December 31, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Top Reads of 2023 – Part 1, Fiction + One Outstanding Read

In this post I share my Top 7 Fiction titles = One Outstanding Read of 2023, click here for Part 2, my Top 5 Nonfiction of 2023.

I have waited until this last day of December to share my Top Reads of 2023, thinking that there may be something to add in the last two weeks, sadly there wasn’t, instead there was a single book I struggled with that put me off reading, not wanting to pick it back up until yesterday.

It’s been a great reading year, 68 books read despite a hiatus over the summer months when multiple humans encroached on my usual evening reading time, but it was worth it to see so many of my family and friends, visiting for the first time since 2019 thanks to wedding celebrations and a rugby world cup, here in France (with my son at the All Blacks vs Argentina semi-final, below right).

Non-Fiction Titles Continue to Ascend

Of the 68 books read, almost a third (19) were nonfiction, a recurring trend over the past few years.

I read so many excellent works of nonfiction this year, it was hard to whittle down my Top 5, as seven of the titles I read were 5 star reads.

For fiction, I’ve gone with a Top 7 but I’ll also share the other 5 star reads at the end.

Reading Around the World, A Small Island Nation Dominates

As you will know, I love to read around the world, works by authors from different countries, including in translation. And this year was no different, albeit with a lot more of the European reading from non-English language countries and Latin American featuring more prominently.

In 2023, I visited 23 countries through works of literature, with the lead country Ireland (18), with France (7), Argentina (4) and Italy (3) all in my top six destinations. I can predict that I’ll be spending more time in those literary destinations in 2024, thanks to a love of Irish literature which is indeed flourishing, a desire to read more French and Italian works and a 2024 Charco Press subscription for Latin America!

Opening Minds and Hearts Through Storytelling From Elsewhere

One of the great joys of recent years for me has been reading works originally written in other languages, translated into English and in particular, those often least favoured or likely to be published, women in translation.

What was a small niche aspect of publishing has become more popular, particularly with young adult readers, which is a life affirming trend, in an age where nationalism is so often promulgated.

In 2023 I read 22 books in translation, with seven of them 5 star reads and of my six outstanding fiction reads of the year, 3 of them were in translation.

It might take a little work to find these titles, but I’ve come to rely on my favourite independent presses, Europa Editions, Charco Press, One World Publications and more recently Daunt Books Publishing, who are reaching back to bring literary gems that deserve new light, to readers.

In this Part 1, I will share my Top Fiction Reads and Part 2 Top Non-Fiction Reads.

One Super Outstanding Read

14 novels were 5 star reads for me in 2023, so to whittle it down, I looked for those whose reading experience still stands out for me now in December. I always have one outstanding read, but this year there were seven I would describe as that, however there was that one that truly stood above them all, my Super Outstanding Read of 2023, that I read early in the year yet still feel the profound effect of reading it.

My One Super Outstanding Read of 2023 is:

Things They Lost by Okwiri Oduour (Kenya)

Kenyan literary fiction Dylan Thomas Award 2023

This book is an absolute gem, a post-colonial, coming of age novel of a young girl Ayosa, living in a neglected house, full of aspects of the past, whose mother is often absent; she is kept company by her notebook, the radio, a couple of kind neighbours and a new friend, all of whom compensate in some way for this loss. Ayosa is omniscient, and remembers things from before she was born.

The story is told in vibrant, mesmerising prose that depicts her coming of age, the effect of abandonment and the nurturing to be found in her community, while allowing the reader to see from another perspective. In letting go of our own version of reality, we are invited to see differently, to understand anew. A story of mothers, daughters and of girls who are abandoned and alone, of girls who create family with other lonesome girls and of how death continuously permeates our lives and how poetry can redeem it.

This is a wonderful example of the richness that comes from reading stories told through the lens of a culture and mythologies other than one’s own. What Oduor accesses and how she tells this story is unique, enlightening and unforgettable. It was one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I have ever had, so new and otherworldy and insightful. A favourite author immediately. Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2023.

A total trip, I read this in February and nothing came close to knocking it off top spot.

Top 7 Fiction

In no particular order, here are my top fiction reads of 2023, click on the title to read my review:

Child of Fortune by Yuko Tsushima (Japan) (1978), translated by Geraldine Harcourt (1986)

– I have not read much Japanese literature, but I was intrigued to read Yuko Tsushima based on reviews I had read on JacquiWine’s Blog. This novella is an immersive account of a young mother of an 11-year-old daughter, raising her alone without support and under the judgmental eye of a sister, whom the daughter increasingly prefers to be around. It is an unravelling, a period of giving in to what others think, before a quiet reassertion of her own unconventional beliefs, an honest reckoning and struggle for freedom.

Introspective, often uncomfortable, an immensely powerful read.

Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar/Tanzania/UK) (1996)

Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 and I chose this book to acquaint myself with his readability and discovered an insightful, erudite and humorous author from an island off the west of Africa, now based in the UK, who depicts the complexities of cross cultural relationships and the push/pull effect of having allegiances to two countries and cultures.

