Round-Up 10

Dorothy Koomson’s The Ice Cream Girls

The paperback edition of The Ice Cream Girls has arrived on the bestsellers list at no. 2 after just one week on the list. Straight from no.14 to no.2, that is absolutely amazing. Congratulations to Dorothy.  I wrote about the 6,000 hardback copies sold in two weeks back in March – The Ice Cream Girls. So here we are five months later talking about sales of 47,560.  I have not seen any reviews so far. Have you got a copy? WH Smith just had it on offer at half price (£3.49) and Amazon has it on offer too at £2.80. That’s not bad price for a bit of guilty pleasure!

Where is the new edition of Granta?

The summer edition of Granta (111) was launched last month and I have tried to buy it a couple of times in the past week or so, from my local independent bookshop and the Waterstone’s branch close to work. Neither has it. And if I order it will take up to 5 days or more to arrive – isn’t that odd? Definitely worth tracking it down though, it has pieces in it by Leila Aboulela (the Sudanese winner of the first Caine Prize in 2000) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Observer mentioned the two authors in passing, in a sharp but in the end positive piece about why a contemporary literary magazine has led on an article from long dead Mark Twain.  (My answer would be it is all about good writing!) Read a short free online article from the Granta website by Leila Aboulela: here

Kei Miller

Listen to this insightful interview with the prolific Jamaican poet and novelist Kei Miller (from the BBC World Service’s programme The Strand. Listen again) It is about his new novel The Last Warner Woman, which is set in Jamaica and explores the issue of prophesying and what happens when the lead character, Adimane Bustamante, who has the innate skill of being able to ‘warn’ people of things yet to happen is misunderstood and considered strange and is sectioned when she moves to the UK.  I love the bit in the interview where Kei talks about the people who have influenced his writing and along with WS Merwin and Ted Hughes includes his grandmother and Sister Sybil from his church. I also like the idea that he thinks it is important to leave ‘space’ for the reader to make up their own lines of thoughts and stories in the bits of the story that he chooses not to tell. This book definitely sounds like it’s one that will cause hot debate.

As an aside, for those of us with a Kittian heritage – we know that Warner was a 17^th century privateer [pirate might be a better word] who played a part in claiming St Kitts for the English, his legacy is a rather crumbled looking gravestone at Old Road on the island and the fact that many people on the island are still carry the last name Warner – you know what I am saying! Google it if you don’t believe me.

A Light of Song of Light Kei’s new book of poetry was reviewed a few weeks ago now on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review: Listen again The poetry book is in two parts – night and day and through the language of light and song he explores life here in the UK and tells stories of the history of Jamaica – listen to Kei reading from one of his poems – Some Definitions of Light   Of course they did not have this in my local Waterstone’s branch either, but I ordered it direct from the publishers, Carcanet, and it was here within  a couple of days with no postage or packing costs for delivery in the UK.

Film: White Material, Claire Denis and Marie NDiaye

Claire Denis is considered one of the leading French directors of her generation. She is not afraid of dealing with the most challenging of subjects – sex, race, incest, murder, often all in the same film, while using the less accessible forms of film language. Many of her films are set in Africa where she grew up in what are now the countries of Cameroon, Burkina Faso and jDjiboutii. After a period in France, her later teenage years were spent in Senegal. Her early films Chocolat, No Fear, No Die and I Can’t Sleep look at the post-colonial experience. [It was reviewed on Saturday Review in the same programme as Kei Miller above – White Material review.]

For her current film, White Material, Denis shares a writing credit with the writer Marie NDiaye, the 2009 winner of the prestigious literature Prix Goncourt. She is the first black woman to win it.  NDiaye, is half French and Senegalese, she grew up in France and did not meet her African father until she was 15.  Rumour has it that the working relationship between the two women did not begin well. With Denis giving, in a few sentences insight to the differences between life as an writer/author and that of a screenwriter/film maker “But there were circumstances at the beginning of our relationship that we had to sort out Marie is a writer and she is used to spending a lot of time on her own, but I always work with people and when I do that I have to spend time with them – a lot of time walking, swimming, eating, talking, living with them. I know that Marie found this difficult at first. She was used to working and thinking without a partner. But we travelled together to Africa and that’s when the work came together. I had an African childhood, which Marie did not have, and we discussed that, and what it meant to be white in Africa, and it was from that contradiction that we began to put together White Material.”

White Material is set in an African nation that is not named, just after a civil war has begun. There are drugged-up child soldiers running checkpoints, with no one really sure what is going to happen next. Everyone is afraid and villagers and farm workers are leaving for safer places. At the centre of the film is Marie, a white coffee plantation owner trying to bring in her crop. She’s the only one in her family, of duplicitous husband, invalid father-in-law and her lazy indulged teenage son, who actually does any work. She loves her land and feels that she totally belongs. It is clear that her time, the white colonial time, is up, but she is not ready to face it. She is in fact part of the problem. Having left it too late to realise that she could have looked after her workers better and played a different role in the life of the nation. It’s a fraught, complex and anxious film, and even though much of the horror has already taken place when the film begins, or actually takes place off camera, it is tense. Marie hides The Boxer, the leader of the child soldiers, in her barn. I wasn’t sure if ‘Boxer’ is a reference to the workhorse in Animal Farm. But as with that character in the George Orwell allegory, the real power is elsewhere; with this Boxer doing the work of getting the children to get a taste for killing, when they are looking for better leadership and guidance, and have the potential to be part of new and different world.

It’s a fascinating story, still playing out throughout Africa. I hope that Denis and NDiaye work together again. If you prefer not to see a conflict film I recommend Denis’ Vendredi Soir or 

35 Shots of Rum as a good way into her work.