Musings from a book fair

Frankfurt Book Fair (2007) - After days of trying to keep up as our editorial director wheeled and dealed with distributors, publishers and sales agents from around the world, I finally got a chance to explore some of the thousands of exhibitions at the world’s biggest book fair.

I stumbled across a hall reserved exclusively for children’s books, and I was amazed by the extravaganza of colour, gimmicks and packaging on display.

Under the influence of coffee and orange juice (or should I say kaffee and orangesaft), my bitter inner child awoke as he realised how deprived he had been. I don’t remember my middle-class parents spending a baht on fancy activity books with stickers, magnets and sound effects; they only bought textbooks for school.

Yes, they did value education; however, to them, education did not include fun or bright packaging.

The hall was full of adults making deals and drinking wine in the fairy-tale setting. Standing there made me realise, business and profit aside, how important books are in shaping young minds, and I was particularly pleased to come across a book about a young girl named Camille, whose series of illustrated tales were a language unknown to me. From what I could gather, the book recounts how she befriends a black classmate, playing seesaw with him. In return for her hospitality, the boy offers Camille a candy. A lovely little story, isn’t it?

Perhaps children’s books shouldn’t be called children’s books, but rather books produced by adults for children. Then again, it is our obligation to teach children new things we weren’t taught when we were young, for the world is ever changing. (Perhaps the next mum-and-cub polar bear tale should include a thing or two about the effects of global warming?)

In contrast to the happy-go-lucky themes found in children’s books, most grown-up books are damn serious: genocide, wa, etc. Plus their pages are full of small letters. Boriiiing!

The contrast between adult’s books and children’s made me wonder: if everyone had read Camille’s story, would the world be a better place by now? I believe books are meant to educate readers’ souls and minds. How do we then go from decades to centuries without any real progress? The world seems to be a darker place with each passing day. After who-knows-how many years of passing on our mistakes and virtues from generation to generation through literature, shouldn’t we be making progress? Or are we just innately violent and cruel, no matter how many books we read?

-Pornchai S

Misery ink

Danuta Kean’s stinging attack on the publishers of so-called ‘misery memoirs' (Daily Mail, 10 November) reeks of hypocrisy. Surely, even she must see the incredibly irony in launching this quixotic attack against ‘sensationalism’ from her lofty moral high-ground at the Daily Mail – a paper often criticised for it’s bigoted agenda.

Kean writes:

'Rather than inspire, [misery memoirs] risk titillating with the intimate detail they provide: members of religious cults rape young girls, fathers rape sons. '

Perhaps, Kean would like to confine subjects such as child abuse to the closet?

Had she done her homework, she would also know that 'inspirational memoirs', are mostly read by women, and often people who have suffered abuse or domestic violence themselves.

The world is an ugly place, Danuta...

Let us know what you think?

A strange, strange land...

The author of Farang, Dr Iain Corness, chats to Thailand's PM TV about a reincarnated squid, his date with a fortune teller and one of the few countries where you can still get run over by a shop!



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Confessions of a maverick

"Do engineering," said my school careers officer – so I enrolled for Medicine. I was 17 years old and that young man was already showing signs of being a maverick.

In my third year we were given ID cards stamped with "to be carried at all times on University property," so I tore mine up. When questioned by the Dean I replied simply "I know who I am, so I don't need one." Being a maverick earned me a severe reprimand, but I didn't carry an ID card for the rest of the course.

Returning from the UK to Australia with my shiny new medical degree I immediately went motor racing. "Son, doctors don't go motor racing," said my father. "Sorry, Dad, but this one does."

My refusal to fit into the accepted mold has seen me open a photography studio and score a contract to do the Australian equivalent of the famed Pirelli calendar. That maverick nature had me open up the first Thai fast food restaurant in Brisbane, and import a Tuk-Tuk from Bangkok as a promo item. Of course I also drove it to my medical practice as well. The patients loved it. The police did not. If it were a car, where were the seat belts? "Attached to the canvas roof? Come on, officer." If it were a motorcycle, where was my helmet? "At home."

A maverick never conforms.

