Madagascar diaries, part 3: Tana

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this story.

As I mentioned, I wanted an extra day on arrival because every now and then I get violently motion-sick (by which I don't mean that I throw up and live happily ever after; violently sick to the degree that knocks me out for days). But fortunately this didn't happen, and in the morning we were ready to explore, although our guidebook helpfully suggested that there wasn't much to see or do.

When we first made our plans, Anton said that one of his former classmates from San Diego lived in Antananarivo. What were the chances? But Anton's former classmates from San Diego seem to be spread all over the world. It turned out that Nick was stationed in Madagascar with Peace Corps, and he gave us the best imaginable introduction to Tana. Without him, I wouldn't have ventured out at all or turned back after two blocks. Although – and here I cannot say that it wasn't worse than Russia, because it was much, much better than Russia; it wasn't worse than Morocco or other Southern places I'd been to: hot, crammed, crowded, buzzing. An exciting city to walk around, with someone who knows it.

Tana has a population of two million, and not one single traffic light! But it wasn't worse than some East European cities with traffic lights, and there seemed to be no traffic accidents. It seemed to work just fine, for cars as well as for pedestrians. I guess when you have learned the rules it's not a problem.

Lots of street vendors to whom Nick spoke friendly, but firmly in Malagasy. He claimed that he had learned very little Malagasy during his three years, but he seemed quite conversant. We went to several markets, food markets and craft markets, which reminded me again of other places, most of all Old Town in Jerusalem. Everybody knew Nick and greeted him cheerfully in Malagasy and French: “Nicolas!” There were some nice things, carved wood, raw silk scarves that I might be prepared to buy, but I didn't know what was to come yet, and without Nick I wouldn't have known what the reasonable price was. So when I found a pretty set of dollhouse-size table and chairs, he bargained at length, which I would have done myself if I were good at maths to convert money into a familiar currency. Moreover, Nick pointed out that the set I initially fancied was rosewood, illegal to sell and export, which I didn't know – one of many, many things I hadn't known and learned during the trip.

Then we walked up a very long, steep street with pretty colonial architecture, in a area I definitely would not have entered on my own; and I was very proud of myself that I was so fit that I kept pace with the young men. The street brought us high up on a slope, with a grand view of the city; then we went down a thousand steps.

Nick had a Swedish friend who worked for an NGO and hadn't spoken Swedish for three months, so she was eager to meet us, and we had lunch at Cafe de la Gare, railway station now turned into a miniature shopping mall. Both talked enthusiastically about Madagascar and Tana and other places they had visited. I had a zebu steak, which felt wonderfully exotic, not knowing that it would be staple for the next ten days.

Among many other things, Nick told us about a friend from Peace Corps who went into a small, remote and very poor village, looked around, taught the people to make goat cheese, and the village is now thriving, selling their famous cheese all over the country. I hope it is a true story, because I like it, and it means that the utter poverty we would soon see can be overcome.

It was otherwise unclear, and still is, how the people are who sell things in a market can support themselves. During the whole day we saw no other white people. Selling souvenirs to almost non-existing tourists cannot be profitable. Or can it? This became all the more evident later. The pocket change I paid for the wooden dining set would apparently feed a family for a week.

On the other hand, we saw lots and lots of new expensive cars. They could not all belong to the very few rich people. It is hard to understand a country unless you have been there for a while, preferably with someone knowledgeable, like Nick. His introduction to Tana was the best that could happen to us on that first day, because, as I say, I would probably not have ventured beyond the main street.

By three we felt we have done enough and went back to the hotel, full of expectations. In the evening, we met our guide, Mami, and our travel companions, including Mike whose luggage hadn't turned up; Mark, from Washington DC, whose luggage had been lost and found; Joan, from Los Angeles, whose luggage got irretrievably lost; Lynn and Cathy from Australia, who had just met. All experienced travellers, sharing memories of Galapagos and Arctic, Borneo and Chile. We seemed all to be on the same wavelength.

Madagascar diaries, part 2

Read the beginning of this story here.

