Tag Archives: Not My Review

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: Senegalese novelist’s win is a landmark for African literature

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Mohamed Mbougar Sarr on a TV show after winning the Prix Goncourt.
Photo by Eric Fougere/Corbis via Getty Images

Caroline D. Laurent, American University of Paris (AUP)The Prix Goncourt – the oldest and most prestigious literary prize in France – has been awarded to 31-year-old Mohamed Mbougar Sarr from Senegal. He’s the youngest winner since 1976 and the first from sub-Saharan Africa. Critics have been raving about The Most Secret Memory of Men, his novel about a young Senegalese writer living in Paris. The jury made a unanimous decision to award Mbougar Sarr the prize after just one round of voting, calling his work “a hymn to literature”. The prize will bring him literary fame and huge book sales, says Caroline D. Laurent, a specialist in Francophone African literature in France. We asked her more.

Who is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr?

Author of the 2021 Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Most Secret Memory of Men (La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes) Mbougar Sarr is a young Senegalese author who grew up outside Dakar and moved to Paris to continue his studies. At just 31, he has already published three other novels, his first in 2015: Encircled Earth (Terre Ceinte), Silence of the Choir (Silence du Chœur) and Pure Men (De Purs Hommes).

Starting his studies in Senegal, he began his doctorate at the prestigious School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, working on poet and Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Writing got in the way and prevented him from ever finishing and graduating. He now lives in Beauvais, a city north of Paris.

What is the novel about?

The Most Secret Memory of Men plays with reality and fiction. It tells the story of a young Senegalese author, Diégane Latyr Faye, who lives in Paris. In high school in Senegal he had come across mentions of a mysterious novel published in 1938 by a Senegalese author called T.C. Elimane, The Labyrinth of the Inhuman. Unable to find a copy, he had put his quest aside, considering it to be one of the many lost books of literature. But, by chance a few years later, he meets a Senegalese writer, Siga D, who gives him a copy of the book. The reading (and numerous re-readings) of what he considers to be a masterpiece revives his desire to find out what happened to the mysterious T.C. Elimane.

Why does the book matter?

The Most Secret Memory of Men is a novel about writing and literature. It is full of literary references – like to celebrated Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño and prolific Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. But it’s the obscure references that are probably the most interesting: the fictional T.C. Elimane’s book and his fate echoes that of real-life Malian author Yambo Ouologuem – who Mbougar Sarr’s own novel is dedicated to.

Winner of the 1968 Prix Renaudot for Bound to Violence (Le Devoir de Violence), Ouologuem sparked controversy after a 1972 article in the Times Literary Supplement claimed he had plagiarised several authors, including Graham Greene and André Schwarz-Bart. He returned to Mali and never published again. Just as the narrator of Mbougar Sarr’s novel, Diégane Latyr Faye, is his alter ego, T.C. Elimane is Ouologuem’s.



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As much as it is about writing, The Most Secret Memory of Men is also about reading. The work is polyphonic (with many narrators besides Faye), it is transcultural (set in Europe, Africa and South America) and it mixes different literary genres (letters, articles, conversations), encouraging many different types of readings. Some may focus on the historical events depicted – the novel alludes to colonialism, the World Wars, Nazism and the Holocaust, the dictatorship in Argentina and recent Senegalese demonstrations against state corruption. Others may focus on the mysterious elements that recall some features of magical realism. Or on the literary references, both African and global, that punctuate the text. Or all of the above.

A book cover with a brown and black illustration of an African man with turquoise written words in old-fashioned italics behind him.

Philippe Rey

It needs to be read for what it is – a great novel – and not because of the origin or the skin colour of its author. This is exactly why T.C. Elimane disappeared: hurt by some reviews, he felt misunderstood because his work was read through the lens of the work of others, notably that of French poet Arthur Rimbaud (he was called a “Rimbaud nègre” or black Rimbaud).

Why does this Prix Goncourt win matter?

For these reasons, winning the Prix Goncourt should be viewed as African literature finally being recognised for its literary qualities. One should focus on this (late) recognition and perhaps question why, faced with the many great novels by African writers, Mbougar Sarr’s win is so rare. The Most Secret Memory of Men is quite subversively brilliant in denouncing, through literature, the literary capture of African writers by former colonial powers.



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Jointly published by two small publishing houses, Philippe Rey in France and Jimsaan in Senegal, the novel is truly transnational. The recognition of these publishing houses on two continents will, hopefully, enhance and help rebalance African countries’ role in publishing and distributing the works of their authors. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is not only denouncing colonial and neocolonial practices, but also encouraging new ways of publishing and reaching readers.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is a powerful text not only because of its writing, its themes, and what it says about the place of African literature in the world, but also because of how it opens up future possibilities for Francophone authors.The Conversation

Caroline D. Laurent, Assistant Professor, American University of Paris (AUP)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Book review: Sean Kelly’s The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison

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Joshua Black, Australian National University“How can you tell if a politician is lying?” It is a favourite joke of my grandfather’s, and the punchline is all too obvious: “His mouth will be moving.”

