The Arrogant Emu

Another Arrogant Emu Book Review: Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan

I’m not going to rate this book in terms of emus.

The book is a collection of short stories about children in Africa. It was written by a Nigerian Jesuit priest, which prejudiced me in its favor. If I’m going to be reading a book about a deadly depressing subject, I like to know that it’s by someone who is professionally obligated, so to speak, to a certain optimism. “The Catholic writer,” as Flannery O’Connor said,  “in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.”

I don’t really mean optimism, come to think of it. Nothing ends well for the young protagonists of these short stories, and there’s no immediately obvious comforting moral that can be drawn from them.   But there is still a sense that human beings, while being about as bad as anything can be, are fundamentally worth it.

The most remarkable accomplishment of these stories is the way in which they convey the mute, forceful, oblique influences that govern life.  The situations - street life in Kenya, religious violence in Ethopia and Nigeria, child trafficking in Benin, mob war in Rwanda - are situations that ought to be incomprehensible.  Chaos grips the social order and the human heart, but the author doesn’t allow the readers to simply write off the events and the situations as beyond understanding.    He doesn’t make an effort to make events make sense, he merely presents them with a patient regularity that eventually brings the reader to understand in spite of himself. In doing so, he brings a sense of coherency to situations that are essentially incoherent, and that is at once a relief and a much deeper horror.

The language is flexible, sonorous and expressive.  He blends standard English, Nigerian pidgin English (the small-small) and various local language (Goun, Datcha, and Fon all get shout-outs, Benin folks!) with the facility of familiarity. Nigeria is one of the best or the worst things ever to happen to English, and it’s a virtue in a book that it makes that language, perforce, understandable to outsiders.

Is this something that’s happening everywhere, or is it just DC?  Lately I’ve been seeing, blazoned on busses or posted in the subway, advertisements which do not appear to be encouraging anybody to buy anything, but rather simply complaining about some circumstance.  What are they expecting to accomplish by telling me that the Washington Post is unfair, or that Verizon intends to bypass DC in favor of the suburbs in terms of high-speed internet?  Raising public awareness is all well and good, but how will public awareness help their campaign?  If they were selling rival products, that would make sense - I actually checked the anti-Verizon ad to see if Comcast’s logo were discreetly placed somewhere - but they don’t seem to be.

;Or, how we lost the Emu War.

Thanks to Martin. Oh, so many thanks to Martin!

What a wonderful day.  I woke up later than I meant to, and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to the metro in time for the 10:00 service.  So I pulled on a pair of sweatpants under my Sunday skirt, and hopped on my bike, figuring that I would certainly be able to make it in time for the 12:30 service.

The Mount Vernon trail runs along the Potomac, and I had biked along it once before, heading from Alexandria to Arlington and exhausting myself in the process.  I was delighted to discover today that not only is Alexandria to DC not nearly as far, but that uphill magically grow less steep as the weather warms up.  Certain parts of the trail, and of the parks around the Jefferson Memorial, must be really lovely in spring.

But even with the modicum of warmth that the day afforded, people were out and about.  I do like biking, I like the instant flash of community you have with others who are also out on bikes.  Someone passes you, or you pass them, and you wonder: why is this person on a bike?  For pleasure?  For exercise? Is this the sort of person I would like? Maybe!  Or maybe not!  You go by just slowly enough to wonder, just too fast to find out, and so the whole exercise is wrapped in a friendly mystery that passes for neighborliness.