Things Fall Apart

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is from Yeats's poem "The Second Coming". Fifty years after Chinua Achebe wrote this deceptively simple Nigerian tragedy, Things Fall Apart has never been out of print. It's hailed as Africa's best known work of literature and I can easily see why.

At the heart of the story is a strong man, Okonkwo, with an overwhelming need to prove himself--to himself and his tribe; he must overcome the bad reputation of his drunkard ne'er-do-well father. Although Okonkwo can easily defeat enemies he can wrestle, chop or kill; his stubborn pride and anger collide with and fail to overcome those aspects of life which he cannot so readily tackle: providence, family and tribal laws.

So much of the appeal of Things -- for me at least -- is watching Okonkwo encounter a traditional village. I was fascinated (and repulsed) by its customs, mores, and overall precarious harmony. The appropriateness of the title is in the extreme delicacy of that tribal balance which is rocked to the core by the arrival of the English missionaries. All that was as Okonkwo understood the world to be, changes with the introduction of Christianity and Western civilization. It is both a clash of one individual against his own society and a foreign power, as well as the collision of two diametrically opposed cultures. You don't often find so much carefully-contained conflict in a book of this size. Truly incredible!

Chinua Achebe wrote this masterpiece before most of the African nations had declared their independence. Since that time, the Dark Continent has been washed in rivers of blood. One wonders when, and prays for an end to, all the suffering. Such a sacred place and beautiful people; in many ways so like the Garden of Eden. Long live Africa!

Thanks to Ginnie from Goodreads for this link from The Economist about A Golden Jubilee of Things Fall Apart.

Check out my books on Goodreads!

'Children and War' Books

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. ~~African proverb

Children and war? Surely not?! Sadly, yes! When we think of war, we want to think of ‘over there’, men and machines, not children and certainly not our children. But the reality is just the opposite. Children are war’s first and most devastated victims. They are used as barter, soldiers, and human bombs. They are tortured, raped, killed, and left homeless, orphaned, and dead. Children are the greatest sufferers when adults ‘play’ war.

What can we do? Many things certainly, but most of them are beyond the scope of this blog article. Here I would just like to point out some excellent books I have recently run across which deal very sensitively and poignantly with the subject of children and war. By reading these books ourselves and to our children, we can raise the level of awareness of the destructiveness of war—what it does to individuals, families, communities and nations. We can educate our children about the seriousness and the reality of war. Wars are not just somewhere else, happening to people we don’t care about and will never meet. When people kill each other, it affects all of us. When whole cities are burned down and great works of art destroyed, all of humanity suffers the loss.

Also I would like to put out a call for others to let me know when they find other books about children dealing with the effects of war by posting comments here.

I will be listing the four books I have selected in age appropriate order.

The first book is The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter. In this book – suitable for even the youngest child –a very enterprising librarian saved most of her city’s books from utter destruction when the invasion of Iraq reached Basra on April 6, 2003. This is a very gentle introduction to the realities of a current war which can be safely read to even toddlers without too much fear of nightmares. (Parental discretion still advised!) The pictures are bright and colorful and there is usually no more than a sentence or two per page. It teaches the lesson about respect for personal property, something every two year old is very interested in.



Silent Music, A story of Baghdad by James Rumford doesn’t seem at first glance to be a story about war and that may be the best approach to take in reading to our children about difficult subjects. In Silent Music, the little boy, Ali, who lives in Baghdad, loves to write his letters. He seems to love to write as much as yours truly likes to read. Perhaps my readers have some personal passion they can relate to? Ali describes the feel and beauty he experiences when he draws his Arabic script; sometimes the letters are flowing easily, other times they are stiff and awkward. But always, he has the sense that he is making ‘silent music’ with his letters. Then one night he uses his writing to get himself through the bombing of his city. He notes how easy it is to write the word ‘war’ and how difficult to write the word ‘peace’, shalom. How ironic.

The third book I chose, Aram’s Choice is a book for older children, due to its length and text; it is twelve chapters and sixty-nine pages. It deals with the aftermath of the World War I. Aram and his grandmother are the sole survivors from his family of the Armenian genocide by the Turks. The story begins in Corfu, Greece in 1923 and Aram is twelve; he and his grandmother have already fled Anatolia, Turkey and taken shelter here. Now Aram has been offered the opportunity for a new life in Canada, but he doesn’t want to leave his grandmother to go so far away. The book is about beginning again, but not forgetting, learning to let go, but to treasure what was good and is now good. It's a beautiful story—both in the text and the illustrations. Not many books that I'm familiar with have dealt with this first atrocity of the twentieth century and certainly there are few for children. Most highly recommended!