The joke gives succinct expression to a cynicism that has shaped Australian politics since the introduction of self-government in the 1850s. The implication, of both the joke and the culture informing it, is that the politician’s lies reflect solely on their kind and reveal nothing about the rest of us.

In his newly published profile of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Sean Kelly flips this way of thinking on its head. The Game offers many powerful and revealing insights into Morrison’s career and the tricky political tactics that have characterised it. But the most important revelations in this book are about the society that created our prime minister, and the structures and cultures that facilitated his path to the Lodge.

Kelly explains, for example, that Morrison worked hard to be a “blank canvas” in the public eye until perhaps 2015, at which point he became the more recognisable suburban “good bloke down the road”.

This persona, replete with the “ScoMo” nickname, has characterised his public performances ever since. But the performance only matters because it finds in the Australian community “a willing audience” who, recently at least, like to have what novelist E.M. Forster called “flat characters” (or instantly recognisable “types”) in their newspapers and their parliaments.

Formerly a self-described “spin doctor” for both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Kelly studies Morrison’s public persona not just with the eye of a Canberra insider, but also with the lens of a cultural critic. In this “land of extremes”, he says, Australians are

always splitting ourselves in two, then ignoring the half that discomfits us.

For Kelly, this mentality explains why the so-called “quiet Australians” have indulged “the game” that Morrison plays, while the others have rejected him entirely (“I am completely different”).

Given Kelly’s Labor connections, cynics might expect a partisan hit-job on the prime minister. This portrait is no hit-job, but it is, unsurprisingly, unflattering.



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Kelly gives Morrison the benefit of the doubt with respect to the early stages of the pandemic, “a situation unlike anything those involved had dealt with before”. There is recognition, too, of the burdens that Jenny Morrison and her daughters have borne in service of public life. But the portrait of Morrison himself is a study of duplicity and hollowness.

There are criticisms of Morrison’s more tone-deaf and morally dubious performances, none more so than the forced handshakes with reluctant bushfire survivors and firefighters during that black summer of 2019-20.

But the most important conclusion about Morrison in this book relates to the way he thinks. Kelly suggests Morrison’s mind does not think in narratives, but only in images or snapshots (think of the punchline of the tourism ad he commissioned, “Where the bloody hell are ya?”). This, Kelly reasons, is why he can say one thing with such apparent conviction today, and the opposite with equal fervour tomorrow.

For a public figure, this inconsistency would be impossible “if it were not a central aspect of their experience of the world”. The psychological analysis here is sweeping, its inferences devastating.

There are many praiseworthy qualities in Kelly’s study. Serious issues, from asylum-seeker policy to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine roll-out, are given ample coverage. But this is no traditional biography, and these debates are not its central concern.

The main subject of this book is the performance of politics itself, and the narratives that mediate the public’s relationship with its representatives. The idea of “performance” seems resurgent in political theory and history, and its capacity for revelation is rich.

In some ways, Kelly’s book builds on an older tradition of political profiles that took performance as their main subject. Graham Little’s Strong Leadership (1988) and Judith Brett’s Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) stand tall in that tradition, using psychosocial theory to unpack the hearts and minds of Australian liberals from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) is equally important, part-memoir, part-meditation and part-psychological study of Paul Keating as prime minister, written from the intimate perspective of a prime ministerial speechwriter.

In each case, the biographer’s goal was to explain not just who the prime minister was, but how their way of thinking engaged with the world around them.

Kelly does not try to discover the “real” Scott Morrison, a task rendered almost impossible by the vacuousness of the prime minister’s performances and the role of the media in presenting him to us.

Instead, he evokes the divided community to whom Morrison performs, and the social and cultural processes that allow those performances to take place and, at least sometimes, hit their mark. Kelly’s method is to home in on public speech, its sounds and cadences, as well as the often elusive messages and impressions that Morrison seeks to convey with his words.

The chief limitation of The Game is that, relying largely on public material, it cannot take us into the institutions that empower Morrison, other than the media.



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We don’t learn much about the Prime Minister’s Office, other than that it failed to respond to Brittany Higgins’s alleged rape in Parliament House in an appropriate fashion.

Parliament itself is a stage here, but scarcely recognisable as an institution that makes laws. The public service is invisible. National Cabinet is, according to Kelly, little more than an “aesthetic change” from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that preceded it.

It says something about the condition of contemporary politics that it is hard to say whether these absences are a flaw in the author’s approach, or inevitable given the style of leadership it so astutely anatomises.

