Once my Mother

Once my Mother is a kind of two-pronged documentary in which the Australian director, Sophia Turkiewicz, explores the horror journey that her mother, an orphan from a young age, had to endure, as well as her own journey of learning to forgive her mother after she’d ‘abandoned’ her in an orphanage in Australia. 

Helen, the mother, born in Poland in the years before the Second World War, lost both her parents early on. She went to live for a few years with an uncle in Poland, but he suddenly threw her out on the streets when she was 11 or 12. In the first of several intrepid undertakings she walked to the nearest big town, and survived on the streets for four years (!), without ever being forced into prostitution.

The Russians took over half of Poland after Hitler divided the country up between Germany and Russia - without asking the Poles. Thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia by train where they were forced to work in the freezing weather. Their general, Anders, refused to train them for the Russian army. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Anders (he must have been a brave man to stand up to Stalin): Continued friction with the Soviets over political issues as well as shortages of weapons, food and clothing, led to the eventual exodus of Anders' men – known as the Anders Army – together with a sizeable contingent of Polish civilians via the Persian Corridor into Iran, Iraq and Palestine. Here, Anders formed and led the 2nd Polish Corps, fighting alongside the Western Allies, while agitating for the release of Polish nationals still in the Soviet Union. 

In the movie Sophia makes the point that the Polish men wouldn't leave without the women and children, so they all went. 

Helen was part of this huge exodus; it required them to walk 2000 miles to the south of Russia, and later they went on another extraordinary walk 2000 miles east. Finally after these two awful treks she finished up in Africa, in a British refugee camp. She met an Italian prisoner-of-war and he fathered a child with her. However, he was sent back to Italy after the war. Being a solo mother she was castigated yet eventually, when the refugees were sent on, she got to Australia (Perth, initially) and finally to Adelaide. She was forced to leave her daughter in the orphanage for two years so she could get work; again, as a solo mother she was sidelined. 

She managed to find a Polish man amongst the circle of refugees, a man who was willing to marry her, even though he knew she didn’t particularly love him or find him attractive. Thankfully he was a good guy, and Sophia was brought home into the family. The marriage prospered and other children came along. 

It took Sophia a long time to get over her sense of abandonment, but finally in her fifties (!) she managed to see that her mother’s abandonment had been far more severe than her own. How the mother got through all she did when hundreds were dying around her is hard to grasp. 

There's a great deal of archival material, some of it seeminglessly woven in with acted shots, clips from an earlier film Sophia made about her mother, and more recent material filmed when Helen was living in an old people's home. It's an extraordinarily moving film. 

What Facebook Reveals About Us

One of my sons wrote this piece, and suggested I might like to include it on my blog...

Social media reveals the condition of the human heart. If you didn’t think there was a problem with someone before, now they prove it - on Facebook. But it’s not like there is suddenly a problem with someone. There was always a problem with people.  It’s not as if somehow, before they used social media, they were more righteous or worthy. We just didn’t know them as well.

Sometimes I will read something neutral, sweet or even benign like, “Cat gets caught on tape jumping.” And there’ll be a cute video. These days nothing is benign. A series of comments below a video make the seemingly neutral video completely sordid.

Comment 1. Cuuuuuute!

Comment 2. Cats are the dummest animals.

Comment 3. Dummest is spelt with a “b” m$%#%^ f$%^^&!!!

Comment 4. People need to be shot in the head because they’re dumber than cats.

And all of a sudden, you have this nasty string of angry comments, chiding and slandering each other, biting and devouring each other. And for what? The cat must be thinking, “Soooo, do you like my video?”

So, why does Facebook make people so angry at each other? It doesn’t. It reveals the human condition of sinfulness that has always been there. “From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

People think we are moving society towards greater and greater good, with every new country’s GDP rising, with the discovery of new vaccines, with every “good deed.” But really, we are continuing a long tradition, since the Fall of Man, which shows us, with every new generation, our own personal need for salvation in Jesus Christ.

Every time I see a discussion about an Ebola nurse coming back from Africa and someone blatantly states, “We just need to level the whole continent,” it’s reveals the condition of the human heart - wretched.

Where were these thoughts and opinions before? Does social media make us nastier people? No, those thoughts were already there. They were in the private conversations we had with friends who felt the same way, when no one else heard us, or when we thought no one else heard us. They were in the private thoughts and desires we held and told no one about. How do I know? Because I have had the filthiest conversations and thoughts. Am I unique? No. I am a product of Adam, a descendent of sin, who needs salvation as much as the next guy for every thought, every feeling. And for me, I need not feel any shame for my past sins, now that I am crucified with Christ.

Every time I see a nasty comment I recognize the need for God’s redemptive power in that life. Every time I see a person trying to find a solution to a problem, I recognize the need for God’s redemptive power in that life. Every time I see a good deed I recognize the need for God’s redemptive power in that life. Why? Because without the foundation of God’s truth, His Spirit, and Jesus working in our life, we are all lost, trying to figure out this world, and proving it with the things we say, on social media.