In this novel a young fatherless man from Zanzibar furthers his studies in England and begins to make a life there, without being totally upfront with his family about his circumstances. He observes his new life and relationships, avoiding his past, until it can no longer be ignored. 20 years after leaving, he returns.

Insightful, uncompromising yet compassionate, a chronicler of the outsider.

Italian feminist writing classic 1940s 1950s

Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes (Italy/Cuba)(1952) translated by Ann Goldstein (Italian) (2023)

– this lost classic was a joy to discover and compelling to read as a middle aged working woman with two older children, begins to discover aspects of herself she has never dared to allow flourish, discovering through the act of writing in a notebook. The purchase of the notebook is her first transgressive act and the revelations within it will lead her to consider more. At first, a stranger to herself, it is revealing to witness how her thoughts and actions are often in conflict, so ingrained are society’s expectations, her will is unknown to her until she discovers it on the pages of her notebook.

A riveting, feminist awakening follows a restless rebellion from this unique Italian voice, with Her Side Of The Story (1949) coming in translation from Daunt Books Publishing in 2024.

La hija unica Mexican literary fiction Women in Translation

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico) (2020), translated by Rosalind Harvey (Spanish) (2023)

– shortlisted for the International Booker 2023, this was a standout read for me, another whose method of storytelling was so compelling, it felt like I was reading a true story; I was sure the author must have had first hand experience to have portrayed much of what I read, as it concerned a family with a child that was often hospitalised and the way their treatment by the institution made them feel.

The story is about two independent and career-driven women, friends who initially declared they did not wish to have children and how their lives change as motherhood touches in different ways.

Like Claudia Pineiros’s A Little Luck, there is a thematic subplot, this time involving a pair of pigeons with two eggs in their nest, that appear to have been subject to a brood parasite.

A riveting read, a visceral encounter of all that surrounds the decision or be or not to become a mother, a carer and how the most insistent of intentions can mould, evolve and change according to our nature and circumstances.

women in translation argentinian literature crime fiction literary fiction

A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro (Argentina)(2015) translated by Frances Riddle (Spanish) (2023)

– having enjoyed Elena Knows I was keen to read more and this was absolutely stunning, intense, moving and one I could not put down. A woman returns to her home town after 20 years, in fear of what she is likely to confront. As her backstory is slowly revealed her visit provides the opportunity to reflect on the past and heal from tragic events.

A tour de force!

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (2023)

– clearly a writer at the height of his literary powers, this was a riveting, yet slow burning, introspective read. It observes a retired policeman’s new routine in his first year of retirement, disrupted by the investigation of a cold case, which awakens old memories of events he has no wish to revive.

The way Barry writes, we enter the declining mind of his protagonist, equally unsure of what is real and what is memory trying to re-impose itself. As the story progresses, the past comes back with a force, revealing the effect of rage and the counter effect of genuine familial love. Utterly brilliant.

Irish Book Awards 2023 motherhood literary fiction

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland) (Literary Fiction) (2023)

– a new author for me, Soldier, Sailor made quite an impression on those who read it including me. It confirms that I love to read books that make you feel the experience of the protagonist, this is a clear theme in many of my top fiction reads for 2023.

Soldier Sailor is the story of a mother (Soldier) and her son (Sailor) and the wild ride that entering motherhood takes her on, one she is little prepared for and ravaged by. Never sentimental, it takes the reader to the edge of a woman’s sanity, to coping and not coping with the onslaught of caring for an unformed, small human, a text written in the second person, addressed to that son, a sharing and a warning to him, to beware and be aware.

Motherhood as a thriller, a test of one’s sanity, the necessity of solidarity with a genuine friend.

The Special Mentions, The Other Seven

I couldn’t leave without sharing the close runners up, all of which were five star reads, that I highly recommend, I will leave you to discover them through my reviews (click on the title) below, should you be interested to learn more about their merits.

I loved the short story collection, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (2021) by Heba Hayek (Gaza, Palestine) short vignettes of childhood, auto-biographical fiction; I was riveted by the debut novel The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg (Italy) translated by Frances Fenaye (2021); in deep admiration of the classic debut novel Go Tell it On The Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin (US); best summer light read Lessons in Chemistry (2022) by Bonnie Gamus (US); most informative and memorable, historical fiction, The Art of Losing (2017) by Alice Zeniter (French) translated by Frank Wynne (2021); the unforgettable reflections of two men observing a fallen man in Two Sherpas (2018) by Sebastian Martinez Daniell (Argentina) translated by Jennifer Croft (Spanish) (2023); and another excellent novel in Baumish prose, from one of my all-time favourite authors Seven Steeples (2023) by Sara Baume (Ireland).

* * * * * * * *

Did any of these make your year end favourites? I hope you fins something here that might tempt your reading taste buds in 2024. Happy Reading and Happy New Year All.

December 31, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro tr. Frances Riddle

Stunning.

This was a heart-racing, thrilling and moving read that begins mysteriously as a woman returns to her home country (Argentina) following some kind of event 20 years earlier that we don’t fully learn of until almost halfway into the novel.

Though she lived most of her early life there, her physical appearance is so radically different, no one recognises her – yet.

We are made aware, though it takes a while to reveal, that she is anxious about the possibility of seeing someone connected to that past event, that sent her into self-imposed exile.

