Year: 2015

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin

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Zenith Hotel ― Oscar Coop-Phane

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‘When I wake up my teeth feel furry. There’s a foul taste in my mouth – a nasty sort of animal taste.’ – For Nanou, this is how each day begins. Nanou is a Parisian streetwalker ‘Not a call girl or anything. No, a real street whore, with stiletto heels and menthol cigarettes.’

In Zenith Hotel Oscar Coop-Phane details the not so glamorous life lived by Nanou. The book takes the form of a one day diary, interwoven with short portraits of the men who seek solace in the withered arms of Nanou. The book is original and incredibly moving, creating a world of solitude and sadness encompassed in the actions of just one day.

Nanou’s story is different to how you might expect. It is not a sob story dreamt up by Coop-Phane to make a reader feel better about their own sad existence – no, it is just a day. ‘I don’t intend to go into detail and tell you about my childhood, my love life and all my woes. I’m not going to tell you how I ended up like this’ say Nanou, she is clear that in knowing her past ‘you’d get too much of a kick out of it’, and she would not give you the satisfaction. Instead, all Nanou tells us is her day, so, – ‘If you were expecting me to talk about rape, being abandoned, HIV and heroin, you can fuck off, pervert’ – if you are looking for a misery maker this probably isn’t the book for you.

So why does Nanou write, if not to tell of her woes and mistakes in life? She doesn’t complain, and doesn’t even seem to see the worth or the point in her own writing. ‘I don’t know why I write. It churns me up, it soils me from the inside. To pass the time perhaps. That’s it. I write like some people do crosswords, it keeps me busy. I think about words, style and shape of the letters. I feel as if I am doing something without getting up off my arse.’

The book is structured into short chapters each detailing background of each Nanou’s clients – this is the only background information we are given, as though the messed up lives of her clients say more about her life than her own past – each chapter ends with a short interaction between Nanou and her client. Through each entry Coop-Phane digs into the very heart and soul of Nanou’s clients, voicing their innermost thoughts, desires and anxieties, while detailing Nanou’s complete lack of interest. These chapters come between passages written by Nanou herself, short ramblings scratched from the street corner, recording her day’s activities and musings.

Nanou’s life is routine, living hand to mouth with only but the smallest of pleasures to call her very own. ‘I drink my coffee all alone in my room. Smoking my fags. To cheer myself up, I tell myself I’m saving money.’ The reality is more depressing, it is not that Nanou cannot afford to drink her coffee out, but that she gave up socialising when the smoking ban was implemented, the pleasure of a combined nicotine and caffeine hit too great to spare for a chat with friends.

1024px-Rotlichviertel_Frankfurt_MainHer living quarters are dismal, the shared bathroom having fallen into the bleakest state of disrepair, Nanou resorts to borrowing the bathroom of another friend, where her morning wash routine is clinical, a mere formality rather than something to be enjoyed: ‘I wash with a mini soap. I like feeling the roughness of my skin, the way it goes taut and chapped after washing. Shower gel is too gentle. It leaves your skin slightly greasy, like when you oil it. I prefer it when my skin’s dry. I feel cleansed – disinfected.’

After leaving the discomfort of her living quarters for a day on the street Nanou meets an extraordinary circus of men. Among them Dominic, a young man who, having been convinced of his family’s desire to murder him, beat them to it and earned himself life in an institution, and Emmanuel a dreary school worker, who has no friends and spends each Saturday when his wife is away sneakily masturbating into their sofa.

Of course Nanou does not really notice these men. She is not really there when she sees them, making small talk, being kind and giving them what they want is all part of the service after all. It is just as much a part of prostitution as the selling of her body itself. These men use her as escape, as a method of running away from the harsh realities of life, which she herself has come to accept. The reality is that these men do not even come close to being with Nanou when they pay for her services: ‘I can tell you that when they screw me, when they get all horny jiggling about on top of my poor inert body, those sad suckers are well and truly alone.