Maybe I hadn't done my homework properly after all, or maybe I remembered Staffan's and my trip to Kruger Park and thought it would be the same, only better. Because we were going to sleep in tents in the rainforest and be there for whole ten days. So when the trip turned out to be something completely different from my expectations, was it my own fault? I thought I was going on a wildlife safari. When the trip description said: We will visit a gemstone factory, or We will stop for lunch in the town of This or That, the centre of wood carving, I knew that such visits were compulsory, and tour guides got commissions when tourists bought something. It was perfectly fine with me.

We bought or borrowed everything on the list the travel agent had sent us. We got our malaria pills. I trained hard, had trained hard the whole year. I was anxious that I wouldn't be as fit as other people in the group. I was anxious about the long flight. I wasn't at all anxious about my emotional well-being. Sometime before the trip, Anton expressed concerns about the ethics of travelling in a country of extreme poverty, and I replied, like we used to as we travelled with the children when they were small, that by coming there and spending our money we were hopefully contributing to their economy. It turned out to be more complicated than that.

But I am going ahead of myself again.

The travel agent offered to book flights for us, but the best he could find was a 48-hour flight with 16 hours stopover on Mauritius, and I couldn't bear the thought of it, so I booked myself, London to Paris and non-stop to Antananarivo, which I by that time learned to say without stuttering. It felt too famliar to say Tana, as we soon would do. However, the flight to Paris was at seven in the morning, and after considering many less attractive options, such as a limousin from Cambridge at four, we went for the easiest: booked a hotel at Heathrow, I came from Cambridge in the evening, Anton flew in from Stockholm. Since I am a poor flyer, I wanted an extra day to become human, so there we were, starting our adventure on what I called Day -1 in relation to Day 1 of our tour. 5:45 shuttle to terminal 4, painless check-in, nice coffee and croissant on the short flight to Paris, smooth change of planes, easy flight (reading, listening to music, lunch). Late arrival, which I was anxious about. Some confusion at the passport control because we had read that you could obtain visas on arrival, but it turned out that we didn't need visas at all, which, paradoxically, took longer time than if we had had visas, and the baggage took longer time still, and all the time I was anxious that we wouldn't be picked up and trying not to show it. I had firmly decided to be as brave as possible, not to make Anton regret that he had come with me. Actually, the wait was by no means worse than what I had experienced repeatedly in Russia. (I would make this reflection again and again: not much worse than in Russia).

As we came out, there was a man with a sign for Unique Madagascar, who took our luggage, shooed away boys offering their services, took us to a minivan and started, but suddenly remembered that there was somebody else he was supposed to meet. He parked again and disappeared, and it took a very, very long time, because our fellow traveller, Mike from Manchester, had lost his luggage.

Statistically, it seems, in a group of ten visitors in Madagascar, half lose their luggage and half get diarrhoea. It was very close to this in our group of seven.

Meanwhile, we were counting the hundreds of thousands in local currency that we received in exchange for a hundred euro and deciding how much was appropriate to tip the driver. It was 1:30am before we were at the hotel. In retrospect, it was lucky that we arrived in pitch darkness because the sight of the suburbs might have triggered my depression two days earlier. But at the moment, everything was fine, and we went to sleep.

To be continued.

Madagascar diaries

It has now been over a month since I returned from my unforgettable trip to Madagascar. Unforgettable is an ambiguous word. Most often it is synonymous with wonderful, fabulous, splendid. But if you think what it actually means, it is “hard, or impossible to forget”, and it can have both positive and negative connotations. Something can be unforgettable even though we would like to forget.

Over a month after I came back from my unforgettable, overwhelming, life-changing trip to Madagascar I am probably ready to share my experience. Carefully. Gently.

I kept a diary when I was there, many pages every evening. A lot of what I wrote is too private to share, and I will try to make sense of it, not by omitting anything, but by sorting, structuring, reflecting in retrospect. There will be a selection of pictures from the two thousand that Anton took.