I should have said no, that I couldn’t go, that it would have been impossible for me to make the trip. Whatever excuse. But I didn’t say anything. Instead I made excuses to myself, over and over, as to why, even though I should’ve said no, I agreed in the end. The abyss calls to you. Sometimes you don’t even feel its pull. There are those who are drawn to it like a magnet. Who peer over the edge and feel a desire to jump. I’m one of those people. Capable of plunging headlong into the abyss to feel – finally – free. Even if it’s a useless freedom, a freedom that has no future. Free only for the brief instant that the fall lasts.

rail crossing train barrier A Little Luck — Photo Tim Dusenberry Pexels.com

As the mystery unravels, the tension mounts. Each new chapter begins with part of the backstory, then stops, this is used as a kind of repetition, as the narrator acquires the courage to reveal the full extent of the backstory.

The constant repeating of this text adds to the volume of its impact on the reader and the sense of suspense and intrigue.

The barrier arm was down. She stopped, behind two other cars. The alarm bell rang out through the afternoon silence. The red lights below the railway crossing sign blinked off and on. The lowered arm, the alarm bell, and the red lights all indicated that a train was coming.

As these events of the past some into clarity, in the present day this woman is booking into a motel, arranging to visit the school that she will consider for accreditation, we encounter the mndane reason for her visit and the extraordinary motivation behind it.

Simultaneously we follow a small sub-plot drama featuring a bat. And a theme of entrapment. The story of the bat corresponds to our protagonists state of mind and how it evolves over the course of the novel. Once again she must make a life or death decision.

I’m still trapped. I must now decide whether to go out and face the task at hand or stay here and wait for the poison to kill me or the smoke to force me out.

Ultimately, it explores many themes, in a profound way, of motherhood, of domination, community judgement, condemnation and gas-lighting, of the effect of undermining a person’s self-worth, of twin aspects of abandonment, of why it might be deemed necessary and the effect it has on the one abandoned.

Do I deserve to explain why? What I mean is, do I have that right? The right to unburden myself and expect someone to listen?

Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows (see my review here) I found curious; there is a similar feeling of mysteriousness as the author withholds telling all, drawing the reader in – however, in A Little Luck, she plummets the mind of the protagonist, letting us into her thoughts, showing us the events and enabling the reader to witness the reactions – allowing us to see the patterns, those all too familiar ways of subjugating a person, of the desire to blame, the withdrawal, the disappearance.

A Little Luck is also a story of healing, of kindness and finding the one person who puts the right thing in one’s way that will lead to release. In this story, a kind man finds the right stories that assist a woman to express and release suppressed emotions. And sends her on a trip.

I began to list the questions that I’d asked myself while reading Alice Munro’s story, questions posed in her words. ‘Is it true that the pain will become chronic? Is it true that it will be permanent but not constant, that I won’t die from the pain? Is it true that someday I won’t feel it every minute, even though I won’t spend many days without it?

Brilliantly conceived, after a few chapters, I absolutely could not put it down, I highlighted so many passages, and it had a surprising though satisfying, tear-jerking conclusion, definitely one of my top fiction reads of 2023. I read this in October, but found it hard to describe the intense reading experience, but I’m sharing my thoughts now, before my end of year review, where it will feature!

Highly Recommended, another fabulous title from Charco Press!

Claudia Piñeiro, Author

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Claudia Piñeiro has won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A crack in the wall).

She is best known for her crime novels which are bestsellers in Argentina, Latin American and around the world. Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen. According to the prestigious newspaper La Nación, Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Borges and Cortázar.

More recently, Piñeiro has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and for the legal recognition of writers as workers. Her fiction (as shown with Elena Knows) is stemmed in the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political and ideologically committed, reflecting the active role she plays in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and Latin America, and for the recognition of employment rights for writers..

December 15, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Mother of Pearl by Mary Morrissy

I decided to read Mother of Pearl (1996) as a precursor to Mary Morrissy’s latest novel Penelope Unbound (2023), a re-imagined and slightly changed life of Nora Barnacle (the wife of James Joyce) which I intend to read in 2024. Having enjoyed Nuala O’Connor’s excellent novel Nora, I’ll be curious to see where Morrissy takes her.

It is only now, since the death of Joyce’s grandson Stephen in 2020, one of the most litigious heirs in history, that stories can safely be written about Nora and James Joyce – as Stephen did all he could to prevent access or usage of the family archive, including the destruction of hundreds of letters. James Joyce, a brilliant writer with an overprotective grandson

It seems that Mary Morrissy likes to take inspiration from real life characters or stories, and so it was with Mother of Pearl. A little backstory then before reviewing the novel.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction

A notorious baby-snatching case in 1950’s Ireland was the inspiration for Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl. Re-imagining elements of that story, rather than retelling the facts was a decision she made because the truth would have come across to readers as unbelievable. Morrissy in an article on her website explains:

Elizabeth Browne 1950 Dublin kidnap victim

Elizabeth Browne, above, was kidnapped from a pram on Henry Street in Dublin on November 25, 1950. Her kidnapper, Mrs Barbara McGeehan, who lived in Belfast, took her north on the train and passed her off as her own child to her unsuspecting husband.

