Kruse's Keys: Read "Right-Hand Shores" to See One Community's Post-Civil War Struggle to Find Its Place in the World.

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One afternoon two weeks ago, this book appeared on the crowded counter in the upstairs library of our home.  Neither Emily nor I had ever seen it.  

I leafed through the description and was intrigued by the endorsements on the back--one author called him a "novelists' novelist"--that caught my eye since one of my favorite writers James Salter is often called a "writers' writer.

I asked around the house. Did this book get lost in the shuffle of our Christmas bounty?  Queries to our extended family yielded no clarity.  It remains a mystery.  The only thing to do was to open to page 1.

I'm glad I did.

Reading Tilghman's writing is effortless--which means he's both incredibly talented and works hard at it.  His 2012 tale (one of 4 in a series I found out later) of a family's doomed (cursed?) farm on the Eastern shore stretches across generations from the Civil War and through to reconstruction.  He creates deep characters that bring the complex community surrounding the farm to life as he not only captures the entangled master-slave dynamic but also the fraught relationship between farm owner and newly freed men following the Civil War.  That he unfolds this story through the backdrop of the main character's scientific obsession with creating a peach farm comprised of thousands of trees is remarkable.  

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2024,  2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Kruse's Keys: Read "Blessed Child" to Grapple With Miracles and Sorrow

I
I'd forgotten about the author Ted Dekker. Some time 10 years ago or so I'd read through 4 or 5 of his books in a row--he's a great suspense/thriller Christian writer admittedly a narrow, strange niche.

"Blessed Child" was in a pile of books that my sister gave us during our evacuation to pass the time while in quarantine. Turns out its partially set in Ethiopia!

The premise is that an American baby named Caleb is given to an Ethiopian monastery after his mother is murdered by invading Eritrean forces. 10 years later his life is in jeopardy and a Peace Corps worker and Red Cross nurse rescue him and take him to the U.S. In the United States, we discover that Caleb can heal people and that senior politicians want him dead. This political thriller unfolds as the central characters grapple with the idea of miracles in the modern age and what is more important: healed hands or healed hearts?

Dekker does a good job in unpacking some difficult questions that many skeptics (and believers) have such as why do some people get healed and other die? Why is there evil if God is all powerful? There's no easy answers to any of this genre of questions but the author provides a solid framework by which we can consider them.

See our 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Key Quotes:

Whoever said that a straightened hand was more dramatic than a healed heart anyway?

“Remember, Caleb, words are weak instruments of love. They can do many things, but they do not carry the truth like your hands do. People need to be shown, not told.”

Kruses Keys: Read “American War: A Novel” to Imagine an America that Says on its Current Trajectory

Egyptian-Canadian (by way of Qatar) journalist-turned-author Omar El Akkad has penned a tale of what I’d call “future-historical fiction(ish).” We are dropped into a world 40 years in the future where America has erupted into a chaotic conflict over the federal government’s outlawing of fossil fuels. This north-south split is aggravated by accelerated global warming and rising ocean levels that are swallowing up coastlines everywhere. 10 years ago this type of novel might have seem far-fetched but a casual perusal of today’s headlines place in squarely in the realm of scary-enough-it-just-could-happen-maybe?
California bill would ban new fossil fuel vehicles from 2040
A legendary Silicon Valley investor wants to split California into 3 states, and his proposal just qualified for the November ballot
A Second American Civil War: Trump's "war on the deep state" could have frightening implications
Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?
IS A SECOND CIVIL WAR LIKELY? ONE THIRD OF AMERICANS THINK SO

Amidst these cataclysmic events, we witness the tragic arc of Sarat, a young girl whose life is quickly thrown into chaos as the violence of war encroaches and overwhelms her family’s life. Sarat quickly becomes a hardened women-turned sniper-turned prisoner of war-turned mass murderer.

The staying power of this novel comes from Akkad’s mastering in capturing the ways that media and political rhetoric can distort reality and inflame the populace. It’s also a good lesson on why it’s important for students to learn to evaluate events (past and present) from a diversity of viewpoints and sources.

To bring this lesson home for me as a AFRICOM foreign area officer, it’s of limited utility for me to study an African nation by reading only histories, political analysis and journal articles written by white western authors. It’s important to seek out indigenous sources and contrary viewpoints. It’s one of the reasons that I regularly read the blog “Africa is a Country” which has a decidedly anti-American, anti-colonial (for good reason), anti-white bent. I may not agree with much of their analysis but I surely wouldn’t be challenging myself intellectually by insulating myself against such contrasting viewpoints.

