WhirledView

Poaching, Propaganda and, Maybe, Romance: A Memoir that Turned into a Novel

Diana Forrest abandons a bad marriage, rejoins the Foreign Service and is sent to counter Soviet disinformation in Tanzania, where bribery corrupts the socialist ideal and elephant lovers are battling ivory poachers.

Toggling between a diffident boss and a hard-to-please Ambassador in a country that turns out to be a media wasteland, Diana spends weekends in the bush, usually with a Tanzanian colleague, whom she probably likes too much. Safari life involves her with local hunters who aren't above petty poaching.  The worst of them is covering up the murder of a headman adamantly opposed to the ivory racket.

Diana will be on probation for a year.  Then what?  Even if she can stay in the Foreign Service, she may not.

Meanwhile, Diana is making friends: a pair of baboon-loving primatologists; an American visa officer who actually says “yes”; a beer-dispensing village nurse; a park ranger too honest for his own safety; a professor desperate to keep her daughter; a French social worker dreading the results of a lover’s HIVntest; a Tanzanian secretary married to a smuggler; a roots-seeking, African-American fashionista; an embittered Tanzania-born Pakistani in the transport business; and courtly old Suleiman, a safari chef, whose snores are as resonant as lions’ roaring.

Those lions aren’t bit players. They move things along, as do the elephants, hippos, wildebeest, impala, cape buffalo, warthogs, baboons and malaria mosquitoes.

There’s serious stuff in this slice of the diplomatic life, all wholly relevant in these days of Russian disinformation and a  revived Cold War.  But Poachers isn’t a tract. You see. You feel. You care. About the people. About the wildlife. About the resilience of the land.  And there you are, on the savannah, leaning happily against an old termite mound, far from your companions—and way too far from the loaded rifle....

Um...sorry. No lions attack. No elephants charge. Diana tells the story, but it isn’t only hers. Think of a knockout engagement ring: a major brilliant wonderfully enhanced by the smaller sparklers encircling it.

P.S.  There's lots of humor, too.

Available on Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble and on order through your local bookstore.

Introverts Aren’t Losers: Re-reading Haruki Murakami’s Latest

A Review Article

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Prisms turn a beam of  colorless light into a full color spectrum. Sunshine in.  Red/orange/yellow/green/blue/violet out.  A rain- bow! No one who learns to do this in junior high science forgets the magic of it.  

Well, hardly anyone forgets, unless they become literary critics, it seems.  None of the reviewers I’ve encountered caught what’s largely at play in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.  They've tended to see the hero as a pathetic loser, which is almost excusable.  Murakami, in his usual devious way, leads us into this trap.  Even the hero of his tale has difficulty grasping the wonder of his own talent, which takes the  form of engineering efficient railroad stations.  He may be a level-headed, practical man of science, but people depend on him to get where they want to go safely and on time.  What’s pathetic about that?  Especially considering the importance of railroads in Japan.  Bullet trains anyone?

The novel’s set up involves a group of five young people who eventually attend the same public high school in the suburbs of Nagoya.   This group of inseparable friends includes two other boys, one named Akamatsu, which means Red Pine, the other named Oumi or Blue Sea.  The two girls are sisters, Shirane or White Root and Kurono or Black Field.  The latter names seem to be outliers at first, but they are tricks of light as dramatically in tension as the notions of colorful and colorless.  One expects such modulations/complications from Murakami.

As for Tsukuru, he received from his father a curious name that means “create” in Chinese characters or “make/build,” in simpler Japanese characters, the variant deemed by papa to be less “burdensome” as a name for his son, whatever that means.  Looking back at his childhood, Tsukuru isn’t sure.  As a boy and young man, however, he fears that he is “the only one of the group [of friends] without anything special about him.”  Ao is much smarter.  Oumi is a terrific athlete. The girls are talented and beautiful.  As for Tsukuru, he views himself as a colorless,    middling sort of guy, smart but not brilliant, decent-looking yet far from film star handsome, no sportsman but not a klutz either.  Oh yes!  As a child, he liked to play with trains, a boyish obsession that turns into a profession demanding resourcefulness as well as calculation.   

