Solito

Solito Javier Zamora

There are not many good words spoken about people traffickers, and they do not write memoirs.  Perhaps they should, since the books would probably sell well as the reading public tackled the narratives in the hope of understanding: firstly how it feels to be such a person and secondly, how they can be stopped.  Ireland has its own culture of immigration ranging from the recent film, Aisha, the novel, A Slanting of the Sun, by Donal Ryan and the exhibition at the Triskel Centre depicting Direct Provision Centres in photographs of derelict rooms with damp walls and filthy mattresses.

Here, in Solito, the story is told by Javier Zamora, who as a child migrated from El Salvador to California, a trip which was arranged by Don Dago.  Explaining why his prices are high, and non-negotiable, Don Dago describes himself, in a line delivered without irony as ‘only one pearl in a long pearl necklace’. He takes his cut and the remainder of the cash is passed, in backpacks, down the line as strangers bundle the child from one to another.

Zamora’s parents have already left their country: his father for political reasons and, later, his mother for economic ones.  He, their child, is ensconced with grandparents and aunts in the fishing town of La Herradura, down a dead-end road.  As he grows from 5 years old to 9, Javier hears the mantra about how ‘La USA is safer and richer’.  Every week he speaks to his mother on the phone, and the conversation centres only on his trip to join her. 

Don Dago journeys with him for only a short time and then Zamora is told to stick close to a man named Marcelo who comes from his own locale. In return for his nervous smiles the child receives, from his neighbour, only glowering silence.  Instead, he snuggles up to Carla, and her mother Patricia, and the three stick together in their sub-group of six which also includes Chino, Chele and the forbidding Marcelo. 

Zamora likens the group of terrified and desperate humans to some ants that he once saw in a flood.  The creatures linked their legs and antenna to form a living raft and floated on the top of the water.  Can the six compadres reach the promised land or will they, like the insects, sink to the bottom still holding on to each other for dear life? Zamora’s account is, of course, heart-breaking and heart-warming.

Just as it is rare to find an account of illegal crossings produced by traffickers, it is unusual to find one by border guards.  And yet most people, if they are honest, are much more sympathetic to those who prevent entry than to the immigrants themselves.  It is easy to sympathise with Zamora’s plight as a vulnerable minor, powerless to negate the wishes of adults. But those feelings do not necessarily transfer to a welcome for arrivals in a country, like this one, with a serious shortage of housing.  

Javier Zamora: Legal status gained in 2018

In her novel, Spring, Ali Smith studies the daily routine of an officer in a detention centre, and her mindset.  There is cognitive dissonance between her concept of herself as a person and the mundane cruelty of her behaviour.  These are the areas which need exploring, perhaps, rather than wallowing in empathy for a child, now an adult, who left a country we know little of, to travel to another country far from ours.  The moral choices that must be made in Ireland concern what is happening here and now in front of our eyes. 

Works cited

Smith, A. Spring. Penguin. 2021.

Zamora, J. Solito. One World. 2022

A version of this review was first published on page 44 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 17th December 2022. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

My Soul Twin

My Soul Twin

Nino Haratischvili: translated by Charlotte Collins

Pain pervades the twinhood of this novel by Nino Haratischvili in which the ‘soul twins’, one of Georgian heritage, the other German, may represent the two nationalities of their creator.  Award-winning Haratischvili is best known for The Eighth Life (2020) an epic narration of the history of her native Georgia told, through generations, by ‘unimportant’ women.  In My Soul Twin, Haratischvili deals instead with a contemporary family, who live in her adopted home of Hamburg, Germany.

At the start Stella, one of the soul twins, is living a ‘normal’ prosperous life with her husband, Mark, and son, Theo.  Their extended families are nearby, and the child is receiving a well-supported upbringing. Disrupting the, possibly dull, stability, is a whirlwind in the form of Ivo, returning unexpectedly from America. When they were children, Ivo who is unrelated by blood, was raised as a brother to Stella and her sibling, Leni.  The elder girl was interested in fashion and after-school activities whilst the younger sister, Stella, and the strange boy ran wild on the bleak beaches along the northern bank of the Elbe.

Incest is always disturbing, and  Stella’s relatives, terrified by the sudden reappearance of the adult Ivo in Hamburg, fear for her sanity and her physical wellbeing. The family had witnessed, as the children grew through their teens to adulthood, a strange and poisonous intimacy between the ‘twins’.  Stella’s husband is bemused because although he knows of Ivo, he has no inkling of the effect the newcomer will have on his wife, and through her, his child. 

