Author: Wayne

A Savaged Dreamland. Journeys in Burma.

Author: David Eimer

Bloomsbury (2019)

Howl dines on David Eimer’s superb new account of modern day Burma, a land where the past is never that far away.

Appertiser

Five years ago, in a leafy café in the heart of Phnom Penh, I sat down with David Eimer whose new book, A Savaged Dreamland: Journeys in Burma, was published in August. Back then, however, our conversation centred on another book, also by Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, which I was reviewing for a city paper. 

Eimer was newly arrived in Phnom Penh, having escaped from Bangkok for a planned new beginning in the kingdom’s fair capital (it did not work out, Eimer moved on a few months after our interview). 

The Emperor Far Away was an excellent piece of travelling reportage and I enjoyed the opportunity to sit down and to talk to the man who had ‘fathered’ the tome. Time quickly passed and with the second latte kicking in David announced the need to leave for another appointment. There was, though, time for one last question as he made his way towards his bicycle.

“So what are you working on next?” 
“Something on Burma . . .’ David replied, “it’s more in my head than on paper, but it’s coming together.” 

And then he was gone, pedalling off into the monsoon sun of a lazy Phnom Penh afternoon. 

But now Mr. Eimer has returned and that ‘Burma book’, referred to several monsoons ago, has passed through its gestation and now seats prominently on the hollow shelves of the globe’s bookshops.

Main Course

‘Fractured land’: it is an oft-used term but in many ways it seems the best phrase to describe contemporary Burma. This was not how things appeared four short years ago, in 2015, when the National League for Democracy (NLD) swept to power, voters inspired by the promise of its Noble prize winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s  (or Daw Suu as she is know to most Burmese). In the aftermath of the election the number of international tourists arriving in Burma, previously in the low thousands, swelled to 3+ million, with Yangon, Bagan and Mandalay on the ‘hot list’ of places to visit. The end to isolation also saw foreign companies navigating to Burma’s shores, drawn by an inexpensive labour force, copious natural resources and the knowledge that they would no longer be called to account for trading with a pariah state. 

Four years on and this flush of optimism has given way to disappointment. Tourists numbers have declined markedly since the halcyon days of the mid-decade, while Daw Suu’s hero status has been tarnished by her seeming indifference to the persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority and the detention of local journalists. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the nation’s generals remain clearly in charge, their control on the strings of power as tight as ever. 

It is this Burma, the country that rose and then fell from grace, that Savage Dreamland documents. And in Eimer it has found the perfect chronicler. Former foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph (China desk) and for the South China Morning Post (Southeast Asia) Eimer clearly has the reporting chops to bring the story of modern Burma into the light. 

To accomplish this task Eimer takes us on a ‘journey’, one that draws on history, culture and the post-WWII politics of Burma, mingled with interviews, conservations and ‘vignettes of observation’ draw from those who he meets and the places he visits through his travels. The resulting view of Burma is a thousand miles away from the post-card image of saffron clad monks and twilight-lit temples. Instead the nation emerges as a disjointed country; a land at war, where minorities, nominal leaders and generals battle with the notions of what the future should be, bracketed by the aspirations of powerful neighbours, with the whole menagerie periodically stirred by forces originating from imperial wrongs. 

Eimer also has an eye for detail and when he shares some of these with the reader his dispassionate reporter persona falls away—an account of watching Yangon natives using ropes and hitches to hoist food items to their top-floor balconies is one such example. Although quickly—too quickly perhaps—Eimer returns to the role of ‘objective observer’, his emotions and feelings placed on hold. The impression left is of a man meandering through a museum, telling us what he sees but revealing little of what it means to him. 

It is also a challenge, sometimes, to follow Eimer’s physical path across Burma. In part this is because the ‘journeys’ that feature in the book unfolded across several years of travel and reporting. But still, as a reader you long for some unity of theme or idea around which his movements can coalesce, rather than the patchwork feel that arises across the chapters of A Savage Dreamland.

Dessert

But none of this takes away from what is a compelling, informed and superbly written account of modern Burma. The result: A Savage Wonderland is—for now at least—the ‘go to’ book for those wishing to understand this most complex and divided of nations.

After Dinner Mints

Some factoids from A Savage Wonderland

• A third of Burma’s 55 million people belong to 30 or more ethnicities, the greater number in open conflict with the Burma’s national army (the Tatmadew).
• These conflicts represent the longest running civil wars in modern history. 
• In the 1950s Burma was home to a flourishing movie industry that reached as far as California, with the Burmese actress Win Win Than starring alongside Gregory Peck in the Hollywood production of The Purple Plain. 

