Written on April 20, 2012 by frances

A Life Spent Searching – the Travels and Writing of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

It’s mainly the reason why every October I write about all the books I’ve read in the last year, that some remain in my thoughts. Isabel Cole’s translation of Annamarie Schwarzenbach’s All Roads are Open is one of these, as well as having the kind of attention to typography, layout, and design that … well, makes me less likely to spill a late-night snack in bed over.

Which is to say, it’s already near the top of everything I’ve read in the last six months. I also read Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way and Vita Sackville-West’s Twelve Days in Persia as a result, and Annamarie makes them both read like spoilt upper-class nobs whose only talent is the distinct whiff of colonial racism – I kept thinking if I was traveling with them I’d be obliged to leave them stranded and be off with their car and money because that’s all they’re good for. Perhaps being hooked on heroin gave Annamarie an empathy absent in these others; it did wonders for William Burroughs also. At very least, her translation into english adds a great deal to 20th century Central Asia writing.

25 April, 2012
20:00
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Berlin, Germany

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Journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, world traveler, the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) became a European cult figure following her rediscovery in the 1990s. At long last, her works are also appearing in English via Seagull Books.

To celebrate, join Dialogue Books as we host Alexis Schwarzenbach, the writer’s grandnephew and the leading expert on her life and work. He and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s translators Lucy Renner Jones and Isabel Fargo Cole will also read from a selection of her works suggesting the breadth of her concerns and creativity. Lyric Novella is the tale of a young “man’s” love for a nightclub singer in decadent Weimar-era Berlin, while Death in Persia is a more open exploration of lesbian love and existential anguish against the background of 1930’s Teheran, and All the Roads Are Open is an account of Schwarzenbach’s epic journey in a Ford from Switzerland to Afghanistan on the eve of World War II.

ABOUT

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, born in 1908 to one of Switzerland’s most prominent families, published her first novel at the age of 23. Her friends Klaus and Erika Mann introduced her to artistic circles, and she scandalized her conservative family by living an openly lesbian lifestyle and supporting leftwing political causes. From 1933 to 1941 she took numerous trips in Europe, the USSR, the United States, the Near East and Africa as a photojournalist covering social and political issues, while also publishing novels and short fiction. After the outbreak of World War II she sought ways to take political action, helping the Manns’ anti-Fascist efforts, but increasingly succumbed to depression and drug addiction.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach died in 1942 in Switzerland following a bicycle accident.

Annamarie Schwarzenbach

Written on March 20, 2012 by frances

Reading: Vita Sackville-West — Twelve Days in Persia

I don’t have much in particular to say about Twelve Days in Persia: Across the Mountains with the Bakhtiari Tribe, nor about Vita Sackville-West. This was one of the books recommended to me by Lucy, who is translating Annamarie Schwarzenbach, during talking about Iran and Central Asia.

Lately my interest has moved slightly from Afghanistan, though naturally still swirling around Central Asia (in addition to all things China and Canton), and I’ve had a curiosity to wonder what I’m missing about Iran. I have read through the region many times, as I’ve traversed the Silk Route, or in various other works of the region, yet never given it the specific attention I’ve devoted to, say, Afghanistan. Though I’m loathe to take on another country and all its history in the same way as I have that land-locked place, Iran is somewhere I’d like to travel to.

So, Vita then. I was never especially fond of her writing, and have her engraved in my memory as one of those early-20th century feminist writers I was supposed to love, yet found a bit pathetic and earnest. It has been a long time though since I was obliged to read those writers, so perhaps I’ll find something I can’t resist and go on a Vita trip.

Vita Sackville-West – Twelve Days in Persia

Written on March 18, 2012 by frances

Reading: Ella Maillart — The Cruel Way

The first of my new pile of books, though i haven’t finished the last lot yet (some shall dwell in my reading stump for quite some time, I suspect, and one likely shall be read in the furthest-from orthodox manner possible; no starting at the start and finishing at the over end.

