By The Sea & The Resignation of Saleh Omar

Some books I read because I think I should…

(currently Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — I’ve been self-describing as a Libertarian Sympathizer for long enough that I figure I should read the basic texts. It’s like being a Christian without reading the Bible, a Trotskyite without reading Marx, a Scientologist having never watched Travolta rock Battlefield Earth. However, based on the speed at which I’m making it through Ayn Rand, it would seem that my commitment to the Objectivist Mind is on thin ice. See Obama, below.)

Some books I read because they’re good fun…

(recently Election — If you liked the movie, you’ll love the book. Heck, if you’ve ever been to High School you’ll love the book. It’s pretty hard not to have a good time with this one. Of course you could skip it and just watch the movie. They provide a similar experience, and the book lacks the topless and puffy Matthew Broderick shower scene.)

Some books I read because they’ve been passed on by good friends…

(currently The Audacity Of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream — I’ve never read one of these election year ghost-written rush jobs before, but I’m giving this one a try. Mr. Obama comes across as a pretty decent fellow. I’m not sure he’s actually going to bring any of his patented “Yes We Can! Change!” along if he makes it to the White House — or even if I want him to — but it will be interesting to see him give it a try. My lack of faith in politics in general makes me sympathetic to Ms. Rand, but I’m always willing to take chance on something new. How much harm can one man do in four years anyway?)

Some books I read because my friends are moving to Tanzania…

Such is the case with By The Sea, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Not quite technically a Tanzanian himself, Gurnah hails from Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous island fiefdom off the coast of Africa which lends its “zan” to Tanzania. (The rest of the post-colonial nation consists of the much larger mainland Tanganyika.)

Wise counsel has stated that the best way to understand a new place is to chew on some good fiction from the region. In the past I’ve hypocritically nodded in agreement. Now I’ve given it a try. And now I nod vigorously with heartfelt advocation of the practice.

However, if you want to understand By The Sea, you must dig up your old Anthology of American Literature, Volume I (we’ve all got one, right?) and re-read Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville. Why must I make you suffer so? Because it’s the fried-nerved suffering of Bartleby that brings comfort to the late-life refuge seeking Saleh Omar.

Like Bartleby, Saleh has reached the point where he “prefers not to.” He’s given up. He’s watched everything he’s worked for end up like one of The Scrivener’s dead letters, but lost to a more malicious bureaucracy born of the vestiges of empires from the Arab to the English, who washed across his paradise island looking for loot and leaving complications.

He is now a refugee heading to England for the first time — to feel winter for the first time, and to be robbed of what little he still owns for the last time. And he rests at peace with this new condition.

He is not alone; he is merely not exempt. He is not exempt from a too-common fate of displacement, misfortune, and victimization. Sometimes this fate strikes an entire tribe or nation. Sometimes it hits one man at a time. Saleh’s story falls somewhere in between. Although his people have suffered at the hands of a greater machine (most recently the British Empire) his troubles arise out of the strife stirred up by family loyalties, business obligations, and local politicians gone bad.

In referencing Bartleby, we have a comparison with an Englishman stuck in America a hundred years earlier. With the inclusion of Jan and his mum we see the parallel lives of those displaced by the East German Iron Curtain. And in Rachel — spawned of generations of involuntarily nomadic Jews — we see again that no one is from just somewhere. Seems we’re all the descendants of turbulence and transition if you go back a little bit further. Do what you can where you are. Change is a-comin’.

(Note: More on the ongoing work in Tanzania: here here here.)