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Her work day is rhythmic, relentless and monotonous ‘like a factory worker in a production line. The same action relentlessly for years. No hope. A little factory worker of the flesh’. She gets no pleasure from the lifestyle, other than the cigarettes and coffee bought with her wages. As the day progresses Nanou’s thoughts become bleaker and bleaker, as though she has an intrinsic hatred of everything she stands for. She is not self-pitying, but self-loathing, considering herself to be of no worth other than a temporary recipient of other men’s primal desires: ‘I feel hollow – as commonplace as a chamberpot that you plonk down beside the bed.’

The day drags on, and the money comes easily, ‘but at what cost?’ she asks herself. She works the street all day, until finally, after her sixth client and a day spent absorbing the filth of the city, it is time to go home. ‘At last’ she thinks, ‘I can go to bed, turn on the television and light up another fag.’

Nanou is a streetwalker in Paris. Her heart has taken on the colour of the pavement. And when she falls asleep she knows ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

Taken at face value Zenith Hotel is a striking representation of the depressing life lead by a Parisian prostitute, but it is also deeply poetic, insightful, and beautiful in a way which speaks mountains about the work of Coop-Phane. Nanou is the picture of a life lost to the grime of the Paris streets, her ‘soul sweats the filth of the city’, and her words speak volumes.

I was given a free copy of Zenith Hotel by Arcadia Books, the publishers, in return for an honest review.

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.” ― George Orwell

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The Kiss of the Spider Woman – Manuel Puig
(El Beso de la Mujer Araña) 

n273641‘– Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others.’ This is how Argentine author Manuel Puig introduces his most highly acclaimed novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman.

What does this opening sentence tell the reader? Is it speech? Narration? The introduction of a protagonist?

In beginning the book in this way Puig throws the reader in at the deep end – there is no introduction, explanation or clue as to how the novel will progress.

This novel is unusual, formed as it is without any form of narrative voice – a primary feature of the traditional novel. Puig composes the novel almost entirely of dialogue, interlaced with periods, often extended, of stream of consciousness, providing the reader with nothing side from a dash (–) to show that the speaker (or thinker) has changed.

As such, the characters are never actively introduced, and their names only emerge through their conversation with one another. It is up to the reader to remain attentive in order to work out who is speaking, and keep up with the flow of speech. It takes some time, but as the story unravels it becomes apparent that the two main ‘speakers’ are cell mates in an Argentine prison.

The two protagonists are Molina, a homosexual window-dresser who is serving a sentence for ‘corrupting a minor’, and Valentín, a political prisoner, serving a sentence for his membership of a leftist organisation attempting to overthrow the government. In the seclusion of their cell these two men talk, or rather, Molina talks, while Valentín listens. Molina reanimates the films he so loves in order to light up the darkness of the prison cell, while the cynical minded Valentín allows himself to become absorbed by the scenes which emerge before him. Sometimes they talk all night long – given over to their desire to escape from their surroundings.

This is how the novel begins, with a film, or rather with Molina’s description of a film – Cat People if you are interested – and this introduces one of the most important aspects of the novel. Molina’s retelling of the films make up the majority of the novel, the effect of which is strange, I found myself absorbed by these subplots and a desire, just like Valentín, to know how the films end, while simultaneously desperate to know how the novel itself will begin to pan out.

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The storytelling is captivating, I felt at times as though I could see the film panning out before me, Molina’s descriptions, particularly those of the women, bring the scenes to life before your eyes.

‘She has her legs crossed, her shoes are black, thick high heels, open toed, with dark-polished toenails sticking out. Her stockings glitter, that kind they turned inside out when the sheen went out of style, her legs look flushed and silky’

While the eloquent, effeminate Molina and the gruff, radical Valentín present themselves as almost polar opposites the character that emerge through their conversation share a key similarity. Valentín believes in suffering for the greater good; while Molina believes in enduring all else for the magic of love, but each man feels destined to be alone, Valentín for want of the cause, and Molina due to his passion for heterosexual men.

Slowly, as the novel progresses and the men spend night after night wrapped in each other words, they begin to surrender themselves to one another, with each committing himself to the cause of the other.