In the end, The Game invites us to look toward the next election. That poll will, Kelly implies, reveal something more of ourselves, or at least those “quiet” Australians who are supposed to have voted for Morrison in 2019. Like most of us, Kelly is unsure who will have the last laugh.The Conversation

Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning novel probes white South Africa and the land issue

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Damon Galgut at a photocall for this year’s Booker Prize in London.
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images

Sofia Kostelac, University of the WitwatersrandSouth African writer Damon Galgut has won the UK’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, for his work The Promise. It was Galgut’s third shortlisting for the career-defining award, which has evaded him until now. In 2003 he was shortlisted for The Good Doctor and in 2010 for In a Strange Room. So what is it that makes his latest novel The Promise so special? We asked Galgut expert Sofia Kostelac to fill us in about the writer and his tale of a white South African family’s reckoning with a racist past – and why the book is important, especially in South Africa where it is set.

Warning: This article contains spoilers.

Who is Damon Galgut?

Damon Galgut is a South African writer born in Pretoria in 1963. He now lives and works in Cape Town. He made his literary debut at the age of 18, with the publication of his first novel, A Sinless Season, in 1982. The Promise is his ninth novel, and the third to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Although best known for his novels, Galgut has also authored several plays, screenplays and short stories.

Like many readers, I was first made aware of Galgut’s writing when The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003. That novel encompasses many of the themes that Galgut has become best known for, including his searching meditations on the devastating legacies of apartheid and white-minority rule in South Africa. Yet his literary range also extends well beyond forms of politically engaged realism. It includes experiments with fictionalised memoir or ‘autrebiography’ (In a Strange Room), biographical fiction (Arctic Summer) and metaphysical crime writing (The Quarry and The Impostor).

What is The Promise all about?

The Promise is a carefully layered novel that spans just over three decades in the lives of the Swarts, a white South African family living on a farm just outside of Pretoria. The promise of the novel’s title refers to the commitment that Manie makes to fulfil his wife Rachel’s dying wish: to give their domestic worker Salome, who has worked for the family for decades, the house on the Swart farm in which she lives. The promise remains unfulfilled for the next 31 years as successive inheritors of the land refuse to cede the property to Salome.

The novel is divided into four parts, each focused on the death and funeral of a member of the Swart family. The deaths occur roughly a decade apart from each other. This is a structuring device that allows Galgut to hold three decades of South African history – from the violent state of emergency in the mid-1980s to the tumult of contemporary times – in view. While the dramatic socio-political changes of these years are apparent in every aspect of the Swart family’s lives, little changes for Salome, whose wait for the dignity and safety represented by land and property endures.

Why does the book matter?

At the heart of the novel – and the unfulfilled promise to Salome – lies the question of what sort of restitution is possible in the context of South Africa’s brutally iniquitous history? The bitter irony on which the story rests is that Salome’s house is entirely undesirable, consisting of “three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land.” It holds almost no material value for the Swarts, yet the family is torn asunder by their disagreements over its fate.

What would it take, the novel implicitly asks, for a family like the Swarts to give up a modicum of their privilege to nudge us towards a more equitable society? The Promise attends, with meticulous detail and insight, to the pathologies of racism, pride and fear that make such acts unlikely.

Galgut has rightly been praised by reviewers and the Booker judges for the formal skill with which he handles these vexing themes. The narrative voice is a remarkably inventive one that ranges between diverse characters with apparent ease, and delivers a rare combination of irony and empathy that wryly critiques the novel’s deeply flawed and afflicted characters without dehumanising them.

Does the Booker Prize matter and what will it do for Galgut’s career?

The Booker Prize is almost unparalleled in the attention and esteem it affords its winners. The prize has played a significant role in shaping the South African literary canon, and Galgut is now likely to take up a well-earned place alongside pantheons like J.M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer as among the most recognised, studied and anthologised of the country’s writers.The Conversation

Sofia Kostelac, Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Guide to the classics: Euripides’ The Trojan Women – an unflinching look at the brutality of war

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Aomawa Baker as Andromache in a production of The Trojan Woman in Los Angeles.
Wikimedia Commons

Chris Mackie, La Trobe UniversityThe story of the long struggle for the life of the city of Troy might be thought of as the pre-eminent Greek myth. Extensive narratives of the war are told in the oral traditions of myth and literature, and they also appear very significantly in the material evidence of Greek art and architecture.

The Trojan Women, a play by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides (485-406 BC), was produced at Athens in the early spring of 415 BC. It is set immediately after the fall of Troy and the killing of the Trojan men when the fates of the royal women and children of the city are being decided by the victorious Greeks.

The grim subject-matter and mood of the play in its Trojan setting have a parallel in the Peloponnesian war, which was being fought at the time between Athens and Sparta (431 to 404 BC). The Trojan Women speaks both to the renowned war at Troy, described most famously by Homer in the Iliad, and to the great military struggle taking place in Euripides’ own lifetime.