There is a truism that those who immigrate find it difficult to feel at home in either their new country or their birthplace and it might be so for Haratischvili.  Emanating from her sense of alienation may be sentiments of frustration, anger, jealousy and resentment.  She includes these emotions in My Soul Twin as Stella, crammed with negativity, binds herself to Ivo so that they resemble a pair of black eels, wound around each other, snapping and biting regardless of injury to self or adversary.

Closure of the unfinished business between the two of them requires that they strip each other down to the core: only when they have destroyed all outer elements of their beings will they cease struggling. Stella is similar Cathy in Wuthering Heights, who states that Heathcliff is ‘more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’.  Stella feels that, following an event in their shared childhood, Ivo has ownership of her life and soul; that he is living for her whilst she merely exists.  She feels that she must battle to regain herself, whilst his project is more ambitious: to heal two parallel families – one in Germany and one in Georgia. 

The damage that Ivo wreaks ricochets from the maelstrom of the central relationship, injuring the uncomprehending bystanders.  With Ivo having such a Russian-sounding name, it is possible to wonder if the tale is metaphoric: certainly, the evils committed during the era of Haratischvili fellow Georgian, Josef Stalin, have affected her outlook and attitudes.  Perhaps the writer is dealing not only with the tensions of a Georgian living in Germany but with Russia and its ingestion of Georgia.  These possibilities add richness and complexity to a novel which concerns itself with the domestic.

Charlotte Collins’s translation of My Soul Twin has just been published but the German original was available in 2011.  This means that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine are absent from the plot but Haratischvili is not short of intriguing material to address. 

works cited

Haratischvili, N. Eighth Life. Scribe. 2020. First published in original German 2014.

…- My Soul Twin. Scribe. 2022. First published in original German 2011.

Brontë, E. Wuthering Heights. 1847.

A version of this review was first published on page 37 of the Weekend section in the Irish Examiner on 10th December 2022. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

The Lonely Century

The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz

As Noreena Hertz approached the publication date of her book The Lonely Century she received an unusual, and undoubtedly unwelcome, boost to its likely success in terms of sales.  A pandemic placed Hertz’s argument plumb in the limelight as people were forced to stay at home.  They had more time for reading.  And, indeed, they were even more prone to feel isolated because they were locked down.

Presumably Hertz had to make a difficult decision.  Should she go ahead with the book as it was, or should she revisit every sentence and paragraph with a red pencil poised to revise her text in the shadow of Covid 19?  She chose the latter gargantuan task and must have burnt many a midnight candle making additions and changing emphases. 

It is a strong piece written, I feel sure, by a strong woman.  She is determined to draw attention to the concept of loneliness and to explain how drastically it affects our communities, societies and countries.  Like those of the coronavirus, the ill effects of loneliness are global.

According to Hertz the type of capitalism known as neoliberalism is responsible for lonesomeness because of its celebration of big finance, big business and greed.  She sees neoliberalism as deleterious to workers and societies.  Recently, however, the effects have been somewhat mitigated by huge government programmes designed to support citizens through lockdown.  Now is the moment for governments to decide how to build an improved society rather than rebuild the old unhappy one.

Early on in The Lonely Century Hertz includes a questionnaire devised by the University of California Los Angeles which she describes as the ‘gold standard in loneliness research’.  In her conversation with her readers, Hertz encourages us to complete and score the grid.  But she gives a caveat explaining how she thinks that loneliness is not just to do with a personal community, or lack thereof, but also with our relationships within societal structures.  If, she suggests, people feel unsupported by government and employers and the other entities controlling our lives, then we will feel even greater levels of loneliness. 

Having included a sense of alienation as part of her spectrum Hertz proceeds to show how modern life militates against ways of communing.  Gone are the mothers’ unions and youth clubs, the parish luncheons and many of the libraries.  Currently people are fearful of, for example, going to the gym or cinema or even to the pub.  Forums, not already closed by lack of use or lack of funds, are now shutting down because customers are nervous of inhaling virus particles.

Filling the vacuum says Hertz are, among other things, extreme political groupings which encourage get-togethers to plan protests or other action.  Members share chants and songs in similar ritual behaviours to those previously carried out at church.  But they are not healthy gatherings as they encourage hate and division rather than care and compassion.  Rallies and protests are still taking place – outside these days.  The participants need to be mindful that the virus in aerosol, rather than respiratory, droplets may stay in the air longer.

the alternative.org.uk

Each chapter of The Lonely Century looks at a particular, though not necessarily entirely unconnected, phenomenon such as the hostile environments in some workplaces. Many employees have now escaped from the physical buildings to their own home offices but employers can use digital monitoring and surveillance to replace the direct eye of the manager. Hertz also looks at city living and examines the reasons why we choose anonymity and separation. 

