ImageNations

The Sun rose up in the sky gradually. Its disc turned into a ball of fire, choking the wind, bearing down on the trees, turning everything into solid dryness, so that all things seemed to suffocate, burn in its red fire, and dry up, except the rivulets of sweat pouring down from Zakeya's face and body on to the ground. Beneath the sweat her face was livid like the face of the buffalo turning round and round in its yoke. [4] [E]verything tastes bitter to the mouth of a peasant. [17] Instead of painting her lashes with kohl, he had blinded her eyes. [17] People have become corrupt everywhere,..., You can search in vain for Islam, for for a devout Muslim. They no longer exist. [20] [O]ne cannot learn except at a high price. [37-8] Since she was sure that the odour of godliness and moral uprightness smelt good and was pleasant to respire, she realized her nose was to blame for making the atmosphere around her smell like a latrine which was never washed down. [42] ...

July was an extremely slow month. It happened to be the month that ushered in the reading fatigue that usually comes when one has been consistently reading. Last year, the fatigue months were May, June and August, where I read the least.  In my review of June's reading activities I projected to read four books, hoping that I could add another one to get to the average of five per month required to meet the challenge. However, July had its own ideas and I had to suspend reading for days. I have read (almost) three of the four projected books: Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein .  [374 p.] This is an engaging story about the slave trade. It is not only about the Atlantic slave trade but also about the kind of internal slavery that existed among the tribes. It is an interesting book that needs to be read by all. God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi . [175 p.] Nawal was in her elements in this story. This is a book or a story about the pol...

Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade  (374; Techmate) by Manu Herbstein won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book in 2002. It explores, boldly, one of the darkest moments of human history when human beings (blacks from Africa) were traded like articles or farm animals. Assessed for defects - muscles, clear eyes, etc. - and for profitability. Thus, in that period, black men and women were no different from livestock - in treatment and in conception.  Manu Herbstein painfully peels off the gangrenes from our necrotic wounds to show us our painful complicity as Africans in our own enslavement and therefore our debasement. To this extent Manu is in league with Ayi Kwei Armah, who in his books -  Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers  - showed how far we went as Africans, how lowly we bowed, how stupidly we grovelled, and how greedily we participated in our own destruction. Armah called the chiefs who stupidly surrendered our sovereignty for p...

No one knows what the elephant ate to make it so big. [40] The Tail of the elephant may be short ... but it can still keep the flies away. [40] [A]t another's hearth, you do not have the same freedom you might have in your mother's kitchen. [71] Chapel. You don't know what chapel is? That is their room where they go to worship their gods. It is in the charge of the chaplain, who is like a fetish priest for them, an Okomfo  you know, except that he does not know how to dance. ... Sometimes the chaplain tells them stories which he says comes out of a special book. That books is one of their main fetishes. Mijn Heer tried to tell me some of the stories when we were married. Some were not bad, but most were rubbish. I told him he should listen rather to our Ananse stories, they are much more entertaining and there is always a lesson to be learned from them. [136] De Bruyn had tried to fit her feet into a pair of his late wife's shoes, but the foot of a fema...

Gradually Bessie Head is becoming my most read author. It all started after the Writers Project of Ghana held its twitter discussion on her book A Question of Power .  I had earlier read the book (and two others: A Woman Alone and Maru ), even before it was chosen and had had it reviewed on this blog. However, the discussion got me thinking about that woman, her beautiful spirit, her audacious writings, and her sense of humour even in the midst of dire adversity. Thus, I picked three of her books, including Tales of Tenderness and Power  and When Rain Clouds Gather . The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories  (1993; 141) contains a novella and seven short stories and meditations. It is a story about the effects of racial discrimination and how it breaks down families and flings their members about to the ways of the storms of life. In The Cardinals , set in South Africa, not only are the lives of the natives battered by poverty and destroyed by lack, politi...

You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap. [22] I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently. [24] Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it? [37] They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpecte...

The Karamazov Brothers (870; 1880)* is the second book by Fyodor Dostoevsky I have read, in addition to Crime and Punishment .  The book counts towards two reading challenges: the Year of Russian Literature and Top 100 Books to be Read in Five Years . In this book, which happened to be the author's last work, Dostoevsky traversed several grounds and themes and perhaps knowing (or through serendipity) completely and fully invested himself and his knowledge in this book. I am not sure of this, but The Karamazov Brothers  could be a cauldron of a major part of Dostoevsky's ideas. In effect, this author-researcher, this psychologist of a novelist, this student of human nature and thoughts, produced a seminal work, worth studying in different fields of social sciences, in this novel. Thus, to describe The Karamazov Brothers  as a novel is an understatement. It does the book a huge injustice and undermines its quality. This is a compendium of human thoughts, psych...