Have mercy on me, Oh God,

According to your unfailing love.

According to your great compassion

Blot out my transgression,

Wipe away all my iniquity,

Cleanse me from all my sin.

God’s response to the psalmist?

“Ok.”

The Source

I can't say I'd come across the 2011 film The Source before, and there don't seem to be many English-language reviews of it online. It's directed by Radu Mihăileanu, a Jewish Romanian-born French director who also wrote the script in collaboration with two French writers. It has more than one title: as you can see from the poster, it's called La Source des Femmes, (The Source of/for Women) but the poster on IMDB names it La Sorgente dell'Amore, which translates as The Source of Love. All are equally valid: there is dialogue in the film in which the source of or for women is discussed, and also the source of love, that is, where does love come from - the answer in the film is pretty much, from women, although that's not the whole story. 
But there's a further aspect to the word, source: in the movie the starting point for the story is the spring up on the hillside to which the women must go each day with their buckets to collect water. This water is the source of life - especially in the drought-stricken time in which the movie takes place - and its place far up on the hill is another source: a source of contention. The women argue that their menfolk (who sit around most of the day doing nothing because the drought has destroyed their crops and livestock) should take the money gained from passing tourists and use it to put a tap from the spring right within the village. The men are loathe to - among many reasons is the one that women should know their place, and if they only had to go to the water in the village, what else would they do with their time? 
One of the women, an outsider, whose husband (a much more kindly and gentle man than most in the village) has taught her to read and write, begins a sex strike, and this has ramifications for all concerned. The story is an old one - the bawdy Greek comedy, Lysistrata, is one of the oldest known versions of it - but Mihăileanu and his team have set it in a remote North African village where Islam is the dominating force, and where men have license to beat their wives (just as one would beat children, gently, to discipline them, says the local Imam), and to demand sex nightly, if they're so inclined. And where teenage girls are frequently thrown into marriage without any instruction or care. 
Unlike Aristophanes' play, the comedy is minimal (though the film is billed as a drama/comedy) and there are some vicious beatings, fights, slappings and the like. People's passions run high here, and no some seems immune from a good slap across the face. 
But the story has more to say than just bringing harmony back between husbands and wives - harmony does return, as you'd expect, but at considerable cost. There is the much bigger issue of Islam itself, which pervades the lives of the people alongside elements of folk religion. Though these people are Arabs, they've been in this part of the world a very long time. 
The gentle husband talks at one point of the Islamic Enlightenment. If there's such a thing, it's got very stony ground in which to grow in in this village, and at the film's end it's debatable as to whether it's made much progress. Certainly there's an important scene in which the educated wife fronts up to the Imam with great respect, and counters his views of how husbands and wives should behave by quoting back the Koran to him with great confidence. He's shaken by having a woman stand up to him, but, to his credit, does listen, and reflect on it. 
In spite of the male domination aspect, this is a film where women have the focus. They sing at the beginning and at the end (the film is almost a musical at times - some of the story is told in song, and some of the interactions between men and women, or women and women, take place in musical terms), they have two other wonderful scenes in which what they're singing is exactly what the men don't want to hear, and which publicly embarrasses them. and they have a scene in their bathhouse (where there is some nudity on display) in which they discuss sex quite openly as well as the prospect of a sex-strike. Women's talk may embarrass men, but the women aren't embarrassed by it - the group song early in the piece is quite forthright in this regard. 
Love is a big theme throughout - it's seldom mentioned by the men, except in terms of disparagement - but for the women it's a thing to hold onto dearly; if it can be received and given it's priceless. The educated couple at the centre of the movie celebrate love, even when it also seems to make their lives more complicated (a man the girl had loved previously turns up to make things difficult), and several of the women long for love but have never received it, including one who gets the educated women to write letters for her to a man she loves, named, somewhat improbably, Slim. 
At times the wealth of subplots almost gets in the way of the focus of the story (one scene, in which one of the young husbands tells the educated man just how much he hurt him when he treated him as a lesser person, seems to be going somewhere and then doesn't) but Mihăileanu holds it all in place somehow, and makes the film all the more rich for all its different elements. It could have been a diatribe against Islam and its treatment of women; it could have been political (there are a few elements of this); it could have been primarily a love story. It's all these and more.
And what a cast: Algerian Leila Bekhti is wondrous as the educated wife; her husband is played by Palestinian actor, Saleh Bakri, who manages to overcome the occasional inconsistencies in his role. The older women have faces that never came from any Hollywood movie (some of them may be non-professionals). Israeli actress Hiam Abbass plays the vicious mother-in-law with an underlying fury - justified, we learn in due course, but terrifying all the same. Biyouna, who has a face of considerable ugliness (but happens to be a great star in her native Algeria) plays the aging widow who encourages, provokes, and generally manages to keep her finger in several pies at once. This international cast - it also includes several French-born actors - speak and sing in Arabic throughout, and it's more satisfying than having them dubbed (though the film was dubbed into French for the French!)
The Source is a revelation: for one, a look at an area of the Arab world in which terrorists have no obvious presence; a picture of Islam in which jihad is mentioned but in a totally different context; and much more. The Dunedin Public Library has a copy.

