Month: April 2021

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Worth by Bharti Dhir

An Inspiring true story of abandonment, exile, inner strength and belonging

Diverse Wisdom Initiative

This book came into being due to the Diverse Wisdom Initiative at Hay House, a proactive measure inspired by the work of Jessica Huie to find writers from outside the typical mould of who their published authors have tended to be. It doesn’t require me to describe what that looked like, being a well-known universal problem in many publishing houses.

Authors like Kyle Gray, Rebecca Campbell and others were given a group of potential authors to mentor from those who applied to the initiative.

Perseverance

Inspirational memoir of belongingBharti Dhir was a late applicant, encouraged by her niece to submit, she resisted until the last minute of the last day, one finger typing her submission. Tentatively accepted she became a mentee of Kyle Gray, however when all the draft manuscripts were submitted, and they were told which had been accepted, hers wasn’t there. Kyle Gray sent a one word reply. Devastated. And then did what an empowered, loyal supporter he is, would do, not give up until they’d changed their mind!

And what a wonderful book she has co-written as a result.

Review

As a baby, Bharti Dhir was abandoned in a fruit box on the side of the road in the Uganda countryside. To this day she doesn’t know who her birth mother was, though rumours created a version of the story, and the imagination of the author and reader contribute to what might have happened. Fortunately, she was found safe and taken to a nearby hospital.

Bharti Dhir Worth Hay House Diverse WisdomMeanwhile, her future adoptive mother, seven months pregnant with her first child had a kind of vision or strong premonition, in association with the Hindu Goddess Lakshimi, that there a baby girl coming to her, and insisted it wasn’t the baby she was carrying.

Suffice to say, there is a wonderful narrative built around how she came to be the first daughter of this family and how they overcome a lot of negative feeling, prejudice and racism about their decision as a Punjabi-Sikh family to adopt an Asian-African baby of unknown heritage.

At times she begged family members for details about what they knew of her background, however everyone was tight-lipped, those that knew anything having promised never to speak of it.

Left with no other choice, given no one would speak to me, I resolved to live with my imagination.

Overcoming Adversity

Throughout her childhood there are numerous events, situations, heath problems and challenges that Bharti and her family live through, address and overcome, some of which contribute (at the time) to diminishing her sense of self-worth. With each situation, she shares how she is able to look back with compassion and forgiveness and describe how she was able to turn all that around.

It was these daydreams that helped to build my sense of worth, making me believe that I’d get there one day.

Memoir Worth Adoption Abandonment Exile Belonging

Author Bharti Dhir

The situations are often tense and frightening, the heath problems she endures and the witch doctor remedies they seek out, having exhausted all conventional options are alarming and torturous to read of.

However, this is no misery memoir, here is an empowered woman, writing her early life story for her own daughter, acknowledging that there will be times in one’s life when all seems to be against you, that every situation is temporary, that finding and nurturing that core of self belief will carry you through even the worst situations.

Curses and witchcraft were the given explanation for so many ills in Uganda – from businesses failing to sickness, and from childlessness to death. In Uganda, you couldn’t pretend that the belief in magic didn’t exist. It was soaked into the fabric of our lives. To survive in society, you needed to both fear and respect it.

Her father both took her to witch doctors and tried to take a stand against superstition by promoting education, including paying for the education of many who came to work in his garage and ensuring that all his daughters received an education.

Empowering Girls

Understanding why for example girls were treated as ‘less than’ boys, and how a society judges those of mixed race, or different religions, or a multitude of differences, enabled her to either become a victim, turn to anger, resentment, bitterness, self-hatred, or to choose another way.

Girls were given lectures on many occasions as to how they could and couldn’t behave and I felt a real sense of injustice about these rules as a child. This was my sense of worth rising to the surface. It comes with anger, and it comes from injustice. As girls, that was another thing we weren’t supposed to show, either: anger. But I felt it nonetheless and came to recognise it as my worth letting me know when a situation wasn’t right. That feeling of worth always began with an emotion, not a thought. I’d feel it first in the pit of my stomach and then it would rise into my heart.

A New Beginning

When the Ugandan President Idi Amin in 1972 decreed that all Asians must leave Uganda, everyone in their town had already had their cars confiscated, sue to their proximity to the border. Escaping, wasn’t easy, finding a car to take them and getting through roadblocks, where any small reason could result in trigger happy soldiers punishing defiance. One of the most tense moments in the books happens when Bharti’s mother is confronted over her mixed race daughter.

In England, they would encounter fresh challenges, in school, in the neighbourhood, another country where they were perceived as unwelcome foreigners. At 15, Bharti announced she intended to change her name, having had enough of the teasing. Her mother explained the cultural significance of her name and she earned another truth.