Ireland has not rushed into the modernity of solitariness: local communities are still very much valued on the island.  Weddings and funerals extol the importance of friends, families and neighbours, and village or town GAA clubs glue together entire areas.   Expatriates return to their base and not just for Christmas; they often come back to raise families near their childhood home.  The feeling of Irishness continues to flourish and probably keeps Ireland well out of the top ten loneliest nations.  The flip side of this coin might be that immigrants and ‘blow ins’ can feel extremely isolated and unsupported. 

Hertz is not expert on Ireland as she has mainly studied the USA and UK with forays into Japan and other countries.  Bhutan and Taiwan, she tells us, are world leaders in matching economic policies with ‘happiness’ quotients.  In New Zealand Jacinda Arden has pledged to decide budgetary policy ‘by kindness and compassion’.  Her criteria will include a response to loneliness and will attempt to give her people a ‘sense of belonging’.   

eneuro.org

The Lonely Century is accessible and entertaining as, in amongst the government policies, Hertz uses poignant and individual examples of how people manifest their unhappiness.  A woman in Japan turned to crime so as to move into a prison where she has no money worries and plenty of companionship.  There is also a chapter called ‘The Lonely Mouse’ which opens with an account of how if you keep a mouse in a cage all on its own and then try to introduce one or more ‘friendly’ mice the singleton will often attack the intruders rather than play nicely. 

In ‘Our Screens, Our Selves’ Hertz engages passionately with the problems of social media particularly in relation to children.  She writes about the fear of being unpopular and thus feeling lonely because of not getting enough ‘likes’ or being uninvited to parties.  Children learn screen addiction from their parents and have fewer weapons to protect themselves.  Hertz advocates school intervention with courses in managing social media.  Such lessons are common for children in classrooms.  There is some irony in them being taught online.

Hertz’s research is far ranging and deep.  There are more than 200 pages of notes to support the 248 of text.  There is a consummate index as well. She is academic in approach although her prose is encouraging and supportive.  She seems to be a warm and friendly person albeit one who has been upset because, from fear of infection, she has been forced in recent times to sleep in a different room from her long-term partner. 

The Lonely Century warns, in a similar way to David Attenborough’s polemics on global heating, of dire danger.  She, like he, suggests ways forward; for her it is ‘coming together in a world that’s pulling apart’. 

The chapter about the ‘Loneliness Economy’ chronicles many efforts that are being made, around the world, to challenge the rampaging juggernaut of isolation.  Unashamedly Hertz mentions some very small steps that can be made by individuals.  She lauds those neighbourhoods in which volunteers helped with shopping during lockdown.  She praises the ‘colatecs’ of South Korea which offer cheap daytime discos for the elderly.  Ultimately Hertz hopes that small initiatives will coalesce with government and business activities to recentre the concept of common good.

Unfortunately for Hertz’s credo the pandemic has delayed most meaningful action to reinstate communality.  She is aware of this, of course, and tries to remain optimistic.  It is true that clapping the NHS nurtured friendly attitudes in streets around the UK.  But the doors are shut these days as a binary opposition forms between the intimacies inside households and the social distancing outside.  Self-isolation is the zeitgeist now.  

works cited

Hertz, N. The Lonely Century. Sceptre. 2020.

A version of this review was first published on pages 33 and 34 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 14th November 2020. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

The Pianist of Yarmouk Aeham Ahmad

From every conflict emerges an iconic photograph. Nine-year-old Kim Phuk, in 1972, running naked from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, or the body of refugee Alan Kurdi, aged three, washed up on the shore near Bodrum in 2015. The 2014 image of Aeham Ahmad, playing an upright piano surrounded by the debris of Yarmuck, is also unforgettable.

It does not have as much pathos, of course, as depictions of wounded or dead children, but there is poignancy and romance in the idea of music floating through devastated streets. The minaret piercing the dust-laden air provides an alternative hint of hope. On the one side is art, culture and religion and balanced against it is hatred and violence. These are the creations of humankind.

A picture is, allegedly, worth a thousand words. And here is the nub. The Pianist of Yarmouk presents itself ‘as told to Sandra Hetzl and Ariel Hauptmeier’ and then translated by Emanuel Bergmann. It is like a camel, in that the ungainly humped animal is, it is said, a horse developed by a committee. Hetzl and Hauptmeier, and many other people, appear in the final acknowledgments, credited as having ‘stood by the side’ of Aeham Ahmad and given him support, help and encouragement.

Collaboration is admirable but it doesn’t make the book well written. The language is inelegant and the structure is clumsy and repetitive. But it is a great story. Or, in fact, two. Firstly Ahmad describes his blind father, a character who merits a memoir or biography of his own. His relationship with his talented son, Aeham, and with the music they make, is extraordinary.

