Books – Dear Sister Shull

Extraordinary and Unforgettable Books

Every few days as I scroll through my Facebook feed, images of a starving child or hands outstretched and grasping for food relief give me pause. Thanks to persistent reporting, we have a documented history of the ongoing Saudi war on Yemen and U.S. complicity in its effects on the people of Yemen. We cannot deny the inhumanity of weaponizing starvation as a tool of war. But wait, haven’t I heard this story before?

Biafra is an indistinct memory from the late 1960s. Back then I didn’t know exactly where Biafra was on the globe or the source of the conflict there. I remember it more as a symbol of suffering people than as an historical event. While America seethed with confusion over the Vietnam War, Biafra was one more fight for liberation. From my memory I pull out strands of conversation at a faculty party Steve and I attended at Millikin University in 1969. Perhaps we talked with other young professors about Biafra? Perhaps I recall Newsweek cover stories or posters of starving children around campus? It barely registered in a world gone crazy.

A couple of years ago a friend whose reading tastes are similar to mine recommended Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I devoured the book and craved more of Adichie’s writing and ideas. Last year I discovered her earlier novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which told a story of war as important today as it was in the novel’s time period of the 1960s. This book peels away the superficial glory of fighting for a cause and reveals modern war in all its exhausting, sickening, degrading ways. The terror invoked by an air raid siren, bombs aimed at civilian targets, forced movement of peoples from their homes and villages, mass starvation as a weapon of war, these were real tactics of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

The racist ideas of white America shape our expectations of what a novel set in Africa will describe: a continent of largely illiterate, backward and superstitious ebony-colored people living in mud huts and preying on each other in modern adaptations of a primitive society. Adichie’s Nigeria is populated with all classes of people from extremely wealthy to impoverished, living complex lives in the largest, most diverse, and best educated African nation. Half of a Yellow Sun changed my thinking about the lives of the people who constitute the nation of Nigeria in the same way that Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns altered and enlarged my perception of the black experience of America.

The novel’s plot line nudges us along, from the comfortably smug lives of the educated professional class in the early 1960s to the rapid deterioration into chaos, brutality and mass killing brought on by the civil war and its fight for liberation of the Igbo people. The terrible truth of the story is that the utter chaos of war could happen anywhere, and has and still is. But perhaps the more profound truth is that at the end of the story there is hope, and that too can happen anywhere, even in Biafra.

The best caption for what happened in Biafra was created by Adichie: The World Was Silent When We Died. The novel’s cast of characters includes Richard Churchill, an Englishman who comes to post-colonial Nigeria without a purpose, other than to write something. His emotional distance from the events taking place there prevents him from actually writing anything, but he cannot forget the plea of a Biafran army colonel: “The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die.” At the end of the war Richard bequeaths to Ugwu, a houseboy turned soldier turned writer, the right to name his book with the title Richard had planned to use, “The World Was Silent When We Died.” As Richard explains to Ugwu, “The war isn’t my story to tell, really.”

But it is Adichie’s story to tell. Of Igbo lineage, she grew up in a post-colonial Nigeria torn apart by competing interests and religious divisions. Her family supported the liberation movement of the Igbo people from the larger and stronger nation of Nigeria, which had both British and Russian support, and members of her family suffered for their belief in a free Biafra. Her novel can almost be read as a memoir, its emotional clarity bearing truth beyond any factual events or persons.

The story Adichie tells is one of movement. Bodies move from one place to another, at times only moments ahead of the advancing Nigerian army. The arc of life in Biafra moves from plentitude to bare survival. Emotions sweep across the page and hearts move together and apart. The reader, too, is moved from curiosity at a distance to the realization of witnessing a tragedy, one that is all but forgotten now. We can avert our eyes from the worst of it, but it is still there in today’s Nigeria, birthed from colonialism and Western capitalist exploitation. And yet we also see the pride and optimism of those who called themselves Biafran. Their flag with its half of a yellow sun sewn into the center of black, red and green fields flew briefly, defiantly, and with hope.

Notes:

A movie based on the book was released in 2013. Although Adichie worked on the adaptation of her book, the film is primarily a love story and minimizes the breadth and depth of the book’s essential message about war, liberation, and hope.

For a 50-year follow-up to the Nigerian civil war and its destructive remnants, view this video: https://www.france24.com/en/20170901-revisited-biafra-nigeria-civil-war-landmine-famine-humanitarian-aid-obudu

In the next few weeks Dear Sister Shull will be sharing a few of her choices for good reads: fiction, memoir, history, perhaps a surprise or two. Some of the books are classics, worthy of a fresh read, and some are brand new. I begin with a book that I bought myself for Christmas and read slowly to savor every word. I admit, I was hooked by the title!

Orlean, Susan. The Library Book. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Part history, part detective story, part memoir, The Library Book is one good book. Orlean moves the reader from an account of the horrific fire at the Los Angeles Central Library in April 1986 both backward, to the library of her childhood, and forward to the Los Angeles Central Library of today. The composite picture reveals the library as an institution that is much, much more than a physical repository for books.

Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, was drawn to tell the story of the Los Angeles library fire when she first heard about it in 2011, soon after moving to LA. She had been invited to tour the historic and architecturally renowned building in downtown Los Angeles and was duly impressed by its beauty and the richness of cultural expression represented by the building. Toward the end of the tour her guide picked up a book and sniffed the pages deeply. He commented, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.” “Smoke? From when patrons used to smoke in the library?” “No, from the fire.” It was then that Orlean learned about the biggest library fire in American history, one which burned for seven hours, consumed 400,000 books, damaged another 700,000, and required nearly every firefighter in Los Angeles to extinguish the blaze. How had she not known about this remarkable event for 25 years? When she read the newspapers from April 29, 1986 it became obvious. On that same day the fire was upstaged by another disaster of global proportions—the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown that threatened much of the earth with radiation.

The cause of the library fire has never been determined. Any evidence that might have led to an answer was consumed by the flames. But that did not prevent investigators from trying to solve the mystery. The district attorney eventually arrested a man named Harry Peak with arson, but the case was later dropped for lack of evidence. Peak was a Los Angeles character, a wannabe actor who preened before the cameras and told many versions of his whereabouts on the morning of the fire. Orlean treats him sympathetically and in the end concludes that there is simply no way to unravel the mystery.

The heart of the book is not the story of the fire, or even the story of the remarkable building designed by Bertram Goodhue in the 1920s. It beats with the lifeblood of this most American cultural treasure, the public library. Orlean manages to condense more than a century of library history into the pages of her book by weaving the past, full of characters like Charles Lummis, with the many strands of present-day library work. In page after page I could find myself in my own library settings and identify all of the tasks, the tools, and the skills that I used in my career in public, academic, and law libraries. With wit and humor and insight, Orlean enlarges the recounting of the library fire into a remarkable tapestry of life among the books.

Orlean spans writing styles, from prosaic details of how fires burn to exquisite reveries on the purpose of libraries. At times as I read I felt as though I floated on a current of memory back in time to the libraries I have loved. It is best to leave you, dear reader, with Susan Orlean’s own words about libraries to meditate upon:

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possible know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty. [page 266]

[Senior librarian Stone] once confided to me that when he worked at a branch downtown, local drug dealers used to come to the library and ask him to help fill out their tax returns. He thought it was a perfect example of the rare role libraries play, to be a government entity, a place of knowledge that is nonjudgmental, inclusive, and fundamentally kind. [page 267]

[In the library] the silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen… I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. [page 309-310]

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen. [page 310]