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The center of the world, where recorded civilization got its start over 7,000 years ago, can be found in southwestern Asia, in ancient Mesopotamia. It can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Torah and the Talmud, in The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer; in Zoroastrianism, which predated the Qur’an by over 2,000 years; in A Thousand and One Nights and in the literature of 20th-century poets and writers, among them Khalil Gibran and Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Ahdaf Souief, Nizar Qabbani, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmood Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Amin Maalouf, Edward Said, Hisham Matar, Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine and too many more to name.

Eventually nationalism took root, as it did in Europe, and the ancient civilizations became identified as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the many other countries, small and large, that stretch from the Mashriq to the Maghreb — as far east as Pakistan and Afghanistan to Morocco in the west.

But in 1902, American naval historian and retired admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan expressed a hegemonic vision of the world in an argument he published in the National Review. In “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” Mahan described the western Asian region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean as “the Middle East,” suggesting that whichever navy controlled that part of the world would hold the key to world domination. After World War I, Europeans jumped into the fray with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divvied up the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with several countries coming under British or French influence. The domino effect of outsiders meddling in the affairs of west Asian nations led to the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference, the partition of Palestine, the creation of Trans-Jordan (a British protectorate for 25 years), the division of Greater Syria into Syria and Lebanon, then the end of Palestine and the establishment of Israel . . . right up to the year 1953, when the CIA with the machinations of MI6, succeeded in fomenting the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, which would lead to the anti-Shah uprising 26 years later that became known as the Iranian or Islamic Revolution.

Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction, edited by Jordan Elgrably. Click here to buy.

All of this to say that the “Middle East” or the “Near East” are akin to exonyms, terms used by outsiders to define others as they often do not define themselves; they are convenient catch phrases that continue to cause consternation today among those of us who are from the center of the world. Lebanese poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine calls the “Middle East” a trap — “a made-up thing, a construct of history and treacherous geography, the Middle East as an American trope, a stage for identity politics.”

To be sure, neither Rear Admiral Mahan nor Lord Balfour, much less Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, or any of the other many thousands of Western politicians, secret agents, generals, businessmen and other meddlers have ever given much thought or exhibited empathy when it comes to what it means to be Iraqi or Syrian or Iranian or Egyptian, or Palestinian. Geopolitics has been capitalism’s overlord and nationalism’s emperor, serving agendas that have little to do with the needs of real people.

It is a given that governments prefer borders and passports, shored up by flags and patriotism, while people will always find a way to relate to one another, in spite of their nationalities. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the mosaic or the salad when it comes to parsing identity: just as it takes several colors to create a mosaic, and a salad contains diverse ingredients, we are all the sum of multiple parts, and each of us is much more than our national identity card.

I became closer to my own North African roots as a result of living in Spain in the lead-up to the 1992 Quincentennial, when there was a lot of talk about the Spanish Muslims and Jews who were effectively exiled as a result of the Inquisition in 1492. They left a powerful imprint on the soul of the country, as Marie Rosa Menocal so elegantly describes in her classic work, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002). But the convivencia that Menocal described was not merely a period of Spanish history; this cultural entente was innate to southwest Asian societies, which had long been comprised of a mix of religious, cultural and ethnic communities. In the aftermath of the post–World War II reconfiguration, the Nakba, the Islamic Revolution and the Iraq War, however, the region has lost much of its organic diversity, and current economic strife and climate devastation continue what Western meddlers started over a hundred years ago.

Not all is doom and gloom when it comes to the center of the world today, however, because despite the failures of the Green Movement, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, “what has not changed is West Asia’s geopolitical centrality,” as Chas Freeman has written. “It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet. The region’s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three ‘Abrahamic religions’ that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach.”

This is the time for the original voices of people from the region to be heard — for Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Middle Eastern Jews, Armenians, Turks, Afghans, Pakistanis, the Amazigh and Kabyl peoples, Druze, Assyrians, Copts, Yezidis et alia to speak up, and speak out.

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The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

The Denis Villeneuve Dune films signal that the Fremen Bedouins of the desert planet Arrakis are “Muslim” in various ways, including casting Arab Muslims, shooting in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the use of Arabic vocabulary, drawing from the Herbert novels. The films have been charged with playing down the Muslim-ness of the Fremen, and perhaps there is somewhat less Arabic in their language and less reference to their religion (which in the novels is ZenSunni). But I think the visual vocabulary of the films makes pretty clear that the Fremen are some sort of descendants, at least, of old earth Muslims.

We are seeing the films in a different context than the one in which the 1965 novel appeared. It is a Cold War novel (as I will explain below). We are now watching it in the wake of the Bush “War on Terror” (against Muslims) to which the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party in the US are still committed. For this reason, the films do not use the term “jihad,” translating it inaccurately as “crusade” (ironic!) or “holy war,” in contrast to the Herbert novels. Jihad is a sacred word for Muslims, meaning to exert oneself or struggle for the faith in all sorts of ways– ethically, by donations to charities, by speaking out. It can also refer to taking up arms at the order of legitimate political authority to defend the country. Americans might call it “patriotism.”

We are also watching the second film in the the duology during Israel’s war on Gaza, and it is difficult not to see the Fremen as Palestinians. At least it was difficult for me not to see it in that context, though of course Villeneuve could not have predicted this moment when he and his team were shooting.