Secondly Ahmad tells the tale of the Seige of Yarmouk. His account of the former refugee camp and its fate provides another piece of the jigsaw which Europeans need to construct if they are to get a better understanding of Syria and its ongoing war. Sitting cosily in Ireland, worrying about the availability of tinned tuna after Brexit, becomes ridiculous.

Ahmad, who won the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights in 2015, demonstrates immense strength of spirit in his refusal to sell out to extremism even in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances.

Ahmad was born in 1988 to parents of Palestinian heritage. The family lived in Yarmouk which had grown beyond its refugee camp origins to become an impoverished suburb on the outskirts of Damascus in Syria. Because his father is blind his elder son became his seeing-eyes guide and companion. The lack of eyesight did not affect the patriarch’s ambition and confidence. He made his living as a carpenter and a wedding violinist but determined that his son would be a classical musician.

Higher Institute of Music, Damascus

The first section of The Pianist of Yarmouk details the struggles that father and son faced to secure places at prestigious music establishments where the boy faced hostility and prejudice from wealthier, more bourgeois Syrians. Being blind meant that Ahmad’s father could often get entry to places from which his lack of status would normally have excluded him, and enabled him to persuade school authorities to accept his son as a pupil.

Ahmad’s studies demanded all sorts of unaffordable equipment such as solfège exercise books, music scores and, of course, a piano to replace the family’s lowly electronic keyboard. Although Ahmad was naturally musical he was no genius and success came only as a result of hours of practice. Sometimes, as is natural, Ahmad preferred to go out and play football in the streets but the influence and wrath of his father repressed these urges most days.

The story that Ahmad tells lists events in his progress through his musical training but does not really explore his relationships with his mother or brother. Neither does he provide a three dimensional impression of his own character and emotions. He states baldly that from an early age all he wanted was a family of his own but he does not seem that interested in girls. After many attempts he persuades his mother to find a wife for him and then he gets married. That’s it, really. Although the young couple seem to have been inseparable from the moment they met.

Equally sparse are references to religion. It appears that Ahmad’s attitude to God is pragmatic and not in any way fanatical. He prays passionately only when he is in trouble. It is reminiscent of most people’s attitude to Christianity. Much of the time they don’t give it a thought but at times of crisis they turn to God for help. On the other hand his faith in humanity is strong. He states, ‘whether someone was Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Orthodox or agnostic, gay or not, didn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters is being a wonderful human being’.

Yarmouk before the civil war. Alexios Konstantos

In Yarmouk life was a constant struggle for Palestinian Syrians. They had very few conveniences. Journeys to school, involved three buses and walking, taking two hours or longer each way. Building and labouring had to be done by the men of the family. Everything took forever. Money was short. But they were happy within their community. Ahmad says, ‘we’re sitting in our store throwing another log onto the stove, roasting chestnuts in the embers’.

But then the Syrian Civil War intruded. The streets were barricaded and their neighbourhood sealed off. Tahani, his wife, gave birth to a son. The small family existed surrounded by ‘hunger and death’. Reports came in from the rest of the country. Towns controlled by the Free Syrian Army were now besieged by President al-Assad’s forces and their populations were being starved to death. Before long the citizens of Yarmouk would also be eating clover and leaves. Ahmad’s brother, Alaa, disappeared in 2013 and his parents have still found no trace of him.

 

 

Ahmad himself was not entirely despondent. He and a friend, Abu Mohammed started a street choir. At first it was for men only. The participants brought in poems and Ahmad set them to music making refugee songs about longing and survival.   The band had the idea of taking a piano out into the street and a local journalist filmed them. The song, ‘Oh You Emigrants Return’ was uploaded on YouTube. Thus the concept of Ahmad as the piano man of Yarmouk was launched on January 28^th, 2014.

The Yarmouk Boys soon disbanded. It was the usual story of ‘petty jealousies’. For a while Ahmad played with a choir of children until a young girl, Zainab, was killed by a sniper as she sang, ‘Yarmouk Misses You Brother’. Now Ahmad felt he could risk no one but himself. And so it was in April of the same year that he was photographed by Niraz Saled, wearing his green shirt – a pianist amid the rubble. The image went viral.

Chronologically The Pianist of Yarmouk terminates in 2018. By then Ahmad had escaped from Syria and brought his wife and children and then his parents to live in Wiesbaden in Germany.

The image says Ahmad, ‘can never tell you what happened before or what came after’. His book can and does.

Works cited

Ahmad, A.  The Pianist of Yarmouk. 2019. Michael Joseph.

A version of this review was first published on pages 33 and 34 of the Weekend Section of the Irish Examiner on 18th May 2019.  It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.