What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A great novel from Africa,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

No prorogation for me. I guess one of the differences between art and politics is that politics can stop, at least for a while, but art, the living of it, never does.

The book I have for you this week is Things Fall Apart, by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. In case you don’t know much about him: he was born in 1930 in Eastern Nigeria, among the people known then as the Ibo, now the Igbo. He was brought up speaking Ibo and English and chose to write in English. Things Fall Apart was his first novel, coming out in 1958. Its success was immediate, and endures. The cover of the edition I’m sending you, which dates from 1986, states that the novel has sold two million copies. Well, that fact is long out of date: it has now sold over eight million copies. It is the first English-language classic to come out of Africa, and is read in schools and universities around the world. As it should be. Things Fall Apart is an absolutely superb novel. It seems simple enough, resting on short, descriptive scenes. But the overall picture it draws is breathtakingly vast and complex, nothing short of a snapshot of the encounter between African and British societies in the late 19th century and the ensuing wreckage of colonialism. This comment perhaps makes it sound as if Things Fall Apart were an overtly political novel, with the author’s grinding ax screeching in the reader’s ears. Such is not the case. Rather, Things Fall Apart, certainly in its first two-thirds, reads more like a work of anthropology. Achebe describes the way of life of the villagers of Umuofia, their religious beliefs and practices, their agricultural economy, their social interactions, and so on. Okonkwo is the protagonist of the story. The reader follows him through the seasons of his life, hearing about the events big and small that mark his life and make him who he is. Okonkwo is a proud man, generally fair in his dealings with his family and neighbours, and a successful farmer and, when need be, a fierce warrior. He is far from perfect, just as his society is far from ideal, but both muddle along, he shaped by it and it affected by him.

And then the white man comes, in the form of missionaries. They are not intrinsically bad, these newcomers. In fact, Mr. Brown, the first missionary, is a rather sympathetic character. He is a zealous Christian, for sure, but not a blind one. He wants to convert the African heathens among whom he lives, but he is not insensitive to their feelings. He makes genuine attempts at dialogue. Alas, Mr. Smith, his successor, is not so open-minded. As for the District Commissioner, who is there to provide the colonial administrative muscle behind the religious preaching, he is even less so. Incomprehension, the white man’s of the African man and the African man’s of the white man, wins the day—and things fall apart.

The marvel of the novel lies in its even-handedness. It is not that the African way of life is Edenesque until the arrival of the white man. Not at all, and the novel makes that clear. Some of the religious practices of the Africans are barbaric, such as their treatment of newborn twins, who are thought to be evil and are abandoned in the forest to die of exposure. Achebe makes plain the travails of life in Umuofia. And yet the villagers manage. Life may be harsh at times, but they know who they are and where they belong. They are a people and a civilization. Not very different, really, from the people and civilization of the white man. That is the point so deftly made by the novel, that the encounter between Africans and Europeans went so poorly not because one was inferior to the other, but because they failed to understand each other and, as a direct result, to respect each other. The villagers are patriarchal,  for example. Take Okonkwo and his three wives. An outrage. But were the Victorians any less patriarchal? The religion of the Umuofians is so much voodoo mumbo-jumbo—but is it really any different from the voodoo mumbo-jumbo of the white man? The villagers expect evil to befall the missionaries for flaunting the native gods, just as the missionaries expect evil to befall the villagers if they continue to flaunt the new God. And so on. The Umuofians are shown in their bigness and smallness, just as the white man is shown in his bigness and smallness. Why couldn’t they properly meet and gently, slowly syncretize? It wasn’t to be. Hence the heart-wrenching tragedy at the heart of the novel: things didn’t have to fall apart. Given better emissaries, given greater efforts to reach out, perhaps Africa wouldn’t have been so wrecked and Europe so tainted.

I have rarely read a novel that so portrays a foreign reality with such an acute mix of perception, understanding, and outrage. Things Fall Apart is a brilliant novel, Mr. Harper. I heartily recommend it to you.