This one, Ella K. Maillart’s The Cruel Way, came to me from a conversation with Lucy who has been translating some of Annamarie Schwarzenbach, whom I met on the Pförtner bus with Isabel, translator of All the Roads are Open, currently near the top of my list for best non-fiction of the year. They both fielded me that afternoon with the names of several authors who reside at the intersection of a number of sets I have been distracted by for some time: women authors, writing on Afghanistan and Central Asia, in the (broad) subjects of anthropology and history.

I promptly forgot the names, though knew I’d get around to remembering soon enough, and thankfully Lucy scribbled them down for me. To Saint George’s!

When Annamarie travelled to Afghanistan overland by car in the second half of 1939, she did so with the companionship of another writer, Ella Maillart. For both of them, the journey resulted in a book, though until this year, Annamarie hadn’t been translated to english. Ella, on the other hand, was in english since 1947, with one peculiarity: there is no mention of Annamarie Schwarzenbach.

Ella travels with Christina. The one photo of her is from a distance, head down over the campsite, so as to be unrecognizable. Despite this (at the insistence of Annamarie’s mother), there is little or no disguising of whom she travelled with, though this does make for a somewhat sombre reading, knowing full well who Christina is, and that her identity is erased by her own mother in a perverse desire for familial respectability.

It is a rare pleasure to read two highly accomplished writers documenting the same journey; to see the same experiences through the eyes of each. Annamarie writes with such a sparse, poetic, lyrical style as to be a novelist, and very few fiction authors I have read can seduce in telling a story more than she. Ella is somewhat the opposite; a travel writer who is romantic almost becoming saccharine. Nonetheless not to say she is a poor writer, and being a couple of chapters in (arriving at Sophia), she recalls for me the best of the writers of who ventured into Central Asia in a manner unimaginable now.

Ella K. Maillart — The Cruel Way

Written on October 29, 2011 by frances

Reading: Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World

I once stayed a night in Chungking Mansions, when a flight from Canada arrived too late to catch even the cross-border bus to Guangzhou. I was given the address by a woman at the information booth just past the exit gates from customs, and probably told to make certain not to get off the city bus one stop too early. Someone was waiting for me, amidst the hysterical confusion of touts, and led me into the depths, up an elevator and to a small guesthouse, run by an older Pakistani man. My room even had a window, from which I could see the street below, washed in rain, with a throng of bodies like no other.

Another time, after a climbing trip on Hong Kong island, I went with a group for dinner in a Pakistani restaurant. Once more up elevators and along corridors. As we departed, I glimpsed through another door momentarily opened and saw groups of serious islamic men eating their own dinners around wooden tables.

I stayed there because of course living in Guangzhou and having a fascination with the Pearl River region how could I not hear of this place with the dangerous reputation — especially given my taste for Wong Kar-wai’s films. Were I to get stuck again in Hong Kong now, I’d likely stay there again, given at least it’s a name I know.

There is a compulsion in accounts of globalisation and the developing world to make the story about us, we who live in the global north, who either speak english, are of european descent, or both. That there could be a parallel yet predominantly disconnected globalisation, a flow of trade, people, ideas and culture is often seen as irrelevant or incomprehensible to the central narrative, if even addressed.

Gordon Mathew’s anthropology of this building, Ghetto at the Center of the World — Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong appealed to me for more than just what goes on in the confines of its seventeen stories and five separate blocks. As he points out in the introduction, the history and culture of the building is also one of low-end globalisation. This is not a narrative of the developed world’s arrangement with China in providing cheap, off-shore manufacturing, but rather that of a globalisation in which Europe and America are at best ancillary nodes on multiply-layered and discrete trade routes that span from Africa to South-East Asia by way of Dubai, India, and Guangzhou, and more often simply don’t occur at all in the narrative.

I’ve already spent much of the morning perched on the windowsill in the sun, having knocked off half the book in a sitting, which should give an idea of how fascinating I find the topic and book.

Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World

Written on October 6, 2011 by frances

Occupy the World

Published on Sunday, October 2, 2011 by NYC General Assembly
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
by NYC General Assembly

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011, with slight adjustments in wording on October 1, 2011:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times

Please read the Principles of Solidarity working draft

Interested in starting your own General Assembly, here is a quick guide from Takethesquare.net

Written on August 1, 2011 by frances

Places

Because I seem to spend so much time in Brussels, and also have lived in several cities which until now have only been tags …

Berlin, Brussels, Zürich, Vienna, Guangzhou, Taipei, Adelaide, Melbourne. Countries also. How does living in Switzerland or Germany differ from the city within which I reside? Or rather, how does it differ here, where I write?

Because there’s no way to make things neat, to allocate everything according to its place; categories, tags, uses, definitions change over time and even from post to post, I decided to stick with the cities I lived in as sub-categories for the Places category. Countries, other cities I have spent time in or have a connection to have remained free-floating.

Another way to regard the issue: these cities should have been categories all along, and by making them so now, I’m merely anticipating the addition of new cities (or places) in which I shall reside.

Anyway, more importantly, it makes it easy to see where I (will) (might) (have) be(en). There, in the sidebar.

Written on February 12, 2011 by frances

the sound of the people gives me hope

There has not been enough of this in my lifetime.

It’s almost 4am, I should be going to sleep but all I want to do is …

Hosni Mubarak resigns as Egypt prez: Video of Tahrir square first reaction

The Egyptian people have toppled Mubarak, an extraordinary moment, but the regime has not been toppled, not yet.
‘This Is Who Egyptians Are’
Iran: Hope, Joy, Envy as Egypt Breaks Free
Egypt: The Vlog before the Revolution
Egypt: The World Rejoices as Mubarak Resigns
Mubarak steps down. Egypt Uprising wins the first round…
Triumph as Mubarak quits
What next for Egypt?
Where does Mubarak go now? [Updated]
Timeline: Egypt unrest
Egypt: The Moment of Triumph
Twitter: #egypt, #jan25

Written on December 18, 2010 by frances

Reading: Reza Negarestani – Cyclonopedia

reza negarestani – cyclonopedia

Written on December 3, 2010 by frances

Burka Bondage

The past couple of months Dasniya has been rehearsing with Helena Waldmann, in a piece she helped with last year in Shibari instruction. She left for India and Sri Lanka with them yesterday, for a three-week tour. Originally the tour was to go to Iran and Afghanistan, but political issues made that impossible. For those of you in the region, here are the dates:

‘BURKABONDAGE’ VON HELENA WALDMANN

mit Vania Rovisco, Dasniya Sommer, Acci Baba und Mohammad Reza Mortazavi

Infos unter: www.burkabondage.de

Indientournee Dezember 2010
06.12. – Chennai
10.12. – Colombo
12.12. – Bangalore
16.12. – Mumbai
19.12. – Delhi

— Burka Bondage

burka bondage

Written on October 16, 2010 by frances

Reading… a 3rd anniversary

Regarding the two-score books of the last year, it is surprising which of the non-fiction – a term I use somewhat lightly given the nature of the fiction I read – I think is the most important. Not to say best, because it is simply not possible to compare G. Whitney Azoy’s Buzkashi – Game and Power in Afghanistan with Hanna Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Katherine Pratt Ewing’s Stolen Honor – Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin, besides perhaps to consider the strong anthropological authorship in each.

I think perhaps I’ve been reading more science-fiction than I should in the past few months though; somewhat akin to my previous chocolate indulgence, put paid to by immanent risk of gaping holes in teeth. Charles Stross is, as in the last year, well-represented, though slogging through all six volumes of The Family Trade series doesn’t exactly count. With three other books devoured this year, he nonetheless pads out the numbers.

Perhaps to start with disappointments. William Gibson and Zero History. It’s curious to find a writer of near-future speculative (science-)fiction (hence my remark about the ambiguity of a fiction/non-fiction division) feeling dated and behind the times even on the day of publication. I’m sure I’ll read him again, but this was unexceptional, in no way saved by the pseudo-MacGuffin. Charles Stross’ Family Trade series also wallowed adrift for the second trio, and many intriguing ideas hinted at in the earlier ones (and outlined on his blog) remained undeveloped or abandoned; instead veering off on an un-engaging Bush-era terrorist spiel.