But let me start from the beginning. I may have seen Madagascar the movie or I may just have seen trailers and posters. It didn't leave a lasting impression. One of my fellow travellers shared an anecdote she ascribed to her sister-in-law, whose little daughter, on receiving a globe and studying it for a while, asked: “Mummy, where is Madagascar?” to which the mother replied: “Oh, it's not real, it's just a movie”. So much for education.

All I knew about Madagascar when I was that age came from my stamp collection. Thinking about it now, I wonder how a Malagasy stamp found its way to Soviet Russia and into my stamp album, but I remember the stamp well (featuring, unsurprisingly a lemur, although I didn't know it then), and because I, as appropriate, sorted my stamps into countries and countries into continents, I eventually found out that Madagascar was an island off Africa's east coast. A strange tear-drop in the ocean. Madagascar wasn't on my school curriculum in any subject.

I wouldn't swear that this is my stamp, but something like it. 

Madagascar didn't feature in any of the adventure novels I read as a child, nor in any children's books I read professionally. If there are any, I would like to know. I can imagine that it is a gratifying setting.

In my dreams of exotic countries I wanted to travel to when I was young, Madagascar did not appear at all, and when my dream of Amazonas came true three years ago I thought that I had seen everything I wanted to see.

Then Staffan and I watched David Attenborough.

Let me tell you: Attenborough's nature programmes are a pack of lies. They are compiled of rare moments captured on film in areas far too remote for any mortal to reach. They give you the impression that, contrary to alarming reports about ongoing extinction of species, there are places where “millions of...”, “biggest in the world...”, “largest diversity...” Yes, yes, I know. But, seriously, my own garden has larger diversity of species than I saw in Madagascar. Yet, I am ahead of myself. After I had watched Attenborough's Madagascar programme I decided that there was one more place I wanted to visit before I died, and there was one person I wanted to do it with, Anton. There are many reasons why Anton: because we share interests in strange things, because we have travelled to Australia together, twenty years ago; but mostly for very selfish reasons. I knew that I wouldn't dare to travel alone, I knew that Staffan wouldn't want to go with me, and Anton seemed a natural choice. I wanted it to be a wild safari rather than a luxury trip, and I knew that Anton would find it attractive.

Anyway, I asked Anton whether he would like to come to Madagascar with me and whether Kory, his girlfriend, would mind – or whether she would like to come too (to which Anton informed me that Kory preferred culture to nature).

Very well, when were we both available to go to Madagascar? What was a good time to go to Madagascar? Apart from Attenborough's technicolour paradise, I did not know anything, I repeat: I knew absolutely nothing about Madagascar. But a year is ample time to do your homework. Because a year it would take before we were both free to go and before it was right season; and I searched the web and found the best travel agent for the kind of trip I was looking for, not “Madagascar's beautiful beaches”, but “Unique Madagascar” with ten days on the road, basic accommodation, no more than twelve people per group. People who come on these trips are usually people I can stand.

That's how it started, and there were many small issues during the year, but some time last spring I bought a guidebook, and Anton gave me the book Mammals of Madagascar for my birthday, and I got my medical statement signed by my GP, and we bought insect repellent and head torches.

Let the big adventure begin!

To be continued.

Real literature

As children's literature scholars, we often hear colleagues and friends say: “And when are you going to write about real literature?” To explain that children's literature is real is pointless: the prejudice is too deeply rooted.

This summer I read four real books, all recommended to me, for which I am hugely grateful because I would probably not discovered them on my own: The Luminaries, The Name of the Wind and sequel The Wise Man's Fear, and The Goldfinch. As I was reading, in this order, I kept telling myself, This is the best book I have ever read... or at least the best book I have read in a long, long time... a book that I don't want to end (hopefully, there will we a third volume of The Name of the Wind). Contrary to the current studies, I don't get distracted when I read on screen as opposed to reading a printed book. If anything, I read slower and more concentrated. All the four books are slow reads because they demand attention and memory if you want to follow the plot, although, frankly, plot is the least interesting aspect in them. All the four are beautifully written so that I almost did what I claim I never do: read them outloud for myself.