The massive firepower and awful destructiveness of the Harkonnen forces recall the intensive aerial bombardment pursued by the Israeli Air Force for five months. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Bedouin tribespeople, of course, but highly urbanized and literate. Still, the search for a religious and political deliverance from a brutal Israeli occupation led them to the fundamentalist Hamas, a dead end. In today’s political atmosphere in the United States, the only sort of resistance against occupation that can be lionized is fictional, in Dune and James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite their own progenitors’ revolution against King George’s despotism, the majority of Americans nowadays, according to opinion polls, have a knee-jerk tendency to identify with the occupiers and not the freedom fighters.

Warner Bros. Video: “Dune: Part Two | Official Trailer 3”

For those who have not read the book or seen the film, I should give a brief plot summary. A set of planets, each ruled by a Siridar or planetary governor with a noble rank such as duke or baron, owe fealty to an emperor, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. They form of council of nobles, the Landsraad. Flying spaceships between these imperial planets requires pilots to ingest a psychedelic drug, melange or the “spice,” produced by fungus in the sands exposed to effluvia from young sandworms on the desert planet of Arrakis. The vocabulary here is Islamicate. Padishah is Persian for emperor. Shaddam has the morphology of an Arabic word and may be modeled on Saddam (though not the Iraqi one). Siridar is from the Persian sardar or governor.

Shaddam IV grows concerned about the growing influence on the Landsraad of Duke Leto Atreides of the lush planet of Caladan, and fears Leto may make a play for the throne. He therefore forces him off Caladan and orders him to rule the arid Arrakis instead. In this alien environment, Leto is vulnerable. The emperor puts Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Siridar of Giedi Prime, up to attacking the House Atreides on Arrakis, and secretly provides imperial Sardaukar troops to help in the assault. Leto is killed but his concubine, Lady Jessica and his son, Paul, escape to the desert and find refuge with the Fremen, tribal desert dwellers. Jessica belongs to a religious order, the Bene Gesserit, who engage in genetic engineering, and Paul is a result of this experiment (though he was supposed to be a girl).

Among the Fremen, Paul is given the personal name Usul (Arabic for “principles,” “foundations”) and the title Muad’Dhib (Arabic mu’addib, one who teaches culture). Paul Atreides, by imbibing the liquid derived from killing and harvesting a young Sandworm, gains superpowers, including prescience, and becomes accepted by the Fremen as their messiah or Mahdi (Arabic for “guided one”). He initially resists the temptation to lead them, seeing visions of a vast murderous horde conquering the known universe if he takes that course. But the Harkonnen attacks back him and the Fremen into a corner, and ultimately he takes on the mantle of the Mahdi, the “tongue of the Unseen” (Arabic lisan al-ghayb). He leads the Fremen in a campaign to overthrow the Harkonnens, and to subordinate the emperor himself.

I first read the book, I think, in 1967 when I was an army brat on a base in Africa. It had won a Hugo award the year before. Like many adolescents of my era, I found the story mesmerizing. We all wanted to be Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve, 15 years my junior, admits that the same was true for him. I didn’t understand then that Paul Atreides is an anti-hero, who becomes a monster to fight monsters.

Herbert was deeply influenced by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a minor British intelligence official and amateur archeologist depicted himself as the true leader of the Arab Revolt during WW I, in which the Hashemite leaders of Mecca rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. In return for their opening of an internal front against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain, London promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom that would have encompassed what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Iraq (the British may have excluded Christians in Mt. Lebanon from the deal). The sons of Sharif Hussain, Faisal and Abdullah, were of course the actual leaders of the revolt, and were joined by many other Arab chieftain, officers and intellectuals. The predecessors of MI6 and James Bond were embedded with them, but weren’t all that consequential. After the war, the British roundly screwed over their Arab allies, giving Palestine to the Zionists, greater Syria to the French, and colonized Iraq themselves. The British government (both major parties) are still dedicated to screwing over the Palestinians.

Herbert was also inspired by Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960), which recounted the story of the rebellion by Caucasus Muslims against the Russian Empire after it conquered them in the nineteenth century. They were led by Shāmil of Daghestan, a Sufi.

Haris Durrani wonders why Herbert, a Republican, was so open to multi-culturalism and psychedelics, but this bewilderment is anachronistic. Herbert was a fierce environmentalist, as many Republicans were in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon passed the Clean Air and Water acts. Herbert had Libertarian tendencies, like Libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was also very interested in drugs for expanded consciousness. And Herbert hated bureaucracy and big government.

Here’s the thing. In the Cold War era, for Libertarians the ultimate symbol of big government was the Soviet Union. And in that era, conservatives saw Muslims as allies against international Communism. The Eisenhower administration was afraid Muslims would secularize and go Communist, so it actually appropriated funds to encourage pilgrimage to Mecca by improving rail links to the holy city.

Much later, Ronald Reagan (whom Herbert admired) allied with the Afghan Mujahidin, about half of whom were fundamentalists, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So Herbert’s symbolic deployment of Muslim Bedouins against the iron law of bureaucracy and Big Government (with the Soviets as the biggest of big governments) was actually entirely in character.

The wrinkle is that Herbert was at the same time very nervous about such alliances with religious groups against the Soviet Union, because he feared their irrational tendencies and their coercive power. One of the strengths of Dune is that there are not really any heroes. There are just bad choices. Shaddam IV tried to centralize power and reduce the power of the nobles, destroying Leto Atreides for his despotism. Paul Muad’Dhib Atreides could only fight back by enlisting the Fremen. But in so doing he distorted the Fremen ethic of a kind of humanist egalitarianism, turning them into fanatical zealots and unleashing interplanetary war. People who see the story as fascist don’t understand that it isn’t an endorsement of either of these two extremes but a critique of them, a sigh of despair by someone who believes in liberty and the individual and fears the arc of reality is going in bureaucratic and authoritarian directions instead. I have argued that it is a Libertarian critique of the 1950s, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Herbert clearly admired much in Islam and its history and culture. It was, in specific, Mahdist movements that aroused his simultaneous fascination and distrust. In this regard, Herbert’s Orientalism is distasteful, since of course many Muslims have waged political campaigns for liberty without surrendering to those impulses. Algerians freed themselves from France without becoming Mahdists, and their revolution looks like a lot of other decolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, whether in Indonesia or largely Christian Kenya.