On the non-fiction side, Christopher I. Beckwith, who is indisputably a formidable scholar on Central Asia and Tibet frustrated me in twice. First in Empires of the Silk Road for his ceaseless tirades agains post-modernism and other failings of scholarship, which is especially jarring when I’m trying to concentrate on the lineage of Mongolian barbarians. The second is for confusing said lineages with history. I was deeply thrilled to receive The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, anticipating much excitement (and winter fashion) with the Goloks. Instead I was beaten into submission by the feudal slaughter equivalent of biblical begatting. History is not an ad nauseum which man with an army ground which other underfoot.

Lucky The Tibetans, while not so much an an in-depth academic text, manages to avoid this monotony and thus far is the best generalist volume I’ve read on the region. Still, I am searching for more substantial books, be it eastern Tibet, Amdo and the Goloks, or western and the mountain passes into the -stans. I haven’t really begun reading The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan, which I hope might bring a little more enlightenment… I’ll have to wait for next year’s anniversary to discover that.

Many other books I’m very happy to have at least attempted this year. Edward Said’s Orientalism falls into this category. I expect I’ll slowly absorb it by sleeping near than by overthrowing it in a week-long siege. Some out of China also, Voices from the Whirlwind, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and The Age of Openness: China Before Mao filling out my sino-reading – something I’ll need to do more of in the next year if I wish to get through even a portion of my reading list.

Surprisingly, the non-fiction book of the year isn’t some Sino-Tibetan / Central Asian monograph on horse sport, but one which many people I know have read: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. That it made me question and change my already infrequent meat-eating, as well as dispose of much dairy product consumption through reminding me why I became vegetarian and vegan in the first place is only part of the reason. That it is causing in my friends similar responses is perhaps the greatest achievement. And to think I read it out of boredom in an evening lying on a sofa in Vienna.

To say a little more. It is beholden upon us and our generation to instigate change. The governments, politicians and businesses who nominally are our seniors and act in our interests have categorically failed to act in any meaningful or decisive way on what is unequivocally a great catastrophe facing the planet. To reduce this catastrophe to the term, ‘global warming’, while certainly affording attention to one aspect, fails to include myriad interconnected impending disasters which are the singular result of our lifestyles. When confronted with the reality of the ecological vandalism and destruction eating meat involves – even before raising the issue of the suffering it causes and our complicity therein – it becomes unarguable that the single biggest, immediate difference a person – we – can make to bring about change, to attempt to avert or at least partially ameliorate this coming ruin, is to comprehensively and permanently change how we eat.

On, then, to science-fiction.

Charles Stross has provided many hours enjoyment this last year; The Fuller Memorandum was consumed twice in quick succession, but it was Saturn’s Children that came closest to fiction book of the year. He, like Iain Banks attracts my attention because he writes strong female characters (even if the females are sexbots from after the demise of humans) and like Banks and Miéville has an obvious social and political agenda in his work that I find an affinity for.

Iain (M.) Banks provided similar pleasure with re-readings of many old favourites and the new Transitions and (just finished) Surface Detail. Both are very good but don’t quite get up to the level of wild brilliance of earlier novels. Yet, they do seem to – along with The Algebraist and Matter – point to a new period in his writing and I’m already looking forward to his next.

Further on the unambiguously fiction side, by which I mean science-fiction or science-bloody-horror-no-near-future-speculative-fiction-here-fiction, the book of the year though is the quite brilliant, verging on genius for the two most terrifying thugs in London – far better than The City and The City which won a Hugo this year – China Miéville’s Kraken. If I’ve managed to persuade you to read Iain (M.) Banks, this isn’t quite Feersum Endjinn, my book to take if I can only take one book, but it’s close.

Finally adding a Reading category, almost all the books I’ve read in the last couple of years can be found there. Otherwise, some of the many books I’ve enjoyed this year…

(Oh, I started the ‘Reading … ” thing here in October, 2007 (with William Gibson’s Spook Country), which is why ‘Book of the Year’ arrives in October (the 16th or so) instead of on some other temporarily significant yet nonetheless arbitrary date such as the end of the year.)

nazif shahrani – the kirghiz and wakhi of afghanistan