Meanwhile, although the young Tsukuru often wonders why his colorful friends put up with him, he revels in the reliability of their mutual loyalty, which seems to endure even after they graduate from high school, when Tsukuru is the only one to continue his studies.  Leaving the others to do what they can in Nagoro, Tsukuru follows an engineering curriculum in  Tokyo, returning periodically to visit his widowed mother and enjoy his friends.  And then, horrors!  During a routine visit, he’s informed that none of his friends want anything to do with him anymore.  No visits. No phone calls.  No explanations.  The long expected has actually happened.   His colorful friends have  rejected him.  He falls into a debilitating depression, and his social life in Tokyo is too meager to compensate.  

Worse, the one girl who interests him won’t get serious until he returns to Nagoro and solves the  mystery behind the wall of silence.  Forced into a face to face session, Ao spills the beans.  The neurotic “black” girl, having returned from a trip to Tokyo, had told her friends that Tsukuru had raped her.  Ao admits that it was hard to visualize Tsukuru as a rapist, but the girl’s mental health was too fragile for argument.  They had to pamper her, he says, although their loyalty couldn’t protect her from being murdered some time later by an intruder in her own apartment.  This is tragic news for Tsukuru, but it’s also heartening news: he himself hasn’t been rejected—and he has made another important discovery.  His colorful old pals, while succeeding up to a point, aren’t exactly making history.  They certainly aren’t doing any better than he is.

In the closing chapters Murakami tips his hand less ambiguously than usual.  The best scene finds Tsukuru sitting on a bench, one of many along the platform of an important station.  He's watching the arrival and departure of trains, the ebb and flow of people.  Like a poet rereading one of his own very good poems, Tsukuru takes quiet satisfaction in what he does so well.  He also feels the drama and romance of the travel that he makes possible for people with errands and dreams.  No, Tsukuru is not flamboyant.  He’ll never be colorful. But he’s colorless as white light is: complete, integrated, whole.

Realizing this (though never is so many words), he’s ready to pursue the woman who wasn’t ready for him, which doesn’t mean she’ll accept him.  Murakami isn’t going to give us such easy satisfaction.  Nevertheless,  Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage isn’t the story of a dorky sad sack.  It’s a success story.  And his pilgrimage?  It’s a journey to self-understanding and self-acceptance.  

Why did so many American critics fail to see this?   Partly, I think, it’s because Murakami slyly invites the derogatory interpretation.  He depicts Tsukuru as thoroughly brainwashed into believing that only flamingly colorful extroversion is real personality.  But mostly, I believe, the critical blindness stems from the deeply-ingrained American preference for extroverts, a phenomenon that is brilliantly examined by Susan Cain in her recent book entitled  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  Even in intellectual circles, evidently,  there’s little appreciation for quiet accomplishment.  

People, Places, Perspectives: Please Visit My Fiction and Poetry Website

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I’m happy to announce that the website for my non-WhirledView writing is (at long last) up and running. Its name is very easy to remember: www.patricialeesharpe.com.  As a web presence  www.patricialeesharpe.com differs from many writers' sites.  I’ve enlivened the bedrock basics (bio, photo, titles) with some poems, some bits of fiction and also a little context.  In addition, I’ve built in the potential for interactivity. Comments and reactions are encouraged.  Take a look.  Let me know what you think.

 

 

“Shakespeare: Staging the World” - A Review

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The most talked about play in London this summer is the Globe’s “Richard III.”  At least among my small circle of friends and relatives.   The most reviewed exhibit is “Shakespeare Staging the World” on display at the British Museum until November 25.   I don’t pretend to have seen the former but I did visit the Shakespeare exhibit last week.