I realise now, it was because I felt the need to project a certain image, or to say or do things, just to fit in or not lose friends. But when we do that, we’re accepting others’ definition of our value, rather than our own.
People who know your worth accept you just as you are. If you have to change anything about yourself to get others to love you, then you’re denying your sense of worth, thereby crushing the strength that comes from self-belief and self-love.

Her reflections on compassion and empathy are enlightening and model a nurturing way to embrace our humanity and practice them as acts of self-care.

Being able to see from the forgiveness perspective creates distance between you – you become the observer rather than the victim. When you’re stuck in a place of anger, hatred and rejection, I believe your self-esteem cannot grow.

By the end of the book, her life will have come full circle as she too becomes a mother and a protector of children in her role as a social worker and shares 15 affirmation to boost self-worth.

It’s so refreshing to begin to read uplifting books like this coming from cross cultural life experiences and being shared through the more traditional publishing platforms. Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi – excellent novel by another Ugandan author now living in the UK

Raise Your Vibration by Kyle Gray

More Spiritual Well Being Reads I’ve Reviewed

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The International Booker Prize Shortlist 2021

Since I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump I didn’t post about the International Booker longlist when it came out, and to be honest, nothing on it really jumped out at me, so I felt little motivation to share it.

However I do like to have a record of what was highlighted, so I’m sharing below the six books that have made the shortlist and below that the longlist. Clicking on any of the titles will take you a description of the book.

I don’t have any of these to read and I’m unlikely for the moment to add to my list of reading, since I’m looking for more of an uplifting read at the moment.

The 2021 International Booker Prize longlist

I Live in the Slums by Can Xue, translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, Yale University Press

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Mocschovakis, Pushkin Press

A novel that captures the tragedy of a young man’s mind hurtling towards madness and tells the little-heard story of the Senegalese who fought for France on the Western Front during WW1.

Alfa Ndiaye and Mademba Diop are two of the many Senegalese tirailleurs fighting in the Great War under the French flag. Whenever Captain Armand blows his whistle they climb out of their trenches to attack the blue-eyed enemy.  One day Mademba is mortally wounded, and without his friend, his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone amidst the savagery of the trenches, far from all he knows and holds dear. He throws himself into combat with renewed vigour, but soon begins to scare even his own comrades in arms.

 

The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili, translated from Georgian by Elizabeth Heighway, Peirene Press

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, Granta Books

Unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, these stories walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror, with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear and in limbo. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken – fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history – with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighbourhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, Pushkin Press

Albert Einstein opens a letter sent to him from the Eastern Front during the First World War. Inside, he finds the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity, unaware that it contains a monster that could destroy his life’s work. The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause. Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined.

The Perfect Nine: The Epic Gikuyu and Mumbi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, translated from Gikuyu by the author, VINTAGE, Harvill Secker

The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Lolli Editions

Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, The Employees follows the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship which consists of those who were born, and those who were made, those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly living. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

Summer Brother by Jaap Robben, translated from Dutch by David Doherty, World Editions

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated from German by Jackie Smith, Quercus, MacLehose Press

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, Fitzcarraldo Editions

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale, Fitzcarraldo Editions

The story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. Following the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova builds the story out of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs left behind: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia.

In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with intellectual curiosity and a soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley, And Other Stories

The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti, Pan Macmillan, Picador

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century takes on the powerful and the privileged. It quickly becomes more about the bourgeoisie. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth? There follows a furious struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer, a complex and controversial figure. Sifting through history, Éric Vuillard extracts the story of one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in which he lived – a moment when Europe was in flux. Inspired by the recent gilets jaunes protests in France: a populist, grassroots protest movement – led by workers – for economic justice. While The War of the Poor is about 16th-century Europe, this short polemic has a lot to say about inequality now.

Have you read anything on this longlist?

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The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore (1955)

Brian Moore at 100

This is my second read for the year long read along of Brian Moore novels organised by Cathy at 746 Books. Previously I read Lies of Silence, which I very much enjoyed and next up for the month of May will be The Doctor’s Wife.

Review

Brian Moore at 100 Northern IrelandAll I can say is thank goodness that’s over and wonder what I can read to mitigate the toxic absorption of reading it and being amidst a pack of inhumane characters and a main character set up for incarceration due to her having had her way in life taken from her after the prolonged and dutiful care of an unappreciative and domineering Aunt.

We meet Judith Hearne as she is moving into yet another boarding house, having lost her youth and employment prospects to the years of caring for her Aunt in the postwar years, despite her initial resistance.