See our 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Key References: 
2017 NPR: American War Explores the Universality of Revenge
2017 Guardian Review of "American War"

Sleepwalking Land (Mozambique): Couto crafts a surreal tale about hopelessness but also about never giving up in civil-war era Mozambique

Sleepwalking Land

Loved It Because: Mia Couto has crafted a surreal, engrossing tragic tale of the hopelessness of life during the fifteen year long civil war that consumed post-independence Mozambique.  I went into this novel knowing little about Mozambique's history apart from a broad knowledge regarding the brutality with which Portugal ceded independence to its colonies.  

Reading this novel won't give the reader even a brief overview of the country's civil war, instead Couto focuses on pulling the reader into the pysche of those affected most by war--the ones not doing the killing--the women and the children.  Early on, Kindzu the narrator relates one of the most bizaree stories that I've ever read--his younger brother is forced to live in the family's henhouse bu their insane father, and then forced to act like a chicken--for so long that he eventually becomes one and disappears.  This type of magical kafkaesque storyline is repeated throughout Sleepwalking Land, as the oprhaned narrators (yes, plural) struggle to exist in a country that is dying under their feet.  The very idea of life turns Kindzu into a fatalist as he remarks at one point: "the best things in life are those that don't lie ahead"--meaning that pleasure and meaning can only be found in distant memories or in the most immediate present.  

Read This For More:
2103 Paris Review Interview with Mia Couto
2015 Guardian Interview with Author
Sleepwalking Land (2007 Movie is free with amazon prime)

*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

 **See our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

NOTES:

15  Kindzu is the worst as pronounced by his mother

16  Mozambique likened to a beached dying whale

17  An Indian doesn't have black friends

20  Sincerity is a childlike virtue

22  Wish to be men of no race--men of an ocean instead

33  The elephant as a symbol of the dying land

35-43  Recounts surreal ocean journey and a dream-like conversation with his dead father

40  Desire and journey to become a naparama (witch doctor of sorts)

41  Mozambique's plight is blamed on the country forgetting its ancestors

53  Mozambique's fate is that of a mat: "History will wipe its feet on our back" 

60-7  Surreal Skellington episode on repopulating Mozambique

62  'dreams are letters we send to our other, remaining lives'

75  in the end we all yearn for connection

105  The cause of the war: to license robbery...'death was necessary so that laws could be forgotten'

108  narrator's role from the beginning: a dreamer of memories, an inventor of truths...a sleepwalker like the land where I was born

157  "the best things in life are those that don't lie ahead"

158  the solitude and loneliness of war: "that's what the war had done:  now, all of us are alone, the dead and the living.  There's no nation anymore."

176  cunning = hyena = death

192  "those who suffer most in war are those not involved in the killing"  it's the women and children

The Fishermen: My Notes and Kindle Highlights

2015 Reading List


Updated 9/15:

This is Obioma's first novel and it has been met with widespread critical acclaim in places like the Times; it also made the long short list for the 2015 Booker Prize.  And for good reason--Obioma stands as the heir apparent to Achebe because of his writing acumen in translating and capturing complex political events amidst parables and fables (personally, I also prefer Obioma's writing to that of Achebe).  In Fishermen, we hear the tale of a family falling apart amidst the backdrop of the turbulent 1993 elections.  As the reader is drawn in with a tale of a family's arc toward destruction, one can't but enjoy Obioma's insights into Nigerian family life (e.g., the switching between Yoruba, Igbo and English in a single conversation and headscarves tied to indicate you've been praying).   Like most great stories, though, when you strip away everything Obioma's Fishermen is about relationships and family and the secrets they keep.

BUT, perhaps one of the best things about this book is that Obioma is still in his 20's and just beginning!

