Why John Updike should be every writer's role model

Updike's example seemed the model of a real writer's life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades. On top of that, he was a generous, intelligent reader who produced criticism that emphasised the intimate joys of reading, free of the usual dogma and cant. He had an almost sacred, illuminated sense of our little community of writers and readers and his death is a great loss.

This is Zadie Smith on John Updike in the Guardian. Do read the piece, there are some wonderful tributes from many writers who admired him.  I read Couples, and tried to read one of the Rabbit books, but I did not like them all that much. Then again, I was in my very early twenties, and I have not tried to read Updike since.  As I think about what it means to be a writer, I have developed profound admiration for his work ethic, and his sheer commitment to his writing and reading. Zadie Smith's statement sums it all up for me.  In a world where so much fluff is written and said about writing, John Updike simply got on with it.  He is the kind of writer I want to be.

The week that was and what a week it was

If I had any doubts that Easterly and I are in the best possible hands, they were resolved in the last two days.  I have come back from an incredible two days doing pre-publication publicity stuff in London. I am moved and elated by the support and commitment Faber is giving to this unknown writer.  

One of the highlights of my trip was  a dinner with some great books people  - what I thought would be a highbrow dinner ended up with about four of us rapping the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and I am ashamed to say that I still remember all the words. Another highpoint was a visit to the offices of The Guardian, to record a story for a podcast and do a reading and an interview. 

Now, it turns out more people read this blog than I had thought, so I have to step up my game a little. This post is the first of a new weekly feature where I post links to various stuff of interest.  Please check out this incredible series of portraits of Obama's peeps, wonderful studies of the simply brilliant team Mr. Obama has put together, including two of my favourite Obaminas, Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, the power couple with a Zimbabwean connection. Okay, the Zimbabwean connection is a bit of stretch, as it comes in the form of their Rhodesian ridgeback, Perry.  Can you tell I have been stalking them? 

Also check out Obama's new bodyman, the incredibly attractive Reggie Love, the real life Charlie Young. Drool.  Is it me or is this looking more and more like the West Wing with even hotter looking people??  Gawker certainly thinks so, they ran a poll to elect the Hottest Obama Hottie ... and Rahm Emanuel won!  Nothing against Mr. Emmanuel, but I cannot believe he won over  my man Reggie, Eugene Kang and Jon Favreau.  Maybe it is that whole missing middle finger Rambo thing he's got going.

This portrait series is a sobering contrast to the portraits of Bush's old guard in the February issue of Vanity Fair.  Even though Bush is gone, Vanity Fair is not letting up. It looks like we will be reading about Bushian misdeeds for the foreseeable future. 

I like all of Obama's decisions this week, especially the Guantanamo one and the lifting of the funding ban on foreign organisations that provide abortion help. Nice one. The thing about having a president everyone likes, well, the funny people anyway, is that the comedy suffers. How do you make fun of the guy? Post-inauguration, American late night comedians focused on Bush, because, I guess, Bush jokes never get old,  while The Onion had this really funny story: Hillary Clinton Mouthing Along to Presidential Oath.  Now, I love Hillary, but hee hee.  

The most memorable blog entry for me this week was my best and only Danish friend Peter Fogtdal's joyous celebration of Slumdog Millionaire, which included this great line:  After seeing the film, I wanted to move to Mumbai and live like a beggar.  And the headline of the week came from the front page of Friday's Guardian: Flood warning: Kate (Winslet) gets Oscar Nod.  

Hee hee.

Meanwhile, in the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi ... 

Nothing is more entertaining when you are in bed with the flu than a gladiatorial contest.  I developed a nasty flu in London, and spent the weekend reading Zimbabwe Times editor Geoff Nyarota's stinging zinging response to Jonathan Moyo's wiffle waffle attempts to interpret the constitution, and MDC No. 3 Tendai Biti's withering blistering critique of Arthur Mutambara.  Now, Mutambara may be his own worst enemy, his stements lately are such self-parody that it does not seem to be worth the trouble to respond to him, but read the piece in all its splendid verbosity at The Zimbabwe Times.

