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Authenticity - in some very varied forms

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Oscar season is finally over … among other things delivering the weird revelation that TV viewers might actually prefer the broadcast to go over-length (in that this year’s ratings were up slightly) – and with it have now faded the many movie-related reflections and surveys that this trophy-fest always triggers. This time, the subject of how Africa is portrayed in movies was chewed over a lot -- maybe helping, maybe not, to secure Forest Whitaker’s Best Actor award for his role as Uganda’s late, mostly unlamented dictator, Idi Amin.

Pundits have pondered the broad continent’s filmic treatment – from featuring as just an exotic backdrop ... to its portrayal as a hell-hole of casual slaughter ... and (maybe sometimes) when it’s purely a natural setting for familiar human interactions, whether normal or extreme. But much less attention has been given to the publishing industry’s recent devotion to Africa, noticeably with recurring sagas of human endurance in the face of horrifically-stacked odds.

The range that these newish books offer in differing authorial standpoints is intriguing. There has been, first of all, veteran spy novelist John Le Carre with The Mission Song (published by Little, John). He offers geo-political intrigue centering on the many-sided Congolese civil war, and it’s presented with much writerly spleen (– though a bit less, mercifully, than in his previous, almost crazy-mad The Constant Gardner, where big pharmaceutical companies received a lashing from his elegant but bitter tongue).

I ultimately found The Mission Song unconvincing – mainly because I could not register Le Carre’s voice as very credible in the character of his story-teller and protagonist, a multi-lingual interpreter born in the region (and originally educated at a Christian mission, hence in part the title). Angry Le Carre may be - but world-weary is what he can’t help sounding. And that doesn’t fit with the gullible twenty-something he’s impersonating here.

First-person narrative of very different kind distinguishes Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and it proclaims unarguable, fact-based authenticity. Beah, after all, really was a boy soldier pressed into service by the RUF rebel army of Foday Saybana Sankoh in Sierra Leone during the 1990s.

The book is being promoted by Starbucks, which - like it or not - has pushed itself forward as the urban and suburban tastemaker of modern-day America (no longer mere coffee, but music and movies too, not to mention books). Beah has also become a spokesperson for UNICEF, the UN’s agency for children. Amid all this trumpeting, Beah’s prose in the memoir itself remains clear, simple and compelling – and deeply saddening.

Perhaps the oddest mode of delivery is adopted in “What is the What”, a novel that is credited to the still-hip author Dave Eggers and is put out by his own publishing house McSweeney’s (also the literary quarterly that Eggers and friends founded). But the book’s narrating voice is largely, except for when it slips into flashback stories from other characters, that of Valentino Achak Deng, a real-life “lost boy” of Sudan. Deng explains in a preface that he told his story in many conversations with Eggers. Almost like an American political candidate who must “approve this message” in TV commercials, he tells us he endorses Eggers’ re-telling of the tale in novelistic form.

The literary device turns out to form a powerful admix, and achingly persuades the reader of the wretched, horrifying odyssey that Deng took between southern Sudan and (eventually) Atlanta, Georgia. He avoided being forced into boy soldierdom like Beah, but he endured just about all other horrors imaginable – and, pointedly, these didn’t stop when he got to the USA.

Standing out for me, however, from all of these Africa-based books is a triumph beyond serious compare – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (from Knopf). It traces the fortunes and misfortunes of an Ibo family, indigenous to that region of Nigeria indelibly known now to many of us as Biafra, the scene of secession, war, genocide and starvation in the 1960s. Authenticity here is of a different order entirely. It is hard to doubt – even though the author’s viewpoint shifts from character to character throughout (and for my money it’s at its most successful when the adopted eyes are those of Ugwu, 13 year-old house-servant to a Biafran academic). The book’s power in fact derives from bold talent and depth of feeling - oh, and a lot of detailed research, too, of course.

Adichie is unsurprisingly an Ibo, and this is not her first novel – it’s her second. What may seem surprising is that she wrote it at the age of 28. Imagine her reaction on hearing that the virtual demigod of African literature, Chinua Achebe, praised her for it in this way: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers … She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war”.

IN ANOTHER REALM OF THE MASS MEDIA, THE UNIVERSALITY of human suffering was demonstrated this week with the award of Newspaper Photographer of the Year, in the so-called POYi Awards (acronym for Pictures of the Year, International). It’s one of the news business’s most prized trophies, given by the Missouri School of Journalism, and it went to a previously under-recognized but undeniably brilliant photo-journalist, Tyler Hicks of the New York Times.

Perhaps the picture picked from Hicks’ portfolio that's represented here with a small detail (above, courtesy of the Times) could have been taken almost anywhere – in one of Africa ’s many theaters of war, indeed.

The photo in fact shows Sergeant Antwain Vaughn, a US Army combat engineer - who was catastrophically brain-injured by an Iraqi roadside bomb. Hicks took his picture in the Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Tampa, Florida, along with the soldier’s 1-month-old daughter, Liyah.

The image, powerful as it is, comes with a crisp example of caption-writing from the photo-editorial team led by Assistant Managing Editor Michele McNally. Along with the basic “what, where and who” about Sgt Vaughn, we are told simply that: “In daily therapy, he has been relearning how to eat and other basic skills”.

STEVEN HATFILL, THE FORMER US ARMY BIO-WEAPONS EXPERT (who originally trained in white-ruled southern Africa) felt he was wrongly named as “a person of interest” by FBI investigators into the anthrax killings of 2001, as THE MEDIA BEAT reported 6 weeks ago, when a federal judge was dismissing Hatfill’s defamation suit against the New York Times for its reporting of his apparent involvement.

This week comes news that Hatfill has now dropped his $10 million case against Vanity Fair, writer Donald Foster, and Reader’s Digest – in return for retractions of any implication that the scientist lay behind the attacks by mail. No statement has been made about whether any money was involved in the settlement, but in legal circles it’s believed to be minimal, if any amount at all – and “we're very satisfied with the results” is all a Digest spokeswoman would say about it.