The Fishermen: A Novel by Chigozie Obioma

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Last annotated on August 10, 2015

Because things followed this known and structured pattern, no day was worthy of remembrance. All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future.Read more at location 65

But Father’s move to Yola changed the equation of things: time and seasons and the past began to matter, and we started to yearn and crave for it even more than the present and the future.Read more at location 70

Father made it a tradition to visit every other weekend, in his Peugeot 504 saloon, dusty, exhausted from the fifteen-hour drive.Read more at location 81

At the beginning of the third month, his long arm that often wielded the whip, the instrument of caution, snapped like a tired tree branch. Then we broke free.Read more at location 86

For we derived great joy from this fishing, despite the difficulties and meagre returns.Read more at location 171

When I look back today, as I find myself doing more often now that I have sons of my own, I realize that it was during one of these trips to the river that our lives and our world changed. For it was here that time began to matter, at that river where we became fishermen.Read more at location 172

eye that mocks a father, that scorns an aged mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.”Read more at location 293

Mother ended the night with this passage from Proverbs—the most frightening I knew of in the entire Bible. Looking back, I realize it must have been the way she quoted it, in Igbo—imbuing the words with venoms—that made it so damning. Aside from this, Mother said all else in English instead of Igbo, the language with which our parents communicated with us; while between us, we spoke Yoruba, the language in Akure. English, although the official language of Nigeria, was a formal language with which strangers and non-relatives addressed you. It had the potency of digging craters between you and your friends or relatives if one of you switched to using it. So, our parents hardly spoke English, except in moments like this, when the words were intended to pull the ground from beneath our feet. Our parents were adept at this, and so Mother succeeded. For, the words “drowned,” “everything,” “exist,” “dangerous” came out heavy, measured, charged and indicting, and lingered and tormented us long into the night.Read more at location 294

He bemoaned the poor health facilities in the country. He swore at Abacha, the dictator, and railed on about the marginalization of Igbos in Nigeria.Read more at location 350

I sweat and suffer to send you to school to receive a Western education as civilized men, but you chose instead to be fishermen. Fish-a-men!”Read more at location 408

Our parents often found the need to explain such expressions containing concealed meanings because we sometimes took them literally, but it was the way they learned to speak; the way our language—Igbo—was structured. For although the vocabulary for literal construction for cautionary expressions such as “be careful” was available, they said “Jiri eze gi ghuo onu gi onu—Count your teeth with your tongue.” To which, once, while scolding Obembe for a wrong act, Father had burst out laughing when he saw Obembe moving his tongue over the ridge of his mouth,Read more at location 494

Ikenna threw off his shirt and hissed in reply. I was stupefied. Hissing at an older person in Igbo culture was considered an insufferable act of insubordination.Read more at location 667

In this part of Africa, married women often went by the name of their first child.Read more at location 764

It was covered with posters bearing the portraits of Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presidential aspirant of the Social Democratic Party (SDP).Read more at location 831

But now, Ikenna replaced “Mama” with “M.K.O.,” and we had all joined in, singing at the top of our lungs:Read more at location 875

M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description. Too marvellous for words. The most wonderful of all creatures, Like nothing never seen nor heard. Who can touch your infinite wisdom? Who can fathom the depths of your love? M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description. Your majesty is enthroned above.Read more at location 877

“Ladies and gentlemen, these four boys of one family will now be awarded scholarships by the Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola campaign organization.” As the crowdRead more at location 919

She sat there wondering what had happened to Ikenna. She was worried because Ikenna was, until recently, our beloved brother, the forerunner who shot into the world ahead of all of us and opened every door for us. He guided us, protected us and led us with a full-lit torch. Even though he sometimes punished Obembe and me or disagreed with Boja on certain issues, he became a prowling lion when an outsider rattled any of us. I did not know what it was to live without contact with him, without seeing him. But this was exactly what began to happen, and as the days passed, it seemed he deliberately sought to hurt us.Read more at location 946

Lost in the moment, I watched this awesome creature with all the concentration I could gather until details of him filled my mind. He was robed from head to foot in filth. As he rose spryly to stand, some of the filth rose with him, while some was left in patches on the ground. He had a fresh scar on his face just below his chin, and his back was caked with a dripping mess from some dead mango in a state of putrefaction. His lips were dried and cracked. His hair was unkempt; it stretched like tendrils, giving him the appearance of a Rastafarian. His teeth, most of which were blackened as if singed, reminded me of fire-blowing gypsies and circus players who blew fire from their mouths and probably, I thought, burned their teeth. The man lay bare before our eyes, stark naked except for a shred of rag which hung loosely from his shoulder down to his waist; his pubic region was covered with a dense foliage of hair in the midst of which his veiny penis hung limply like trouser rope. His legs were bursting with taut varicose veins.Read more at location 1015