Ironically, the biggest force for a messianic fanaticism in today’s world is the US Republican Party, so it turns out that the contemporary face of the Fremen fundamentalists is Donald John Trump. Herbert would have been a never-Trumper. One only hopes that our American fanatics don’t pull us into their holy wars.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

When New Year’s rainclouds wash the tulip’s face,
get up and to red wine your will entrust.
Since this green lawn that now delights your eye
Tomorrow will be growing from your dust.

(In Mohammad ibn Bahr Jājarmī, Mo’nes al-Ahrār, dated 1340, in E. Denison Ross, “’Omar Khayyam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, 3 (1927), pp. 433-439.)

Now that the bloom is on the rose of bliss,
Don’t hesitate to raise a wine glass high.
Drink up, for your determined foe is time:
You won’t again come by a day like this.

Whinfield 71

Wine server, rise and bring shame to my name.
The old and young have often seen our like.
Musician, my physician, sing a song,
then grab a wine decanter: a chord strike!

“Kholāsat al-ash`ār fi al-Robā`īyat,” Safīneh-‘e Tabrīz.

Into the garden flew a drunken nightingale,
delighting in the cup of wine that was its rose.
It whispered with its mystic voice into my ear:
“Grab hold, for life is gone when once it goes.

Whinfield 81

Tonight, who brought you from behind the veil;
who brought you, tipsy, to me, drawing near?
–to one on fire because you had been gone–
one like an arid wind; who brought you here?

Whinfield 2

The dawn has broken: rise, you hopeless flirt,
and gently – gently -— sip some wine and strum.
For those who dwell here will not be here long.
Of those who left, not one again will come.

– Mo’nes al-Ahrar

“Now Ruz on Sunset,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ Lunapic, 2023

What’s being, then, if death is the reality?
What is the road to our impossible desires?
No layover will offer any benefit.
And when the journey’s done, what kind of rest transpires?

Whinfield 88

Wine is an essence that takes many forms:
It animates all life and waters roots.
Do not imagine that it ever dies.
Its essence lives, if not its attributes.

Whinfield 75

Since I translated the poetry into a contemporary idiom, I thought I’d try my hand at a digital image that pays homage to the Bravo show, “The Shahs of Sunset,” instead of the Victorian, pre-Raphaelite sort of painting that has typically accompanied the The Rubaiyat in Western publishing.

These poems are not in my translation of the Yerbudaki manuscript, which is available as below:

Juan Cole, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian (London: IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020). Click here.

Reviews:

“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

( Tomdispatch.com) – I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that — a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside — from the novels that are generally published.  For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it.

As for myself — I’m a novelist — I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me.  So why is it always lurking there?  Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class.

Going to War in the South Bronx

I come from — to use an old-fashioned phrase — a working class immigrant family. The middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the South Bronx in New York City.  In my neighborhood, war — or at least the military — was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were “soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods — multi-ethnic, diverse, low-income — it was the way things were and you never thought to question that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and, given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well.

Many of the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.)  However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that surrounded us as we grew up.

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Then as now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain for relief.

When I was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued, broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I dated, worked with, or was related to men who participated in some of these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact — I must have been three — is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir.

When I was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept close at hand for the rest of his life.

My first “serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S. Warrington. I was 15. Not surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction to alcohol.

I was 18 when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of his life. And so it went.

Today, I no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth, and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense.

Rejecting War

It’s in the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War — I had, by then, made it out of my neighborhood and my world — something challenged this trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way previously unknown in our history.  With that mindset suddenly in ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war, ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers.

In those years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on campus.  (Working class women worked at paying jobs!)  As I learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job).

During those years, two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours — and come in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited, unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and, above all, about the country they were invading.

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Our storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness. Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a blessing.

The second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals. I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing.

Breathing War

In those years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that was — always — shadowed by war, in fiction.

Why doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison once wrote, “Literature is the lie that tells the truth.” Yet in a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally not among them. 

My suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is somehow not us.

My own urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels — without, that is, speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it.  When American fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the lie that denial tells.

That war shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my characters breathe it, too.

Copyright 2013 Beverly Gologorsky

Tomdispatch.com

( LA Review of Books) – DURING THE LONG summer days in Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk devotes himself to intensive writing on Büyükada, an island in the Sea of Marmara, and in the evenings, he meets with visitors. Last August, Pamuk and I had dinner there and discussed everything from politics (could Erdoğan survive the May 2023 elections?) to the author’s illustrated notebooks, selections from which were recently published in Turkish and French. (The English version, Memories of Distant Mountains, won’t appear for another year or two.) His latest novel Nights of Plague (2022) was soon to be released in the United States in English translation, but Pamuk had already started on his next novel, with the working title The Card Players — yes, he was familiar with the eponymous five-painting Cézanne series.

As we talked, Pamuk placed a sheaf of colorful manuscript pages before me. In the first illustration, words and letters were raining down from the sky in an arresting manner.

