Shannon > Books: book-club‎ (70)

"I need you to be quite clear on how I feel about a highway and a bridge that gets them here in forty-five minutes from airport to door, with a great big slip lane and traffic noise day and night. This bridge is my nightmare. I won't stop fighting. Everyone laughs and says don't we know we're beaten. But I'm not beaten. [...] We're trying to protect the only thing Tasmania really has going for it in the twenty-first century. Its isolation. Its quiet. Its lack of population. Its remoteness. We need fewer people with more money coming here. [...] this bridge is a dumb strategy." [101]

"The world is a machine that feeds on people. There's always a cost. There are always broken marriages and messed-up children. Happiness - simple happiness - maybe it doesn't really exist anymore. Not in the world I saw, anyway. When it did happen, it was fleeting at best. Somewhere in the great rushing wind of conflict, refugees, climate change and capitalism, it had dissipated. It would be easy to blame capitalism but it wasn't just capitalism. It was this idea that everyone had a God-given right to live as they pleased. Now, in the US, there was a righteous, well-armed underbelly wearing their brown shirts and creeping deeper into America's psyche while the Democrats might as well have been talking underwater." [p.48]

What a difference there was between her expectations and what her marriage had really turned out to be. She belonged, she knew, to that group of women from Europe who had married non-European men as an escape from the strictures of their world, a refusal to conform. What they did not know, could not have known, was that these men, so outcast in Europe and America, were, in their own land, the very thing women like her were trying to escape. This was what she had not been prepared for. Balendran's unquestioning obedience to familial and social dictates, his formality even in their lovemaking, his insistence that they maintain separate bedrooms. [pp.79-80]

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"Your father signed a document granting power of attorney to the law office of Bello & Usman in Lagos."
"So why aren't you contacting them?" asked Warren.
"Because they don't exist," said Laura. "Jesus Christ, Warren, what part of this don't you understand?"
"Language," said their mother, roused from her indifference.
"What if someone took them up on their offer?" Laura asked. "Flew to Lagos and confronted them face to face?"
Detective Saul looked at her. "People have tried that. They've gone over there and started poking about in the city's underbelly.
"And?"
"Like I said, they usually end up floating in Lagos Lagoon."
"But what if - what if you made them come to you, pretended to be an investor, say? Turned the tables."
"That's a dangerous game. You'd be on their turf."
"But couldn't you meet them on neutral ground? An embassy or something."
"Odds are, even if you made it out alive, you wouldn't get your money back," said Rhodes.
"What if," Laura said, "it wasn't about the money?" [p.139]

One of the boys was wavering on his feet. His eyes were milky and unfocused. It reminded Nnamdi of the glassy gaze of the Egbesu boys, but without the bravado or the gin.
"The hardest part is protecting your line from other boys. We have to stand guard twenty-four hours. Take turns, work it in shifts. But dey fumes is always leaking, from the hose or from the valve. So you inhale a lot of it. Gives you headaches."
Nnamdi looked at his sickly friends, grown wan and thin. "You have to stop," he said. "The gas will make you ill. It will poison you."
"It already has, Nnamdi." And then, in Ijaw: "It was our bad fortune, wasn't it, Nnamdi? To sit on top of wealth that others wanted. Why do you think the gods punished us like that? Cursed us with oil. Why?"
"I don't know."
"Do you suppose the oil is tainted by the souls of the Igbo and others that we captured? Do you suppose it's the blood of those, come back to haunt us?"
"If that was the case, my friend, the oil would make the oyibos [white men] ill as well."
"I think it has, Nnamdi." [pp.289-290]

What was Nigeria?
It was a net, loosely thrown, a name on a map, one created by the British to paper over the gaping cracks in the joinery. A conjurer's trick, where the many became one, a sleight of hand, like the tired magic of old men making coins disappear. "There is no Nigeria." This was the lesson [Amina's] uncle had wished to impart. "There is Fulani and Hausa, Igbo and Tiv, Efik and Kanuri, Gwari and Yoruba. But Nigeria? That is on the pail we carry these in."
But she knew better.
She knew that the naming of a place helped bring it into existence. The naming of a location - or a person, a child - was a way of claiming them. Until you named something, it wasn't fully real. The trick to staying invisible, then, was to remain nameless. Without a name, you couldn't be pinned in place, couldn't be cornered or captured. [p.82]

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns.

