Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila

The Africa Reading Challenge asks folks to read five books about Africa or by African authors in 2008 and then review each book in a blog post. I’m good at the reading part, and I like the blogging part, but I’m a miserable reviewer. So you’ve been warned.

I found Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel on some list of great African literature somewhere linked from the original Africa Reading Challenge blog post. If for only this book, I am glad to be focusing my reading on Africa.

Waiting for an Angel is a short book, closer to a novella, really, or linked short stories. It focuses on a group of young people during a coup in Nigeria. Habila’s writing is quite lyrical. I’d say it reads like a poem, except poems aren’t always easy to follow. How about it reads like a flowing stream? Or maybe more like a whitewater river: always downstream, but big nasty rocks along the way (in the form of some really tragic happenings).

Okay, no more river metaphors from me. I’m trying to say this was a great book about very sad things. The end.

Africa Reading Challenge update

When I started the Africa Reading Challenge, this was my draft list of books to read:

• Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)
• Held at a Distance: A Rediscovery of Ethiopia by Rebecca G. Haile (Ethiopia)
• The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
• Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (South Africa)
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe)
• Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe)
• Measuring Time or Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (Nigeria)

Ha! I laugh at myself. There’s no way I’m reading that much Mahfouz. Here’s my current list, with two down and three to go:

• Mating by Norman Rush (Botswana) done!
• Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (Nigeria) done!
• Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) on my shelf
• Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (South Africa) to be obtained
• Another book TBD (I have lots of my shelf but I’m not sure yet which I’ll end up reading)

So, that’s the update.

Reading Sudan

About three years ago, I started combing book lists for books about Ethiopia. My search expanded geographically, and I read a lot of stuff about Sudan, probably because there’s so much great writing coming out of Sudan–which is probably because of all the terrible things happening there.

In an earlier post, i recommended What Is the What by Dave Eggers. Of the four Lost Boys narratives I’ve read, this is the best, because a talented writer and editor, Eggers, took Valentino Deng’s powerful story and combined it with his own writing talents. When I read What Is the What, I was already familiar with the basic plotline of Deng’s story, which is similar to other Lost Boys’ works, but the story still captured my attention completely. None of these stories are easy reading–a friend of mine had a hard time with What Is the What because it’s really such terrible thing that happened to these young kids–but they are incredibly compelling.

If you’d like to read more accounts of young refugees from Sudan, here are some other great books:

God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir by John Bul Dau
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan by Benson Deng, Alphonsion Deng, and Benjamin Ajak

I’ve also read some more current Sudanese memoirs. Some people don’t know that slavery still exists in the world, including in modern day Sudan. The word is getting out, in part because of the writing and speaking of the following two authors, whose books I recommend:

Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazer
Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in American by Francis Bok

It’s incredible the injustices these two endured including, in Nazer’s case, being enslaved in London after the family who kept her moved there.

All of these books relate directly to the tragedies happening daily in Sudan, so reading them is a good way to learn also about the current situation there.

So, that brings you all up to date, pretty much, on some great books I read before I started the Africa Reading Challenge. There is more to come. Let’s hope it’s soon.

Africa in the New York Times

Two articles from today’s online New York Times caught my attention.

First, some new research suggests that the transition of northern Africa from Savannah to Sahara was gradual and over about 6000 years.

Next, alarmingly, the Times reports that regional war and the global increase in food prices portend a major famine in the Horn of Africa.

Great books about Africa, Part 1 of 8 million

First, a technical note: I keep promising, and then not delivering, blog posts with pictures. The truth is that my internet connection is s o o o o s l o w and inconsistent that it’s almost physically painful to deal with uploading and then blogging photos. I have a million pictures just waiting to be blogged. Maybe I’ll get to them eventually.

Meanwhile, my friend K in CO asked me a glorious question: what are my favorite books set in Africa? Given my commitment to the Africa Reading Challenge, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I have two categories in mind: books by Africans and books set in Africa. Of course there’s tremendous overlap, but I will also eventually highlight a few books written by non-Africans but set on the continent.

I should also note that despite my residence in Egypt, my reading has focused on sub-Saharan Africa and especially East Africa, an interest that began before my kids’ adoptions (and really was probably one of the reasons I became interested originally in Ethiopia).

So, here are a few great books set in Africa I read before I began the Africa Reading Challenge (and really these books are on my unofficial life list of best-stuff-I’ve-read):

What Is the What by Dave Eggers. A fictionalized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a former “Lost Boy” of Sudan, now a college student in the US. This book will knock your socks off (right, K?). (And my copy is autographed by Deng! But that was actually after I read it.)

We Wish You to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. Did I say the Eggers book would knock your socks off? Well, this one will knock your shirt off. This non-fiction book inspired the Don Cheadle film Hotel Rwanda (also highly recommended), both of which focus on the Rwandan genocide perpetrated against the minority but historically dominant Tutsi tribe by the Hutus. (And, no, I didn’t know the difference between Tutsis and Hutus before I read the book.) Based on the description, it might be hard to understand on how this book can be so good. But it is.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. Set in Nigeria during the Biafran-Nigerian War (the Nigerian Civil War) of the late 1960s, this novel focuses on the lives of three people, an upper class Igbo/Biafran woman professor; a white British expat who longs to be a true Biafran; and a young Igbo/Biafran man who works as a household servant. The writing is gorgeous and the story engrossing.