In The Kiss of the Spider Woman Puig rewards his readers with a truly unique reading experience. Puig’s unusual style and abstract form choice combine to create a novel which is both deeply moving and incredibly thought provoking. The unique position if the reader within the novel allows for the development of an almost intimate character-reader relationship. As such Molina’s films serve as an escape, not just for the prisoners, but also for the reader.

Who is the spider woman?

The main question I found myself asking while reading this book was – what is the relevance of the spider woman? She is referred to just once, briefly in the novel, when Valentín tells Molina ‘– You, you’re the spider woman, that traps men in her web.’ Still this doesn’t give much away as to who, or what the spider woman is. It requires a little research.

Pur_12_aracneIn Latin American history, the Teotihuacán Spider Woman, or Great Goddess, is thought to have been the goddess of the underworld, and, somewhat strangely, of earth, water and possibly creation itself. While in Greek mythology the other spider woman, Arachne, was a mortal woman who was incredibly skilled in the art of weaving and challenged the goddess of wisdom and crafts, Athena, to a – for want of a better phrase – spin off and was transformed into a spider as punishment for her arrogance.

So which of these spider women lend themselves to Molina? Having read the book I feel I could attribute either of these personas to his character, although I’m not sure myself which Puig was referring to, if indeed he was referring to either. Puig presents Molina as a glittering weaver of great things, as a true an artist adept at creating beautiful scenes to distract and allure Valentín, but it also emerges that he is a great manipulator capable of influencing those around him for his own cause.

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.” ― Marcus Aurelius

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Good news obscure poetry fans – I have another #TBT treat for you!

I can’t take all the credit for this one, it was the combined effort of myself and several school friends – the result of one of many days spent the days lurking in the sixth form study room (we were far too unpopular to think of straying into the so called ‘common’ room). I had been set the task of writing a sonnet for an English literature task, and implored upon my school friends to help me.


Ode to a rotting corpse emily_of_corpse_bride_by_starreyley94-d3krr5b
Shall I compare thee to a rotting corpse?
Thou art more gruesome and more horrid yet,
The one for whom the maggots use their sporks
To eat up all the rotting flesh they get.
Sometimes I want to tear your eyeballs out
And often I succeed in doing this,
And all the time I wish that you had gout
By summer you will smell like rotting fish.
But that will not redeem your horrid life.
Nor make your presence any less morbid.
Nor will you ever learn to play the fife,
While rancid lips remain so, so sordid.
As long as there is flesh still on your bones,
I hope to always hear your corpsey moans.

I am beginning to get the impression that I was a strange child…

“The ignorance of the oppressed is strength for the oppressor.” — A. R. Bernard

jadetheobscure Light reading

First to Dance  — Sonya Writes 

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Sonya Writes lives in North Carolina with her two daughters. A quick look at her website reveals she has a love of all things literary, Writes is an author, book reviewer, and non-fiction fanatic – so no stranger to the world of words. Writes’ novels delve into the obscure, exploring the results of slight changes to traditional plots and include a series of ‘fairy tales retold’. ‘In most cases, the plots to my books were started with a simple question,’ she says, reeling off the questions that led her to publish her first few novels. ‘I’ll continue to ask many more as my writing career goes on.’ As well as an impressive collection of novels, Writes also has a series of books designed for children. Her first full novel, First to Dance, was published in 2014.

Zozeis is a dismal planet, with a society so oppressive it seems to bleach the bleak streets that streak its surface. On such a place there is no room for individuality. Children are moulded into their positions, plucked from school and assigned to their lifelong roles. To see the children in their classrooms you may think them all the same, as they sit absorbing knowledge, with no opportunities to learn through exploration. On Zozeis the written word is fact, and ‘they’ decide which facts are learned. Any kind of creativity is shunned, not banned as such, but certainly not considered as acceptable.

