Book Review: the Magdalen Laundries horror brought home in a novel by Claire Keegan

At the urging of a friend, I read this fictionalized account of one man’s shocked awakening to the hidden horrors of the Magdalen Laundries. Of course I had read the journalistic exposés about the cruel exploitation of unwed mothers by a particular order of nuns. But the novel addresses a thornier question: how could an entire town have remained willfully ignorant, or at least unwilling to act? Claire Keegan sets the narrative in 1985, a time of great economic hardship in Ireland. Her protagonist, Bill, is a decent, hardworking man, making an honest but precarious living as a coal merchant, providing for his church-going wife and five daughters, in a tight-knit community where the nuns are figures of power and wealth. The novel is very short, but Keegan takes her time laying out the daily details of Bill’s family and work life, relaying the exchanges in the local patois, to make a point. An ordinary man, not a hero or a rebel, must make a stand. One of the pleasures of this novel is the occasional unexpected image: a woman’s hair is neither red nor brown, but the colour of cinnamon. If I have a nit to pick, it is that the dialogue can sound too expository to be natural. And there is a puzzling episode: Bill happens upon an unknown neighbor in her nightgown, and experiences fleeting desire for her. Is it meant to emphasize that he is no saint? But that aside, how is it that, in this tight-knit community, he has no idea who the woman and her family in the house across the road are?

Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence, revisited.

According to my principle that if you read a work before you were twenty, that first time doesn’t count, I am now (re)reading two masters of early twentieth century English fiction, Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. Not exactly beach reading, but what you grab at random from your old schoolgirl bookcase as you head out the door. Both writers were obsessed with class, both borderline misogynistic. One of them, Lawrence, bonafide working class; the other, Maugham, bourgeois, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. In his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s mercilessly mocking parody of Cockney underclass accents, tastes, and mores comes across today as shockingly snobbish and judgmental. Their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbesian terms. They drink and procreate “in the double digits.” The men beat their wives and even their lovers, and the women have hair-dragging, face-clawing catfights. And yet Maugham is not entirely unsympathetic. His eponymous heroine, Liza, high-spirited and coquettish as she is, starts off with her own code of conduct. Maugham presents her downfall as an inevitable consequence of her circumstances rather than due to an inherent vice.

Lawrence also transcribes the Nottinghamshire dialect of his coal miner milieu with its “thee” and “thou” but without caricature or irony. He is equally aware of the ready brutality of the men, and the hard lives of the women, but he sees their lives as essentially tragic, and worthy of dignity. Lawrence himself escaped the “downpit” life he was born into, but the humiliation and class resentment transpires through all his work.

Two Related, Timely Books addressing Conflict and Conscience

 Two timely, related books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Both are reporters and both make a plea for the humanization of those whose victimhood is conveniently ignored by the media. The world view of both writers springs from a personal history that is inextricable from the objective realities they witness and report.

Coates travels to Dakar, Senegal, to retrace the origins of the slave trade, and experiences a conflicting sense of himself as, simultaneously, belonging as Black but foreign as American. He then travels through Israel and the West Bank and is shocked by the systematic oppression of Palestinians under Israeli rule. When he notices that some houses have cisterns on the roof to catch rainwater and others do not, he learns that Israelis are given permits to have cisterns but Palestinians are almost always denied that permission. He relates these conditions to what his slave ancestors experienced in the South.

Omar El Akkad recounts his family’s journey from their native Egypt to Qatar then Canada and eventually the United States. In due course, after college, he becomes a journalist, a war reporter covering the invasion of Afghanistan and other conflicts for major Canadian and American newspapers. Years later, he is jolted out of his comfortable middle-class life in Oregon with his wife and child, by the Gaza war and its brutality. He is particularly shocked out of his complacency by the dehumanizing way in which the relentless bombing of Gaza is covere in the Western media. He had believed that American society would not violate its own rights, freedoms and principles beyond a certain point. But El Akkad does not absolve himself of the human struggle to fully empathize with the suffering of others: he notes that a momentary fright over the health of his five-year-old daughter terrifies him beyond anything he sees on the news.

Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

 Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

I remember the precise moment in February 2011 when I decided to go to Tahrir. I had been in Egypt on vacation that winter, as I often am, when the revolt against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25th. My initial caution was shared by many: dread of chaos and pessimism about a democratic outcome. The tipping point for me came when Mubarak’s police forces started shooting at peaceful civilian demonstrators. For the first time, I joined the throngs finding their way to Tahirir in support of the young protesters camping there.