This special exhibit – a hefty entry of 14£ for non-museum members except for half prince for seniors on Mondays – has been on display since July 19 presumably to coincide with the 2012 Olympic games in London.  The title is catchy and the exhibit uses multi-media effectively but it seems to me that Shakespeare focused primarily on British history, the flora and fauna surrounding Stratford-on-Avon, plus the Greeks and the Romans – don’t recall seeing a play of his that even included a Native American, for example, so I’m not sure that the Bard did “stage the world.” But never mind, this special exhibit itself placed Shakespeare’s world in the context of his time and I guess the museum needed a title that somehow tied it into the world class games.    

Shakespeare wrote when England had just begun major expansion beyond its core – from the hostile takeover of Scotland - or the consolidation of Scotland into England - depending upon how one looks at it - to the exploration and colonization of the New World.  Spain was its major international rival although, as it turned out, plenty of land existed for both and the French too.  

Censorship and Propaganda Not Just Twentieth Century Phenomena

Years ago when I worked in Moscow, one of our exchange students described a production of Hamlet that he had just seen.  Theater was one of the Russian intelligentsia’s few outlets for expressing opposition to the Communist regime.  But it had to be done carefully.  Productions had to be approved by the censors. That meant many plays never appeared on the official stage but, the student told me, in the case of Hamlet, it was how the actors had performed the story that turned the production into a riveting indictment of the Soviet leadership not Shakespeare’s lines themselves which had been rigorously adhered to and, of course, had been written three centuries before Brezhnev.   

Professor P. Lal: He da Man

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

        That is Fullness
               This is Fullness
                      From Fullness comes Fullness
                             Take Fullness from Fullness
                                    What remains is Fullness
                                           Om  Shantih  Shantih  Shantih
                                                        The Paramahamsa Upanisad

This has been hard to write, not only because I am sad, but because sloppy thinking and writing won’t do for  P. Lal.

I planned to visit him, in Kolkata, this coming January or February.  For months I’ve been looking forward to another session of wide-ranging, exhilarating conversation, some heavy literary and philosophical stuff, perhaps, but also the elation of minds meeting in surprising ways, all to be heightened (I hoped) by cups of Darjeeling  and squares of cloud-light shondesh from the kitchen of Shyamasree, his wife, whose family had been intimately connected with the Shanti Niketan of  Rabindranath Tagore. 

That wordfest won’t happen now.  P. Lal died on November 3, 2010.

Purushottama Lal (aka Profsky) was, oddly enough, the only mentor this American writer ever had.  He hounded me relentlessly until I let him publish my first collection of poetry.  The Deadmen and Other Poems appeared in 2002 with the Writers Workshop imprint, gold-embossed, handloom-bound, in a rainbow of colors.  Three books have followed that one.  Would any of my poetry gone public without P. Lal’s hectoring?  I don’t know.  But this is the way publishing began for me, and I am grateful.

We met face to face, a qualification whose importance will emerge shortly, while I was Branch Public Affairs Officer at the American Consulate in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1998.  He had committed himself to translating (or transcreating, as he immodestly put it) the Mahabharata of Vyasa and, tranche by tranche, he was reading his beautifully—indeed lovingly Englished lines to a small collection of enthusiasts who gathered at 11:00 am on Sunday mornings. Having taken a graduate course in Sanskrit literature at the University of Chicago, I’d nibbled at some tone-deaf Victorian and 20th century translations, so I was eager to know if a readable version might finally be in the works.  Off I went, one Sunday, and established myself, as discreetly as I could for the only non-Indian in the room, as far toward the rear as empty seats permitted.

Thus I found a refuge from the pain that went along with the State Department’s gleeful absorption of the U.S. Information Agency.  U.S.I.A.’s Indian employees were being squeezed mercilessly. Collegial operations were being replaced by rigid hierarchies.  Rapid response was giving way to bureaucratic sclerosis.  My efforts to influence the process were fruitless.  But Profsky knew nothing of this.  I left it all behind on Sunday mornings. 