That word-storm set the volume’s tone, a series of miniature illustrations and notes serving to illuminate Pamuk’s writing process. They offer windows onto his creative method as a self-described “visual writer” who often writes through a dialectic of image and text. This might take the form of ekphrasis, as in My Name Is Red (2001), which is punctuated with descriptive prose depicting Islamic miniatures; or it might simply be the basis for developing the novels — that is, figures, scenes, or settings sketched out as he wrote. Accompanying text might appear as a separate caption, as an image itself (cobblestones, for example), or as an embellishment to an existing image. He was, more or less, painting with words. Later, we agreed to discuss Nights of Plague and some of these notebook illustrations in a public event at Duke University, where I regularly taught a Pamuk seminar.

Three months later, as we drove to the campus from the airport, Pamuk spoke quickly, in the manner of one whose mind races ahead of his words. This would be the first time he had discussed the illustrations. He was also in the midst of teaching a seminar on “The Political Novel” at Columbia University, where he taught each fall. On the reading list was his own novel Snow (2002), and he told me that situating his own books was part of his work as a writer. As he spoke, it seemed as if ideas and information were swirling around us like the words in his illustration. Occasionally, he turned toward me and widened his eyes for emphasis. “Which images are we going to discuss?” he asked.

It was a chilly November day, but he cracked the window as a precaution. As we drove, he continued to describe his writer’s life in New York and on the road. We discussed his schedule on campus, where he would be giving two talks: the first on Nights of Plague and the second on the notebooks he’d been keeping for the last 14 years. Pamuk’s creative life had proliferated, and, in addition to being a global author, he’d become a curator, a photographer, and an artist — something he’d aspired to be as a young man. Moreover, illustrations, including sketches of character types, informed his writing process as a kind of scaffolding. For Nights of Plague, for example, he’d sketched figures like a fez-clad quarantine official whose duty was to disinfect areas with a special Lysol spray pump: it was a succinct portrait of late Ottoman modernity.

When we got to the hotel, we set to work going over the draft of a collection of 30 interviews that I was co-editing with Pelin Kıvrak, covering Pamuk’s four decades as a published author. I pointed him to the last piece, an interview about interviews we had planned but not yet completed. He looked at the questions and immediately began to take notes. He described various aspects of the interview as a literary vehicle and as an alternative literary history. He had, in his youth, studied journalism. Interviews, whether investigative or ethnographic, had become a part of his writing process and sometimes entered his plots themselves. Ka, the protagonist of Snow, posed as a reporter and often asked questions of those he met in the small Anatolian border town where the novel is set. In A Strangeness in My Mind (2015), interviews of Istanbul migrants and street hawkers formed part of his quasi-ethnographic process. Pamuk talked about the place of the interview in the writerly life, about paratexts that situate the author or the book, and about a writer’s consideration of different local and international audiences. “I love to talk about my novels,” he said. “Doing interviews is a sort of a public introduction to the reception of the book and also the possibility of manipulating it.”

Once we had finished, we walked to Duke’s East Campus. While we waited for the event to begin, I skimmed the notes for my introduction describing Pamuk’s significance as a practitioner of the global novel. Most of his work is set in Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire and the city of his birth. Writing with a focus on Turkish culture, history, and politics, he mixes multiple genres, from the historical novel to the romance and detective story, from the political novel to the autobiography. Along with allusions to Turkish and world literature, common tropes in Pamuk’s work include identity, conspiracy, doubles, obsessive love, murder mystery, coups, curation, Sufism, and the power of the state.

For Pamuk, the novel is method, a multifaceted process of archival work, interviews, reading in the genre, and locating visual corollaries or memorial objects. He brings to his fiction a historian’s attention to detail. It’s not surprising that the narrator of Nights of Plague, Mina Mingher, is a historian and scholar who assembles the story from an “archive” of letters written by an Ottoman sultan’s niece. Pamuk’s fiction occupies the gray area between history and literature — or, as Mina states, between “a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel.” His work often reflects the novelist as archivist and curator, perhaps best exemplified in the Museum of Innocence project that began in 2008 with the novel of that same title and then became an actual brick-and-mortar museum in Istanbul in 2012 and later, in 2015, a documentary film. Taken all together, the project reflects Pamuk’s work with radical intertextuality of object, image, and narrative.

Nights of Plague is an outbreak narrative, set during a contagion in the late Ottoman era. What is known historically as the “third major plague pandemic,” which began in China in 1855, has already killed millions before it arrives, in 1901, to Mingheria, a half-Muslim, half-Christian island in the Ottoman Mediterranean (with evocations of Cyprus and Crete, as well as Pamuk’s summer haunt of Büyükada). Sultan Abdul Hamid II (who reigned 1876–1909) sends his most accomplished quarantine expert, Bonkowski Pasha (something of an early-20th-century Anthony Fauci), to the island. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a Sufi religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to respect the quarantine. In the context of state-backed quarantine measures, Nights of Plague also tells a story of political formation and national self-determination, tracing the rise of one Kâmil Pasha as founding president of the independent island-nation of Mingheria, soon to be freed from Ottoman rule and embark on its own quirky cultural revolution reminiscent of Turkey’s own post-Ottoman modernization.

In the novel, physical manifestations of the plague combine with allegory, as colonial modernity confronts Islamic tradition. The Ottoman state’s liminal position is captured by the fact that Abdul Hamid  is both an autocrat and a modernizer — an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes and a fan of his deductive reasoning. This depiction is based on historical fact; indeed, Yervant Odyan, an Ottoman Armenian writer, even wrote a novel about the sultan’s fondness for the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle entitled Abdülhamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911). This novel is a literary curiosity today, but at the time of its publication, it offered a denigrating portrait of the deposed sultan after the Second Constitutional Young Turk Revolution of 1908. By contrast, Nights of Plague is a nuanced take on Abdul Hamid’s end-of-empire legacy.