So it was not by accident that I tentatively sent my outline for a book to publishers called Maverick House. One maverick can recognize another. In fact a house full of mavericks.
So for all the mavericks out there, do whatever you want to be doing. And resist all attempts at classifying you. Me? I'm just an ordinary doctor who races cars, photographs ladies and oversees a damn fine Tom Yum Goong!

- Dr Ian Corness, auhor of Farang: Thailand through the eyes of an ex-pat

Trapped in No-Man's-Land

I am Paula Grieg. I have three children and no stretchmarks. Therein lies the story of my life; a life of inner conflicts and contradictions. My early life, childhood and adolescence were spent in Germany, a country to which I am now bound only by memories, since almost all my family there have vanished.

Before I reluctantly left Germany for a new life in Ireland, I first became aware of my gender ambiguity, though at the time I had no clear idea what this meant or where it would lead. In Ireland I fell in love, married and started a family; those same dearly loved three children. My career took off and I built an existence. Those who looked on might have thought I had it all, but everything I built always stood on shaky foundations, because at the very heart of it I was not who I seemed to be.

Progressively I realised that I needed to acknowledge my true self or I would never find peace within myself. But that personal inner peace came at a high price—the disintegration of family, the loss of friends, home, career and status, and once more, emigration.

Both my career and my thirst for knowledge of other places and other peoples have led me through five continents and more than 50 countries. They have given me a broad and tolerant outlook on diversity in every sense, while my life in two genders has given me unusual personal insights available to few. But it is also true that the more I travelled, the more I have become displaced and lost all sense of home.

My biography No-Man's-Land is the telling of an unusual story, the writing of which helped me to make sense of my life and the telling of which will hopefully help to reduce barriers by helping others to understand the challenges faced by transsexuals and to realise that transsexuals can and do lead normal lives.

I remain hopeful though that there is another chapter yet to be written, entitled, ‘The Leaving of No-Man’s-Land,’ where through finding love once more I will also find that elusive sense of home and belonging, and can then look back at my life with a new perspective.

- Paula Grieg

Blood in the sand

As we stood together in Darfur’s golden sand, the stark reality hit us squarely over the head: the Sahara is rolling slowly southward. The desert is advancing, rendering access to basic resources such as land and water a matter of life or death. If you have access to those resourcesor the support of those in political power, you survive. When there is no democracy, no peaceful way of accessing power, then in Sudan, as in so many other places around the world,
people pick up guns to win back their rights.In Darfur, the government of Sudan armed that country’s far deadlier version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Janjaweed, a mixed bag of bandits and racist ideologues whose ethnic cleansing of all non-Arab people is mostly motivated by the desire to take over land and steal livestock. John has talked with young Janjaweed recruits. They felt they had no economic alternative. These were the same feelings of the young members of the militias that committed the genocide in Rwanda. Cynical leaders can exploit economic destitution and desperation, and like macabre, racist piedpipers lead people right over the moral cliff.Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. The genocide in Darfur is only the latest in a series of horrific conflicts. Sudan’s civil wars unfold in a depressingly familiar pattern. The Khartoum government’s counterinsurgency strategy has nearly always begun with killing and displacement on a massive scale. When the international community starts to take notice and the spotlight shines on government atrocities, the regime then scales back the military assault and the chess game begins. They manipulate ethnic dynamics, sowing internal divisions within the opposition. They manipulateAmerican, European, and African diplomats, buying time through disingenuous negotiation to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. And they manipulate humanitarian assistance, hiding behind the iron curtain of state sovereignty to deny humanitarians access to territory where vulnerable civilians need help.The ruling National Islamic Front (known today as the National Congress Party) has taken state-sponsored brutality to extraordinary levels, but the systematic hoarding of wealth and power by elites in Khartoum and the endless violent campaign to silence a deprived and angry population have deep historical roots.
- Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, authors of Not on Our Watch

Genocide in slow-motion

Genocide is unique among ‘crimes against humanity’ or ‘mass atrocity crimes’ because it targets, in whole or in part, a specific racial, religious, national, or ethnic group
for extinction. According to the international convention, genocide can include any of the following five criteria targeted at the groups listed above:

• killing
• causing serious bodily or mental harm
• deliberately inflicting ‘conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part’
• imposing measures to prevent births
• forcibly transferring children from a targeted
group.