David Eimer’s A Savage Wonderland is available at all Monument Book stores.

American Carnage: 
On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War 
and the Rise of President Trump

Au: Tim Alberta

Part II: 
Bush Redux

The pages of American Carnage offer what, for me at least, was an unexpected opportunity, namely to reappraise the former president George W. Bush Jr. This re-assessment is less about his policies and political decisions—remember his administration brought us the Second Iraq War, extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib and the Hurricane Katrina debacle—and more about his manner, style and capacity to predict the direction of America.

American Carnage reveals three Bushes that, I suspect, you never knew existed:

1. Bush the Sage

Nearing the end of his second term Bush could see the dangers posed by the rise of populism and nativism before most Washington commentators: “the ‘isms”, he told his team in 2007, “are goanna eat us alive.”

2. Bush the Political Commentator

At the 2018 inauguration of the newly elected President Trump, G.W. Bush provided what some consider the most succinct summary of the new leader’s agenda, which he had just laid out before a crowd that was not half as big as he believed. Leaving his anointed spot on the stage behind the departing president, Bush offered the following overheard remark:

“That was some weird shit.”

3. Bush the Compassionate

Six days before leaving the Whitehouse, his Democrat replacement having swept the Republicans aside in a blaze of hope and optimism, Bush hosted a meeting of prominent conservative talk-show radio hosts in the Oval Office (the more extreme hosts were kept off the invite list; they, it was agreed, were a lost cause). 

Part way through the meeting Bush announced the reason for bringing the hosts together, and looking across at the faces of the ‘on-air right’ he made a request:

“I want you to go easy on the new guy.”

Today, this voice of compassion on behalf of a political rival, seems a million years ago. 

Bush the sage, the commentator and the compassionate – who would have thought. 

Delayed Rays of a Star – A Review

Author: Amanda Lee Koe

A chance encounter, a photograph, three cinematic legends captured forever on film at a party in the thrilling world of 1920’s Berlin. This is the opening cue for Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, a work of overarching genius destined for a permanent place amongst 2019’s ‘best fiction’ lists.

The three ‘legends’ (and the photograph really happened, it is amongst the opening pages of the novel) Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl provide the source material and narrative pace for Koe’s 387-page tome. Most will be familiar with the trio: Dietrich – a bi-sexual, gender-blending German actress who renounced fascist Germany to become a Hollywood icon; Anna May Wong – the first Asian star of Hollywood (although she was actually born in California, to Chinese parents), whose type-casting into ‘native’ roles overshadowed her enormous abilities as an actress; and Leni Riefenstahl – actress and film-maker, who immortalized the Nazi aesthetic in ‘Triumph of the Will’. 

Back to that photograph, with this as her entry point Koe moves back and forward across multi- story and time-lines, using what we know about the trio—their experiences and dramas, in sum there non-fiction lives—to fuel and propel the novel’s fictional accounts. While there are numerous uses of this technique by the author, arguably the most powerful comes towards the book’s end, when Anna May is called upon to defend her Hollywood typecasting, a journalist challenging her on a dance routine she once performed:

“Everyone around the dinner table was staring, waiting to see what would happen next. They were no longer trying for discretion. Anna May had made no verbal response to the journalist’s condemnation, but tears were running down her face . . . Cutlery plinked as she rose from her feet majestically. She turned to the journalist. ‘An actress’s authenticity is not in her life’, she said, ‘it is in her performance. Now did I dance well, or did I not?’”

Class!

Phrases such as ‘sprawling’ and ‘ambitious’ have been used to describe Koe’s novel, and there is substance in these terms; however, while that might imply a work that is unwieldy and overreaching, this is not true here, for the tales told are welded expertly into a story that feels holistic, be it one where the parts are interesting in their own right. And it is the presence of numerous bit-characters that ensure the reader is never allowed to tire. They include Hans Hans, an Afrika Korpsman seconded to a Riefenstahl production, a man struggling with lost love and tragedy; Bei Bei, a sex trafficked Chinese migrant who becomes the Sunday maid to the bed-ridden Dietrich, in late 1980s Paris; a blacklisted Jewish writer fleeing pre-War German; a West German bureaucrat; a wolf; a gypsy, the tableau of characters is as opulent as Koe’s language, each adding a thread to her book’s rich fabric.