Pamuk has nurtured an interest in the nexus linking plagues, quarantines, religion, and state formation for almost 40 years. In Pamuk’s second novel, Silent House (1983, in Turkish), another historian, Faruk Darvınoğlu, researches the “plague state” created when a contagion ravages the Ottoman Empire and the government goes into remote quarantine. The theme reappears in Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle (1985), set in the 17th century, in which a plague epidemic becomes a metaphor for conversion for a Venetian man captured and enslaved by the Ottomans. Working with his Muslim master, he is able to predict the end of the plague by tracking the number of deaths in each neighborhood. Methodical thought uneasily confronts Muslim fatalism here, as it does in Nights of Plague, in which the epidemic becomes a catalyst for a new political formation.

Among other accomplishments, Nights of Plague places the reader at the intersection of epidemiology and nation-state formation. As such, it dramatizes a variety of biopolitics. If we can speak of the nation as an “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s formulation), then we can also consider its “imagined immunities,” Priscilla Wald argues in her 2008 book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. “While emerging infections are inextricable from global interdependence in all versions of these [outbreak] accounts,” she writes, “the threat they pose requires a national response. The community to be protected is thereby configured in cultural and political as well as biological terms: the nation as immunological ecosystem.” Readers understand, morbidly, that the modern state “inoculates” against political others who are relegated to a lethal precarity.

In Nights of Plague, Pamuk confronts us with the ironic idea that a political entity, even a nation-state, could arise in response to, or as a symptom of, an epidemic.

During the event, Pamuk further elaborated on this topic, contrasting novels in which plagues figure as documented material events, as in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), with those in which they function as allegories, such as Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). In Pamuk’s novel, it is a little of both. Of course, the plague in the novel isn’t just a plague — it’s a force of historical transformation like religion, modernity, or colonialism. The presence of the contagion turns people into others, transforms them forever; it demands, at a minimum, some degree of conversion to the rules and regulations of modern governmentality, something we’ve all experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nights of Plague speaks back to the Orientalist tropes of the European plague novel, showing how the imposition of quarantine in any context (not just Islamic) comes with potential political or epistemic violence (including disinformation). In a 2020 New York Times editorial entitled “What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us,” Pamuk summarized the basis of mob anger at quarantine regulations as a widespread but mistaken belief that “[t]he disease is foreign, it comes from outside, it is brought in with malicious intent.”

For his second talk, in the auditorium of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, Pamuk explained the writerly process that rests at the intersection of image and text. The pages of Pamuk’s notebooks contain a running commentary on the labors of writing, as well as intimacies, confessions, and symbolic or poetic codes. They not only trace his travels in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also reveal what might be called the topographies of the writer’s mind. A piece of gossip sits next to an epiphany. A statement of nostalgia shares the page with news of publications or a simple accounting of the day’s expenses. That contrast, in which the profound cohabits with the quotidian, reveals the writer in the messiness of life. Pamuk’s notebooks are the calm eye of a storm of creativity. They are itinerary and raw thought, both meditative and marginal. For anyone interested in the inner workings of a brilliant mind, the notebooks are an addicting pleasure that lay bare the wellsprings of Pamuk’s writing.

The images contained in his notebooks, which were projected on a large screen during the event, reveal ideas, visions, daily concerns, and snippets of conversation intertwined with vistas and landscapes. At times, the words actually constitute the “view.” As Pamuk writes, “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.”

The images Pamuk projected included the picture of words raining down from the sky, as well as vistas of Crete. One illustration contained the line, “Everything begins with a VIEW.” We saw drawings (based on historical photographs) of fez-wearing late-Ottoman youths fishing with nets, which uncovered Pamuk’s fascination with narrative detail and local color. And we saw an illustration that captured the Italian skyline of Urbino, which inspired the city of Arkaz in Nights of Plague, showing how the author’s travel and writing are linked. The image had a kind of aphorism at the top that read, “Me at one time in the past: fable and history; writing and picture.”

In response to a question from the audience, Pamuk discussed ekphrasis, the process of painting with words. An eager student asked which takes precedence, image or text? “It’s not translating that image,” he responded. “It’s putting that image in words, describing that image with words … When we think, do we use pictures or words or neither? Or is some chemistry happening? What is a thought, is it an image? Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s a word. When I call myself a visual writer, for me, a thought is closer to an image.” As he responded to questions, Pamuk frequently made the audience weigh and consider — and laugh. At one point, he produced the current notebook he carried with him as his portable studio, in which he sketched and wrote whenever time allowed. The attentive faces of the spectators revealed that he was connecting, in word and image, with a new generation of Pamuk readers.

Reprinted from The Los Angeles Review of Books with the author’s permission.

A survey commissioned in 2019 revealed the shocking result that over half of Britons did not know that at least six millions Jews had been murdered during the Holocaust.

This result was all the more surprising given the fact that the Holocaust, as a topic, has been part of the national curriculum in England and Wales since its creation in 1991. The 2014 iteration of the national curriculum has the Holocaust as a firm part of key stage 3 history – compulsory for all 11 to 14-year-olds in state schools. Additionally, many secondary school pupils may encounter the Holocaust as a topic in English or religious education lessons.