All eyes will, of course, be on the SADC summit in South Africa tomorrow, where we can expect revolutionary things from the guardians of our nascent democracy.

Or not.

Have a good week, good people. 

My favourite images from last night

These have to be two of my favourite pictures from last night. Very nice. Thanks to Gawker and the Huffington Post, from whom I nicked them. UPDATE: Over at Gawker, the commentariat is going to town with puns about regular balls versus inaugural balls. Heh heh. I have no comment that I can make in public, other than to say the chemistry between these two is burning my eyes, it is that sizzling.

On the Pulse of the Morning of this Fine New Day

Wasn't that something? I bought four newspapers this morning, my usual Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. They are my gift to Kush, and to his children if he ever has any, so that he understands the meaning of 20 January 2009, and he sees that the hope and pride expressed in America on that day were echoed by people in all languages everywhere.

Not in Zimbabwe though: the only national broadcaster, rather than have the people of Zimbabwe experience the glorious changing of the guard in America chose to rerun an old movie. If you are a paranoid dictator with totalitarian tendencies , you will not want your people to see the torch being passed to the fifth man in 28 years to win the eighth presidential election in the country you are constantly demonising, while you have been in control of (and pauperised) your country for those same 28 years. You will not want all that guff about hope and change poisoning the minds of your people because change is bad, really bad. Bad change.

That movie, whatever it was, had better have been good. Is that a grammatically-correct sentence? But you get my meaning, nothing short of a combination of Terminator II:Judgement Day, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Fugitive and every kung-fu film starring Jet Li and Bruce Lee could possibly compete with the adrenaline rush of watching history in the making.

I am amused that the Zim forums are alight with discussion of Obama's reference to leaders with clenched fists, it is, goes the breathless verdict, an attack on the most famous fist of all, the fist of fury, as the Zanu PF proudly called their president's fist.

But ... Zim is going to sour my year enough without spoiling this moment too, so back to Obama.

So I am watching the inauguration with my son Kush, and there is a shot of a black woman with tears down her face, and Kush says, Mummy, why is the brown lady crying?

Kush's world is one of brown people, and strawberry people, and yellow people. Colours to him are literal, so black people are brown, white people are strawberry, and mixed race people and Asians are brown, yellow or yellowbrown depending on the skin tone. His reference to strawberry, by the way, comes not from the fruit but from the colour of the Petit Suisse strawberry yoghurt he eats every day.

There were some strawberry people who used to go to Africa to kidnap brown people and sell them in America, I begin.

Like Joseph? he asks.

Joseph, is, of course, he of the Amazing Technicolour Dream-coat.

Like Joseph, I say.

It is not good to sell people, he says

You and William Wilberforce, Kush, I think, but I only say, No it is not. The conversation is getting off track and I continue: So they sold all these people from Africa as slaves, and then the slaves had children who were also slaves but then they were freed and they had more children, and the children had more children, and now those children are really happy to see someone with a father from Africa as the President of America.

Did they kidnap Obama? he asks with a look of horror.

According to John Pilger and the Sour Left Brigade they did, I say. Not really. I just laugh, and reassure him, because the point has been totally lost. Maybe we will do the translatlantic slave trade and its implications for contemporary race relations when Kush is 6 because 5 may just be too young.

Mummy munoziva, he says later (munoziva is "did you know" in Shona, that is how he begins almost all his sentences) Munoziva, Obama lives in a White House.

He does now Kush, I say. He does now.

In which we witness the failure of an African solution to an African problem and await with trembling eagerness the next African solution

I reluctantly turn my mind from the glorious events in America today to the farcical results of talks in Zimbabwe yesterday. Farcical is the wrong word because Zimbabwe is now beyond a farce. The talks between the two parties, MDC, and ZPF, have, predictably broken down. Another special SADC summit has been called. There is speculation about the next move, many are saying that SADC will now ask Mugabe and his ZPF party to form a government.