Four years later – and this is where truth is stranger than fiction – Mrs McGeehan travelled south again and stole another child, this time a boy, Patrick Berrigan, from outside Woolworths on Henry Street. As luck would have it, a fellow passenger on the Belfast train noticed Mrs McGeehan, in particular that she had no milk for her baby, and went to the dining car to get some. Afterwards when the alert was raised about the Berrigan baby kidnap, she remembered this incident and contacted the police.

Mrs McGeehan was traced to her home in the White City estate in Belfast where police found the Berrigan baby and the four-year-old Elizabeth Browne, now renamed Bernadette. In these pre-DNA days, she was identified by a distinctive birth mark, and her parents, news-vendors John and Bridget Browne, travelled to Belfast to claim her.

Identity Trauma

What interested Morrissy in particular, was the identity trauma of a four-year-old being forcibly removed from a loving home and familiar “parents” and being returned to a family, who though biologically related, were strangers to her.

Clearly this was something Elizabeth’s parents thought about or experienced the repercussions of, because there was another twist, a strange fact that once again did not go into the novel. After Mrs McGeehan served her two year jail year sentence for the kidnap, the Browne family contacted her. Following their reconciliation, every year Elizabeth would travel to Belfast to spend a holiday with the very same woman who had kidnapped her.

Though Elizabeth would marry and have her own family, sadly she died at the very young age of 38 years from cancer.

The Novel, A Dark Re-Imagining

A novel in three parts, Mother of Pearl explores perspectives in three women’s lives, the first two will mother the same child, the third is that of the child grown – the consequence of a repressed childhood, of events never talked about, of the effect of those events and years and the suppression of them, on her psyche.

Part 1 – We meet Irene in Granitefield sanotorium, an institution where she spends some years due to having contracted TB. She willingly leaves her family behind and finds some kind of comfort in the hospital environment, electing to remain there as an employee long after she has recovered from her illness and might easily have left.

The operation, they told her, had saved her. But she had lost four of her ribs, cracked open by a giant pair of shears…Without her ribs Irene felt as if part of her protection against the world had been removed.

Standing vigil, she is known to recognise the imminence of death patients. One in particular will be kife changing.

Irene knew the moment she saw Stanley Godwin that he was watching someone beloved die. Healthy people keeping vigil seemed to take on the symptoms of the disease.

This son, who is with his mother, suddenly understands the implications of his mothers death, of the great loss and hole in his life, her absence will mean for him. His attention moves towards Irene.

Inwardly he was quaking. He could comprehend the impending loss; what he couldn’t imagine was his life afterwards. A middle-aged man about to be granted unwanted freedom.

Outside of the institution, longing for a child she knows will not come, brooding on her own losses, Irene succumbs to fantasies and one day indulges her desire, removing a sickly child from a hospital, a baby she names Pearl.

This was her offspring, hers alone, the child of her illness, Irene’s first loss. And she was still out there. Not dead, simply lost. In a hospital ward somewhere, unclaimed, waiting for her mother. This time Irene determined she would tell no one, not even Stanley. She would seek out the child who was rightfully hers, the fruit of Eve’s ribs.

Part 2 – We meet Rita, who becomes Mrs Mel Spain, mother of the baby she had not initially realised how much she wanted, until the day she is taken from her. And the husband Mel, son of an absent father, who feels a yearning to follow in his carefree footsteps.

It didn’t stop Mel wondering, however, how his father had managed the extraordinary trick of disappearing into thin air. He had become invisible by simply walking out of his life. Ten years after the event, as he nursed his fourth drink of the night, Mel finally understood how easy it must have been. It was not, as he had always thought, a daring but calculated move; it was a matter of impulse and extreme selfishness.

Part 3 – we meet the child, a child who remembers little of her early life, who is told stories that don’t resonate with the dream-like memories she has, who feels like an outsider in her family and can not explain to herself why.

Exploring themes of loss, abandonment, denial, Mother of Pearl takes us inside the dysfunction of family, of obsession with and rejection of a child, of the long-lasting impact on those formative years of the compromised adult that will little understand their own inclination(s), as those threads of early development and the scars of traumatic events imprint on their psyche and affect their future selves.

A compelling and thought provoking read that is all the more astounding given the events that propelled the author to recreate such a situation.

Author, Mary Morrissy

Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin in 1957. She has published four novels – Mother of Pearl (1995), The Pretender (2000), The Rising of Bella Casey (2013) and Penelope Unbound (2023) and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993).

She won a Hennessy Award for short fiction in 1984 and a prestigious US Lannan Literary Foundation Award in 1995. Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for the Whitbread/Costa Award and longlisted for the Women’s (Orange)Prize for Fiction (1996) while The Pretender was nominated for the Dublin Impac Award and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. The Rising of Bella Casey was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award.