And now for my favorite! Even though I enjoyed the other three books very much, this last one touched me most deeply. Perhaps it is because it is set in my own country, I do not know. It could be that, but I think it is the book itself and the author’s mystical writing style. For one thing, the text is written as if it were verse, which gives it an almost poetical feel. You will see what I mean when you open the cover. And then there is Kek, himself, the little Sudanese refugee who has come to America on the ‘flying boat’ but finds living here ‘hard work’ due to cold ‘like claws on skin’, sun that ‘burns your eyes’, dead trees, and no cows. Poor Kek is a fish out of water in our technological civilization. He is used to green, warmth, livestock and free movement; he has come to white, cold, metal and confinement. But Kek is known as a boy who ‘finds sun when the sky is dark’ and indeed he does find and make his way in this strange new world. As the story progresses you see the beauty and perfection in Applegate’s title, Home of the Brave.

Please do check out these books. In the war for the safety of our children, these are winners. I owe thanks for finding all these marvelous books to my favorite librarian friend from goodreads, Krista the Krazy Kataloguer! Thanks a million, Krista—keep those recommendations coming!

P.S. It only just dawned on me that this might be taken as a 'political statement' rather than as a blog post offering excellent books which gently introduce and teach our children about a difficult and yet very important subject. I am not trying to say or even imply that wars are never necessary; I served in the United States Air Force from 1979-1991 achieving the rank of major before I took an early retirement to stay home with my children. I know the value of our military forces and that wars can be just, valid and essential to world stability and overall peace. But as a mother, I'm also mindful of what happens to children during wartime.

The Beauty and the Devastation

ICE STORM 2007 ~~ MIDWEST CITY, OKLAHOMA ~~ December 9th-11th (so far)

We've lost a good portion of every one of our trees . . . and we're the lucky ones.

Hotel Rwanda

Started: 6 November 2007
Finished: 12 November 2007

What were you doing between April and July 1994? Do you remember that almost one million Rwandans were murdered in just about 100 days during that time period in history?

I'm ashamed to say that when I started to read Hotel Rwanda I had only the vaguest memories of this African tragedy. I knew it occurred when my children were small and my political attentions at an all-time low, but still . . . Then I thought back and recalled that 1993-1994 was also the year we lived in a rented house while we were building our so-called 'dream' house. And in June of '94, the house was finished and we moved in. Yes, the world situation was the last thing on my mind at that time.

Not that I could have done much about the tragedy unfolding in Rwanda had I been paying attention. But I can't help wondering, what was Bill Clinton's excuse? He certainly knew what was going on and he was in a position to have mitigated the worst impact of the genocide.

However, Hotel Rwanda isn't about all the people and countries who did not respond to the plight of the Tutsis, but about one man who did--the 'Oscar Schindler of Africa' some people have called him. That man was Paul Rusesabagina and this is his story.

In 1994, Paul was the hotel manager of the Belgian-owned luxury hotel, the Mille Collines in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Through his courage and cunning he was able to save 1,268 people from almost certain death.

This book is not a narrative of the tragedy--there are a number listed in an appendix--nor a biography about Paul, but the official companion book to the movie made and directed by Terry George. It includes essays on the history of the genocide, the complete screenplay and many photographs from the movie of the same name.

In 1994, Rwanda was the most densely populated African country on the continent--and 51% of the population had the HIV virus; life expectancy was only 39 years. But to really understand what happened during those three and a half terrible months of 1994, we have to go farther back in Rwanda's complex and largely unrecorded history.

Prior to the late 1800s Rwanda didn't even exist as a political entity per se, but was just the land inhabited by two different ethnic groups: the wealthy land and livestock owning Tutsis and the more numerous, Hutus.

With the German defeat in World War I, the Belgians took over Rwanda and began to use the existing Tutsi monarchy to control the population and exploit the institutional differences between the two native groups--granting favored status to the Tutsis and relegating the Hutus to a subservient place within society.

When this situation led to huge tensions and inefficiency, the Belgians tried to rectify the problem with reforms but the Tutsis resisted. So the Belgians turned on their former allies and encouraged a Hutu rebellion which succeeded in 1959. The Belgians themselves were ousted when the Hutu majority declared independence in 1962.

But getting rid of the Belgians didn't resolve conflicts between the two groups of Rwandans; over the ensuing years, rampant corruption, a military coup in '73 and the dictatorship of Major General Habyarimana only further inflamed existing animosities.

On the way home from peace talks which marked the end of a four year civil war and solidified the Arusha Accords promising democratic reforms, General Habyarimana and the President of Burundi were assassinated in a plane crash by members of their own parties. Their deaths were subsequently blamed on the Tutsis and that same night a pre-planned systematic execution of all high-ranking Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

From there the insanity spread like wildfire, primarily led by roaming groups of highly organized military Hutus known as the Interahamwe. As I mentioned initially, almost a million people were killed in a little over three months and most were killed with machete. Three million fled the country causing the world's greatest refugee crisis and leading to wars in neighboring countries, further bloodshed and the eventual re-migration of most of the original emigres.

And what did the United Nations do during those critical three months? Reduce its peace-keeping presence from 2,500 to 270. Wait a minute. Did I read that right? Was that a reduction in peace-keeping troops? Huh?!

