Black Gold of the Sun

Here's one by Lessa Josselyn, another welcome newcomer to TKR, on Black Gold of the Sun by Ekow Eshun. Lessa tells me that her interest in the subject transcends the mere professional: she will soon be traveling to Ghana herself. - RD

For those of us in our twenties, attempts to understand ourselves often start with others, beginning where we began, illuminating the upstairs rooms and back gardens of our families and the homes that witnessed our upbringing. In his recent memoir Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond, Ekow Eshun explores the flats of London and the village homes of Accra, Ghana, in an attempt to explain what he himself has yet to discover – a history and heritage he is unwilling to claim and unable to interpret. His struggle to do so is both the work’s greatest frustration and its ultimate redemption.

Before the second page, Eshun’s thesis is clear: “who you are is determined by where you are.” As the child of Ghanan diplomats buffeted by coups, appointments and, ultimately, chosen exile in London, place is of utmost importance to Eshun and his siblings. The return to Ghana which starts his novel is therefore not surprising, nor is the pilgrimage to one’s home country a unique form for memoir. And, while Eshun’s location is fascinating – the streets of Accra and costal towns of Northern Ghana have stories to tell – he is not quite comfortable with the words needed to tell them.

Eshun’s expositions on the London of his youth are clear and touching as he delves into themes like the uncertainty of childhood and the realization that we are individuals distinct from our parents, their decisions nevertheless affecting our geography and psychology. As he leaps to present day Ghana, however, his frustration with the society, what it represents as it is torn between a hip-hop culture imported from the West and the ancestral traditions he seeks, makes for slightly disjointed reading. It is as if Eshun expected to find a truth among the population of Ghana – a definition of what it means to be Ghanan that could fill the gaps in his own understanding of himself.

What he finds instead is a culture of contradictions. There are the fortresses of Elmina, which saw the backs of a fifth of the slaves shipped out of Africa. There is Eshun’s family home, built by his great-grandfather with the monies brought in from slave-trading. There is the influx of Westernization – the fashions of Sean Jean and the music of Tupac Shakur. What is more, the anti-American actions of Osama Bin Laden are celebrated alongside W. E. B. DuBois’ renouncing of his American citizenship.

If Eshun discovers anything, it is this: there is no singularity in truth – for Ghana or for himself.

In the final two chapters of the work, the freedom Eshun allows Ghana, and himself, liberates his story – both are allowed to be more than any one thing, to exist in the celebration of their contradictions. Here he writes with a clarity of vision that is lovely in its forgiveness.

I found myself wishing that Eshun had returned to the earlier chapters of his book after this important self-discovery. His direction, vision and exposition in the second half of the novel would have helped edit and clarify the first half’s frustrated stabs into the dark. Of course, such a cleanup may have taken away from the memoir’s resolution. How would we know whether Eshun found himself if we could not see how lost and confused he had been?

The texture of this novel, the obvious research he put into his subject matter and the honesty with which the story is told make Black Gold worth reading – perhaps all the more so as a reminder that we needn't have all the answers to who we are or whence we came at our fingertips, that there is beauty and value in working to discover them.

- Lessa Josselyn

The Master and Who?

Justin sends in his new review of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which, I quote, is "short, innocent, and somewhat ignorant." Come now, Justin, modesty doesn't score any points at TKR! - RD

A most unusual, but pleasant, conversation happened upon me several months ago while I was eating lunch on a patio outside Joe’s Pizza at the University of California, Santa Cruz campus. Now, although I would like to claim that I ventured onto the campus strictly to have lunch that day, I must admit that I was also participating in a discussion forum organized by a friend of mine. The forum was developed in attempts to engage students in dialogue about important “life” questions outside of the classroom. Being that I enjoy a good conversation, I volunteered to be the moderator for the event. On this one peculiar afternoon, an extremely inquisitive and eccentric student happened by my table and sat down; whereabouts he proceeded to interrogate me about the nature of the forum. After several minutes of conversation, primarily dictated by his thick Russian accent, I could tell that this student was a serious learner. He was by all accounts of the word, a book worm, and a developed one at that. He was a history major and particularly interested in Eastern European history because of his Jewish heritage. We talked intensely for an hour or so, the subject ranging everywhere from the verisimilitude of New Testament literature, to the current conflicts in the Middle East, to the current intellectual crises in American culture. Towards the end of our exchange he recommended a book to me, exclaiming, “I think you might enjoy this.” It was titled The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and apparently it was one of the most influential books ever written about Soviet culture. That afternoon I proceeded to the nearest Borders Bookstore to purchase the book. Little did I know that my earlier encounter with the history student from UCSC would serve as a real-life analogy to the contents and themes of The Master and Margarita.