As I was reading, I couldn't help asking myself why I was enjoying them so much, and my only explanation was – sorry, children's literature friends – that they were real books.

Except for The Luminaries, the books feature, wholly or partially, very young people, children. Then what makes them real books rather than children's books? My colleagues and I have been trying to answer this profound question for the past forty years: what makes a children's book a children's book; in what ways is children's literature different from real literature? (I will go on calling it real literature in this post, although I never do so in my academic studies). We have dismissed the ridiculous claims that children's literature is simple; and we have shown, convincingly I hope, that there are no themes and issues that cannot be treated in children's literature. Just the other day, I had an email from a journalist saying: I have discovered that there are some children's books depicting death, it must be very unusual. I replied, as I always do, that death is the most prominent theme in all children's literature. She didn't get back.

The four real books I read this summer are full of violent deaths, but this is not what makes them real books. They all have happy endings, which some scholars claim is the hallmark of children's books. It is not the young protagonists' budding sexuality (The Wise Man's Fears has some exquisite erotic scenes), because children's, or if you prefer, young adult books are seasoned with sex to saturation. What then? As a scholar, I might say something I argue in my clever academic books: children's literature has a particular narrative voice; it reflects uneven child/adult relationships; it speaks to the cognitive and emotional experience of a young person. Well, maybe the last aspect brings me closer. My real books speak to me as a grown up. But I cannot really explain how, and it is frustrating, because I have been paid for the last forty years to be able to explain.

As a reader, when I contemplate reading real books as opposed to children's books, I feel that the former are slow-paced. Contemporary children's books can be nine hundred pages long, but these nine hundred pages are filled to the brim with action; dialogue is used to propel the plot, characters' reflections are to consider the text step. (This is a crude generalisation, to be avoided in academic work). I want to finish a children's book because I am curious how the author will manage to round it up. That is, with good books, because with bad books, I am not even interested in that. I don't finish bad books these days, unless I must.

But with real books, I want them to go on forever, because real life typically goes on forever (as opposed to childhood that is finite), and I want to get to know the character because their lives tell me something about myself. Children's books can only tell me something about what I once was or wasn't or could have been. But then, children's books are not written for me. I only read them because it is my job.

Mind, I am not saying that children's books are inferior, which people outside the world of children’s literature scholarship might easily infer from my argument. My professional interest is to pin down the difference, the children's-literature-specific aesthetics, its specific social and psychological function. My interest as a reader, common reader, not professional reader, is to understand why reading real literature is on the whole a greater pleasure than reading children's literature. I guess the answer is, because it speaks to me as an adult. It doesn't mean that the four real books I read this summer won't speak to a young reader, but in a different way, as a projected future rather than past conditional.

PS. I do have some strong objections to The Goldfinch. A serious author should have asked a native speaker to check her Russian. I wonder whether the Dutch is all wrong as well.

My cucumber mum

A long time ago, in my pre-previous life, I had a phone call from the Chairman of the Swedish Writers' Union, who was a friend. “We have an invitation from the Soviet Writers' Union to a conference on children's literature”, he said. “They want an author and a scholar. We asked the director of the Swedish Children's Books Institute first, but she couldn't. Would you like to go?” I would, for a number of reasons. I had not yet severed my umbilical cord with Moscow and took every chance to go back. But it was also important for me, a traitor as my former country viewed me, to be invited formally by a respectable organisation, as a guest of honour. “If so”, said the Chairman, “which author would you like to bring along?” “Gunnel Linde”, I said without hesitation.

I had read Gunnel Linde's books in Moscow, and when I came to Sweden I read everything by her. She was one of those great Swedish authors of the 1960s, the pioneers of the everyday, but imaginative, slightly mystical children's narratives. She was never as famous as Maria Gripe, and she never really got known internationally, even though some of her books are translated, and if you want to read one, read The White Stone.