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence – A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, tells the tale of an attractive and wealthy thirty year old man’s obsession with an eighteen year old shop girl who was also his distant cousin. The story is set in 1970s Istanbul, a different and far poorer city than today. In this book, Pamuk sprints, then almost painstakingly strolls, through the separate but interconnected lives of the westernized elite, the idiosyncratic Turkish film world and that of a lower-middle class family all set against an outside world of the country's ongoing political turbulence and economic stress.

Political murders were commonplace during those years, nightly killings transpired on the city’s streets between left and right and Pamuk hints that perhaps Turkish security forces themselves played murky roles in the carnage. The military coup of 1980 ended the escalating urban violence and ushered in a more stable era. But Pamuk leaves an important question unanswered: whether and by how much the Turkish “dark state” was involved itself in underwriting the unrest. A question that still echoes today.

1970s Istanbul

Istanbul of the late 1970s was a difficult place to reside or even visit. I well remember visiting friends there in January 1979: the petrol lines were long. The Turkish lira was nonconvertible and inflation was high. Imports were almost non-existent but the markets were filled with fresh produce from the countryside and fish from the seas and the Bosphorus - even in winter. Internal migration was rampant and the city’s public services were overwhelmed by the influx of peasants from Anatolia - but Islamists did not figure prominently in Pamuk’s world of the time.

Pat Sharpe Is Reading Her Poems This Sunday: Come, If You Can

Patricia Lee Sharpe will be one of the featured readers at the New Mexico Women Authors’ Book Festival this weekend.  She will be reading from her three volumes of poetry on Sunday, October 3, at 1:30 pm.  The Festival is being held at the New Mexico History Museum in downtown Santa Fe.  Poems from The Deadmen, her first book, which was published by Writers’ Workshop in Kolkata will be included, as well as selections from Indus Suite and Coming and Going Love, her latest, which was published this summer.  WhirledView readers will not be surprised to learn that her poems grapple with the hard issues of our times, although the human heart is not by any means neglected.

A Gift for Pakistan and the Women of Pakistan

Finishing Line Press has just published my collection of poems Indus Suite, which is now available at www.finishinglinepress.com and  www.amazon.com.  Regrettably (except for an extract serving as a blurb on the back cover) there was no room for the introduction that Pakistani poet  Fahmida Riaz so kindly and generously wrote when this collection was first coming together.  Here is that "Forward," word for word.  PLS

 The Indus Suite poems were written in Pakistan.  They are interwoven in the years of Patricia Sharpe=s sojourn in Karachi and my friendship with this amazing woman, who was then an official at the American Consulate in Karachi. [We'd first met twenty years before, when I was a Fulbright Professor teaching American Literature at Punjab University in Lahore. PLS] 

How did I become her friend, when I have never had even a nodding acquaintance with anyone belonging to the diplomatic community?  Neither before nor after her.  (This unconscious striving to keep a respectful distance must be mutual!)  And yet I went to her so often, sought her company so frequently while she was here that I was sometimes the first reader or listener of these poems.

I read them or listened to them in silence and wonderment.  There is something inexplicable about them.  Something that defies all notions of keeping one=s distance, remaining aloof, or minding one=s own business. 

I have marveled at them because these poems could have been writtten by a Pakistani.  A sane Pakistani who loved this land and grieved for it.  They could be written by me.

Did I write them, too?  I can see lines from my own poems echoing in hers.  Of course, Patricia never read them.  They are all in Urdu, which she could not read.  Nor did I even read them out to her.  Translating them into English would have been a bother.

But when I read in ACover Up@

You who dare

to hide my handiwork

in windowless rooms,

in coffin-like cells,

and call yourselves

protectors--O

you brain dead

jailors of body and soul,

who

gave

you

this brief

to suffocate daughters and wives

                  for the crime of being female......

I marvel at her passionate involvement and think of my own poem AChadar aur Chardivari@ (AChadar and Four Walls@)

Sire, what shall I do with this black chadar.

Why do you bestow it upon me,

                            your Grace?