The book is also a visceral affair, the narrative world rendered authentic through vivid descriptions—from the stench of a urine filled pan to the physicality of sexual encounters—that jar and unnerve (“Today Madame’s stool was shaped just like a petit-croissant”). 

Eventually, for the book is long, one leaves the final chapter with a degree of sympathy for Dietrich et al., with all of the trio having suffered for their fame – cherished and adorned independently from how they regarded their own talent and accomplishments. Indeed only Riefenstahl leaves the novel with any sense of contentment, albeit satisfaction bound together by knots of righteous denial (Riefenstahl lived to be 101, dying in 2003).

Delayed Rays of a Star is nothing short of a fiction supernova – a book to be enjoyed and savored. And personally I envy those who can come to it for the first time – before them the promise of a crisp new page and the print of an old black and white photograph from the Berlin world of 1928. 

The Beekeeper of Sinjar, Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

Author: Dunya Mikhail (meet the author here)

In 2014 a black wave swept across western Iraq. Salafi jihadists, following a fundamental doctrine of Sunni Islam, moved out from the shadow world of ‘hit and run’ insurgency to launch a full-blown campaign to occupy territory and establish a caliphate. Over the ensuing period, from August 2014 to March 2019, when the last fighters were driven out of the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani, the group best known by its acronym, ISIS, became the globe’s most potent force of extreme Islam.

The story of the rise and impact of ISIS has been documented in several excellent books, with Joby Warrick’s Pulitzer winning Black Flags and William McCant’s The ISIS Apocalypse amongst the best (for a journalist’s own account of her experiences with ISIS, including the English accented executioner, ‘Jihad John’, check out I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad Mekhennet’s, the subject of a forthcoming HOWL review). But across this writing there has been a noteworthy vacuum of words dedicated to the voices and experiences of those who suffered under ISIS rule. This was until 2018 when the English-reading world welcomed the translation of Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar. Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, a book that focuses almost exclusively on the stories of Yazidi women under the caliphate.

Before 2014 most of the world had not heard of the Yazidi, a small religious minority who had lived for centuries under the shadows of the Sinjar Mountains, in northern Iraq. This changed in August 2014 when ISIS fighters starting overrunning their towns and villages, pushing the survivors towards the cold barren flaks of Mt. Sinjar, a mountain that had provided a traditional refuge for this insular people. Down below, away from the drama unfolding on the peaks, ISIS forces moved across the Yazidi homelands, its soldiers engaging in a wholesale campaign to eliminate the Yazidi identity; a group whose religious credo, an amalgam of Christian, Islam, Judaism and Zoroastrainism was heretical to the fundamentalists – a blight to be eliminated (see video). The results included the mass execution of Yazidi men, the forced recruitment of children into jihad militias and the wholesale trafficking and sale of Yazidi women.

It is the plight of these women and the efforts made by numerous Iraqis to help and rescue them that forms the basis of Mikhail’s book. Herein, across its short 200 pages the author—herself a refugee, a journalist and poet driven out of Iraq after she incurred the displeasure of Saddam Hussein—draws on first-person accounts to reveal the reality of death, survival and hope under ISIS rule. These stories, as you would suspect, are harrowing; but there are also moments of light, instances of people and events that show how nothing, no matter how evil, can destroy the capacity for human goodness. True to this is the continuing presence of Abdullah Shrem, the ‘beekeeper’ of the title, who has devoted his life to the rescue of Yazidi women from ISIS enslavement. A modest man with a penchant for the romantic—at one point he tells the author of the motivation he receives from bees, comparing the women he rescues to the queen bees of a colony, the loss of which would signal the death of the hive—he is also driven and practical; a man wholeheartedly dedicated to the recovery of ‘lost’ women from their jihadist captors. 

Another quality of the book, which serves to sustain the reader through some of the darker passages, are the occasional flourishes provided by the author’s poetry—Mikhail is an award winning poet—the verses serving up imagery and sentiments that connect the reader with the emotions unleashed by her accounts. Some reviewers have been critical of this aspect of Mikhail’s writing, but for me it adds another layer of emotional expression that enriches the stories that her verses touch. 

Our girls, our girls, confined in chains, dragging the world along behind them.

Some of them fall to the ground in the water in 

the dirt in the air on the ground,

leaving the world without meaning, like a clock with only 

a long hand.

Who’s left in the village?

