Search Results for: The Awl

‘We Stayed Children’: Akwaeke Emezi on Growing Up in Chaos in Aba, Nigeria

Photo via Flickr

I spent my entire childhood in Aba, a commercial town in the south of Nigeria, where both my siblings were born. When I came back to the country after leaving for college, I knew from my first circling of the Lagos crowd that the location of my childhood would be ammunition against people who thought I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t Nigerian enough. No one could argue with Aba. It was my best card, even better than being born in Umuahia, where my father and grandfather were born. It made me authentic in a way that was absolute; you couldn’t question if someone who grew up in Aba was a ‘real’ Nigerian. No one could say anything. Aba didn’t match the background they assumed for me: that I must have grown up outside Nigeria, because I smelled too foreign, right down to my blood. The truth felt like a story. I wanted to tell them we never had running water, that the cockroach eggs gelled into the egg grooves of the fridge door, that the concrete over the soakaway broke open and stayed open. The smell became part of our air and when one of the little chicks fell into the hole, my sister called me wicked for not helping it out. I said none of this, though. I just smiled at their shock and listened to the jokes about how Aba people can make and sell a fake version of anything, even a glass of water.

What I did tell people was how impressive it was that my parents kept their children as sheltered as they did in all the chaos of Aba during the 90’s and early 2000’s, with the way the town felt and tasted lawless. We got piles of books to read, bought secondhand from the Post Office on Ikot-Ekpene Road or sent from our cousins in London or pulled from my parents’ separate collections, and that’s how my sister and I ended up believing in fairies in the midst of riots. We had cats spilling over our carpets, a dog with raw bleeding ears, and several Barbie dolls sent from Saudi Arabia, where my mother moved to in ’96. I didn’t know I’d never live with her again. When our turkeys got fowlpox, we caught them and pinned them under our feet and learnt that you could treat the pox with palm oil. When the dogs got maggots, we learnt that applying careful pressure to the sore made them fall white and wriggling to the sand. We learnt not to handle bitterleaf and then touch your mouth, or peel yam and then touch your eyes, because the first ruins your tongue and the itch of the second can blind you. We mimicked the priests during Mass at CKC, driving home afterwards past the bodies dumped outside the teaching hospital. We stayed children.

– From an essay by Akwaeke Emezi about growing up in the Nigerian town of Aba, chosen and edited by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, for a special literary supplement to the African lifestyle blog, Olisa. (h/t Mary Karr)

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Back in the USSR: A Reading List

Photo: yeowatzup

Svetlana Boym, an eminent Leningrad-born literary scholar, died earlier this month in Boston. She was a versatile and eloquent critic, novelist, and photographer, but is perhaps best known for her work on nostalgia, a cultural and psychological phenomenon that she described as “a strategy of survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming.”

Boym left the USSR in the early 1980s. Since then, her country of birth has formally disintegrated, but has also become one of the most fetishized nostalgic objects of our post-Cold War imagination, a political entity that continues to cast spectral shadows in unexpected places — in Russia, in the former Communist Bloc, and in the West.

Writing about post-Soviet Kaliningrad/Königsberg, Boym described the city, and by extension contemporary Russia as a whole, as a “theme park of lost illusions.” The stories in this reading list — from a haunting travelogue through an abandoned Soviet mining town in the Arctic to Boym’s account of Moscow’s 850th anniversary celebrations in 1997 — take us on a ride through the park’s gaudily uncanny landscapes. Read more…

China’s Booming Domestic Wine Industry

Although eighty-three percent of the wine China drinks is produced domestically, and baijiu grain alcohol is still its favorite alcohol, that’s changing. China is now the world’s fifth largest wine producer. In The California Sunday Magazine, Amy Qin writes about the changing taste of Chinese drinkers, and profiles Ma Qingyun, one producer who is helping change the face of the country’s fine wine industry:

When Ma started Jade Valley, he was drawn to the idea of saving the village from the fate of so many rural Chinese areas. As China’s cities have expanded and new ones have emerged seemingly overnight, traditionally agricultural regions have been eaten up by urban and industrial sprawl. Ma envisioned a beautifully designed winery that would provide high-paying architectural jobs and draw tourists to the Yushan area, giving it a better chance of fending off Xi’an’s encroaching development.

He pitched the idea to his brother. After years spent working as a technician in a military garment factory in Xi’an, Jianchao had returned to the village to set up a small business growing and selling traditional Chinese medicine. “I knew nothing about wine,” Jianchao says. “I only knew about industrial enterprises — input, output, and raw-material processes.” But as the two brothers talked, Jianchao grew enamored with the idea of helping farmers and bolstering the local economy.

