Literature for Luddites
The Tiller of Waters
By
Hoda Barakat
Translated by Marilyn Booth
For purchase information click on image. |
Back in the spring of 2019, when we were putting our moniker, The Wall, to bed, I loosed a rant on the subject of "Ludditism" which, we are inevitably and summarily informed, was the destruction of mechanized looms by 19th century rebellious English textile workers, as they felt these machines were taking away their jobs (they were). On a visit to Northampton, UK, where the Luddite Rebellion began, I discovered that what that definition leaves out is not just the Luddites' objection to the threat to their livelihood, but the fact that these same machines produced embarrassingly poor quality goods. Thus, my notion of "Literature for Luddites": not as an objection to mainstream writing robbing lesser known writers of their livelihood (let's face it, we certainly don't do it for the money!), but a holding out for literature that tops the quality of so much that now infests the mainstream. |
There is a connection between the craft and our craft, they say—between weaving and the artistry of the word:
|
In the language of the Dogon, the word sawah meant 'fabric and also 'speech,' and at the same time it signified the embodied deed...a naked woman, for example, was called a 'mute' woman. In Arabic, look at the consonance of letters in haki, the telling of a tale, and hikaya, weaving!
The weaver is the one who 'makes' speech, and a person 'wears' his words. And after the weaver listens to his grandfather, the third nomo, who breathes from his pharynx the sacred word and pulls and ties the threads of life together, he transmits these to other men by his weaving and the secret calculations that underlie it.... (Tiller of Waters, 128.)* |
. I most recently received a book, That book. It took seven months and 10 days to arrive in my mailbox, two towns down from my mountain hideaway. At first I was stymied and struggled to remember: why did I order it? Where was the review that intrigued me? But, then, I began to read. As a person who has enjoyed the work of Naguib Mahfouz, I was intrigued by the fact that The Tiller of Waters, by Hoda Barakat, won the Naguib Mafouz Medal for Literature.**
.copyright information, I also noted that the Arabic original was published in 1998; the English translation, in 2001. The article that prompted my order —I believe it was in The Guardian—no, it was of another of her books, but I kept looking for an available book of hers to read and la, voila! Tiller, Nonetheless, I did note that mention of her book(s) has come late—later than even the translations into English. At the same time, I was reminded of a recent interview on the BBC of Elif Shafak, the "British-Turkish" writer. Shafak spoke of the privileged, those who assume that not only are their voices being heard but that theirs are virtually the only voices that exist, versus so many others who are rendered voiceless in their own or other parts of the world. All of this underscores the ponderous, if not circumlocutous, path that the best of writing may all too often take to reach readers, as opposed to the hyped and PR'd, less worthy work elbowing its way into our wallets, first, and then colonizing our consciousnesses. (In Tiller, 'Diolen', a polyethylene fabric/yarn, is the crass, dare we say, nouveau riche? pretender to ultimately refined silk.)
Curiously, why is such quality—of speech, of creation—so underappreciated?
Only a few pages further into Tiller of Waters, and I realized that the book was both quite immersive and also well worth the read. Above all the book offers a genuinely created world, set in Beirut during its Civil War, albeit with some basis in the author's experience (she is Lebanese though now living in Paris). In Tiller we have a story about Niqula Mutti, a man wandering in the wreckage of Beirut after/during the devastation of its civil war, hallucinating. He is a man born to two idiosyncratic parents: the Egyptian mother is an unfulfilled opera singer, and the Lebanese father, a seller of fine fabrics. Narrative merges with Mutti's ruminations: suddenly we find ourselves being informed about linen—yes, cloth, almost the first woven fabric to be developed by human beings—and the rumination is both idiosyncratically informative and downright fascinating. Further on, ruminations span not only the science of textiles, but also Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian cultures, myth (including those of the Dogon in Mali), history(the Byzantines, for example), and more. All the while, the protagonist shores up his bombed out family textile stop as a shelter (or illusion of shelter).
On the surface, we are never quite clear when we are wandering in the world of Mutti's illusions or the devastation of 'real' events that he is struggling to cope with. But the weaving of language is in itself a reason to read this book—and a testament to the skill of the translator that, in translation, we are still carried along by the words. In his—infatuation? enchantment? obsession?— passion for Shamsa, the woman who has somewhat inexplicably come to the house as a servant and, in the chaos which follows, appears and reappears in Mutti's dreams/wanderings, Mutti tries to instruct her in silk, the ultimate in woven fabric, and I am again reminded of the Luddites:
.copyright information, I also noted that the Arabic original was published in 1998; the English translation, in 2001. The article that prompted my order —I believe it was in The Guardian—no, it was of another of her books, but I kept looking for an available book of hers to read and la, voila! Tiller, Nonetheless, I did note that mention of her book(s) has come late—later than even the translations into English. At the same time, I was reminded of a recent interview on the BBC of Elif Shafak, the "British-Turkish" writer. Shafak spoke of the privileged, those who assume that not only are their voices being heard but that theirs are virtually the only voices that exist, versus so many others who are rendered voiceless in their own or other parts of the world. All of this underscores the ponderous, if not circumlocutous, path that the best of writing may all too often take to reach readers, as opposed to the hyped and PR'd, less worthy work elbowing its way into our wallets, first, and then colonizing our consciousnesses. (In Tiller, 'Diolen', a polyethylene fabric/yarn, is the crass, dare we say, nouveau riche? pretender to ultimately refined silk.)
Curiously, why is such quality—of speech, of creation—so underappreciated?