To see whether this makes any sense at all, let us see how we got here.

In March 2008, Zim held parliamentary and presidential elections, in the former, the MDC got more MPs in the house of assembly than ZPF and in the latter, Mugabe lost to Morgan Tsvangirai. The figures were manipulated to deny Tsvangirai an outright victory. Mugabe and Tsvangirai then went into a runoff. Tsvangirai was prevented from campaigning, ZTV refused to flight his adverts, he was denied permission to hold campaign rallies. MDC supporters were beaten, raped and tortured. More than 100 were killed by ZPF agents, war veterans and other supporters. Villagers were beaten up, their huts were burned. The violence became untenable, Tsvangirai withdrew from the election, leaving Mugabe to run against himself. Mugabe won by more than 80 percent of the vote.

SADC pronounced this election as being neither free nor fair.

The African Union then mandated SADC to oversee a power-sharing agreement, and recommended a 50-50 share of ministries. This agreement has not been implemented because Mugabe refuses to give up control of all security ministries. And SADC is now going to recommend that Mugabe form a government on his own?

Riiiiiiiiiight.

This particular African solution to an African problem has clearly failed. A power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe is not possible. Only one solution remains: new internationally-supervised elections, winner takes all. If Mugabe and ZPF still win under these conditions, so be it. They will then have a fresh mandate to find the solutions to the mess they spent 28 years creating.

The Gathering of the Thousands ... And it Begins

I love this picture, from Getty via Gawker. 

Zimbabwean and Zimbabweanist scholars respond to Mahmood Mamdani

One of the things that irritates me most about the debate on Zimbabwe is the persistent view of some Africanist academics that Mugabe is a misunderstood titan waging a sole post-colonial slash neo-liberal struggle against the evil forces of the capitalist West. Zanu PF's looting of the state, the cronyism which sees multiple farms go the favoured few, and the violence against opposition supporters is conveniently ignored. At the end of last year, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, originally from Uganda, posited this view in a truly atrocious essay in the London Review of Books, in which he quoted, among others, Gideon Gono, the Reserve Bank governor, as authoritative sources to explain the state in which Zim finds itself. He also had a quite astonishing theory that what he termed the Ndebele-led trade union movement has been in opposition to the struggle of the Shona peasantry. One got the sense that Mamdani was writing about an imagined Zimbabwe.

The article naturally prompted a huge response from Zimscholars like Terence Ranger, Tim Scarnecchia and Jocelyn Alexander. Tim put together a superb response which was signed by 31 scholars and writers including Diana Jeater, Clapperton Mavhunga and my good friend Miles Tendi. I was also proud to be of that number. Below is an excerpt from the letter. For more, see The London Review of Books.

_________________


For a number of scholars, Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ requires a further response, given Mamdani’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. Some aspects of his argument are uncontroversial: there was a real demand for land redistribution – even the World Bank was calling for it in the late 1990s as the best way forward in Zimbabwe – and some of the Western powers’ original pronouncements and actions were hypocritical. There is a real danger, however, in simplifying the lessons of Zimbabwe. It isn’t just a matter of stark ethnic dichotomies, the urban-rural divide, or the part played by ‘the West’.

One of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe is to convince peers working on other areas of Africa to look more deeply at the crisis and not to be fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimisation. Mamdani has, unfortunately, fallen in with this rhetoric by characterising Zimbabwean history and politics as fundamentally a battle between what he sees as an urban-based opposition, supported by the West, and a peasant-based ruling party besieged by external forces.

This flight of fantasy portrays Mugabe and his Zanu-PF cronies as heroes of a landless peasantry (which is how they see themselves) and the state – backed up by the paramilitary violence of war veterans and others – as the vanguard of a peasant revolution. We suggest that Mamdani acquaint himself with the large body of Zimbabwean scholarship, which is easily available, rather than selectively using the arguments of scholars such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros on land reform, and Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s Reserve Bank governor, as his source on sanctions. Citing Gono is rather like using Milton Obote’s writings as a source for conditions in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. A starting point for more informed scholarship is the recent Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, found at http://concerned africascholars.org.