I had met her at the Children's Book Institute annual parties, but I hadn't known her well, I just knew that she would be interested to go to Russia. And so we went. An truly unforgettable trip. Then we went again, when Gunnel invited me as her interpreter and guide on behalf of her organisation BRIS, “Children's Rights in Society”. She wanted to learn something from Russia that might be valuable for her work in Sweden. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child had recently been declared, and Gunnel wanted to know how it was implemented in the country of the Communist paradise. As it turned out – and as I could have told her, but hadn't – nobody in the Soviet Union had seen the Convention. The people we met asked us to tell them as much as possible about it. The people we met were of the kind I had never met before. Directors of juvenile prisons, detention centres and orphanages. It was a degree of misery even I could not have imagined. Gunnel was in chock. In the evenings she and I and another person from BRIS would sit down with a tape recorder on and talk about what we had seen. We brought back pictures, stories and memories. That alone would have been enough to bond us forever. (This trip resulted in my charity work for Russian orphans and juvenile delinquents, but this is another story).

Gunnel had a peculiar endearment – I don't know whether she used it for other people, but she called me “My little cucumber”. Therefore I started calling her “My cucumber mum”. She had three daughers, so she wasn't desperate to have another one, but it just so happened. I was desperate to have a mum. We met often; sometimes she would come to my place for lunch, but more commonly I went to hers, and we would have long mother-daugher talks about everything in the world. At one point she said: “No one single person can give you everything you need. We choose someone who can give us most of what we need. The rest, we have to compensate with other people”. This was liberating, because I had always had high demands on people, with subsequent disappointments. Gunnel made it right.

One summer I was privileged to share her very special Ladies' Summer Club, a week at her country house with a couple of other writers and publishers whom I also knew. The main activity was reading aloud: your own work or anything, for instance, your favourite poetry. Emily Dickinson was highly ranked.

Gunnel wrote a wonderful poem for my fiftieth birthday and read it at dinner for my sixty guests. 

When I learned about her death this morning, I immediately felt a pang of bad conscience. Why didn't I visit her even once during my trips to Sweden these six years? I know that she had already drifted into lands beyond and would probably not have recognised me. No excuse. My cucumber mum is gone. May earth be as light as eiderdown over her. 

Undergraduate memories, part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The old Soviet Union was a country where everything was prohibited and anything was possible. There was always a way to circumvent the rules. In my case, I had a fake employment as a private secretary. Certain categories of Soviet citizens who were more equal than other citizens, for instance, members of the Writers' Union, were allowed to employ secretaries, and this is how I could switch over to evening classes, produce an employment certificate every term and do as I pleased. Actually, I wouldn't have minded at all to work as a secretary and earn some money, but it wasn't part of the deal.

My remaining four undergraduate years were dire. Looking back, I cannot remember one single inspiring instructor or a subject I was interested in. Pedagogy, Psychology, Theoretical Phonetics came and went. Honestly, I have no idea what they were about. The only valuable knowledge I ever got from my formal education was General Linguistics, and my professor remains the only bright spot in my memory. (Many years later I met her in Washington D.C. at a get-together of Fulbright scholars. She remembered me and my phonemic distinctions).

So what did I do with my time? I didn't sleep until noon, and I wasn't a partying type. I got up in the morning and studied until it was time to go to bed. I studied Swedish, and later also Norwegian, Danish and Dutch. I read everything I could get hold of: novels, magazines, cookbooks. I went to the Foreign Literature Library and read books on history, geography, culture and art. I had a huge box of index cards on which I wrote down authors' names and book titles, historical events with dates, facts and fictions. I had notebooks in which I wrote lists with English, Swedish and German names of animals, birds, insects, plants, body parts, metals, gases, tools, utensils, textiles – my homemade encyclopedias. It was in the Stone Age, before the internet. But it was also behind the Iron curtain, with no access to dictionaries, encyclopedias or any other sources of information. I had to do with what was available. There was enough for a lifetime.