Her only connection to family, she places a framed photo of her in view, a symbolic gesture of creating a sense of home. Judith is capable and talented, but worn down by those lost years, anxious about her dwindling prospects and bitter in her thoughts on account of suppressed resentments.  Despite regular religious observance, she is discovering that faith too has abandoned her.

“Miss Hearne had always been able to find interesting happenings where other people would find only dullness. It was, she felt, a gift which was one of the great rewards of a solitary life. And a necessary gift.”

She turns towards three people and a vice, the landlady’s brother Jim, recently returned from decades of living in New York, her local priest and her family friend Moira. The novel explores these encounters and Judith’s deterioration as she seeks solace and loses control with alcohol.

Men Writing Women in the 1950’s

From the opening pages I couldn’t shake off the fact that this 40 year old woman is being created by a man, that the mind looking out from behind her eyes isn’t a woman, but a man living in exile with grievances to bare and an unconscious bias, by virtue of being part of and conditioned by the dominant sex/race of an Irish Catholic flavour.

Written in an era where if women hadn’t been subdued by marriage, tamed by employment, shipped off or upholstered in the habit, they were indeed on a slippery slope towards disillusionment, realising that society did not value them outside certain roles, and by this age had indirectly cast them aside, or put them on a shelf, as the saying went, perpetuating the cultural myth. 

The Outsider(s)

I could believe she might momentarily look upon the returning emigrant Jim Madden with interest, curious about his life elsewhere, but the gaze of them all upon her, as if her considering him a possible suitor were an abominable thought, the weight of all that judgement – it is a world portrayed that lacks care or empathy, disapproves of adventure, lacks imagination and excitement and instead lures the lonely towards oblivion, thus destroying the few threads of potential that have kept this one woman going till now.

The one light of hope comes from her friend Moira, in whom we find thankfully, a small thread of humanity, kindness and consideration.

The Bottle and the Cloth

brown wooden upright piano in shallow focus lens

Photo: Maria TyutinaPexels.com

I found the extreme indulgence in her whiskey bottles totally unrealistic. She was so straight-laced and God fearing, that one bad experience surely would have been sufficient, but the heavy hand of the author deeply imprinted on her back pushed her onward. He had a beef with the church and by God he was going to make his victim confront it. And then have her put away, as they did with any woman who acted with impropriety and lacked a moral (or male) sponsor.

I think Judith was unjustly portrayed, if she were to write a first person account of her story, we would see a more nuanced character, disillusioned yes, but a more perceptive perspective from within, than those who depict her from without, and a society ready to discard her. 

I went looking for Moore’s inspiration, certain that Miss Hearne was not just a creature of his imagination and discovered that he had cherry picked parts of her character from a family visitor Miss Keogh, asking his obliging sister for memories and details. Colm Toibin writes:

“However, he disregarded most of what he was told. (The original Miss Keogh had a job, for example.) He used merely the ‘speech and mannerisms’ of the original and he surrounded them with something else, elements of his own isolation as a non-achiever in a family obsessed with achievement, and as an emigrant in Canada. His own loss of faith becomes hers, and his memory that his original had ‘a little weakness for the bottle’ becomes her alcoholism.” Colm Tóibín

He  also admits that Moore clearly knew that you could achieve certain effects by writing about a woman in the Ireland of his time which you could not achieve in writing about a man, the same behaviour would not bring disgrace, pity perhaps, tolerance certainly, humour most likely, incarceration – never.

Dis Empowerment

Judith Hearne never found her passion, it was conditioned the hell out of her, ensuring she’d never yearn for, seek or ever become aware of how she might empower herself above or out of her situation. 

“In a society that was merely half-formed and had no sense of itself, a society in which the only real choice was to leave or live in a cowed internal exile, the failure to create a fully-formed male character in fiction was emblematic of a more general failure.” Colm Tóibín

Further Reading

Article: Gaelic Gloom by Colm Tóibín

 

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Sensitive is the New Strong by Anita Moorjani

The Power of Empaths in an Increasingly Harsh World

Another excellent work from Anita Moorjani, who had a life-changing experience that gave her a heart-based perspective of reality beyond the three dimensional, externally focused world, we inhabit. Leaving that story aside, she now shares more insights that assist those who already relate a little or a lot to this perspective.

I have read both her previous books Dying to Be Me and What if THIS is Heaven? and I have listened to her speak, it is here where she is fluent, spontaneous and highly relatable, her most authentic and resonant. I love her books, but listening to her YouTube series Tea With Anita (this episode on empaths) and this one on Forgiveness, has for me, been life-affirming.

Become Aware, Develop Appropriate Resources

The Power of Empaths in an Increasingly Harsh WorldHere, she focuses particularly on the experience of those who are empaths, no matter where on the spectrum of empathy they sit. It explains and supports how they feel, expanding awareness and helps them understand how to cope with certain situations and why it is important that they play a larger role in our societies.