The shoes on her feet

You would have to be an alien to be unaware of the implosion of the Zimbabwean economy. The statistics are well-known, the highest inflation rate in the world – the second highest in history – the lowest life expectancy in the world, the highest number of orphans per capita, formal unemployment exceeding 80 per cent. It comes as no surprise that a July 2008 survey found Zimbabwe to be the unhappiest place on earth.

All this comes nowhere near to expressing the desperate reality of Zimbabwe. For it is not in the statistics, but in the painful shock of an unexpected detail that the real tragedy of Zimbabwe can be seen.

I spent three weeks in Zimbabwe recently and saw first-hand what the imploding economy has done to the lives of the very poor. The stories are heartbreaking: the Glen View man who loses all four children to cholera, the Hatcliffe woman whose 18-month old daughter dies because the doctor at Nazareth clinic would not shorten his tea break, the Kambuzuma widow who dies from the stress of burying four close relatives in succeeding weeks. But it was this story of how an old woman from Marondera came to lose her shoes that spoke to me more eloquently than any other about the kind of nation my county has become.

_______

To read more, check out the Last Word column in next month's issue of The Africa Report.

Happy New Year To All of You!

Happy new year, you lovely Leute. I am now back in Geneva after three weeks in Zimbabwe. I have a lot to say about my time in Zim, but I am still a little shell-shocked, so I may take some time to process it all.  In a nutshell, the country we knew as Zimbabwe is as good as dead.  Only a miracle can bring things to anything nearing a semblance of normality. 

I have never seen such misery outside a war zone, but I suppose a war zone is what Zim has become. Everyone is battling for profit, the motto seems to be - rip off the next guy because the next guy is going to rip you off. I bought a few things at TM yesterday, TM is a supermarket that is licensed to sell good in foreign currency.  In a county that does not accept US cents, you find products being priced at $3.05, $12.66, etc, all of this being set up to make sure you leave your change behind. I have left so much money in Zim shops that I felt a small sense of triumph when I forced TM to accept 15 dollars for goods that cost $15.05. I gained 5 whole cents from TM, and felt a little thrill. Other than that, I spent most of my time shifting between despair, incredulity and helpless anger. Yes, Zim is that bad, and worse.  

Those 1000 or so people whose deaths horrified the world in Kenya early last year?  Almost double that amount have died in Zimbabwe in the last three months from cholera.  And the deaths are rising.  I counted about seven funerals that friends and family attended in the three weeks that I was there. Not all of them were cholera-related, but the collapse of the health system means that people are dying more and more from neglect tha anything else. I am still haunted by the story that a friend of my  cousin told me about how his little 18 month daughter Desire died in her mother's arms, because the doctor at Nazareth clinic would not treat her.

"Do not bother me," where his exact words when they pleaded with him to do something during his tea break. Then he threw in this snide little gem, in Shona of course, for maximum effect:  "If it comes to the worst I will accompany you to the mortuary."  

My cousin's friend you see, is a poor man who looks like a poor man. If he had enough US dollars, he could have bought his daughter's life, but nothing works if you are poor in Zim. 

And through it all, the government sings sovereign this and sovereign that.  Here is a funny story -  on our British Airways flight from Harare to Johannesburg yesterday afternoon, one of the passengers, in a navy suit and black patent leather (aka glass) shoes was Gideon Gono, Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank governor and de facto prime minister. So the Sovereign Guv'nor flies BA, which, last time I checked, was part of the perfidious, sanctions-imposing West. Whatever happened to good old Air Zimbabwe, I wonder?  Not good enough for the Guvn'or?   

In the meantime, good things have been happening re my forthcoming book: the Guardian has listed me along with Yiyun Li, Jonathan Littell, Toby Litt, Lawrence Hill,  Chimamanda Adichie, Sarah Waters, Monica Ali and many others as writers whose books are some of the literary treats coming out in 2009.  Nice company, even though my name was misspelt:)