An insatiable appetite to learn draws 19-year-old Ayita behind the panels of her dusty garage, into a long hidden library whose books tell of a planet where creativity is nurtured, beauty is immortalised through paint and stunning ‘lies’ coat the pages of books – Earth. Ayita dares to dream that such a place exists. Exploring her own rebellion, she paints the walls of her bedroom with flowers, and dances alone in the dark. When she is discovered Ayita has no choice but to flee her home, in the hope of finding earth, and freedom not just for herself, but for all the people of Zozeis.

The opening lines of a book can be the most important; it is your chance to capture a reader’s attention – while many people are encouraged now to look beyond a book’s cover, they may not look past the first few lines if what is inside fails to captivate. Luckily Writes did not disappoint:

‘Don’t try to teach Aaron about Earth, Etana. I forbid it.’
‘I didn’t know that I married a dictator.’
‘If you teach him about Earth, you’ll lose him, not because I am a dictator but because that is what the people have decided.’

These few lines precede the opening chapter, and introduce a small, yet important part of the history of Zozeis –my interest was immediately piqued. The chapter that follows introduces Ayita, mid argument with a school friend. It emerges that Ayita has discovered a book that talks about Earth – her friend is not impressed.

‘It’s a book of lies,’ Aira said. ‘Destroy is. None of what it says is true.’

Having only read the first page of First to Dance, there are already so many questions buzzing around in the reader’s head. What is this planet? How did these people get here? And who is Etana? What happened to Earth? The only possible way to find the answer to these questions is to read on.

Feliz_1984Zozeis is a George Orwell-esque society; imagine 1984 crossed with the world portrayed in Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying. Earth, the place it seems the people of Zozeis originated, is like a huge conspiracy, covered up and left out of text books. Zozeis is everything, and within Zozeis everything is regimented – jobs, love, and schooling are all predetermined and rigid:

‘After dropping out, students were assigned a job, and when they were old enough, a spouse and home according to their job district. Five or six years ago, dropping out for Ayita would have meant working in the fields or delivering the weekly grocery boxes to each household. Now it would mean a hands-on internship leading to a more high-profile and envied position in a wealth district, such as where she lived now. If she made it through the next three years in class she could eventually receive a top position in government or be on the committee that decided which facts were taught to people and when.’

Should a person toe the line of what is considered normality, they risk being sent to the dreaded ‘secondary school’. The secondary school is a domineering building, shrouded in mystery, where citizens are sent to learn the ‘truth’ so that they might come back into society – though some who enter are never seen again.

It takes some time for the whole story of Zozeis and its people to come into the light, and Writes opts to introduce this information in a slightly different way. Part way through the book there is a section in which the narrator assumes the voice of one of the founding members of Zozeis, Etana, and it is through this section that we learn the history of Zozeis. Writes’ decision to introduce the information in this way may not be to everyone’s taste – it could seem slightly jarring to have the tense switch like this. I personally thought it worked quite well, although perhaps it could be more carefully slotted in, allowing for time to pass between the present and the past so as to make the section a little less intimidating. I will leave it to other readers to judge for themselves.

Through this section of the book we learn that Zozeis, and many other planets, began as a series of experiments conducted by an eccentric billionaire Dr Timothy Azias. It sounds horrific doesn’t it? Imagine Dr Timothy as a futuristic combination of John Cleese’s character in the film Rat Race and Jeffrey Combs’ in Would you Rather? And yet somehow, at times, I felt something close to compassion for Dr Timothy, despite the fact that he essentially kidnapped thousands of people to satisfy his own morbid curiosity. I can imagine this reaction to be somewhat similar to what Etana herself would have felt. I’m not sure how Writes intended for the reader to feel towards Dr Timothy, his character is left very much open ended and I have a feeling there is much more to learn about him.

I’d love to talk some more about the other planets that come into play in First to Dance, but I am, as always, wary of spoilers and do not want to give too much away. What I will say is Ayita does visit other planets in the book, and that the question on Writes’ mind that led her to write First to Dance was ‘What if everyone shared the same personality type?’ and leave it at that.