Having listened to her speak on the subject, I’m aware there are different categories of empath, depending on certain characteristics. Some people are highly sensitive but may not be as affected by the energy of other people in their presence, or some may have already learned coping mechanisms.

Anita Moorjani shares her experience, which is unique and sees the gift in being this way, identifying some of the ways to mitigate the negative effects of what an empath absorbs and suggests ways to focus on their own well-being.

She writes of appreciating the gift and beauty of our sensitivity, seeing the strength in it, recognising the responses and behaviours in our society that may have contributed to it being devalued.

The Beauty of Your Sensitivity

“Your sensitivity opens up six sensory world. It’s connected to the other side. If you block your sensitivity, you block what’s coming in from the other realm. The thing is to be aware that you’re giving your power to the outside world, and to start giving it to your own inner world or to your higher self.”

And the consequence of suppressing it:

“It’s when you give your power to the outside world that you lose your connection to your inner sense of knowing, and your life starts spirally downward.”

To make the most of the gift of sensitivity, and to develop one’s intuitive capacity, it is necessary to quiet the noise coming from external sources.

Dealing With Sensory Overload

Sensory overload quiet the mind

Photo: Taryn Elliott, Pexels.com

Each chapter provides a short mantras and a meditative text that specifically address the aspect encouraged in that chapter, so that it becomes not just something theoretical, that we read and understand, but something with a practical aspect, an action one can take, something that many who are inclined to read this, will no doubt already be practicing.

“The outside world is loud and demanding so the first step in honing our powers is learning to deal effectively with sensory overload. We have to identify and manage the things that jam our inner guidance system. And that involves turning down the volume on the outside world so we can hear what’s going on inside.”

There are also practical ways to protect one’s energetic body, to recognise the impact  negative influences have on it, and a variety of ways to protect it. This is something I encounter frequently talking with other practitioner’s, how to proactively protect oneself from unwanted energies, and in a case where we have absorbed something, what to do immediately afterwards to remove it and to remember to prevent it in future.

Protect Your Energetic Body (Aura)

1. Carry black tourmaline with you.
2. Smudge your aura with white sage (especially after being in and around groups of people)
3. Strengthen your aura by using colour and learning how to expand and contract it, learning to contract it, helps avoid picking up unwanted energies.
4. Keep your body healthy – drink plenty of water, exercise, go outside (clears energy, centres you)

Connect With the Web of Consciousness

Creativity the Souls purposeOne of the best rewards of dealing with the imbalances and disequilibrium is the creativity that awaits expression, something that is there within, buried beneath layers of issues that once addressed, reveal potential.

“As with Michelangelo finding his angel in the block of marble, we need to strip away these layers and chip away at the false beliefs, thought patterns, fears and unnecessary pressures that jam our internal radar and hinder our connection to our inner mystics.”

Ego and Conscious Awareness

Ego often gets a bad rap. Anita Moorjani puts it in context by considering it one of two elements required in balance, ego and conscious awareness – that it is only when one or other are out of balance with each other that problems arise. If the ego dial is on high and conscious awareness is low egocentricity results. Likewise, raised conscious awareness with little or no ego, results in an ability to act or change. A healthy ego and conscious awareness aligns us with our  purpose and brings meaning into our lives.

“Ego serves a huge purpose. It offsets a tendency to second guess oneself or give power away.”

Imagination Unveils a Calling

“A clue to finding one’s purpose is to use your imagination. When I set my imagination free, I connect with something that is exciting and beautiful: for me, it’s my sixth sense, my intuition, and my higher self.”

Giving the example from her own life experience, from within one of the cultures within which she was raised, she shows how each culture puts upon us a set of differing beliefs, that are often in conflict with each other, which adds to our confusion. And shows how suppressing one’s inner guidance and giving our power away to an authoritative cultural figure can have a detrimental effect.

“Death taught me that I had to recognise my own divinity first before I could be or do anything of value to others.”

Being Your Authentic Self, Empowered Within

“Good teachers help you believe in yourself, rather than cultivate a belief in them. They teach you to connect to the divinity within you.”

There is so much I highlighted throughout the book that I could share. If any of this resonates, I highly recommend reading it, the messages are reassuring, it’s a book I have already passed on to another with whom I have discussed these issues.

One way empaths deal with the effect of this characteristic is to share stories and methods to resolve the associated dilemmas we face, to empower each other, to overcome the obstacles, because the reward of being able to use that quality as a strength is not just beneficial to oneself, but to all we come into contact with, a quality we need more of in this world.

“Accept that your inner world is real. It’s real and you have to empower it.”

Anita Moorjani