However, research into what school pupils in England know about the Holocaust shows that they lack knowledge about its context. They may know bare facts – ghettos, deportations, concentration camps – but are less clear on the ideology that led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the first place. Pupils may not be clear what exactly it is they need to take away from those lessons and how they can be relevant to their contemporary lives.

For instance, it is important to understand how politicians sought to gain popular support by blaming minorities such as Jewish people for all the ills Germany experienced after the first world war. Relentless anti-Jewish propaganda was used to indoctrinate the general population.

It is for this reason that literature can be a meaningful additional teaching tool, not only in schools but also for everybody interested in the events leading up to the Holocaust. Literature can broaden horizons and deepen knowledge. It can offer different perspectives, often in the same narrative; it teaches us empathy but it can also help us to acquire facts and additional knowledge.

However, the sheer number of books on the Holocaust – survivor accounts, biographies, novels, factual books – can be overwhelming.

Sometimes, bestselling books on the Holocaust, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) or Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), lack the factually correct underpinning that is necessary to make them a good way to learn about the history. It is consequently vital to find books that meaningfully introduce their readers to the topic and that provide carefully researched historical context.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

One example is Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) which is based on Kerr’s own childhood experience. It is the story of 9-year-old Jewish girl Anna who has a happy childhood in Germany until the day her father, wanted by the Nazis, has to leave the country.

Anna’s subsequent narrative outlines the repressions affecting Jewish life on a daily basis. She encounters public events such as the staged book burnings and the daily propaganda that perpetuated falsehoods about Jews. As such, it is an excellent – though hard-hitting – way to introduce a younger readership to the prejudices and reprisals Jews were increasingly subjected to in Nazi Germany.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) is probably the one Holocaust book most people have heard of. It charts the two years Anne and her family spent in hiding in Amsterdam.

The book is often praised for its positive and hopeful message. It is, however, vital that even young readers are made aware of the fact that the Franks were eventually discovered by the Nazis, deported to Auschwitz and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne tragically died in early 1945.

Night

Survivor accounts are generally the best way to learn about the Holocaust. Older teenagers could read Elie Wiesel’s outstanding Night (1958). It describes, in a dispassionate voice, Wiesel’s experiences of being deported from his home town of Sighet in what is now Romania, first to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald.

Wiesel lost his father, mother and youngest sister in the Holocaust and dedicated his life to Holocaust education. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. If anybody plans to read just one book on the Holocaust, it should probably be this one.

Maus

Some young readers might be reluctant to read such hard-hitting accounts by witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. They might be persuaded to engage with the topic, though, through Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus.

Spiegelman’s book recounts the story of his father Vladek and mother Anja, who both survived Nazi concentration camps. He uses the imagery of an animal fable by depicting his Jewish characters as mice who are chased by the Nazi cats. While this is potentially a distancing device to soften the impact of his illustrations, it also helps Spiegelman to pass critical comments on the Nazis’ notorious attempts to classify people into strictly segregated groups.

Maus made it back into the bestseller lists in January 2022 when a County School Board in Tennessee controversially banned it from its classrooms and libraries. Censorship is not yet a thing of the past – and it is, maybe, especially the people making decisions about education who ought to read these texts.

Using literature as a tool to augment Holocaust teaching in secondary schools might be a good way to further pupils’ learning and understanding not just of the Holocaust, but of the ideologies, populism and propaganda that lay behind it – and how to identify similar narratives that are, worryingly, on the rise again in the world around them.

Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature, University of Portsmouth

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

I still remember him calling my house. He was old, his hearing was going, and he couldn’t tell that my teenage son had rushed to answer the phone, hoping it was one of his friends. Instead, finding himself on with Studs talking a mile a minute, my son would begin yelling desperately, “Dad! Dad!”

With that — and a recent publishing disaster — in mind this morning, I took my little stepladder to the back of my tiny study, put it in front of my bookcase and climbed up until I could reach the second to the top shelf, the one that still has Studs’s old volumes lined up on it. Among others, I pulled down one of his later oral histories, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. In its acknowledgments, I found this: “Were it not for Tom Engelhardt, the nonpareil of editors, who was uncanny in cutting the fat from the lean (something I found impossible to do) and who gave this work much of its form, I’d still be in the woods.”

And that still makes me so proud. But let me rush to add that, in the years of his best-known work when I was at Pantheon Books (1976 to 1990), I was never his main editor. That honor was left to the remarkable André Schiffrin who started Studs, like so many other memorable authors, on his book career; ran that publishing house in his own unique way; found me in another life; and turned me into the editor he sensed I already naturally was.

Buy the Book

For me, those were remarkable years. Even then, André was a genuinely rare figure in mainstream publishing — a man who wanted the world to change, a progressive who couldn’t have been a more adventurous publisher. In fact, I first met him in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a time when I was still an Asian-scholar-to-be and involved in organizing a group, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, that had produced an antiwar book, The Indochina Story, that André had decided to publish.

In my years at Pantheon, he transformed me into a book editor and gave me the leeway to find works I thought might, in some modest fashion, help alter our world (or rather the way we thought about it) for the better. Those included, among others, the rediscovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early-twentieth-century utopian masterpiece Herland; the publishing of Unforgettable Fire, Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors (not long before, in the early 1980s, an antinuclear movement in need of it would arise in this country); Nathan Huggins’s monumental Black Odyssey; Eduardo Galeano’s unique three-volume Memory of Fire history of the Americas; Eva Figes’s novel Light; John Berger’s Another Way of Telling; Orville Schell’s “Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!”: China Encounters the West; and even — my mother was a cartoonist — the Beginner’s comic book series, including Freud for Beginners, Marx for Beginners, Darwin for Beginners, and, of course, Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, to mention just a modest number of works I was responsible for ushering into existence here in America.

