involved, was there any double-blind testing?

Who carried out the survey that was needed to verify the conclusion?

How professionally trained were they?

How big was the data base that led to the declared outcome?

If sociological matters were concerned,  how many people were interviewed or observed by those who gathered the data? (In sociological matters, the bigger the database, the more accurate the conclusion is likely to be. Last week I polled people and discovered that the Earth is flat and the Moon is made of green cheese. My interviewees were five inmates of a psychiatric hospital.)

What sort of questions were asked of people? Were the questions loaded in any way?

In the case of making comparisons between the sexes, was an equal number of each sex examined or were the interviewees or participants loaded towards one sex or the other?

            And so on.

            The fact is that referring to “studies” as conclusive, without any detailed verification of those studies, is to refer to nothing of value at all. “Studies” often means something as loose as the polling carried out by newspapers and other news services when they want to score a point.

            Of course there are real “studies” that have produced real, verifiable conclusions. But even in the academic sphere, “studies” is often paired with words that imply ideology rather than impartial and empirically provable conclusions.

            Conclusion? Don’t take on faith what is presented to you only as “studies”.