Read more:
Guide to the classics: Homer’s Iliad

Bust of Euripides. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original from circa 330 BC.
Wikimedia Commons

If there was a historical Trojan war it was probably fought in the late Bronze Age, perhaps in the 12th century BC at Hisarlik in north-west Turkey. Accounts of the war seem to have been passed on orally culminating in epic poems that probably date to the end of 8th century BC and after. The Iliad (c. 700BC) and the Odyssey (dated perhaps to a generation or two after the Iliad) are our two surviving early Greek epic poems on the Troy theme.

But we also know of a series of poems, now lost, called the “Epic Cycle”, six of which are focused on the Troy saga. All of these offered accounts of different parts of the Trojan war (which in the Greek tradition lasted for 10 years).

Early Greek epics made no attempt to document the historicity of the conflict in a modern sense, not the least because history hadn’t been invented when they were composed. History (a Greek word meaning “research” or “enquiry”) is a product of later (ie 6th and 5th century BC) rationalism and literacy.

One of four themed plays

As a late 5th century BC Athenian dramatist, Euripides is an heir both to the traditions of oral poetry and mythmaking, and to the rational enquiry of philosophy, rhetoric and history in a broad sense. Whilst Homer was greatly admired by the literati in 5th century Athens, he does represent a world long gone. (Homer’s Iliad may date up to 300 years before Euripides’ Trojan Women – as distant a period as the early 18th century is for us.)


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Euripides himself (485-406BC) was still writing into old age, not unlike his contemporary, the tragedian Sophocles (497/6-406BC), who was still producing plays at Athens into his early nineties! Euripides wrote about 90 plays, of which 18 survive, whereas the evergreen Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, only 7 of which survive. They often competed at the dramatic festivals, with Sophocles easily the more successful.

Euripides wrote four plays for performance on that day in the early spring of 415BC, although only The Trojan Women has survived. We know, not the least from fragmentary evidence, that the first three plays were on the Trojan war theme, but they were not a tightly inter-connected trilogy of plays, as is Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

First was the play Alexander, which focused on the earlier life of the Trojan archer-figure Paris, or Alexander, as he is often known. In the myth of Troy it is he who judges the divine beauty contest (the Judgement of Paris), that precipitates the war between Greeks and Trojans.

The second play was the Palamedes, about a clever but rather obscure Greek prince at Troy. The Trojan Women was the third play presented on that day, and was followed in turn by a more light-hearted “satyr play” called the Sisyphus.

We learn from an ancient source that Euripides’ plays came second in the dramatic competition of 415.

Cold calculation

The Trojan Women focuses on a small group of women of the royal house of Troy who await their fate in Greece – Hecuba, the widow of king Priam; Cassandra, the prophetess daughter of Priam and Hecuba; Andromache, widow of Hector and mother of the boy Astyanax; and Helen of Sparta, who has to plead for her life from Menelaus, her former husband. The chorus of the play are captive Trojan women.

The only Greek prince to feature as a character is Menelaus himself whose task is to decide on Helen’s fate now that she has been captured. The cruel decisions of the departing Greek forces occur with Odysseus as a key player, but these are enunciated to the women by Talthybius, a Greek herald.

The women are dispersed as slaves to particular princes throughout the Greek world who have led contingents within the Greek army. The obvious cruelty of this process is added to by the cold calculation as to who will go where.

Thus, the girl Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, was supposed to go to Achilles after the war; but seeing Achilles is now dead, she is sacrificed at his tomb.

Hector’s wife Andromache goes to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus because Hector and Achilles were rivals and had a major single combat in battle (told in Book 22 of the Iliad). Hecuba herself is to go to Odysseus – a terrible fate, upon which she laments her ill-fortune: “it is my lot to be slave to a vile and treacherous man”.

Cassandra will go as a sex slave to the lascivious and repulsive figure of Agamemnon, whilst Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships – is given back to Menelaus.

Attic plate depicting Ajax and Cassandra, circa 440-430 BCE.
Wikimedia Commons

Cassandra is murdered with Agamemnon upon their return to Mycenae, whereas Helen is a remarkable survivor upon her return to Greece. We encounter Helen again most especially in Homer’s Odyssey Book 4, where she has a kind of “normal” life and marriage with her former husband Menelaus in Sparta.



Read more:
Guide to the Classics: Homer’s Odyssey

It is important to remember that the extended story of the Trojan war is a genocide narrative, and that this comes through very emphatically within the play itself (as it does in other Greek literature).

The Greeks did not shrink from describing Greek atrocities perpetrated on the defeated Trojans. Indeed it is a feature of their narratives to focus on Greek cruelty. In the Iliad, for instance, Agamemnon urges his brother Menelaus on the battlefield to kill all Trojans, “even the boy that is carried in a mother’s womb”.