A member of Aosdána, she is a journalist, a teacher of creative writing and a literary mentor. She blogs on art, fiction and history at marymorrissy.com

“I suppose I explore a female kind of darkness. My characters tend to be very restricted, restricted emotionally, I mean, by fear and guilt and an inability to move in and inhabit the centre of their own lives. And despite all our so-called modernity, I think this still holds true for thousands of women. We may have broken away from the traps of our mothers’ generation, but there is a long way to travel before women have, if I may use the phrase in this context, parity of esteem. - Interview with Mary Morrissy, Studies, An Irish Quarterly Review Vol. 87, No. 347 (Autumn, 1998)

December 13, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

A tale of shipwreck mutiny and murder British navy

The Wager by David Grann recently won the 2023 Goodreads Choice Award for Best History & Biography.

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon (recently made into a film by Martin Scorcese) and The Lost City of Z.

In this latest book he chronicles the fate of the 18th century British warship, the Wager, which had set out on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain (with dubious reasoning behind it), with the intention of tracking down a fleet rumoured to be carrying a horde of treasure.

Not only was there a significant human cost to these excursions, it was the era of plundering natural resources, constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees, therefore a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

The conflict was the result of the endless jockeying among the European powers to expand their empires. They each vied to conquer or control ever larger swathes of the earth, so that they could exploit and monopolise other nations’ valuable natural resources and trade markets. In the process, they subjugated and destroyed innumerable indigenous peoples, justifying their ruthless self-interest – by claiming they were somehow spreading “civilisation” to the benighted realms of the earth. Spain had long been the dominant empire in Latin America, but Great Britain, which already possessed colonies along the American eastern seaboard, was now on the ascendance – and determined to break its rival’s hold.

Wrecked off the coast of Patagonia, after rounding the notoriously dangerous Cape Horn, those who survived would spend months on an island before putting together makeshift vessels from what they had salvaged, leaving the island in two groups, heading in opposite directions, with different stories to tell.

Reading Outside the Norm

It’s not my usual reading fare, however after reading a praise-worthy review, I was drawn to it, when I read that the men who laboured on these large ships were often kidnapped and forced to crew, sometimes taken from workhouses or even snatched just as they were returning from having crewed on another ship, much to the consternation of their waiting families.

After peaceful efforts to man the fleets failed, the Navy resorted to what a secretary of the Admiralty called a “more violent” strategy. Armed gangs were were dispatched to press seafaring men into service – in effect, kidnapping them. The gangs roamed cities and towns, grabbing anyone who betrayed the telltale signs of a mariner: the familiar checkered shirt and wide-kneed trousers and round hat; the fingers smeared with tar, which was used to make virtually everything on a ship more water-resistant and durable.

It took a little to get into the rhythm of the book, as the various characters and their backgrounds were introduced, just as the ship HMS Wager delayed leaving British shores due to setbacks, both human and due to adverse weather conditions. Once they set sail, on August 23, 1740 and with the help of route maps on the inside front and back flaps, the story became more captivating.

Hidden Histories in the Archives, Disrupting the Historical Narrative

It is a fascinating account that David Grann became aware of upon visiting the UK National Archive in Kew, reading an ancient logbook of one of the crew of the ship, which then lead him to other accounts of the adventures of those onboard, in particular, rival perspectives on what happened after HMS Wager was shipwrecked on May 14, 1741 off the southern coast of Patagonia, Chile.

The time survivors spent on Wager Island is reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. As Captain David Cheap tries to keep order and calm, as food sources they manage to salvage deplete and disagreements increase, men become desperate, divisions occur, loyalties waver.

When the Captain crosses a serious line, his authority and ability to stay in charge decline, causing a major rupture in support for the direction they plan to take.

Indigenous Intuition, Avoiding the Real Savagery

One of the more interesting parts of their land based story, given how difficult it was for them to survive and the factions that develop as the group splits loyalties, was the arrival of a group of Kawésqar indigenous people, who pretty much live in their canoes circumnavigating the coast, living off the land, sea and foreshore.

These people helped the castaways by obtaining meat and seafood for them, quickly and adeptly building dwellings and then would leave (they knew not to trust these pale faced marauders). Witnessing the insidious tensions mounting among the castaways, one morning they would awake to discover them, their canoes and dwelling all gone, never to return.

Aware of how helpless the Englishmen were, the Kawésqar would regularly venture out to sea and then magically return with nourishment for them. Byron saw one woman depart with a companion in a canoe and , once offshore, grip a basket between her teeth and leap into the freezing water. “Diving to the bottom,” Byron wrote, she “continued under water in an amazing time.” When she emerged, her basket was filled with sea urchins – a strange shellfish, Byron wrote, “from which several prickles project in all directions.”

Logbooks of Seafaring Adventures Can Be Important Navigation Tools

Eventually the castaways would rebuild from what they had been able to salvage, another sailing vessel and one group who disagreed with the Captain which route to take would depart in one direction and the rest, some months later in the opposite direction.

Cheap’s plan, meanwhile, was taking on new, hidden dimensions. Poring over charts, he began to believe that there was a way to not only preserve their lives but also fulfill their original military mission. He calculated that the nearest Spanish settlement was on the island of Chiloé, which was off the Chilean coast and some 350 miles north of their present location.

Bulkeley, on the other hand, borrowed the 16-year-old midshipman John Byron’s copy of Sir John Narborough’s chronicle of sea tales exploring the Patagonia region, believing it may contain critical clues for navigating a safe passage away from Wager Island. He would use this reference to take his group of men through the tricky Strait of Magellan, thus avoiding Cape Horn.