I must have been lonely, but I have no memories of being lonely or unhappy. My former fellow students had classes in daytime, and my new fellow students worked. I didn't have many people to talk to. When I reflect on it now, it must have been weird. I was like a solitary mediaeval scholar, surrounded by books, scribbling down notes.

There was a brief and intensive period of flanerie when I, together with two bohemian friends, spent days upon days walking around in the city, going to museums and amusement parks, taking a river boat or a night-time bus, talking, smoking, playing cards, reciting poetry. There were very few coffee shops in Moscow, but these few we frequented. It was a happy time.

Sometimes I made plans to go to Leningrad where the University had a strong Scandinavian department. I even thought about going to Tartu in Estonia and study semiotics with Yuri Lotman. But these were sandcastles, for I felt comfortable with my life and didn't think beyond graduation.

Very soon I started writing book reviews and small articles for money, and eventually I started translating. Nobody ever asked me for any certificate or diploma, and nobody questioned my knowledge and skills.

At the time, I did not reflect on whether I regretted my wrong choices. Today, forty years later, I do. I should have chosen an education with challenges, inspiring teachers, enthusiastic fellow students, intellectual climate. On the other hand, I turned out quite well after all; there is nothing wrong with my erudition, and although my professional career has been bumpy and thorny, I cannot complain about the outcome.

Undergraduate memories, part 2

Read the beginning of the story of wrong choices.

I knew from the first day that I had made a wrong choice, that it was wrong education for me. I was passionate about general linguistics, and everything that I learned from that course has been useful throughout my career. I loved Latin that most of my fellow students hated. I liked American History and Society. History of the Communist Party and Scientific Atheism were inescapable, I would have had it anywhere. I quite enjoyed military training: we were trained to be military interpreters and would exit with a lieutenant grade in addition to BA, but in the first year it was general military education. I liked the rigorous learning it implied, and I even liked assembling Kalashnikovs (we were taken to a shooting range just once) and playing with portable radios. I liked map-drawing.

But my major subject was a disapppoinment. I had attended an elite school with focus on English, and in the last year we used textbooks for second-year university courses. I had read scores of English novels. I could make long conversations and recite poetry. Here, we were subjected to “correction” and “remediation” as if we were beginners, and indeed, the level of many of my fellow students was appallingly low. We were sent to the language lab to listen to and repeat long and short vowels. We were not allowed to talk, and we had to read To Kill a Mockingbird in an abridged version. We were told to forget everything we had learned in school. We were failed in tests so that we would know our place.

I joined a student drama club and a “young scholars' society” where I could do more general linguistics, and I even gave a paper at a student conference on the totally fascinating subject of phonemic distinctions in English and German. I was obsessed by phonemic distinctions. I also started taking private lessons of Swedish. After her first chock over my defiance settled, my mother told me that an English degree wouldn't take me anywhere; everybody had an English degree; if I insisted on doing modern languages rather than solid philology I could at least take a more exotic language. At the Institute, we would study another language, but not until the third year, and if it was on the same level as English, it wouldn't be much to long for. So my mother decided that a Scandinavian language was reasonably exotic, and it so happened that the first private tutor she found offered Swedish. It could have been Norwegian, Danish or Icelandic, and who knows where that would have taken me.

In the Institute, we had language classes in groups of ten, and my group was rebellious because we found language labs and abridged Mockingbirds ridicuous and said so. Halfway though the year, our group was dismantled, and we were dispatched to different groups. Based on my previous performance, I ended up in the strongest group of my year, with slightly more challenges and really good teachers. But by the end of the second term, my mother came up with a new idea. I had by then admitted that I wasn't getting an education, merely a degree which I needed to get a job; I was educating myself as much as I could by reading, but my classes, three double-hours six days a week, took far too much time from my precious autodidactic activity, my mother said. I should switch to the evening programme. It would be just three evenings a week, with my days fully dedicated to serious studies. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his education?

The problem was that you could only enroll in the evening programme if you were employed at least part-time, and that seemed counter-productive to the idea of home-schooling. But of course my mother had something else in mind.

To be continued.