I should mention that I am writing this letter in unusual circumstances. Normally I write to you in the quiet of my office at home. Not tonight. Tonight I’m sitting in the middle of the Mendel Art Gallery here in Saskatoon, on a raised platform, writing my lettter in public. I’m participating in a multi-disciplinary carnival-like event called Lugo, which is bringing together dancers, musicians, actors and others in a celebration of the arts. I’m also soliciting book suggestions. I better start writing them down before the pile falls off my desk. So here goes, as they are given to me by the crowd surrounding me, suggestions of books for your consideration from Canadian readers:

Billions and Billions, by Carl Sagan
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
Killing Hope, by William Blum
because i am a woman, by June Jordan
The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence
Stella, Queen of the Snow, by Marie-Louise Guay (with this said of it by the person who made the recommendation: “It will answer many of life’s pressing questions, and bring a smile to your face.”)
Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan
The Red Tent, by Arita Ament
Expect Resistance, by crimethinc.org
Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce, by Joseph Boyden
The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela (I usually send you short books—which this one is not—but I highly recommend Mandela’s autobiography when you have more free time. Now, come to think of it, parliament not sitting and all that.)
The Holy Longing, by Fr. Ron Rolheiser
Staying Alive, a poetry anthology edited by Neil Astley
Your Whole Family is Made of Meat, by Ryan North (love the title)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock
Money for Nothing, by PG Wodehouse
Che, author not given (I wonder if the person meant the movie by Steven Soderbergh?)
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho 
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee (a great recommendation—I’ve already sent you a Coetzee, if you remember, Waiting for the Barbarians.)
Lion in the Streets, a play by Judith Thompson
The poetry of Emily Dickinson (which makes me think that I haven’t sent you poetry in ages.)
Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangaremba (I just looked it up on the internet—sounds really neat. Set in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 70s, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story.)
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
Born to be Good, by Dacher Kelther
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
The Exorcist, by Peter Blatty
All the Names, by José Saramago
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell
Les Belles Sœurs, by Michel Tremblay
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
The Alphabet of Manliness, by Maddox
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff (the person who suggested it added, “This excellent book will teach him [that is, you] openness and how to value all people in our community and land. Be more like Pooh, less like Rabbit and Pigglet!”)
By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño (more on him later, in another letter. I’m thinking of sending you Amulet.)
Half of a Yellow Sun, by C. N. Adiche (another African novel)
Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
Voltaire’s Bastards, by John Ralston Saul
The God of Small Things and Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, by Arundhati Roy
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (”about the heartbreaking lengths it is sometimes necessary to go to in order to address the rule of tyrants.”)
Overqualified, by Joey Comeau
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
The Maintains, poetry by Clark Coolidge
War and Peace, by Tolstoy (about as long a novel as they get, and I’ve already sent you two Tolstoys, but you should get to W & P before you die.)
A Street Without a Name, author not given
Foxfire, by Joyce Carol Oates (”The book I re-read when I want to remember why I write.”)
Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, poetry by Daniel Tysdal
Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway
Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq
Dream Boy, by Jim Grimsley
L’Avalée des avalés, by Réjean Ducharme
One Native Life, by Richard Wagamese
Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon, by Nicole Brossard
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, by Mem Fox
Mid-Course Correction, by Ray C. Anderson
The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis
The Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada, by Allan Casey
The Mirror Has Two Faces, by C. S. Lewis (I find no book of that name by Lewis, only a 1996 American movie by and with Barbra Streisand, a remake of a 1958 French movie of the same name. I wonder what book the reader had in mind.)
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse
Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh
The Art of Japanese Bondage, author unknown (!)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Truth, by Terry Pratchett
A Woman in Berlin, anonymous
The Crackwalker, by Judith Thompson (which is playing here in Saskatoon from March 4-7 and 11-14—you are hereby invited.)
Pinnochio, by Carlo Collodi
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger

That’s quite the reading list. And a reading list as it should be: multinational and of all genres, and fresh from the minds of the people of Saskatoon.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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