After a voyage, the captain of a ship turned over the requisite logbooks to the Admiralty, providing reams of information for building an empire – an encyclopedia of the sea and of unfamiliar lands.

Anson and his officers would frequently consult the journals of the few seamen who had ventured around Cape Horn.

Moreover, these “logbooks of memory”, as one historian coined them, created a record of any controversial actions or mishaps that occurred during a voyage. If need be they could be submitted as evidence at courts-martial; careers and lives might depend on them.

Who Is Actually On Trial Here, Man or An Empire?

The trip culminates in some survivors return to England and various allegations against different people, threat of imprisonment or hanging. A trial will be held.

In the meantime the stories and individual accounts captured the imagination of ‘Grub Street hacks’ and others who profited by publishing narratives of the high sea and inhospitable island adventures, in an era that ironically resembled the ‘fake news’ era of our own time. Due to the sheer number of differing accounts, perceptions of the Wager affair varied from reader to reader.

Once the broadsheet newspapers and periodicals were filled with breathless reports, book publishers competed to release first-hand accounts from the former castaways.

Though few of those narratives survived today, plenty of archive material made it possible for David Grann to put together an interesting account of an inconclusive British imperial adventure that may have lost the nation more than just men and a ship, but much credibility for the human and financial cost of their exploits, all in the name of retaining their perception as being a superior imperial power.

Author, David Grann

David Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best true crime book. He also wrote The Lost City of Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, also adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by James Gray.

Grann’s investigative reporting has accumulated several honours, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and two children in New York.

December 12, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

A Bigger Picture by Vanessa Nakate

My Fight To Bring A New African Voice To The Climate Crisis

Vanessa Nakate is a young Ugandan woman who became concerned about the effect of climatic conditions and change on her country and in particular the knock on effect floods, crop destruction would have on women and girls, disproportionately affected, as explained in her book.

Alternative Learning Experiences for Children

climate change literature Kenya African Voices

She decided to organise a strike, just herself, her two younger brothers (14 & 10), two visiting cousins (11 &9) and another cousin her age. It would be the six of them, holding up a few placards they made, and they would stand in four busy locations in Kampala, moving from each place after 30 minutes when her alarm went off.

“What shall we write?” Varak, the nine-year-old asked.
I wanted us to express something positive, and to ensure that my younger family members held placards they themselves would understand. We decided to pick slogans we thought wouldn’t be too threatening, and so wrote several, in English.
Trees Are Important For Us
Nature Is Life
When You Plant A Tree, You Plant A Forest
Thanks For The Global Warming (that was our sarcastic one) and
Climate Strike Now
We also drew some trees next to the letters.

Nothing dramatic happened, no one told to stop, but it was the beginning of an interest, of a young woman finding her cause and taking an action, that would lead her to learning and discovering more, to connecting with others, to finding local solutions and developing a presence and a new voice, on an international stage.

One woman stopped and told them of some trees being cut down to make way for a school, that they should be stopped. Each time Nakate went out and had the opportunity to engage or had a response on social media, it would often lead her to the next idea, it would put her in touch with others who genuinely wanted something to be done, their voices to be heard.

How One Exclusion Can Lead to Greater Inclusion

It is an excellent read, because it follows her personal journey, as a young person with little knowledge about activism and from this small spark of quiet daring (despite her anxieties, insecurities and fear of judgement), she shares her perseverance, her growing knowledge, the first invitations to attend international conferences and events, to a tipping point, when many more (including me) would hear about her – after she was cropped out of a photograph of young climate change activists including Greta Thunberg at Davos, Switzerland during the WEF (World Economic Forum) in January 2020.

My message was, and is, straightforward: People in Uganda, in Africa, and across what’s called the Global South, are losing their homes, their harvests, their incomes, even their lives, and any hopes of a livable future right now.

The Quiet Methodical, Cooperative Approach

What makes her message and her actions all the more interesting is that she takes a quiet methodical approach to doing things in her own authentic way, in a country where she is aware of both dangers and expectations, so does nothing foolhardy, acting responsibly.

However, when there is the opportunity for advancement of her cause and for manageable solutions she can implement herself, she steps up to those and has helped make life more amenable for many families already, while continuing to pursue the wider message, especially to young people, future leaders, for whom it will be better if they encounter this knowledge through their early education, than as adults already fixed in their opinions or influenced by position or power.

Since I’m always looking for solutions that reflect reality and the need to get the message out, I decided that instead of suggesting that students walk out of classes, I’d try to take the climate strikes into schools – where they could form part of the curriculum in a way that I’d wished climate change had been when I was a young girl.

The first school she approached in this way was open to this collaboration, the teachers assembled 100 students inside the compound, Vanessa Nakate gave a short speech explaining what the strike was about, in a way that could relate to and then lead them in a chant, the teachers encouraging the children to chant even louder.

What do we want? Climate justice. When do we want it? Now.