The Second Time Around

What a chance, in my own fashion and however modestly, to lend a hand in changing and improving our world. And then, in a flash, in 1990 it all came to an end. In those years, publishing was already in the process (still ongoing) of conglomerating into ever fewer monster operations. Si Newhouse, the owner of CondéNast and no fan of progressive publishing, had by that time taken over Random House, the larger operation in which Pantheon was lodged and he would, in the end, get rid of André essentially because of his politics and the kind of books we published.

We editors and most of the rest of the staff quit in protest, claiming we had been “Newhoused.” (Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Kurt Vonnegut would join us in that protest.) The next thing I knew, I was out on the street, both literally and figuratively, and my life as a scrambling freelancer began. Yes, Pantheon still existed in name, but not the place I had known and loved. It was a bitter moment indeed, both personally and politically, watching as something so meaningful, not just to me but to so many readers, was obliterated in that fashion. It seemed like a publishing version of capitalism run amok.

And then, luck struck a second time. A few years later, one of my co-editors and friends at Pantheon, Sara Bershtel, launched a new publishing house, Metropolitan Books, at Henry Holt Publishers. It seemed like a miracle to me then. Suddenly, I found myself back in the heartland of mainstream publishing, a “consulting editor” left to do my damnedest, thanks to Sara (herself an inspired and inspiring editor). I was, so to speak, back in business.

And as at Pantheon, it would prove an unforgettable experience. I mean, honestly, where else in mainstream publishing would Steve Fraser and I have been able to spend years producing a line-up of books in a series we called, graphically enough, The American Empire Project? (Hey, it even has a Wikipedia entry!) In that same period, Sara would publish memorable book after memorable book like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Thomas Frank’s What‘s the Matter with Kansas?, some of which made it onto bestseller lists, while I was putting out volumes by authors whose names will be familiar indeed to the readers of TomDispatch, including Andrew Bacevich, James Carroll, Noam Chomsky, Michael Klare, Chalmers Johnson, Alfred McCoy, Jonathan Schell, and Nick Turse. And it felt comforting somehow to be back in a situation where I could at least ensure that books I thought might make some modest (or even immodest) difference in an ever more disturbed and disturbing America would see the light of day.

I’ve written elsewhere about the strange moment when, for instance, I first decided that I had to publish what became Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable, deeply insightful, and influential book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire on the future nightmares my country was then seeding into the rest of the planet. Think, for instance, of Osama bin Laden who, Johnson assured his readers well before 9/11 happened, we had hardly heard the last of. (Not surprisingly, only after 9/11 did that book become a bestseller!) Or consider Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, which I published in 2003. So many years later, its very title still sums up remarkably well the dilemma we face on a planet where what’s on the mind of top foreign policy officials in Washington these days is — god save us! — a new cold war with China. We’re talking, in other words, about a place where the two major greenhouse gas emitters on Planet Earth can’t agree on a thing or work together in any way.

The Second Time Around (Part 2)

But let me not linger on ancient history when, just the other day, it happened again. And by it I mean a new version of what happened to me at Pantheon Books. It’s true that because, in my later years, TomDispatch has become my life’s work, I hadn’t done anything for Metropolitan for a while (other, of course, than read with deep fascination the books Sara published). Still, just two weeks ago I was shocked to hear that, like Pantheon, Metropolitan, a similarly progressive publishing house in the mainstream world, was consigned to the waves; its staff laid off; and the house itself left in the publishing version of hell.

Initially, that act of Holt’s, the consigning of Metropolitan to nowhere land, was reported by the trade publication Publisher’s Weekly, but count on one thing: more is sure to come as that house’s authors learn the news and respond.

After all, like Pantheon, at the moment of its demise, it was a lively, deeply progressive operation, churning out powerful new titles — until, that is, it was essentially shut down when Sara, a miraculous publisher like André, was shown the door along with her staff. Bam! What did it matter that, thanks to her, Metropolitan still occupied a space filled by no other house in mainstream publishing? Nothing obviously, not to Holt, or assumedly Macmillan, the giant American publishing conglomerate of which it was a part, or the German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group that owns Macmillan.

How strange that we’re in a world where two such publishing houses, among the best and most politically challenging around, could find that there simply was no place for them as progressive publishers in the mainstream. André, who died in 2013, responded by launching an independent publishing house, The New Press, an admirable undertaking. In terms of the Dispatch Books I still put out from time to time, I find myself in a similar world, dealing with another adventurous independent publishing outfit, Haymarket Books.

Still, what an eerie mainstream we now inhabit, don’t we?

I mean, when it comes to what capitalism is doing on this planet of ours, book publishing is distinctly small (even if increasingly mashed) potatoes. After all, we’re talking about a world where giant fossil-fuel companies with still-soaring profits are all too willing to gaslight the public while quite literally burning the place up — or perhaps I mean flooding the place out. (Don’t you wonder sometimes what the CEOs of such companies are going to tell their grandchildren?)

So the consignment of Metropolitan Books to the trash heap of history is, you might say, a small matter indeed. Still, it’s painful to see what is and isn’t valued in this society of ours (and by whom). It’s painful to see who has the ability to cancel out so much else that should truly matter.

And believe me, just speaking personally, twice is twice too much. Imagine two publishing houses that let me essentially find, edit, and publish what I most cared about, what I thought was most needed, books at least some of which might otherwise never have made it into our world. (The proposal for MAUS, for instance, had been rejected by more or less every house in town before it even made it into my hands.)