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Loving Books in a Dark Age

The Venerable Bede, image via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Pye | The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe | Pegasus Books | April 2015 | 31 minutes (8,498 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from The Edge of the World, by Michael Pye, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

 

* * *

There was nobody else alive, nobody who could read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not yet. Read more…

Just Below the Surface

Summer Brennan | The Oyster War | Counterpoint Press | August 2015 | 20 minutes (5,042 words)

The following is an excerpt from Summer Brennan’s excellent The Oyster War: the True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, appearing courtesy of Counterpoint Press. Buy the book here.

***

The road to the oyster farm is paved with the moon-white grit of pulverized oyster shells. There is a gleam to it, and to drive it in the dusk of the dry summer months is to see the dust-coated leaves of the ditch plants take on the powdery luminosity of white moths.

Hugging the edge of the estuary’s northernmost inlet, the narrow lane rises a little above a lush wetland dotted with egrets and blue herons, and then winds down again to the edge of a vast and shining body of water. This is Drakes Estero, what’s been called “the heart of the park.” The air feels different here. In winter or summer, heat or cold, there is an enlivening bite of freshness.

I was at the farm one evening in the late summer of 2013 to look for Oscar, one of the farm’s workers. He had given me an unauthorized tour of the planting sites the month before, and I was worried that allowing him to do so had accidentally gotten him fired. Word on the street was that it had. I was initially shocked to hear this, but considering how contentious things had gotten, what with the legal battle and all the national media attention, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. For owners Kevin and Nancy Lunny, who by some estimates had already sunk more than a million dollars into their efforts to restore the farm and keep it open, the stakes could not have been higher.

Like many of the oyster workers, Oscar lived in one of the rundown buildings that made up the farm’s small land-based component—a smattering of sheds, cottages, trailers and pre-fab homes. At least, that is what he told me, though I didn’t know if he still lived there. The buildings were scattered over just about an acre and a half, so I figured it wouldn’t take too long to look.

I pulled up and parked my borrowed, mud-splattered 1991 Toyota station wagon in front of a weatherworn white building. A brightly painted sign exclaimed it to be the “Oyster Shack.” No more than 600 square feet in total, it housed the retail portion of the business in front and the tiny hatchery in back, where the oysters were grown from spat (or “seed”) the size of sand grains. On the wall of an adjacent shed was pinned a large American flag.

The pop radio station I’d been listening to on the drive out had turned to white noise. I switched it off and got out of the car. Read more…

Fox and Friends

Rachael Maddux | Longreads | August 2015 | 21 minutes (5,232 words)

 

The hounds of Shakerag Hounds, the oldest mounted fox hunt in the state of Georgia, are trained as pups to heed every note of their huntsman’s horn. They know a quick double-note means it’s time to head out into the field, three short bursts followed by a sad undulation means they’ve landed on a covert with no quarry, and three long, shimmying notes mean they’ve run their quarry to ground. It’s a fox these hounds are after, in theory—red or gray—but out here, just beyond the furthest reaches of metro Atlanta’s sprawl, they might find themselves on the trail of a coyote, a bobcat, an unlucky armadillo. Whatever they’re chasing, when they hear the horn’s three long, blooming notes, they know what to do. Three means let it go. Three means let it live.

John Eaton, Shakerag’s huntsman, likewise had the horn’s particular vocabulary ground into him at a tender age. He grew up in Somerset, England, the sixth generation of a fox hunting family. His grandfather was a huntsman, too, and his mother was a whipper-in, one of the hunt staff that rides along to keep the hounds (not “dogs,” never just “dogs”) in line. His family did the kind of fox hunting you think of when you think of fox hunting: tall boots, red and black jackets, black helmet, regal horses. The kind about which a character in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance quipped, “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

In the Britain of Eaton’s childhood, fox hunts operated pretty much as they had for half a millennium: as a combination sporting event, social gathering, and elaborate means of pest control. Back then, it was unheard of to call hounds off a quarry the way he now does as a matter of course—like a pinch hitter knocking one out of the park and walking off the field, or a fisherman hooking a big one then chucking his rod and reel into the lake. What’s the point of coming so close and giving up at the last moment? Why even bother at all? Read more…

My Undertaker, My Pimp

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (edited)

Jay Kirk | Harper’s | March 2002 | 29 minutes (7,333 words)

This essay by Jay Kirk first appeared in the March 2002 issue of Harper’s, where it was edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Our thanks to Kirk for allowing us to reprint it here.