Only a few pages further into Tiller of Waters, and I realized that the book was both quite immersive and also well worth the read. Above all the book offers a genuinely created world, set in Beirut during its Civil War, albeit with some basis in the author's experience (she is Lebanese though now living in Paris). In Tiller we have a story about Niqula Mutti, a man wandering in the wreckage of Beirut after/during the devastation of its civil war, hallucinating. He is a man born to two idiosyncratic parents: the Egyptian mother is an unfulfilled opera singer, and the Lebanese father, a seller of fine fabrics. Narrative merges with Mutti's ruminations: suddenly we find ourselves being informed about linen—yes, cloth, almost the first woven fabric to be developed by human beings—and the rumination is both idiosyncratically informative and downright fascinating. Further on, ruminations span not only the science of textiles, but also Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian cultures, myth (including those of the Dogon in Mali), history(the Byzantines, for example), and more. All the while, the protagonist shores up his bombed out family textile stop as a shelter (or illusion of shelter).
On the surface, we are never quite clear when we are wandering in the world of Mutti's illusions or the devastation of 'real' events that he is struggling to cope with. But the weaving of language is in itself a reason to read this book—and a testament to the skill of the translator that, in translation, we are still carried along by the words. In his—infatuation? enchantment? obsession?— passion for Shamsa, the woman who has somewhat inexplicably come to the house as a servant and, in the chaos which follows, appears and reappears in Mutti's dreams/wanderings, Mutti tries to instruct her in silk, the ultimate in woven fabric, and I am again reminded of the Luddites:
|
The great sufi Jalal al-Din al -Rumi says that in the rhythm of working with cloth lies that which organizes the universe. Were we to understand the great secret it enfolds, the very foundations of the cosmos would crack and all existence would sink into fatal chaos.
|
The leap from handmade to mechanization, from attentive creation to "production" on, quite literally, an industrial scale, ruined many lives in the time of those 19th century rebels; and I am not even going to speculate on all the ways that our attention to imagination and its transmission through the music of language has been degraded and become chaotic. You, dear Reader, have, I am sure, your own ideas on the subject. In Tiller, the protagonist has his imagination transformed/violated by war, by the very chaos that a more orderly universe, not necessarily revealed to him, would avert.
In brief, the unfolding of this odd protagonist's story tells us more about the human condition than anything said by formulaic mainstream contemporary novels. Put a human being in genuinely difficult circumstances and how do they behave? In particular, what do the struggles of survivors have to tell us? In a situation that overwhelms? I don't mean to suggest that something which some might classify as a morality tale is needed and is, ergo, there to serve us, as mainstream novels are there to "entertain" us. No, I maintain that a novel which is worth reading should put us somewhere where we, the readers, have to think on our feet without the comfort of drugstore psychology or the bland wannabe aesthetics of capitalism's minions. Rather, one might well ask, how do we fortify ourselves in a world that is shattered? Even more so, in a world which has done so much to rob us of the tools of myth, imagination, and artistry of the word? Our world, we know, is not doing well—no matter how studiously we try to ignore that fact—but do we have the imagination to grapple our way out of the hole we have dug for ourselves?
In brief, the unfolding of this odd protagonist's story tells us more about the human condition than anything said by formulaic mainstream contemporary novels. Put a human being in genuinely difficult circumstances and how do they behave? In particular, what do the struggles of survivors have to tell us? In a situation that overwhelms? I don't mean to suggest that something which some might classify as a morality tale is needed and is, ergo, there to serve us, as mainstream novels are there to "entertain" us. No, I maintain that a novel which is worth reading should put us somewhere where we, the readers, have to think on our feet without the comfort of drugstore psychology or the bland wannabe aesthetics of capitalism's minions. Rather, one might well ask, how do we fortify ourselves in a world that is shattered? Even more so, in a world which has done so much to rob us of the tools of myth, imagination, and artistry of the word? Our world, we know, is not doing well—no matter how studiously we try to ignore that fact—but do we have the imagination to grapple our way out of the hole we have dug for ourselves?
— Bronwyn Mills
NOTA BENE: Amongst the several epigrams which introduce the book is one I consider most apropos, perhaps even more so, given that the book is not always readily found:
In a desolate region of Persia a stone tower was built, of modest
height, without a door or a window. In its singular chamber, round and
paved with flagstones, were a wooden table and a chair. In this round
room, a man who resembled me was hunched over the long poem that
he was composing in letters I did not understand, about a man living in
another circular chamber writing a poem about a man in another
circular chamber...
There is no end to this path, and no one will ever come to read
what the prisoners write.
— Jorge Luis Borges
height, without a door or a window. In its singular chamber, round and
paved with flagstones, were a wooden table and a chair. In this round
room, a man who resembled me was hunched over the long poem that
he was composing in letters I did not understand, about a man living in
another circular chamber writing a poem about a man in another
circular chamber...
There is no end to this path, and no one will ever come to read
what the prisoners write.
— Jorge Luis Borges
*Without wishing to appear to fussbudgetty, note that the translator assumes the old-fashioned "he" and "men" as synonymous with the collective "people." It is still a worthy book.
** Other of Barakat's books can be found by searching for Hoda Barakat at Bookshop.org. Click here for other sources of Tiller of Waters. To its shame, Amazon US archly comments about the book, "Not to everyone's taste."
** Other of Barakat's books can be found by searching for Hoda Barakat at Bookshop.org. Click here for other sources of Tiller of Waters. To its shame, Amazon US archly comments about the book, "Not to everyone's taste."