Genuine Efforts and Action Do Get Noticed

In 2019 she received an email from the UN Secretary General’s office in New York, an invitation to attend the Youth Climate Summit. Understandably, she and her parents didn’t think it was real, but it was, she would be the first person in her family to travel outside of Uganda and that would signify a new beginning in her self-appointed role.

The first half of the book is about the development of her role, the logistics of trying to attend events and to becoming involved in meaningful solutions at home, such as the Vash Green Schools Project (supports the installation of solar panels and building clean cooking stoves in primary schools) and to realising the need for self-care due to overwhelm.

Role Models and Inspiration, Making Connections

The second half gives a bigger picture of the wider issues, sharing information from others she interviewed and has been inspired by, including the late Wangari Maathai, the inspiring Kenyan woman who created the Green Belt Movement and made much progress (often hindered by men in power) who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for ‘her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace’. Read my review of her autobiography Unbowed here.

Coincidentally COP28 is happening right now in Dubai and Vanessa Natake is there with others trying to get their message across to world leaders who have the power to phase out fossil fuels and support equitable and safe renewable energies. Her article appearing in today’s Guardian below.

I really enjoyed reading this book and learning more about how Vanessa Natake became a voice for her country and continent and inspired so many youth and adults to both learn and do more to try and halt the destruction that is affecting them all.

Highly Recommended.

Author & Activist, Vanessa Nakate

Vanessa Nakate is a Ugandan climate justice activist. She grew up in Kampala and started her activism in December 2018 after becoming concerned about the unusually high temperatures in her country. Inspired by Greta Thunberg to start her own climate movement in Uganda, Vanessa Nakate began a solitary strike against inaction on the climate crisis in January 2019. She founded the Youth for Future Africa and the Africa-based Rise Up Movement and spearheaded the Save Congo Rainforest campaign.

She has addressed world leaders at multiple climate summits and appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in 2021 (featuring on the Time100 Next list in 2021). She was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2022.

Nakate and her work have been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian,Yes!,Vox, Vogue, the Huffington Post, the International Women’s Forum, and the Global Landscapes Forum, and on globalcitizen.org, greenpeace.org, CNN, the BBC, PBS, and United Nations media. She lives in Kampala, Uganda.

December 10, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Redemption Ground, Essays and Adventures by Lorna Goodison

A mix of memoir, poetry, life adventure and epiphanies, I loved this collection by Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison.

Bonding With the Irish Over Tea & Poetry

essays memoir creative nonfiction Jamaican literature

The opening essay ‘The Song of the Banana Man’ and ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ totally sets the scene for the rest of the book. It is an anecdotal story of the author and her friend, excited to be in London, overhearing two ‘bobbies’ (policemen) talk about a cafe they were just passing, in a way that lured them inside.

‘Whassis then, a new tea ‘ole?’

Their schooling in Kingston, Jamaica had been heavy on all things British and European, so entering this establishment was something related to that indirect familiarity. They encounter three boys from Ireland, who ask if they are from the West Indies and they begin to banter, drinking toasts to the colonial experience, singing songs and reciting poetry.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
folk dance like a wave of the sea;

The poems they chose were about ordinary people, sure of themselves, of what they did, grounding words shared by these young people, whose paths have crossed, starting out on their own journeys. The exchange lasts while they’re having their tea and comes to a natural end, upon which they part ways. The author is at the beginning of her life journey, but the lines recited by them all have staying power.

And I was not sure where I belonged or what my own purpose was in life back then…. But listening to those three Irish men recite ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ that afternoon, maybe I’d thought yes, that’s what I’d like to be, someone whose artistry makes people dance like a wave of the sea.

A Working Class Teen Dares to Do Better

In, A Taste of Honey, she recounts the experience of seeing a movie in 1963, adapted from the play created by Shelagh Delaney (who was 18 years old when she wrote it) that moves her, that is a moment of epiphany. Being one of nine children, she relished the opportunity to go and see the film one Saturday afternoon alone.

Shelagh Delaney went to a play that she found boring, pretentious and condescending, and said to herself I can do better than that, and went home and wrote A Taste of Honey.

The film would win a BAFTA award.

A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype. – extract from The Guardian by Dennis Barker

Goodison reflects on why she was so moved by this film, how it gave her some of her life and writing purpose and inspiration.

Shelagh was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everyone else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.

The Daffodil Drama

Writing poetry from a young age, in ‘Some poems that made me’ we read more of this early education and a different take on Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’ poem, after she researches his childhood and life and decides to give the poet a break. See my review Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid for another reference to the daffodil drama.

Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.

She will encounter may poets and poems until she arrives at the one voice that cause her to stop reading everyone else and just read his poems. In the work of Derek Walcott, who would become a friend and mentor, she found poem as a source of hope and consolation; poem as a lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.

As she begins to think of her own place in the world, she seeks out women poets, finding nourishment in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and other African-American fiction writers, while still searching for poetry by Caribbean women, ultimately ending up writing the poems she wanted to read and finding the right language to express them.

I learnt early in my life as a writer that if I wanted to write about my people I had to learn to listen carefully to family stories then imagine, and constantly reimagine those stories…All writer’s do this, but Caribbean writers face formidable or particular challenges because of the ways in which slavery, and then colonialism, erased or distorted so much of our lives that we have to learn to writer ourselves into the story in any way we can.