There was one aspect of First to Dance that I found really quite troubling, and that was the lack of animals on any of the planets. I found this especially problematic given that there seemed to be an abundance of plant life. For me, this part of the book didn’t really work. I can’t quite comprehend how such places could exist without creatures of some sort to sustain the ecosystem. Of course, given that it is a work of fiction, Writes has poetic licence over such matters, but I think if this is to be the approach of the book then some sort of explanation is needed.

On the whole, I found First to Dance to be a thoroughly entertaining read. Writes’ questioning nature has created a great backstory that gives way to an equally brilliant storyline. I do think that there are a few structural things that could do with being improved, and that the text would benefit from being seen by a professional editor, but I don’t feel that these issues are great enough to warrant any kind of despair on behalf of the author. Overall I really enjoyed the book, and would be very interested to see whether Writes will decide to continue the series.

Many thanks to Sonya Writes for supplying a free copy of First to Dance in exchange for an honest review.

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” ― J.M. Barrie

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Flowers, shadows and the age of magic

Nigerian author Ben Okri reflects on how moving from the UK to Africa as a child introduced him to new experiences that were to be a big influence on his future writing

Ben Okri

Writing should be a lifelong experience, says Ben Okri, the Nigerian poet and author. Since publishing his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, at the tender age of 21, Okri has risen to international acclaim. His best known work, The Famished Road, was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize.

As a newcomer to Okri’s work, you would be forgiven for seeing it as somewhat obscure. His ideas, he says, are born “out of the strangeness of reality”. To put this into context, he refers to a time when he first noticed the peculiarity of everything around him, when travelling back to Nigeria from the UK as a young boy. “Everything was strange,” he says, “the trees, and the streets, everything was unusual, and therefore brimming over with ideas.”

In order to reflect this perceived strangeness of reality, Okri expresses himself in a very different way to what he calls the “old Western novel”, referring to books written by the likes of Jane Austen. This older style of writing, he says, follows a sequential pattern, born from a sequential way of thinking taught within Western institutions. Okri’s writing attempts to convey a new way of thinking, to show that writing does not need to follow a strict criteria and can instead be perceived in any number of unique ways  – it can be sequential, he says, or “circular and dancing”.

Okri was participating in the Cambridge Festival of Ideas – a week-long University of Cambridge public event celebrating the arts, humanities and social sciences. He reflected on his colourful writing career, sharing a stage with Tim Cribb, an English fellow at the university. Crowds of people turned up to listen to Okri speak. He was invited to begin reading from one of his poems, with the audience duly advised that there was a problem with the sound system, and so we would have to listen carefully. As Okri rose to begin his recital, the audio equipment suddenly crackled into life and the auditorium exploded into applause.

Okri, however, seemed reluctant to speak into the microphone. “I think I will abandon this,” he said, gesturing towards the device. “I do not like to raise my voice. The gentler I speak the clearer I think.

“It is wonderful to be here,” he added, lamenting on what a lovely day it was for such a splendid turnout. “You must love ideas more than sunlight,” he commented, smiling. “That’s unwise.”

Although he was born in west-central Nigeria to an Urhobo family, Okri spent the majority of his early life in London, only returning to Nigeria in 1968 when the country was in the midst of civil war. These experiences dramatically shaped his writing. While Okri has won several esteemed prizes for his work, including the 1987 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, his ability to write emerged only after completing a long and arduous journey.

“As a child,” Okri reflects, “I would read Plato and the classics, and once, my father told me ‘we have our own Platos’. This confused me, and so I asked ‘Where?’.”

His father’s response to this, Okri shows the audience, was to simply gesture all around him. After many years of not fully understanding what his father meant, Okri says that the realisation suddenly dawned on him. His father’s gesture, he now understood, meant: “It is here, you’re just not seeing it.” This realisation, he says, led to more than seven years of self-discovery through writing, a period Okri refers to as his “critical crisis”. Throughout this time he attempted to break down the barriers of language to establish a way of conveying his new look at reality. “Try and get a dimensional reality into sequential prose,” he challenges, “it cannot deal with it – it does not work!”