***

For a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying people on the telephone every day. The office was that of a funeral-consumer watchdog, which meant that we kept an eye on the funeral industry and helped the imminently bereaved and imminently deceased to make affordable funeral plans. Above my desk I kept an index card with a Faulkner quotation, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” On a particularly bad day I scratched out the last word and changed it to “nothing.” Read more…

In the Grand Scheme of Things

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Hana Schank | From ‘The Edge of Normal’ | June 2015 | 11 minutes (2,634 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from The Edge of Normal, Hana Schank’s story about what it’s like to raise a child with albinism, a genetic condition whose most striking characteristic is white blonde hair and pale skin. Many people with albinism are also legally blind. Writes Schank, “The story is not just one of life with an unusual special need, but also the story of how I’ve changed, and continue to change, as I help my daughter navigate the world.”

* * *

Two weeks after the pediatrician had introduced the word “albinism” to my vocabulary, my husband and I sat in the stuffy waiting room at the neurologist’s, gently rocking my daughter’s car seat. This was the man who would tell us what was going on with my perfect-imperfect daughter. There was still a chance the pediatrician was wrong. After all, everyone else agreed it was probably nothing. Or a brain tumor or cancer. Those were also things that could cause nystagmus or visual impairment. But it was probably nothing. Or albinism. Or nothing. It was probably nothing. Read more…

The World’s Most Lethal Border Crossing

Europe is “experiencing a maritime refugee crisis of historic proportions,” the United Nations warns. Thousands of refugees escaping conflict in Africa and the Middle East are trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. More than 1,900 migrants have lost their lives in its waters so far this year, over twice the amount of people during the same period in 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration. Brad Wieners profiled the millionaire husband-and-wife team trying to save them with their own search-and-rescue operation in his April Bloomberg Business cover story “Dying at Europe’s Doorstep.”

That afternoon, and well into the night, he and Regina discussed what Pope Francis, on his first visit outside the Vatican, had described as “the globalization of indifference” to the plight of refugees at sea. “Papa Francesco said that everyone that could help, should do it, [and] with his own skills,” says Regina, who speaks English as well as her native Italian. “So we start to think, what are our capabilities? We have a good background in helping people in trouble.”

As with the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration is a perennial, intractable problem for the coastal states of Southern Europe, but it’s become a full-on humanitarian crisis in the four years since the Arab Spring. In 2014, 218,000 irregular migrants (the inelegant term of art for refugees and those traveling without documentation) tried to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). That’s more than five times the number that tried in 2010. Some are from poor nations in sub-Saharan Africa, simply seeking a better life. Most have fled civil wars and lawlessness in Syria, Eritrea, and Somalia. Last year at least 3,419 died in the attempt, making the Mediterranean the world’s most lethal border crossing.

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The ship’s first rescue was on Aug. 30, 2014, about 30 nautical miles from Libya. “You had several boats, including one filled with children that was getting ready to capsize,” says Catrambone. “You had the water coming up—the boat was filling up, the children were screaming and crying, many of them didn’t know how to swim.” Before it was over, more than 100 people were in the drink, floating with the aid of MOAS’s plastic orange life jackets. Once the crew had everyone aboard, they almost ran out of infant formula. “On that day, it went from zero to 358 immediately. And it was no holds barred for the next 20 hours.”

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Who Killed Dolly Wilde?

Dolly Wilde, photographed by Cecil Beaton

Megan Mayhew Bergman | Almost Famous Women | Scribner | July 2015 | 36 minutes (6,383 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a short story from Almost Famous Womena collection by Megan Mayhew Bergman, as recommended by Longreads contributor A. N. Devers, who writes: 

“In her vital and poignant themed story collection, Megan Mayhew Bergman explores the interior lives of women who lived on the precipice of notoriety before falling into obscurity. The story here, ‘Who Killed Dolly Wilde?,’ delves into the unusual life and mysterious death of Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dorothy Wilde, building a rich portrait of a witty and wild bon vivant who dated both men and women (but mostly women), drove an ambulance in World War I, and fell prey to dangerous addictions. Bergman daringly imagines Wilde’s last days suffering with cancer and her addictions as something other than what history has recorded, which leaves a unsettling and dangerous aftertaste in the reader’s mouth—if we write women out of history, we never know the truth of things.”

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