I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.

I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life's duty was to prolong that of my mother. [p.1]

Around that time, my employer, who was based in Quebec, clipped an article from a Montreal paper reiterating that the "Quebecois nation" was Caucasian, that my slanting eyes automatically placed me in a separate category, even though Quebec had given me my American dream, even though it had cradled me for thirty years. Whom to like, then? No one or everyone? I chose to like the gentleman from Saint-Felicien who asked me in English to grant him a dance. "Follow the guy," he told me. I also like the rickshaw driver in Da Nang who asked me how much I was paid as an escort for my "white" husband. And I often think about the woman who sold cakes of tofu for five cents each, sitting on the ground in a hidden corner of the market in Hanoi, who told her neighbours that I was from Japan, that I was making good progress with my Vietnamese.

She was right. I had to relearn my mother tongue, which I'd given up too soon. In any case, I hadn't really mastered it completely because the country was divided in two when I was born. I come from the South, so I had never heard people from the North until I went back to Vietnam. Similarly, people in the North had never heard people from the South before reunification. Like Canada, Vietnam had its own two solitudes. [p.79]

Most of those children of GIs became orphans, homeless, ostracized not only because of their mothers' profession but also because of their fathers'. They were the hidden side of the war. Thirty years after the last GI had left, the United States went back to Vietnam in place of their soldiers to rehabilitate those damaged children. The government granted them a whole new identity to erase the one that had been tarnished. A number of those children now had, for the first time, an address, a residence, a full life. Some, though, were unable to adapt to such wealth.

Once, when I was working as an interpreter for the New York police, I met one of those children, now adult. She was illiterate, wandering the streets of the Bronx. She'd come to Manhattan on a bus from a place she couldn't name. She hoped that the bus would take her back to her bed made of cardboard boxes, just outside the post office in Saigon. She declared insistently that she was Vietnamese. Even though she had cafe au lait skin, thick wavy hair, African blood, deep scars, she was Vietnamese, only Vietnamese, she repeated incessantly. She begged me to translate for the policeman her desire to go back to her own jungle. But the policeman could only release her into the jungle of the Bronx. Had I been able to, I would have asked her to curl up against me. Had I been able to, I'd have erased every trace of dirty hands from her body. I was the same age as her. No, I don't have the right to say that I was the same age as her; her age was measured in the number of stars she saw when she was being beaten and not in years, months, days. [pp.82-3]

The so-called mother is no parent of a child, but nurturer of a newly seeded embryo; the parent is the one who mounts her, while she conserves the child like a stranger for a stranger, for those fathers not thwarted by god. [p.103]

It is my business in this case to give my judgement last; and I shall cast this vote of mine for Orestes. [...] I do so because there is no mother who gave me birth, and I approve the masculine in everything - except for union with it - with all my heart; and I am very much my father's: so I will set a higher value on the death of a woman who killed her husband, a house's guardian. [p.105]

"Many desires are falling together into one; there are the gods' commands, and my great grief for my father; besides, it oppresses me to be deprived of my property, so that our citizens, who have the finest glory among men, and honour for their heart in sacking Troy, should not be subjects like this of a pair of women. [p.59]

On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night,
through gloom and the empty halls of Death's ghostly realm,
like those who walk through woods by a grudging moon's
deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark
and the black night drains all color from the world.
[...]
There in the midst, a giant shadowy elm tree spreads
her ancient branching arms, home, they say, to swarms
of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf. [p.191]

But while he begged the sword goes plunging clean through Euryalus' ribs,
cleaving open his white chest. He writhes in death
as blood flows over his shapely limbs, his neck droops,
sinking over a shoulder, limp as a crimson flower
cut off by a passing plow, that droops as it dies
or frail as poppies, their necks wearing, bending
their heads when a sudden shower weighs them down. [p.280]

But Halaesus hot for combat
charges against them now, compressing all his force
behind his weapons. Ladon he butchers, Pheres, Demodocus -
a flash of his sword and he slices off Strymonius' hand
just as it clutched his throat. He smashes Thoas full
in the face with a rock and crushes out his skull
in a spray of brains and blood. [p.307]