We watched the forward-and-backwards swing of his backbone as he sang and danced, the song’s charged lyrics falling back on us like wind-borne dust. A fe f ko le fe ko ma kan igi oko As the wind cannot blow without touching the trees Osupa ko le hon ki enikan fi aso di As no one can block the light of the moon with a sheet of the moon with a sheet Oh, Olu Orun, eni ti mo je Ojise fun Oh, father of the host for whom I’m an oracle E fa orun ya, e je ki ojo ro I implore you to tear the firmaments and give rain Ki oro ti mo to gbin ba le gbo That the green things I have sown will live E ba igba orun je, ki oro mi bale mi Mutilate the seasons so my words can breathe, Ki won ba le gbo. That they yield fruit.Read more at location 1070

followed by a cry from Ikenna’s voice: “Tell me!” “Didn’t you hear him?” Boja asked menacingly even though Obembe—frozen in a posture of his hand shielding himself from an expected assault from Ikenna—had begun to speak. “He said,” Obembe stammered, but stopped when Boja spoke. Now he began afresh again: “He said—he said that a fisherman will kill you, Ike.” “What, a fisherman?” Boja said aloud.Read more at location 1102

were almost at our gate when Ikenna faced us, but with his eyes cast on no one in particular. “He saw a vision that one of you will kill me,” he said.Read more at location 1111

Mother was a falconer: The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm.Read more at location 1224

She wore a headscarf that was knotted behind her head into the shape of a bird’s tail—a sign she’d been praying.Read more at location 1239

once heard that when fear takes possession of the heartRead more at location 1310

of a person, it diminishes them. This could be said of my brother, for when the fear took possession of his heart, it robbed him of many things—his peace, his well-being, his relationships, his health, and even his faith. Ikenna began walkingRead more at location 1311

Then, suddenly clutching his belly, he raced to the bathroom, making choking sounds as he retched into the sink. It was here that his illness began, when the fear robbed him of his health, for it seemed that the account of the man’s death had established in him the unquestionable inescapability of Abulu’s prescient powers, causing smoke to rise from things yet unburned. A few daysRead more at location 1371

Obembe, trying to cleanly erase his spittle, trailed behind momentarily. By spitting and erasing it, we were observing the superstition that if a pregnant woman stepped on saliva, the person who had spit—if male—would be rendered permanently impotent, which I understood at the time to mean that one’s organ would magically disappear. This was indeedRead more at location 1423

he’d tell the story of his escapade as a ten-year-old boy during the war when he was left to cater for, hunt for, feed and protect his mother and younger sisters after they all took to the big Ogbuti forest to escape the invasion of our village by the Nigerian army.Read more at location 1480

“No, we can’t,” Boja objected. “If these men break in, they will recognize we are M.K.O.’s boys, ‘Children of Hope ’93’, enemies, and, we’ll be in greater danger than anyone else.”Read more at location 1495

We could tell from the man’s attire—a long, flowing Senegalese robe—that he was a northerner: the main targets of the onslaught by M.K.O. Abiola supporters, who’d hijacked the riot as a struggle between his west, and the north, where the military president, General Babangida, belonged.Read more at location 1524

Then we knew we were safe and had escaped the 1993 election uprising in which more than a hundred people were killed in Akure. June the 12th became a seminal day in the history of Nigeria. EveryRead more at location 1540

Throughout the rest of that day, Mother was a mined road that exploded when anyone stepped within an inch ofRead more at location 1613

promise,” he’d said, licking the tip of his index finger in a gesture of oath-taking,Read more at location 1622

houses, drowning many and turning whole cities into strange rivers. It would transform the locusts from harbingers of good things into the heralds of evil. Such was the fate the week that followed Boja’s head injury brought to the people of Akure, to all Nigerians, and to our family.Read more at location 1634

was the week in August when Nigeria’s Olympic “Dream Team” got to the final of the men’s football.Read more at location 1636

The man had eyes that stared inwards at each other, the kind of eyes commonly known as quarter-after-four eyes.Read more at location 1674

This was because he was, in fact, a sparrow; a fragile thing who did not design his own fate. It was designed for him. His chi, the personal god the Igbos believe everyone had, was weak. His was the efulefu kind: the irresponsible sentinel that sometimes abandoned its subject and went on far journeys or errands, leaving them unprotected. This was the reason why, by the time he became a teenager, he’d already had his fill of sinister events and personal tragedies, for he was a mere sparrow who lived in a world of black storms.Read more at location 1871

