Category Archives: Arnold Kopecky

Author protests Haiti’s latest labels

The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake
By Dany Laferriere (pictured left)
Translated by David Homel
Arsenal Pulp Press, 183 pages

Reviewed by Arno Kopecky

“The minute” began at 4:53 in the afternoon of January 12, 2010, just as Dany Laferriere was biting into a piece of bread. The Haitian-born, Montreal-dwelling author of How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (and 19 other novels) happened to be in one of the few concrete buildings in Port-au-Prince that didn’t implode—the Hotel Karibe—when the 7.3 magnitude quake struck. Some 300,000 others didn’t have the same luck.

“Very rare were those who got a good start,” he writes, recalling his own belated rush to the roofless safety of the hotel’s courtyard. “Even the quickest wasted three or four precious seconds before they understood what was happening.”

We all know what came next, and yet Laferriere’s account of the subsequent hours, days and weeks is anything but predictable. This is thanks largely to the astonishing lyricism of his writing.  The World Is Moving Around Me reads more like an extended prose poem than a memoir, broken into titled sections that range in length from a single paragraph to three pages. One of them, The Revolution, reads as follows:

“The radio announced that the Presidential Palace has been destroyed. The taxation and pension office, destroyed. The courthouse, destroyed. Stores, crumbled. The communication network, destroyed. Prisoners on the streets. For one night, the revolution had come.”

And yet, the mass looting that the international press half-hoped would ensue, never did. Order prevailed. The instincts of the collective trumped those of the individual, yielding miracles great and small. The day after the minute, Laferriere walked past a mango lady sitting in front of her small pile of fruit, calling out her sales pitch just like any other day. “These people are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope to hell,” he concludes.

Laferriere started his career as a journalist, fleeing Haiti in 1978 after a colleague with whom he’d been working on a story was murdered by the regime. His reportage merges seamlessly with a novelist’s grasp of the zeitgeist. But the thing that impressed me most about this book was the way he captured the disaster-sensation of being dazed and hyper-lucid all at once. A dream-like quality pervades his prose that no camera could capture, suspending the reader between tears and laughter. We hear, for instance, about the woman who sat outside the building her family was buried alive in. She talked to them through the night. “First her husband stopped responding. Then one of their three three children. Later, another . . . More than a dozen hours later, people were finally able to rescue the baby, who had been crying the whole time. When he got out, he broke into a wide smile.”

Laferriere has done the work of sorting through the rubble for us, piling up impressions until some sort of sense emerges from the senselessness. In the process, he duplicates the city’s “stunned air of a child whose toy has just been accidentally stepped on by an adult.”

In documenting this tragedy and his country’s response to it, Laferriere vehemently protests the latest label heaped on Haiti: “All some commentator has to do is say the word “curse” on the airwaves and spreads like cancer,” he laments. “Before they can move on to voodoo, wild men, cannibalism and a nation of blood-drinkers, they’ll see that I have enough energy to fight them.”

Arno Kopecky’s next book, The Oil Man and the Sea, is in its final stages.

Rushdie memoir casts a spell

Joseph Anton
By Salman Rushdie
Random House
636 pages, $30

Reviewed by Arnold Kopecky

“Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.” If you could boil Salman Rushdie’s quarter-million-word memoir down to a single phrase, that would probably be it – though it wasn’t him who said so, nor was it Joseph [Conrad] Anton [Chekhov], the name Rushdie assumed for the last decade of the 20th century. No, it was the German writer Heinrich Heine, writing a century earlier, his words borne out first by the Nazis and later recalled by Rushdie in light of his own experience.
In 1989, soon after the Ayatollah issued the fatwa and the government of Iran started sending assassin squads to England, Rushdie/Anton watches a mob burning The Satanic Verses on television and shouting for the author’s death. This is happening not in Iran, but in Bradford, England; twelve years later, the same mob’s mentality is now incinerating 3,000 thousand people in the twin towers. Rushdie’s private hell has become the world’s war on terror.
Perhaps it helped that I had two weeks in the Mexican sun with nothing better to do than absorb over 600 pages of prose, but Joseph Anton cast a spell on me. I suffered just the slightest bit of detail-burnout near the end. Rushdie kept an immaculate record of every conversation, thought, emotion and social transgression (both his own and those of his friends and acquaintances) throughout the fatwa years, knowing that one day, if he lived, it would be him who wrote them down. The writing is less drunken, more crisp – more accessible, as he would probably hate to hear – than in his fiction; in both substance and style, I’m reminded of G.G. Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping, the riveting account of ten prominent Colombians held hostage for a year by Pablo Escobar.
For a while, Rushdie says, he thought he would turn his fugitive years into a novel, as he’s done with every other aspect of his life. Saleem Sinai’s Methwold Estates in Midnight’s Children, we learn, is a precise replica of Rushdie’s childhood home; the opening scene of The Satanic Verses was inspired by the Air India flight that Qaddafi blew up, with one of Rushdie’s relatives aboard. But when it came to writing about the fatwa years, he eventually concluded that “the only reason his story was interesting was that it had actually happened.”
Interesting, too, that a writer whose best fiction was written in the first person should choose to cast his memoir in the third. Perhaps it has something to do with the surreality of those fatwa years. These were years consumed equally by trying to gain entry into “the halls of power” in order to convince the world’s governments to help him, and by trying to remain a writer of fiction. Throughout it all, Rushdie endured astonishing displays of antipathy from the British public, compounded by the petty squalor of shuffling from one house to another at the behest of an oft-grumbling Scotland Yard. One moment he’s having tea with the Prime Minister of England, the next he’s hiding behind a kitchen sink so that the plumber won’t recognize him.
The memoir reads like a bookish Jason Bourne movie, with a cameo from every writer you ever heard of – good guys and gals include Eco, Fuentes, Sontag, Mailer, Grass, Marquez; John le Carre and Roald Dahl come off as surprisingly bad. The cast expands beyond the world of letters to embrace the likes of Bono, Gorbachev, and Bill Clinton, who – predictably but hilariously – is ever the slut.
Some readers may feel Rushdie’s record of these remarkable years veers into A-list gossip, occasionally even revenge (think twice, reader, before divorcing a famous writer); but a hundred years from now, when everyone in the narrative is dead, what will remain is an intimate portrait of the absurd ends to which religious fanaticism can take not just a life, but humanity.

Arno Kopecky is a travel writer and journalist whose stories have appeared in The Walrus, Foreign Policy, Reader’s Digest and the Globe and Mail. His first book, The Devil’s Curve, is a literary travelogue about his journeys through South America.