Hector’s last visit to his family before his duel with Achilles: Astyanax is on Andromache’s knees. Apulian red-figure column-crater, ca. 370–360 BC.
Wikimedia Commons

The horrific culmination of the cruelty in the Trojan Women is the killing of the boy Astyanax, the very young son of Hector and Andromache. This occurs within the course of the play itself (off stage, of course). Odysseus comes up with the idea of throwing him from the battlements of the city, and the Greeks even threaten to refuse the burial of his body if the Trojan women don’t co-operate with the decision to execute the boy.

Astyanax is a silent character in Homer and in Euripides, but his fate in the aftermath of the war speaks to us about infanticide, much as the fates of the Trojan women do with regard to rape and murder and the enslavement of women in war.

Women’s suffering

It does seem to be significant too that the only compassion for the women coming from Greek male characters in the play belongs to Talthybius, the (non-aristocratic) herald of the Greeks.

The Athenian audience in 415 BC knew very well the main mythical narratives of the aftermath of the Trojan war and the return home. They would know all about the death of Astyanax and about the return of Helen to Sparta to live again with her husband. They would also know, not the least from the prologue of Euripides’ play itself, that the Greek fleet will be hit by storms on the journey home on account of the rape of Cassandra by Locrian Ajax at the altar of Athena – an unpunished act which occurred prior to the opening of the play.

So the Trojan Women deals with the sharp end of Greek brutality in the war for Troy – the enslavement of women, human sacrifice, rape and infanticide.

The graphic violence dealt with in the play speaks to us about the absence of heroism in the narrative of Troy, despite what Homer and the epic poets provided in their earlier accounts.

The focus on women’s suffering in the war is in keeping with other works by Euripides, many of whose plays focused on female lives and female suffering in relentlessly male dominated environments.


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Inevitably, Euripides’ play has inspired many later treatments of the Trojan women theme. Two modern conscious responses to the Greek poets are novels by English author Pat Barker, who was moved to write The Silence of the Girls, based around the Iliad, and (most recently) The Women of Troy: A Novel, to hear the voices of the women themselves from Euripides’ play.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of The Women of Troy in the Guardian reiterates the violence of the language in Barker’s version: “clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling, impressively bleak”.The Conversation

Chris Mackie, Professor of Classics, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Guide to the classics: written in 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland imagines society without men

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Ruth Hollick collection. State Library of Victoria

Donna Mazza, Edith Cowan UniversityRecent television series Creamerie, a dark comedy from New Zealand where a pandemic quickly kills (almost) all men and male animals, revives the concept of an all-female society with a contemporary take on ideas raised by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) over 100 years ago.

Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) is the kind of novel mentioned by critics who dive into speculative fiction dealing with gender or utopia, but it rarely gets serious consideration as a literary work in its own right.

Authors of feminist dystopia in the mould of Creamerie and The Handmaid’s Tale do owe a debt to Herland, but the work itself was out of print for 60 years and is a scarce gem in libraries and bookstores alike.

Sepia photograph
Charlotte Perkins Gilman photographed around 1915, when she wrote and published Herland.
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute

Perkins Gilman was an influential suffragette in America, and Herland was originally published as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a monthly journal edited and written entirely by her for seven years. This is an extraordinary output for a single writer in any circumstances or era.

The book was published as a full-length work for the first time in 1979 by London based The Women’s Press Ltd. If not for the foresight of the feminist publisher, it might well have languished for more decades.

The novel is narrated by Vandyck Jennings, a sociologist out to learn all he can, and one of three men – alongside wealthy American Terry O. Nicholson who bankrolls the trip and Jeff Margrave, a smarmy doctor – who are on an adventure holiday into the wilderness of a continent resembling South America.

When their guides tell them about Herland, an isolated country devoid of men, they are keen to go and try their luck with the women; Terry aims to be “king of Ladyland”.

A land without men

Soon after their first journey, the men return so they are not beaten to “the good lookers” in “the bunch” by some other fellows. They take a small aircraft to map the forest, landing on a wide rock “quite out of sight of the interior”.

“They won’t find this in a hurry,” says Terry, even though the women had run out of their houses and watched them fly over: this is one of many subtle digs by the author foreshadowing the way the men underestimate the intelligence of the women.

The original 1979 cover.

The men scamper through the landscape, armed and dangerous, fuelled by the promise of lusty adventures and thoughts of fending off the men they know must be hidden somewhere, as they have seen babies and children on their flyover.

But there are no men. The explanation for 2,000 years of ongoing procreation comes a third of the way through the novel, where a chapter is dedicated to the history.