The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda took 100 days to exterminate 800,000 lives. This was the fastest rate of targeted mass killing in human history, three times faster
than that of the Holocaust.

JOHN:
In mid-2004, one year into the fighting and six months before the trip Don and I took to Chad/Darfur, I went with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Samantha Power to the rebel areas in Darfur. Samantha was a journalist in Bosnia during the horrors of that war, and her frustration with the failure of the United States to lead a strong international response to the atrocities being committed compelled her to research and write a book about America’s response to genocides throughout the 20th century. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), won the Pulitzer Prize. Samantha showed that time and again US leaders were aware that crimes against humanity were occurring but failed to take action. After she and I travelled to Darfur in 2004, Samantha wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine that won the National Magazine Award for reporting in 2005. At the same time, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting government-held areas in the region. But unlike Secretary Powell, Samantha and I went to the part of Sudan that the regime didn’t want anyone to see, and for very good reason.
Before the genocide, Darfur was one of the poorest regions of Sudan, and the Saharan climate made eking out a living an extreme challenge. But these difficulties only made Darfurians hardier and more self-reliant, mixing farming and livestock rearing in a complex strategy of survival that involved migration, inter-communal trade, and resource sharing.
It had been over a year since the genocide began, so Samantha and I expected certain evidence of mass destruction. And we were indeed witness to burned villages where livestock, homes, and grain stocks had been utterly destroyed, confirming stories we had heard from Darfurians at refugee camps in Chad.
Yet no amount of time in Sudan or work on genocide ever prepares anyone sufficiently for
what Samantha and I saw in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert—bodies of nearly two dozen youngn men lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by the 130-degree desert heat. One month before, they had been civilians, forced to walk up a hill to be executed by Sudanese government forces. Harrowingly, this scene was repeated throughout the targeted areas of Darfur.We heard more refugees in Chad describe family and friends being stuffed into wells by the Janjaweed in a twisted and successful attempt to poison the water supply. When we searched for these wells in Darfur, we found them in the exact locations described. The only difference was now these wells were covered in sand in an effort to cover the perpetrators’ bloody tracks. With each subsequent trip to Darfur, I have found the sands of the Saharan Desert slowly swallowing more of the evidence of the 21st century’s first genocide.

To us, Darfur has been Rwanda in slow motion. Perhaps 400,000 have died during three and a half years of slaughter, over 2.25 million have been rendered homeless, and, in a particularly gruesome subplot, thousands of women have been systematically raped. During 2006, the genocide began to metastasise, spreading across the border into Chad, where Chadian
villagers (and Darfurian refugees) have been butchered and even more women raped by marauding militias supported by the Sudanese government. Sadly, the international response has also unfolded in slow motion. With crimes against humanity like the genocide in Darfur, the caring world is inevitably in a deadly race with time to save and protect as many lives as possible.

In autumn 2004, after his visit to Sudan, Secretary Powell officially invoked the term ‘genocide’. He was followed shortly thereafter by President Bush.5 This represented the
first time an ongoing genocide was called its rightful name by a sitting US president. And yet in Darfur, as in most of these crises, the international community, including the United States, responded principally by calling for ceasefires and sending humanitarian aid. These are important gestures to be sure, but they do not stop the killing. We believe it is our collective responsibility to resanctify the sacred post-Holocaust phrase ‘Never Again’— to make it something meaningful and vital. Not just for the genocide that is unfolding today in Darfur, but also for the next attempted genocide or cases of mass atrocities. And there are other cases, to be sure. Right now, we need to do all we can for the people of northern Uganda, of Somalia, and of Congo. Though genocide is not being perpetrated in these countries, horrible abuses of human rights are occurring, in some ways comparable to those in Darfur. Militias are targeting civilians, rape is used as a tool of war, and life-saving aid is obstructed or stolen by warring parties. Furthermore, by the time you pick up this book, another part of the world could have caught on fire, and crimes against humanity may be being perpetrated. We need to do all we can to
organise ourselves to uphold international human rights law and to prevent these most heinous crimes from ever occurring.

That is our challenge!

John Prendergast & Don Cheadle

Authors of Not on Our Watch