I wonder, now, how Iranians are feeling. Is the tipping point for many of them the massacre of student protesters in January? By all reports the majority of the population is young, well-educated, and chafing under a cruelly repressive regime. Are they now welcoming the chance to topple the regime, even at the cost of foreign intervention? For others, is the bombing of their cities and collateral deaths of their fellow Iranians at the hands of Israeli and American forces too high a price? Do they look at Iraq after the American invasion of 2003 and want none of it?

In Egypt in January 2011, there was no bombing by foreign forces. There may have been covert intervention, as some have claimed, but whatever the case, the young idealists in Tahrir acted in good faith. If there had been an aerial attack by Israel in support of toppling Mubarak, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have spelled the end of any support for a revolutionary movement. Case in point: when Egypt was attacked in 1956, and again in 1967, even those who hated Nasser, those he persecuted most, like my father’s family, did not hesitate for a moment as to where their loyalties lay.

Liberal-minded Iranians today are in a hard place, whether they were hoping for foreign intervention to free them from the yoke of draconian mullah rule, or distrusting it. The odds of a democratic outcome are problematic, to say the least, and the lessons of the Arab Spring are cautionary in this respect. Egypt today, after months of turmoil and a brief, unserious flirtation with an Islamist party, has defaulted back to military dictatorship. 

military 

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes sounded like an intriguing title for a Henning Mankell novel, a departure from the police procedurals he is best known for, so I embarked on it as a sort of neutral “palate cleanser” between other more controversial books. It defied my expectations. The protagonist is an aging, misanthropic former surgeon, Frederick Welin, who self-isolates on a rocky outcrop of Sweden’s remote northern archipelago after a disastrous surgery mistake. For twelve years his only regular contact with the world is the postman who comes on his hydrocopter every week. In winter the ice is so thick even the sea is frozen, and he can walk across to the mainland. The day by day, hour by hour shifts in the weather; the turning of the seasons; the details of every rock and inlet of this barren islet, form not the backdrop but an essential, active agent in the story.

One day, the hermit’s self-imposed isolation is invaded by a woman he brutally abandoned thirtyfive years ago, announcing she is dying of cancer and that he has a daughter he knew nothing about. Now he must face his ugly past, not only with them, but with the patient whose life he ruined on the operating table.

The characters are typically unforthcoming, but when they do engage in long expositions of their feelings, they sound stilted and totally unconvincing. No one speaks like that, not even in Swedish. Also, Mankell spells out every metaphor, even the most glaringly obvious. Finally, a caveat: the book can affect you with its Scandinavian gloom—even on a sunny Carolina day.

Deja Vu

Déjà Vu

Where does it come from, this overwhelming sense of Déjà vu I get watching the coverage of the Minneapolis protests? Then it hits me. Another city, fifteen years ago. Cairo. Tahrir Square. The Arab Spring. A particular incident, the torture and murder of a young man by savagely empowered law enforcement, proved to be the spark that set ablaze fury and resistance to encrusted brutal policing.

The same scenes as in Minneapolis, but to the scale of a city twenty times its size. Eventually a million protesters, mostly idealistic young people, camped out in Tahrir Square, ground zero in the city. Police and security forces, many out of uniform, cracking down on them with tear gas, clubs, violence. And in sympathy with the protesters, a citizenry mobilized to bring food, water, medical supplies and moral support. Even people who did not necessarily sympathize with the cause of the protest were shocked by the brutality of its repression.

At some point, army tanks rolled in, and the desperate protesters turned to the soldiers as saviors, protectors from the police. The same dichotomy, in reverse, as the role played by state as opposed to federal forces in Minneapolis. But in the case of Tahrir, this alliance between the army and the citizenry did not last. In the end, though , when public opinion had reached the tipping point, the regime of thirty years capitulated. Whether or not what replaced it was an improvement is not the issue here. But Tahrir Square reminded the world that the cycle of fear can be broken.

The determined citizens of Minneapolis must be tired of showing up for their most vulnerable communities, day after day, week after week, in freezing temperatures, at the risk of their own lives and safety. Who knows how this story ends? One thing is certain: they have reminded the country, and the world, that “this is not who we are as Americans” is not an empty slogan.