While Tutsi men, women and children begged to be shot rather than left to the not-so-tender mercies of their Hutu, machete-wielding, fellow countrymen, the UN soldiers and remaining Westerners boarded all available aircraft and 'got out of Dodge', so to speak. In all fairness, there were many individual acts of protest, tears, and disbelief on the part of the departing Europeans and other UN representatives who were not all eager and willing to just abandon the poor victims to their fate. However, with the exception of Paul and the mini-fortress he created at Mille Collines, few acts of heroism had any substantive effect in terms of actual lives saved.

So what made Paul Rusesabagina so special? Nothing outwardly, that is for sure. He knew the value of fine wines, good cigars and even better connections. He was a hard worker. He was a husband and a father. Perhaps therein was the secret. His wife was Tutsi; he was Hutu--by Rwandan standards, a mixed marriage.

But whatever motivated Paul, he was willing to trade every favor, commodity and scrap of money he could lay his hands on for a human life. And he did. By the end of the three months, his hotel residents were reduced to drinking swimming pool water--but they were alive.

I have requested the OKC Metropolitan Library System purchase this film. Although I was mistaken on an earlier post as to the availabilty of an item, this time I am quite sure that we do not have this movie on hand, either in DVD or VHS format. Given the magnitude of the travesty, the failure of nations to respond and the heroism demonstrated by one courageous soul, this is a story which needs to be told . . . and seen . . . and spread . . . and shared . . . as often and as widely as possible.

One doesn't encounter men of character like Paul Ruseabagina very often. May God bless him for his fortitude, his persistence in the face of great adversity and most of all for his love. I take my hat off to him.

Happy 100th Birthday Oklahoma, The Sooner State!

Although I'd like to take credit for having written the following, I did not and therefore, I will not. However, I do like all the interesting information presented herein about our great state and I reprint it here with my heartiest best wishes for a very Happy Birthday to our Great State on its 100th birthday!

'If someone mentions California, what do you think of? Hollywood, L.A., crowded freeways, beaches and Arnold Schwarzenneger? California, of course, is so much more than that. How about Maine? I think of cold weather, people with funny accents and lobsters. What if someone brings up Idaho. Does it bring to mind potatoes?

When people hear the name of our state, it seems the first thing that comes to mind is not Oklahoma, but "Oklahoma!" The 1943 musical, the first for Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, is the first thing most people in America think of when they hear about the Sooner State. Having people associate our state with a beloved musical is certainly better than some alternatives, like rednecks and tornadoes, but it certainly isn't representative of today's Oklahoma.

"Oklahoma!" is a delight. The story of cowboys and farmers finding love in Oklahoma territory features classic music and ground-breaking choreography, including the dream ballet illustrating Laurey's difficulty in choosing a suitor between cowboy Curley and farmhand Jud Fry. It also gave us our state song, which never fails to bring Oklahomans to their feet, which can prove a bit unnerving for performers in touring versions of the show who, during stops in Oklahoma, must deal with a standing ovation before the final curtain comes down.

"Oklahoma!" is a classic of American musical theater and deserves its place in the pantheon of enduring entertainment treasures. It is not, however, an accurate indication of where our state has been, is today and is going.

Oklahoma is not only the home of Ado Annie and Aunt Eller but of the aerosol can. That wonder of the age was invented in Bartlesville. Oklahoma City is the home of the parking meter, while the shopping cart was born in Ardmore. The electric guitar also was invented in Oklahoma, by a Beggs' musician named Bob Dunn. The first "Yield" sign was installed in Tulsa.

The state has more man-made lakes than any other state, which give us more than a million surface-acres of water and 2,000 more miles of shoreline than the Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined. The Sooner State has produced more astronauts than any other state in the union. Owen Garriott is a hometown Enid boy, of course, while Tom Stafford is from Weatherford, Shannon Lucid from Oklahoma City, William Pogue from Okemah and the late Gordon Cooper from Shawnee. Oklahoma is home to Amateur Softball Association, Sonic restaurants and more F4 and F5 tornadoes than any other state.

Oklahoma is the third-largest gas-producing state in the nation and ranks fourth in the production of wheat, cattle and calves, fifth in the production of pecans, sixth in peanuts and eighth in peaches. The state's colors are neither the crimson and cream of the University of Oklahoma nor the orange and black of Oklahoma State but green and white. The Environmental Protection Agency recognizes Oklahoma as having the most diverse terrain of any state in the nation. The state, according to EPA, boasts 11 distinct ecoregions, one of only four states to have more than 10.

Oklahomans practice 73 major religions. The largest is the Southern Baptist Convention, with nearly 1,600 church and more than 960,000 members. Oklahoma gave birth to Dick Tracy (cartoonist Chester Gould is a native of Pawnee) and Donald Duck (Clarence "Ducky" Nash, the original voice of Walt Disney's Donald, grew up in Watonga).

Oklahomans have survived the Dust Bowl, any number of killer tornadoes, the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and various oil booms and busts. Oklahoma is populated by people who are caring, giving, hard-working, patriotic and fiercely independent. Oklahoma is a good place to live, work and play. The challenge in this, our centennial year, is to make the rest of America aware of what Oklahoma has to offer.'

Happy 100th Birthday Oklahoma! God bless you and God bless America!