Tributes to the Mothers & Imagination

We read ‘Guinea Woman’ the poem she wrote trying to imagine a woman she had never met, her great grandmother, an elegy for her mother Doris ‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’, and another poem entitled ‘Bedspread’ inspired by news of the home of Winnie Mandela being raided by police, where they seize personal effects including a bedspread, taken because it was in the colours of the African National Congress.

The collection takes the reader to different countries and places on her journeying, sharing both fun and pivotal moments, stories of redemption, of good souls that come to set the indebted free, of her own life crisis in New York, that preceded a change in direction, acting on a promise to herself.

A Musical Accompaniment

Like my reading experience of Bernice McFadden’s excellent The Book of Harlan, whenever Lorna Goodison mentions music, like in the vignette ‘A Part for Tarquin’, I look it up and listen while reading. This one is about her friend Bernard dragging her along to a non-party that she doesn’t wish to attend, and ends with them listening into the night to the pianist Wynton Kelly playing the Miles Davis sextet Some Day My Prince Will Come.

That was the night I began to really appreciate the genius of the Jamaican-American pianist Wynton Kelly, about whom Miles himself was supposed to have said, ‘Wynton is the light for the cigarette; without him there is no smoking.’ That night I realised that if hope has a sound it would be Wynton Kelly’s piano-playing. His hope notes were like sunbeams on the morning waves coming in at Bluefields beach.

Loved it all.

Author, Poet, Essayist, Lorna Goodison

Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1947. A painter before she turned her focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art Students League in New York. She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017 – 2020. In 2018, she received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), Controlling the Silver (2005), Traveling Mercies (2001), Heartease (1988), and Tamarind Season (1980).

She is the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed (2011), Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), and the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

In 2019, she published Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures.

Professor of English and of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison divides her time between Toronto and the north coast of Jamaica.

Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica,” Goodison stated in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. Goodison also discussed the humor in her work, noting, “Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.”

Noting that Goodison often “complements her careful observation of the physical world and her fine eye for detail with a tense, lean, elliptical style” in a review of Supplying Salt and Light, Jim Hannan observed, “At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures.”

December 3, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie

After reading Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize Lecture I Will Write to Avenge My People, I decide to read the slim titles Simple Passion (48 pages) and next I will read Shame (86 pages). I have already read A Man’s Place, and eventually I will get to her more lengthy masterpiece The Years.

Simple Passion was the #1 national bestseller in France for over three months when it was first published in 1991, and a celebrated scandal even in France’s liberal society. It was followed up ten years later by a second book Se Perdre (2001) (Getting Lost), which explores the affair through a series of diary notes.

In this book, Annie Ernaux observes herself throughout the life-cycle of an affair, the in-between moments of a conditional relationship, describing how that passion drew her in and ruled her, even when she took herself away from it.

She writes of this encounter with hindsight, as if observing something external to her, like a work of art, looking for some kind of truth or meaning behind the physical and mental experience, now that she has some distance from it. Her interest in writing is not to focus on the man (who could be any man) but on the obsession itself.

A Simple Passion Reveals a More Complex Humanity

The man, referred to as A, is from another country, he is married; the 18 months he is in her life, this ‘simple passion’ is depicted like an illness or a condition, she is able to see how it changes her. She studies it.

I am not giving the account of a liaison, I am not telling a story (half of which escapes me) based on a precise – ‘he came on 11 November’ – or an approximate chronology – ‘weeks went by’. As far as I was concerned, that notion did not enter the relationship. I could experience only absence or presence. I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between ‘one day’ and ‘every day’, as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.

A Life Suspended, Waiting for a Man

She observes this condition, though she is virtually powerless to overcome or stop it, it will run its course and she will create an honest, transparent account of it, documenting the range of emotions, behaviours and instinct that run through her.

She observes how this desire becomes the lens through which she sees everything around her, how she spends her time endlessly waiting; waiting for him to call, waiting for him to arrive, waiting for the inevitable end of their association.

This endless wait reduces every other experience, as if they were lived by someone else, while magnifying the space in her mind given to thinking about him, of their time together – amid brief lucid moments of realising the insignificance of him, of the exaggerated importance she has temporarily given him.

I often wondered what these moments of lovemaking meant to him. Probably nothing more than just that, making love. There was no point looking for other reasons. I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.

Fulfilling Life’s Purpose, Finding Meaning

The passion passes through a cycle from its beginning, middle, near-end and end, passing through excitement, anticipation, acceptance, moving on, overcoming towards finding meaning.

Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

Written in short fragments, paragraphs, it is a hypnotic read. I have never read anything quite like it, an introspective interrogation of the self, she is able to set aside society’s judgments and write in a way that is as intimate as a journal, but in a short succinct way that has her own purpose, to better understand the human condition.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

The author presses forward towards fulfilling that promise made to her 22 year old self, as we learned of in her novel lecture, to interrogate her own actions, her own mind in the life she has created, having ventured far from humble beginnings. In writing to avenge her people, she writes to avenge all.

He had said, ‘You won’t write a book about me.’ But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words – words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him – the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.