And now, a familiar promise: there is more to come.

Why are we here?

An anonymous Canadian asked me a question:

I have 2 ask..why r u in Egypt? I’ve read ur blog occassionally and for the most part, you don’t really enjoy or fit in with the culture or the predominant religion, Islam.

Why would you stay somewhere that you consider somewhat racist? You spend most of the time with expats. It doesn’t make much sense.

Seems like a fair question, though I’m intrigued by this notion that you should only live places you love, and immediately leave places you find you don’t love. Because how would we know how we’d really feel about living in Egypt until we moved here?

Now here’s the long-winded answer.

What brought us to Egypt was Africa, a real passion for learning more about this gigantic continent with the possibility of traveling to sub-Saharan Africa and especially Ethiopia and other parts of East Africa, which are not all that far away. And where both my kids were born. We brought them from Ethiopia to the US, and they inspired us to come back this way.

What brought us here was a desire for our kids to feel at home in the world, to think of the world not from an exclusively American perspective but one informed by life beyond the States.

What brought us here was a sense of adventure, of wanting to live and work outside of the US.

And what brought us here was an interesting career opportunity for me (the boring part).

All these things have worked out great. I’m fully immersed in the Middle East, of course, but also in Africa, and I have more opportunities to learn about and understand this continent than I ever would in the US. On a daily basis, I see and interact with Africans from all over the continent, not just Egypt but also Sudan, Ethiopia, and other countries.

And the boys, I think, have really benefited, young as they are. Their school is incredibly international, and they are learning a lot about the world. Their classmates are Egyptian, Italian, American, Moroccan, Japanese, Ghanaian, and… the list goes on.

And right now we are here because I have a two year contract. And, actually, I really enjoy my job, which I don’t write about because it’s not good blog fodder, and Mr. Four enjoys his lifestyle too. We can afford for him not to work (a luxury in the US for people in our income bracket), and we can afford household help (an even more amazing luxury). My work schedule here is about 35 hours/week, and I have generous holiday time in addition to six weeks of annual leave. I have so much more time with my kids here; it’ll be hard to go back to the US for this reason alone. Life is easy and good.

We have faced some challenges we didn’t expect. I was warned about racism in Egypt, but coming from the US (with its own problems with racism, you might have heard), it was hard to understand how that would play out for our family. It’s been a disappointment. I also didn’t realize how utterly confusing our family would be to many Egyptians (though I hasten to add there are plenty here who do get us).

Despite occasional angst, the problems, we’ve decided, don’t merit breaking my contract, which would likely cost us lots of money in moving expenses back to the US, as well as major professional issues for me. And the longer we’re here, the more we like.

Lots of people live in places they don’t love for very mundane reasons. And, there are many, many Cairenes who don’t love Cairo at all. In fact, many Egyptians here apologize for Cairo! As if some of the problems of living here are their fault individually. My concerns about Cairo are voiced by many others, Egyptians and expats. And there are plenty of expats who are only here for the money (and not just oil families). That’s not us by a long shot.

We do spend a lot of time with expats. As a friend observes, just like Egyptian immigrants to the US spend a lot of time with Egyptians and other Arabic-speakers. This is not an unusual phenomenon, to spend time with people who speak the same language and have the same culture. Our community here is American but also international, and the expat community is great. Despite all this, we have become friendly with some Egyptian families (including some who have invited us over for dinner this weekend), and I have some wonderful Egyptian colleagues at work. Mostly, though, we hang out as a family.

It’s a romantic and misguided notion to think that if you move to a new country, the locals will rush to befriend you. That doesn’t happen so much in places like Cairo, with something like 40,000 Americans and 100,000 expats.

It’s true that I don’t have a particular adoration for Egyptian or Arab culture (though I do find Arabic fascinating and I love Egyptian food). But I didn’t know any of this until I got here. I don’t have a particular interest in Islam, though it’s been great to learn about Islam from my Muslim friends and colleagues. I love, for example, hearing the call for prayer five times a day. I love seeing the Nile River on my afternoon commute, and, on rare clear days like today, the Great Pyramids in the distance.

Our reasons for moving here, and then staying, are complex. What is simple is this: moving here was a great decision, and I’m so glad we’re here.

Reading my way through Africa

This year I’ve been focusing my reading on African authors, particularly sub-Saharan African. So I was delighted today to learn, courtesy of Andrew at Meskel Square, about the Africa Reading Challenge, sponsored by … some guy with a blog.

The idea is to read, in 2008, six books “that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues” and then write a blog post with a review of each.

So here’s my list of eight books, of which I’ll read at least six or seven (I haven’t read any of these yet):

• Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)
• Held at a Distance: A Rediscovery of Ethiopia by Rebecca G. Haile (Ethiopia)
• The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
• Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (South Africa)
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe)
• Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe)
• Measuring Time or Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (Nigeria)

I read Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun a few weeks ago, and it was incredible, so I look forward to her other book. Of course I’m especially interested in Ethiopia, so Haile’s book should be great. Mahfouz’s book is a choice because I really should read some more Egyptian writers. Mandela’s autobiography is supposed to be great. And the last couple were semi-random picks.

Join me, if you are so inclined.