“The difficulty in writing,” Okri says, “is finding the language to express these ideas without the need for explanation.” Writing, Okri believes, should serve as the special explanation of ideas, where a literal explanation is not needed. The solution to the problem lies within the discovery of language.

Ideas can only exist outside of the mind with the right language; “Otherwise they exist only in their own reality,” he adds.

And more than anything, you must write something which hasn’t been written before. “What are you going to write if it has already been done so beautifully before? How can you do what Dostoyevsky has already done? The whole point in writing is to not repeat – you invest your life in a journey, and if you repeat each day you are effectively writing yourself out of existence.”

In this way, Okri focuses his own writing on the micro moments that have gone unnoticed in more traditional methods of writing. “Everyone focuses on the big moments,” he says, “but reality is in the micro moment, grind it down and you see the seedbeds of the greater moments.”

While uncovering such a method of writing for oneself may seem slightly terrifying to the fledgling writer, reaching a point where you have something unique is the ultimate challenge. “Writing when you do not know where you are going is frustrating and painful,” he says, “but the process, and the finished work, is more fruitful, more rewarding and more beautiful.”

‘Some things only become clear much later’

The Age of Magic ― Ben Okri

The Age of Magic

Ben Okri’s first novel in seven years, The Age of Magic, follows the journey of a film production team travelling from Paris to Basel while filming a documentary. As the voyage unfolds, the team find themselves followed by shadows, plagued by ghosts, troubled by their pasts and enlightened by the world around them.

“What does Arcadia mean to you?” is the subject of the documentary and, increasingly, the question on each of the crew’s minds. The characters are troubled – burdened with their own physical and emotional baggage, in the form of invisible ghommids, trolls, niebelungens, gnomes, harpies, sprites and an elusive quylph. When they are together, the crew speaks increasingly of a disconcerting presence among them – the ever-present, domineering figure of Malasso, the name given by the crew to a haunting, shadowy spectre which stalks the group.

When they arrive at a hotel in a small Swiss town, in the eye of the domineering Rigi Mountain, they are at once gripped by the serene beauty around them. Over the course of the stay, they each find themselves drawn towards the mystery of the crystal clear lake on the edge of the hotel grounds and the secrets of the mountain town.

The novel takes the reader on a journey unlike any other, presenting characters with a different way of seeing the world and offering the reader a very different way of reading. As the crew are transformed by their journey, so too is the reader.

The Age of Magic unfolds to form a truly dreamlike story, with characters wandering like ghosts in a world that seems to form and fall away before their very eyes.

Both the article and review published here were first published in Global: the international briefing. Many thanks to Head of Zeus for supplying a free review copy of The Age of Magic.

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert

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A man of the world

Glimpses of a Global Life ― Shridath Ramphal

Glimpses of a Global Life

Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal was born in 1928 in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, to an Indo-Guyanese family. Having been educated at King’s College London, and later at Harvard Law School, Ramphal went on to live a decidedly ‘global’ life.

In his memoirs, Glimpses of a Global Life, Ramphal tells of his experiences working within international institutions, framing his place within the bigger picture of global politics. The book was released in November following a launch party at Marlborough House, the headquarters of the Commonwealth Secretariat and one of London’s best-known stately homes.

Among his acknowledgements, Ramphal speaks of his reluctance to write a set of memoirs, having been asked, somewhat insistently, by multiple friends and relatives, when his memoirs would emerge. He defines multiple reasons for not having written until now, one of these being that his story had not yet ended. His mind was changed over Christmas in 2011, the time of ‘resolutions’, he says, when he felt that it was not just the time, but his duty to begin writing.

Ramphal begins, somewhat unusually for a memoir, 100 years before his birth, with the abolition of slavery. But it was a key time because it formed the roots of Ramphal’s beginnings within British Guiana, a country built on the trade. The first section, ‘Beginnings’, in fact serves as less of a memoir and more of a depiction of the foundations that supported Ramphal’s life. Ramphal traces the history of the abolition of slavery, painting an extraordinary picture of his family’s life in Guiana.