Yes, two progressive publishing houses are a small thing indeed on this increasingly unnerving planet of ours. Still, think of this as the modern capitalist version of burning books, though as with those fossil-fuel companies, it is, in reality, more like burning the future. Think of us as increasingly damaged goods on an increasingly damaged planet.

In another world, these might be considered truly terrible acts. In ours, they simply happen, it seems, without much comment or commentary even though silence is ultimately the opposite of what any decent book or book publisher stands for.

You know, it suddenly occurs to me. Somebody should write a book about all this, don’t you think?

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

It is not a new controversy. Television journalist Megyn Kelly when she was at Fox insisted that Santa Claus is “white.” I’m not sure why that was important to her (or more likely the bosses who were constantly hitting on her), but it is not true.

Then there were the white nationalist Thor fans who did not want Idris Elba to play Heimdall, the mythic guardian of the Bifrost bridge to Asgard. I pointed out that the far-flung Viking conquests certainly made them a multi-cultural society, and that there were likely Muslim converts among them, as well as intermarriages with Africans and Mediterranean peoples.

As for Middle Earth, it is of course a fictional place with lots of types of creatures in it. It is a little mysterious how people can suspend disbelief enough to accept a story about elves and dwarves and orcs but not enough to accept a story about Black elves. Elves were a step too far for some of Tolkien’s friends. He used to read out The Lord of the Rings to his “Inklings” group at Oxford, and at one point fellow academic Hugo Dyson, lying on the couch, needled him: “Oh God, not another fucking elf!”

Speculative fiction is all about world building. Some literary theorists have noted that story is character, plot and setting, and that in speculative fiction “setting” takes center stage. So let us consider Middle Earth as a world. Black skin is an adaptive mechanism in parts of the earth with high ultraviolet rays It helps prevent embryos from being damaged by those UV rays. If Middle Earth was a whole world, then it had a tropics where there would have been black-skinned creatures, and those would have circulated. It is only the novice speculative fiction writers who speak of an “ice world” or a “wet world.” Planets are large and have many climes. Tolkien was no novice.

Then there was the character of the man. Despite living in a world of white male privilege at Oxford, a world he no doubt could not entirely escape, in some respects Tolkien was what white racialists would now call “woke.” He had been born to an English family in South Africa, and once said publicly that “I have the hatred of Apartheid in my bones.”

In 1938 when a German publisher wary of the Nazis’ racist policies wrote Tolkien to ask whether he could prove his Aryan descent, the author wrote out a couple replies, one of which said,

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.”

As an expert in historical linguistics, Tolkien obviously took some pleasure in pointing out to the Nazis that their ideal of racial purity, Aryanism, encompassed Iranians and Indians, and included brown-skinned and Black people along with whites. Sir William Jones in the late 18th century had been flabbergasted to discover that Sanskrit and Persian were clearly related to Greek and Latin.

In the early 1940s, Tolkien wrote to his son, “I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” Tolkien admired what he called “the northern spirit,” but he thought of it as broadminded and Hitler was ruining it for him.

I think we know exactly what Tolkien would have thought of Trump’s blatant racism and of the values of the American white nationalists who secretly idolize Hitler.

Tolkien’s high fantasy owes some important debts to the pre-Raphaelite William Morris. The pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and poets in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was in important ways a rebellion against Establishment whiteness, privileging Dante over Hobbes, Giotti over Raphael, and brunettes over blondes. Morris did go to Iceland and was influenced by the Elder Edda, but he was also deeply influenced by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Persian poetry from Iran, from the FitzGerald translation of which he created four illustrated and calligraphed manuscripts.

By the way, Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, was also in love with the Rubaiyat, and he made Conan an Iranian.

As for medieval Britain, it was also multicultural. My late colleague Sylvia Thrupp was one of the first historians to look at London demographic data in the medieval period, and discovered large numbers of foreigners living there.

British historian Onyeka Nubia writes for the BBC:

“The medieval English writer Richard Devizes describes London as being populated by ‘Garamantes’ (Moorish Africans), and ‘men from all nations’ that ‘fill all the houses.’ These Africans were described by various terms such as: ‘Black’, ‘Ethiopian’ (a word used at the time to describe all Africans), ‘Moor,’ and ‘Blackamoore.’ Other terms such as ‘Saracen’ were also used to refer to Africans, as well as people from elsewhere, such as Western Asia. Some of these terms are now considered derogatory.

Bartholomew was an African on the run in Nottingham in the 13th century. He is mentioned in the Pipe Roll (21 June, 1259), where he was called an ‘Ethiopian’ and a ‘Saracen.’ The Pipe Roll says, Bartholomew was brought to England by ‘Roger de Lyntin.’ The roll also gives ‘a mandate to arrest’ Bartholomew, for ‘running away from his said lord Roger de Lyntin.’ Bartholomew may have been on his way to the city of Nottingham to escape his lord’s authority.”

I think it is highly likely that some among this gaggle of brown and black-skinned people in medieval London were Muslims, though likely they kept that to themselves given the Inquisition.

So, no, the actual medieval world on which the high fantasy is often based wasn’t mono-cultural or mono-racial. So why should the fictional knock-offs be? And, no, Tolkien was not a racist and indeed he hated anti-Black racial segregation projects like Apartheid and the racial hierarchies erected by the Nazis. He said he only wished he had some Jewish ancestry, and used “ruddy,” which is associated with whiteness, as a negative epithet for Hitler.