After escaping slavery in a harem and having “no-one left on this beautiful high garden land but a bunch of hysterical girls and some older slave women” there followed a decade of working together,

growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then a miracle happened — one of these young women bore a child. Of course they all thought there must be a man somewhere, but none was found. Then they decided it must be a direct gift from the gods, and placed the proud mother in the Temple of Maaia — their Goddess of Motherhood — under strict watch. And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them — all girls.

The three men are captured and held in a “fortress” for six months under the watchful eye of older women they disparagingly dub “Colonels” — and kept well away from their trousers and any young women.

Clothed in the same tunic as all Herland residents, they learn the language and are quizzed about the lives of women in their own country. Here, they divulge “the poorest of all the women were driven into the labour market by necessity” and two-thirds are “loved, honoured, kept in the home to care for the children” but it is a “law of nature” the poorest have the most children.



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The men “escape” under subtle observation and soon form bonds with the three young women they met up a tree on their arrival: Alima, Celis and Ellador.

By the end of the novel, Jeff is “thoroughly Herlandized” and all set to live with Celis in this utopia. The narrator, Van, marries Ellador and his social observations lead to some shifts in thinking (their story is the subject of the 1916 sequel, With Her in Ourland).

Wealthy misogynist Terry is intractable in his patriarchal attitudes. He is abusive to Alima, put on trial and expelled from Herland.

The Amazons

The 12 chapters of Herland are structured around topics (“A unique history”, “The girls of Herland”, “Their religions and our marriages”) that might easily be the titles of an anthropological work from the period.

The tone of the writing mimics an authoritative patriarchal voice. This is obviously intended to be ironic. The novel is darkly comic and filled with subtle digs at the male characters and the inequality faced by women in 1915, especially in response to work and economic disadvantage.

The concept of a female-led society has its roots in Ancient Greece, in the work of Homer who captured stories of Amazon warrior-women in Iliad. Amazon women like the fearsome Penthesilea, who battled Trojan warriors, feature in a range of Greek tales, where they are usually depicted as succumbing to the swords or charms of male protagonists like Achilles and Theseus.

The Amazons have been re-imagined by authors in many contexts since, featuring in art, literature — and Wonder Woman.



Read more:
The truth about the Amazons – the real Wonder Women

Herland pays homage to them, too. The legendary Amazons of Greek myth inhabited a remote homeland at the edge of the “world”; Herland seems to be located in an area resembling the Amazon.

Considering the geography of Herland is a well-forested triangle, the witty Perkins Gilman might also have been intending a symbolic connection with female anatomy.

The Yellow Wallpaper

In her time, Perkins Gilman’s ideas about the public role of women, prevalent male attitudes to women and the structure of the family were radically feminist.

This wasn’t the first work of hers which took up such ideas.

She is best known as author of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story narrated by a woman locked in an upstairs nursery by her husband — who is also her doctor — to treat a nervous condition with the “rest cure”. The rest cure was commonly prescribed to treat what we now call postpartum depression, which Perkins Gilman suffered for three years. It involved restriction of all activity, including reading and writing, while being confined to bed.



Read more:
The Yellow Wallpaper: a 19th-century short story of nervous exhaustion and the perils of women’s ‘rest cures’

Deeply disturbing and gripping, The Yellow Wallpaper is an expose on the treatment of women by medical professionals and narrates the woman’s descent into madness in disturbing detail. Perkins Gilman’s own physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, read the story and, as she claimed, discarded the rest cure in response.

The Yellow Wallpaper predates Herland by a couple of decades, but in comparison, the writing in it is more loose and dynamic. Perhaps the first-person male protagonist in Herland was a less comfortable narrative position for the author, with her well entrenched feminist ideals. The writing in Herland is not as rich in motif and layers of meaning. Characterisation of the women in the novel lacks depth, but this may also be ironic.

Overwhelmingly, the purpose of this feminist classic is to critique the social and economic system that restricted American (and other) women through limiting education, financial independence and life choices. As a novel, it reads as ideology-driven and a vehicle for women’s rights — but it is also very funny.Its ironies are still potent, and sadly valid.The Conversation

Donna Mazza, Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Not My Review: We Are Each Other’s Harvest – Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie Baszile

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We Are Each Other’s Harvest – Celebrating African American Farmers Land and Legacy by Natalie Baszile

Not My Review: Fatal Contact – How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples by Peter Dowling

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Book review: Fatal Contact is a timely account of how epidemics devastated our First Peoples

Wybalenna, Flinders Island: the Aboriginal settlement 1847.
Courtesy of Libraries Tasmania

Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania

Review: Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples by Peter Dowling (Monash University Publishing)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.

As Peter Dowling reminds us in his introduction to this book, violence on the colonial frontier accounted for many thousands of deaths among the First Peoples — a truth unremembered in a process of historical amnesia labelled the “great Australian silence” by anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner.