Written during the last days of Stalin’s dictatorship, in an attempt to undermine various totalitarian philosophies, The Master and Margarita is fascinating and somewhat troubling read alike, especially for a poor hapless American like me. Although I am sufficiently detached historically and culturally from the Soviet era, I appreciated this book all the same for its courageous renouncements of religious dogma, censorship, philosophical elitism, and the monotony of modernized life. For someone like me, this book was an intriguing look into the mind and culture of post-Christian Soviet life. Written in the wake of various “social cleansing” acts perpetrated by the Stalin propaganda machine, Master attempts to illustrate just how desensitized Russians had become to these heinous acts. One of Bulgakov’s subtle themes is that in time, tyranny can become “normative” and accepted. Throughout Master we see glimpses of just how brainwashed the public had become by the power of the government. We see this sort of power delegated and received unconsciously in nearly every facet of Soviet life.

The MASSOLIT (Masters of the Soviet Literature) is a good example of this power, wherein its members are continually shown to be antireligious and somewhat hegemonic in their application of certain philosophical axioms. In the minds of the elite that form this literary group, religion should not be talked about, let alone given the privilege of critical inquiry. Thus, censorship has not simply become a tool used by the powerful to control others, but an attitude applied by the elite to further marginalize the oppressed. Through this faint example, Bulgakov seems to be suggesting that, via various communist social reformations, the Soviet lifestyle had become disinterested in even the most critical forms of human dialogue. No longer was there a spirit of investigation in the academic medium, for it had been replaced by a dull specter of inheritance and stagnant intellectual tradition.

Or, as we see in the complicated and befuddled mess that is the character of Margarita, a woman so compelled to be entangled in the pines of romance, she willingly escorts the apparition of Satan to a dance in hopes that she may once again regain what had been lost to her for so many years. It is in this character that Bulgakov reveals his most compelling argument. The character Margarita becomes a startling example of how love, and the feelings surrounding it, had become for so many but a pathetic attempt to secure one’s own future through the future of another. Although Margarita’s love is true and steadfast, her pursuit of it becomes more important than the object to which it is directed.

From his satirical portrayals of Satan disturbing the Moscow elite, to his post-critical commentary on the life of Jesus Christ, to his delicate depiction of a romantically crazed woman-turned-witch, Bulgakov applies layer upon layer of meaning and symbolism in order to arouse the sleeping imaginations of his readers. Bulgakov, on nearly every page, draws into light the severity by which Stalin’s dictatorship had conquered the imagination and livelihood of the Soviet peoples. Drawing on themes from Goethe, Solzhenitsyn, Gogol, and Cervantes, Master is an exercise in truly “free verbal construction.” Bulgakov stops at nothing to surprise the reader, allowing the imagination to take authority over the security of the rational mind. It seems that Bulgakov was privy to information being withheld from the common Soviet, so his novel takes on a sort of mystical quality which engages the reader in the senses over and against a formal allegory based on historical fact.

Although I cannot pretend to know the entire historical situation from which this book was written, it is clear that Bulgakov was a literary genius, both in form and function. His book captivated millions of pre-Cold War Soviets who were struggling for air in the vacuous environment of Stalin’s dictatorship. I should hope and pray that there are some contemporary Bulgakovs in our midst today. Like the history student at UCSC, who appeared as if from a crowd of wandering intellectual shapes, Bulgakov’s masterpiece has appeared in similar fashion, from a crowd of dark and harrowing literary shapes, to provide an enlightened and unexpected spirit of optimism in the face of so much cynical confusion.

- Justin D'Agostino

Dead Fall

I'm pleased to say that my mom, yes my mom, has contributed a few words on a Patricia Rushford mystery she recently read. The best part about the piece is that it was unsolicited. So there are some people out there who enjoy reading and writing about it for its own sake. This is an attitude we try to foster at TKR. Alas, often to no avail. - RD

Patricia Rushford is a fine Christian fiction author. Her murder mysteries are compelling, intriguing and capture the reader’s attention from beginning to end. As the book jacket reads, “Patricia Rushford is an award-winning author, speaker, and teacher. She is also a registered nurse and holds a master’s degree in counseling. She is a prolific writer with numerous articles and over forty books to her credit…..”

Dead Fall is the second book in the McAllister Series, which was co-authored by Harrison James, whose career has placed him in a major supervising role in a metropolitan police department, to give the mysteries further credibility. We read, “His career accomplishments include work as an undercover narcotics agent, as a detective investigating hundreds of homicide and sexual and physical abuse cases, and enforcing big-game poaching and back-country investigations. James has also appeared in several reality police/crime television series.”

The authors spend time developing the characters with a little romance to balance the grittiness of the plot. The first few pages set the scene for the potential crime with a missing young man in the Oregon wilderness. With all of the characters, including a suspicious girlfriend and other suspects, in place, detectives “Mac” McAllister and his partner Dana Bennett from the Portland, Oregon State Police Department set out to solve the mystery of the young man’s disappearance. Along the way, mysterious bodies are uncovered to complicate the story. The reader has to ponder over the evidence along with the detectives to decipher the clues and determine if the young man was actually murdered and who the culprit might be.

The book is enjoyable and entertaining. Patricia’s other book series, the Angel Delaney Mysteries, is also a good choice.

- Barbara Dixon