As for the stories themselves, as you would expect they are traumatic, often appalling. The account of Nadia, told in the opening pages, is evocative of those that follow: captured by ISIS soldiers while fleeing her home village; transported to a city and separated from her husband and children; transported to another place and sold at auction; beatings, rapes and enslavement until the day comes when, somehow, she is able to make a furtive call to Shrem. After this – escape, a new life, scars and memories—the fate of her husband and children unknown. All of the stories that follow Nadia’s account share elements of her experience, each tale leaving its own mental stain.

If I have one cavil with the book it is the use of the term ‘rescuing’ in its subtitle. This word gives a feel of passivity around those being saved – as if the women in the book are spectators to their fate. Yet as Mikhail’s stories show it is usually their own initiative—the decision to flee a house or to ask for a phone from a stranger—that starts them on the path to escape. ‘Helping the stolen women of Iraq’ might not be as catchy, but I think it is a more rightful depiction of the spirit of the women that fill this tome.

It is inevitable that a volume recounting the rise and excesses of ISIS will leave one shaken, but in weaving together the resilience and strength of the women featured in her pages and the contributions of those willing to help them, one leaves Makhail’s book with their soul intact (just).

Now as the rains set in I will undoubtedly read many more books, but few, I suspect, will be as fine as this one. 

The Beekeeper of Sinjar. Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is available, now, at Monument, Phnom Penh (Norodom Avenue) and Siem Reap (Heritage Walk, in the downstairs atrium). 

Wayne McCallum

Barry Lopez is one of the great ‘landscape – people – nature’ writers of our age. Check out a review of his new book Horizon – sequel to the very excellent Arctic Dreams – by Robert McFarlane, an acclaimed ‘nature’ writer in his own right (reprinted from The Guardian)

I first encountered Barry Lopez’s work in 1997, buying a copy of Arctic Dreams from a Vancouver bookshop because I was attracted by the picture of an iceberg on the cover, and intrigued by its subtitle: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. I subsequently read it while walking the west coast of Vancouver Island over several days. Arctic Dreamswas to me – as it has been to so many others – a revelation. It was a life-changing book. Its braiding of cultural and natural history, archaeology, ethnography, philosophy and something very like prose-poetry was both audacious and graceful. Lopez broke open for me the possibilities of what we still weirdly call “non-fiction” (thereby defining it only in negative and restricting relation to fiction). I was only, of course, catching up with what millions of readers had known for a decade: Arctic Dreamswas recognised as a landmark work immediately on publication in 1986, winning a National Book award and staying in the US bestseller lists for months. It has never been out of print and now, in our fast-warming world, reads as a premonitory elegy for a vanishing Arctic.

Like many who came to Lopez first through Arctic Dreams, I sought out much of his other work, compelled by its stylistic adventure, its ethical address and the secular spirituality of land that it advanced – evident especially in its deference to traditional ecological knowledge, and to animals as tutelary presences. I read Of Wolves and Men(1978), as well as Crossing Open Ground(1988) and About This Life(1998) – two slender essay collections that are, to my mind, stone-cold classics – and I explored Lopez’s fiction, from Desert Notes(1976) to The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren(1994). All the while I waited impatiently for his next full-length work of non-fiction – the follow-up to Arctic Dreams. For almost two decades I waited. Still it did not come. Would it ever? Then I began to hear whispers; there was a title, Horizon. There was a huge typescript, 30 or more years in the travelling and writing, undergoing meticulous revisions.

Now, at last, that book has sailed into view. Anticipation often leads to overdetermination, and overdetermination to disappointment. Not so in this case. Horizonis magnificent; a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular. It is being described as Lopez’s “crowning achievement”, but I prefer to see it less teleologically as a partner to Arctic Dreams, and the late enrichment of an already remarkable body of work.

In his memoir Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Walter Benjamin reflected on the possibility of representing one’s life cartographically. Horizoncomes as close as any book I know to realising this ambition. It tells the story of Lopez’s life through six main landscapes – from Cape Foulweather on the Oregon coast to the Queen Maud Mountains of Antarctica, by way of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, the Turkana Uplands of East Africa and Port Arthur in Tasmania. Place becomes the means of fathoming time; the book also moves over its course from Lopez as an “unsuspecting boy, a child beside himself with his desire to know the world, to swim out farther than he can see”, to Lopez now – an “elder” who carries a huge cargo of wisdom but is unsure how best to land it or what good it might do. The life journey told here is one from “longing to go” to “having gone”; it may also theologically be characterised as one from hope to doubt.