He speaks of his interest in the voyage of women across the Kala Pani under the Indian indenture system and, in particular, the book Maharani’s Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean, by Professor Verene Shepherd. It was a journey that his own great grandmother took, and a story which could easily have been her own. He begins the book in this way because the events helped to shape his life: “I am a child of all I have narrated,” he says.

There are eight parts to Ramphal’s memoirs, each of which could serve as a volume in its own right, every one covering an important era of Ramphal’s life. From his humble beginnings in British Guiana, Ramphal rose to become Foreign Minister of an independent Guyana, from 1972 to 1975, and later was the second Commonwealth Secretary-General, from 1975 to 1990.

One of the most moving sections of the book is that dedicated to the period of Apartheid in South Africa, described by Ramphal as “the most cruel legacy of slavery”. Ramphal recounts the importance of the Commonwealth community, and himself, in ending this legacy and helping to ensure that “the light of Apartheid’s end was faintly glowing” by the finish of his final tenure as Commonwealth Secretary-General. He speaks at length of the events leading up to the release of Nelson Mandela, whose freedom embodied that of black South Africa. In a chapter dedicated to Mandela’s freedom, Ramphal recounts his own words, emphasising the significance of Mandela’s release to the future of South Africa: “The human spirit survives in South Africa in many ways… But most of all, its survival is symbolised in the person of Nelson Mandela.”

The end of Ramphal’s time as Commonwealth Secretary-General was by no means the end of his story. He went on to become Chancellor of the Universities of Guyana, Warwick and West Indies, and served as the chair of the West Indian Commission. He was also recommended several times for the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations. In the final sections of his memoirs, Ramphal writes further of the ‘honours and intrigue’ inferred upon him, and how he was awarded honorary degrees from 28 universities and made an honorary fellow of another four.

Ramphal ends his memoirs, somewhat fittingly, with a story summing up his relationship with Nelson Mandela. In 1996 Ramphal had the pleasure of conferring upon Mandela an honorary degree from the University of Warwick. The graduation ceremony was a tremendous event held at Buckingham Palace and attended by eight top universities, but it is Warwick, and indeed Ramphal, that are said to have ‘stolen the show’ when Ramphal’s offer of a handshake was dismissed in favour of a familial embrace.

Glimpses of a Global Life is a truly fascinating look into the life of a key figure within the Commonwealth of Nations, serving not only as a memoir, but as a recollection of serious global issues spanning several decades. All this is presented in the form of a worldwide show, in which Ramphal stands centre stage, alongside a whole host of the world’s most prominent figures in international politics.

This review was first published in Global: the international briefing. Many thanks to Hansib for supplying a free review copy of the book.

“All glory comes from daring to begin.” ― Ruskin Bond

jadetheobscure Obscure poetry , , , , ,

Throwback Thursday.

I don’t normally opt into the whole #TBT thing, but this just seemed to perfect to pass up!

I recently came across an old book while unpacking one of the many forgotten boxes of my belongings which occupy our storage room.

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Those of you who live in East Anglia might be familiar with this little gem. This book was published by the group Young Writers, an organisation which runs competitions at primary schools for children to submit poetry and the like. The lucky winners have their work published in a book which is available to buy direct from the organisation.

This edition, from 2000, which no doubt once had pride of place on my parents’ book shelf, includes a poem written by me at the tender age of ten.

Warning: Contains scenes which some may find distressing.

The Prince of Darkness
Black cat snoozing in the sunlight,
You are the prince of darkness,
Coat like charcoal as black as night.
Your eyes are like two red hot embers,
Shining in the darkness.
Your call is like a lion’s roar echoing in
My mind.
You flick your tail to and fro to warn
Off unwanted predators.
Your teeth are like sharpened rows of
Sharpened daggers, sinking into the
Innocent flesh of poor helpless mice.
You prowl the forest all night long
Searching for your midnight snack.

Ominous isn’t it? I especially like the repetition of the word ‘sharpened’, it really emphasises the sharpness of that cat’s teeth.