Australia’s sense of its past in collective memory, Stanner said in his famous 1968 Boyer lectures, was:

a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape […] a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.

A great deal has shifted in our understanding of the past since Stanner shocked the historical profession into a halting engagement with the truth of Australia’s settlement.

Yet, as historian Billy Griffiths pointed out in the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, a key part of the “great Australian silence” has been our continued willingness to see pandemic disease that eliminated the great majority of the First People as “inevitable and apolitical”.



Read more:
Friday essay: the ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on

In the face of the current pandemic, playing out on a global stage, Griffiths writes, we can observe that “it is not only about microbes; it is also about culture, politics and history”. The radically different consequences of this pandemic as experienced by different peoples has shown us we cannot blithely assume spread of disease is without responsibility.

This is what Dowling would have us understand in his timely and meticulous account of “the greatest human tragedy in the long history of Australia”. He examines the recurring outbreaks of fatal epidemics of smallpox, measles, syphilis, influenza and tuberculosis (TB), which “nearly wiped out Australia’s First Peoples”.

Catastrophic impact

At the time of colonisation, these diseases were so endemic in Britain that a high degree of immunity existed in the population, as well as medical strategies to control epidemic spread. But in the virgin-soil communities of Australia’s First Peoples, everyone was susceptible, with no-one spared. So there was no-one to provide basic needs for the sick.

The impact was catastrophic, as illustrated in the multiple accounts of the smallpox outbreak at Sydney Cove in 1789. This is widely known about now, but a wave of epidemics, including smallpox, continued to decimate the First Peoples well into the 20th century.

West view of Sydney Cove taken from the Rocks, at the rear of the General Hospital, 1789.
Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Alongside smallpox, syphilis also reached epidemic proportions in the Sydney region in the first few decades of settlement, gradually extending into every corner of the continent.

The scourge of syphilis was apparent in the early colony in Tasmania and a major contributor, along with influenza, to the rapid mortality that had all but eliminated the peoples of the south-eastern quadrant of the island by 1830.

Women and children at Corranderk in Victoria.
Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.

It was in Victoria where the magnitude of the disease was most apparent. In 1839, a cohort of Aboriginal Protectors were appointed to various districts across Victoria. They all reported overwhelming syphilis infection, accounting for as many as “nine out of ten” of the many sick and dying.

One reported of the First People in his district “the most extensive ravages […] will render them extinct within a few years”.

Another despairingly complained “no medicine has been placed at my disposal”.

Worst in camps

Epidemics reached into isolated First People’s communities well out of sight of authorities — the Spanish Flu of 1918 managed to spread its deadly tentacles into communities of the Western Desert. However, outbreaks were much more likely in the government-supervised camps, reserves, missions and stations, where dispossessed First Peoples were forcibly relocated.

Uniformly, these places of concentration had overcrowded and inadequate housing, low nutritional diets and bad water supply, combined with individual distress and depression — conditions favourable to the incubation and spread of diseases.

The First People’s high susceptibility to disease, Dowling argues, was probably a consequence of chronic untreated TB among those forced into camps and settlements.

He examines the settlement on Flinders Island in Tasmania between 1832 and 1847, which became infamous for its horrendous death rate, mythologised by the colonists who had expelled these people simply due to their “pining away”.

The records examined by Dowling show these people actually died of either TB itself or an associated respiratory illness worsened by TB’s immunosuppressant effects.

TB was also known to have been an efficient killer in the Victorian settlements at Lake Hindmarsh and Coranderrk: the attributed cause of more than 30% of recorded deaths in those places between 1876 and 1900. At these same settlements, a measles epidemic in 1874-5 killed 20% of people.

A group of Aboriginal men at Coranderrk Station, Healesville.
Courtesy of State Library of Victoria

It is no coincidence this was the same story as at the notorious concentration camps for dispossessed Boers the British created in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, where various epidemic diseases were allowed to rage.



Read more:
The COVID-19 crisis in western NSW Aboriginal communities is a nightmare realised

As I write, I am acutely aware most communities of First Peoples have the lowest vaccination rates in the nation — even though the government has assured us repeatedly vaccination for these most vulnerable communities was their highest priority.

In despair, I repeat the mantra: the past is not even past.The Conversation

Cassandra Pybus, Adjunct Professor in History, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Book review: Sindiwe Magona’s devastating, uplifting story of South African women

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CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images

Lizzy Attree, Richmond American International University

Reading South African author Sindiwe Magona’s latest novel When the Village Sleeps reminded me of my time researching and teaching in the country’s Eastern Cape province a decade ago. While involved in community engagement for Rhodes University I heard stories of young people who would deliberately contract HIV in order to receive government disability grants.