It has always been among Lopez’s great powers as a writer to bring the natural world to resonate metaphysically, without treating it as just another form of resource. Throughout Horizon, matter is present both as itself and as metaphor – from the great storm that threatens Cape Foulweather in the first chapter, to the tiny, ancient flakes of “debitage” (knapped and discarded flint) over which he stoops in the Thule region of the Canadian Arctic. Again and again, phenomenal presences – birds, elk, rocks, ice – ring like struck bells in the mind. Of these, the most recurrent is that of the horizon itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described the horizon as the “point of astonishment”, mischievously converting it to a thing that it is not. For a horizon is always a line and never a point. The word comes from the Greek hóros, meaning “boundary”; whether that boundary seals the eye in or summons it on depends on circumstance. Early on, Lopez describes setting up a telescope on Cape Foulweather and “working the ocean’s horizon from right to left … the beckoning line where the dark edge of the ocean trembled against the sky”. The sweep he makes is a probing of space, but we understand it also to be a prospecting of the future. To look to the horizon has long been – for mariners, explorers and fieldworkers of all kinds – the simplest form of augury. What weather is coming?

The Anthropocene answer to that is, of course: “the worst imaginable – and fast”. The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education,” the US conservationist Aldo Leopold famously noted, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” The wounding has intensified drastically since Leopold’s remark, but the loneliness has decreased. Environmental anxiety – “psychoterratica” in Glenn Albrecht’s jagged term – is now widespread; at least one has company for one’s fears. Lopez quotes the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski on “the mutilated world”, and speaks himself of “the throttled Earth” that “is now our home”. Horizonis a deeply wounded book. It grieves for harm done and harm ahead. “I want everyone here to survive what is coming,” Lopez says. A lifetime’s training in listening to others has left him vastly empathic – blessed and burdened with a love for all.

A poetry of pity is present here that is recognisable from Arctic Dreams. What is new is the fury. In a startling passage, he excoriates “the hedge fund manager who amasses material wealth with no thought for the fate of the pensioner he cheats”, calling him “a kind of suicide bomber”. Lopez sets forth a running argument with free-market capitalism and fiduciary duty, for causing us to “characterise other people as vermin in the struggle for market share”, to “navigate without an ethical compass”. He reports on the “cultural detonation” under way on the Burrup Peninsula in western Australia, where “25,000 years’ worth of Aboriginal rock art” have been bulldozed to allow industrial development; petroglyphs turned to “construction debris”, “the flayed walls of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet, dumped in a barrow ditch”.

Lopez is happiest at high and low latitudes. The chapters on the Canadian Arctic and Antarctica are superb sustained pieces of writing set in “siren landscapes”; short books in themselves, really. The “dark threads” of both places are traced and acknowledged, but – more distant from the frontlines of atrocity – Lopez is freer to focus and to roam. He accompanies specialists – archaeologists, native hunters, polar scientists – and learns to read place as they do. Here, as in previous books, his respectful fascination for indigenous communities is apparent; especially their powers of resilience, skilful adaptation and community-based decision making under pressure.

Lopez himself is also a veteran fieldworker, of course; his skills are those of attention and interpretation. In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, he recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Horizon’s brilliant last chapter describes the weeks he spent searching for meteorites in the Antarctic. At 7,500ft in the Queen Maud Mountains, the flow patterns of ice have created a “concentrating mechanism” that causes meteorites fallen on to the ice cap over thousands of years to gather on a “stranding surface”. Here, “fragments from the asteroid belt, from Mars and from Earth’s moon, find their way eventually into the planet’s upper mantle”. Holding a meteorite in his palm, Lopez considers “the history of each one in the gigantic sweep of time … they suddenly seemed wilder than any form of life I’d ever known. Like the wind, they opened up the landscape.” This sense of the vibrancy of more-than-human matter shivers throughout the book; his glittering prose becomes a concentrating mechanism and stranding surface for such moments.

Horizonis long, challenging and symphonic. Its patterns only disclose themselves over the course of a full, slow reading. Rhythms rise and surge across 500 pages; recursions and echoes start to weave. This is a book to which one must learn to listen. If one does, then – to borrow phrases from Lopez – “it arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us”. He has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, 35 years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment: “No one can now miss the alarm in the air.”

Robert McFarlane, The Guardian