Ikenna was a fragile delicate bird; he was a sparrow.Read more at location 1948

critical of things, a part of him that greatly resembled Father. He nailed small things to big crosses and would ponder for long on a wrong word he said to someone; he greatly dreaded the reprove of others.Read more at location 1950

This tongue, which was now frozen, used to produce words as fungi produced spores. When agitated, words often sprang like tigers from her mouth, and poured like leaks from a broken pipe when sober. But from that night onwards, words pooled in her brain but only very little leaked out; they congealed in her mind.Read more at location 2270

Then, in late October, the Harmattan—a season when the dry dusty wind from the Sahara desert of northern Nigeria travelled south and covered most of sub-Saharan Africa—seemed to have appeared overnight, leaving a thick, heavy fog to hang suspended in patches of cumulus awnings over Akure like a spectral presence even into sunrise.Read more at location 2405

Although Christianity had almost cleanly swept through Igbo land, crumbs and pieces of the African traditional religion had eluded the broom.Read more at location 2467

have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible.Read more at location 2509

The statue of Samuel Okwaraji, the erstwhile Nigerian football player who died on the field of play in 1989,Read more at location 2572

Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person’s skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one’s spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them.Read more at location 2620

as usual, he berated Gowon, a man we had grown to hate, the man he’d repeatedly accused of bombing our village several times—the man who killed very many women during the Nigerian civil war. “That idiot,” he snapped, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, his neck taut with sinews, “is the greatest enemy of Nigeria.”Read more at location 2703

But my brother had said he would carry out the plan with all the powers of persuasion, determined that he would succeed, for his desire had become an indestructible leech.Read more at location 2719

But Abulu was a leviathan: An undying whale that could not be easily killed by a band of valiant sailors.Read more at location 2722

But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelt of death.Read more at location 2835

Whatever we had in the natural way of living, it seemed, had been mauled by the monstrous termite of grief that had attacked us. And our family had become a shadow of what we once were.Read more at location 2957

We would return home from church, have pepper soup and sponge cakes and soft drinks and just as in past years, Father would play a video of Ras Kimono for the New Year dance. David,Read more at location 3012

Hope was a tadpole: The thing you caught and brought home with you in a can, but which, despite being kept in the right water, soon died.Read more at location 3024

Abulu fell backwards into the water in a wild splash. I’d once been told that if a man wanted something he did not have, no matter how elusive that thing was, if his feet do not restrain him from chasing it, he would eventually grab it. This was our case. As we watchedRead more at location 3153

“Don’t worry,” he said, the chirping of the night crickets punctuating his speech. “It is finished.” “It is finished,” a voice repeated in my ears. I nodded and my brother, dropping the line, inched forward and embraced me.Read more at location 3180

My brother and I were roosters: The creatures that crow to wake people, announcing the end of nights like natural alarm clocks, but who, in return for their services, must be slain for man’s consumption.Read more at location 3184

Benjamin, was a moth: The fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings and falls to the ground. When my brothers, Ikenna and Boja, died, I felt like a fabric awning that had always sheltered me was torn off from over my head, but when Obembe ran away, I fell from space, like a moth whose wings were plucked off its body while in flight, and became a being that could no longer fly but crawl.Read more at location 3437

He seemed to pause between speeches in the way a driver would pull the brake, slow down and ramp up again. We drove in theRead more at location 3483

dawned on me for the first time that Father, our Father, the strong man, could not help me; he’d become a tamed eagle with broken claws and a crooked beak.Read more at location 3554

David and Nkem were egrets: The wool-white birds that appear in flocks after a storm, their wings unspotted, their lives unscathed. Although they became egrets in the midst of the storm, they emerged, wings afloat in the air, at the end of it, when everything as I knew it had changed.Read more at location 3563

M.K.O.’s afflictions had begun a few months after we met, when the 1993 election he was believed to have won was annulled, setting off a chain of events that put Nigeria’s politics on an unprecedented slide for the mud.Read more at location 3611

But the egrets were also known for something else: they were often signs or harbingers of good times. They were believed to cleanse the fingernail better than the best nail files. Whenever we and the children of Akure saw them flying in the sky, we rushed out and flapped our fingers after the low-flying white flock travelling overhead, repeating the one-line saying: “Egrets, egrets, perch on me.”Read more at location 3691

“We were fishermen. My brothers and I became—”Read more at location 3728