When the Village Sleeps spans three generations of women in one family and the central role of ancestral belief and ancient custom – or a lack of it – in their lives. It initially focuses on Busi, a promising young student who benefits from an education at a good school due to the hard work and friendship of her grandmother with her former white employer.

It reveals the devastating motivation behind Busi’s teenage pregnancy orchestrated to produce a financial reward in the form of a child support grant from the state.

The shocking story at the centre of Magona’s latest novel is as heartbreaking as it is cruel – and yet the character of Busi’s daughter Mandlakazi (or Mandla) completely overturns the notion that her birth is a tragedy. She becomes the heroine who unites her family.

A book cover showing the title 'When the Village Sleeps' inside an illustration of a giant moon, trees and lands in the foreground and the name of the author, Sindiwe Magona.

Pan Macmillan/Picador Africa

Magona is a pioneering writer who, with this new novel, continues to feature challenging contemporary issues in her work, with incisive commentaries on power, masculinity and the role of women.

The old and the new

Mandla’s great grandmother, Khulu, who takes baby Mandla to the rural Eastern Cape to recuperate from birth disabilities and strengthen her, is central to the story and it is her unending devotion that seems to bring about such a significant change in the “broken bundle” she brings home to Sidwadweni.

Referencing the poetry and teachings of celebrated isiXhosa-language author and historian S.E.K. Mqhayi, the narration frequently shifts into poetry to enable the voice of Mandla to articulate her nascent consciousness which seems fused with her ancestors, “the Old”. From her earliest moments she would:

fall asleep to the ministrations

of her hands infused with care

and into that sleep

the lyrics of songs pouring from an ancient throat

sink deep into my mind

into my brain, my heart, my limbs.

No wonder Mandla is so transformed by the years she spends under Khulu’s care. She returns to Kwanele township in Cape Town with a divine gift that enables her to access the ancestral realm, and predict the future.

Central to the novel is abenzakalise (those who have harmed) and the consequences of their actions. On a personal level this relates to Busi’s strained relationship with her mother Phyllis and her estranged father, and then, as a teenager, the alcohol and the street drug tik she imbibes in order to deform her baby and receive the state’s disability allowance.

However, all of these characters are shown to be capable of redemption and change, as long as they adhere to Khulu’s wisdom – which is by no means a fixed regurgitation of “tradition” but a practical, living faith. So the resilience and strength of all the female characters shines through, as it does in Magona’s celebrated 2008 novel Beauty’s Gift.

A devastating critique

On a wider allegorical level the novel reads as a critique of South Africa itself, the impact of colonialism and the ruling African National Congress (ANC), who have harmed the people through corruption and a failure to tackle inequality, stunting the growth of a healthy, prosperous nation.

Explicit critique of the government and particularly government handouts which do nothing to really alleviate poverty, but just entrench feelings of helplessness, is evident throughout the novel.

Magona makes incisive judgements, through her characters – especially the elder Khulu and young Mandla – and offers possible solutions, which include honouring the earth and returning to self-sufficiency. This idealism can feel naïve at times but there’s something very seductive and straightforward about the self-care, and self-respect that comes from citizens helping themselves and transforming their communities from within.



Read more:
Learning from the story of pioneering South African writer Sindiwe Magona

Towards the end, the book tips into a kind of disabled girls’ manifesto or set of instructions for how to set up community-based support for disabled and marginalised young people. However Magona expertly shifts the narrative at that point back to a dialogue with the ancestors and manages to transform the didactic elements of the tale into wisdom that reaches up to the present day and the threat of COVID-19.

Very recent commentary on the difficulties of enforcing social distancing in communities which rely on food parcels during the pandemic, forcing locals to gather together to collect much needed help, is painful to read. The mistakes are so preventable and obvious and yet are made time and again.

The prophecy

Most interesting to me is the way in which the novel manages to balance the re-introduction of neglected female initiation rites alongside the magic realism of Mandla’s prediction of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike the 15-year-old Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse’s 19th century prophecy – which led to a millennial movement that culminated in the cattle-killing and famine of 1856-7 – Mandla’s foretelling that “the world will die”, comes true, although perhaps not on the scale the “voices” decreed:

The ground will not be able to swallow all the dead!

O-oh! The multitudinous dead!

There will be none left to bury the dead.

In many respects this prediction blurs, in my mind, with the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that killed more than 2 million South Africans, with 7.7 million currently infected with HIV. Magona has written searingly on this topic before.

Once again excoriating the corruption and failures of government, the Fields of Hope project, which young Mandla initiates to grow food for the township, shines like a beacon when “what government help does for the poor is cement them in poverty… Here comes help that is real!”

Ending on a shockingly blunt and abrupt note, Magona leaves us, as always, with a lot to think about.The Conversation

Lizzy Attree, Adjunct Professor, Richmond American International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.