Surrounded by bees

I'm working my way - very slowly - through Charles Spurgeon's massive book, The Treasury of David.  Certainly the Book of Psalms, to which the title refers, is a treasure, but what makes Spurgeon's book interesting beyond this are the notes that he added to each Psalm: not only his own notes, but those he culled from dozens of books by various authors who had preceded him, some of them dating back two or three centuries. 

Sometimes he quotes the old Fathers of the Church, such as Augustine, or uses extracts from writers who describe modern day equivalents of situations mentioned in the Psalms. The following is such a one, relating to the verse in Psalm 118 verse 12: "They (David's enemies) surround me like bees." It comes from George Schweinfurth's "The Heart of Africa," published in 1873...

Now, as the north east wind of course was adverse to any north east progress, it was necessary that the boat should be towed by the crew. As the rope was being drawn along through the grass on the banks it happened that it disturbed a swarm of bees. In a moment, like a great cloud, they burst upon the men who were dragging; everyone of them threw himself headlong into the water and hurried to regain the boat. The swarm followed at their heels, and in a few seconds filled every nook and cranny of the deck. What a scene of confusion ensued may readily be imagined. 

Without any foreboding of ill, I was arranging my plants in my cabin, when I heard all around me a scampering which I took at first to be merely the frolics of my people, as that was the order of the day. I called out to enquire the meaning of the noise, but only got excited gestures and reproachful looks in answer. The cry of "Bees! bees!" soon broke upon my ear, and I proceeded to light a pipe. My attempt was entirely in vain; in an instant bees in thousands are about me, and I am mercilessly stung all over my face and hands. To no purpose do I try to protect my face with a handkerchief, and the more violently I fling my hands about, so much the more violent becomes the impetuosity of the irritated insects. The maddening pain is now on my cheek, now in my eye, now in my hair. 

The dogs from under my bed burst out frantically, overturning everything in their way. Losing well nigh all control over myself, I fling myself into the river; I dive down, but all in vain, for the stings rain down still upon my head. Not heeding the warning of my people, I creep through the reedy grass to the swampy bank. The grass lacerates my hands, and I try to gain the mainland, hoping to find shelter in the woods. All at once four powerful arms seize me and drag me back with such force that I think I must be choked in the mud. I am compelled to go back on board, and flight is not to be thought of... I felt ready, in the evening, for an encounter with half a score of buffaloes or a brace of lions rather than have anything more to do with bees; and this was a sentiment in which all the ship's company heartily concurred. 

The Wah-Wah Diaries

Seem to be reading a book a day at the moment...it won't last. I need to get on with some other more important things!

Anyway, yesterday while filling in a bit of time at the library, I came across The Wah-Wah Diaries by Richard E Grant. Wah-Wah was a movie written and directed by Grant back in 2004, and the book is a record of the day-to-day trials and tribulations he experienced, less on the shooting of the movie itself than on the pre- and post-production, when his French producer either failed to communicate vital information, or get things done on time, or kept putting various spanners in the works for no good reason - except that she was the producer.

The book starts in 1999, when the idea for the movie was first mooted and the script drafted. From then on it's a constant swing between highs and lows as producers come and go, the script is revised and revised, actors are gained and lost, and the aforesaid producer gets it into her head that everything should be done with French technicians. This book should warn anyone off co-production between England and France forever, though to be fair, there are some very good French technicians involved, the editors in particular.

The actual shoot is a breeze by comparison with everything else that goes on, with near-perfect weather in Swaziland (where it is all filmed, often in places that Grant grew up in and knows like the back of his hand). The amazing thing is that while Grant has some extreme moments of stress and insomnia from all the hitches (and, of course, the French producer), the film gets made, and he survives without going insane. His determination and fortitude prove to be far beyond what he himself thinks he's capable of, especially since this is the first time he's ever directed a movie, and it's an extremely autobiographical one at that.

It's perhaps not the ideal book to read before embarking on getting a musical up and on stage, although the financial aspects of my show won't be nearly as daunting as those Grant faced, nor will we be working with people who don't speak our language - in any sense of the phrase. Nevertheless it shows the value of having a good solid team around you, for support in times of stress and when things all seem to be going down the tube....!

Levy wins, Naipaul loses

The other day I wrote about a couple of books, Small Island, and, A Bend in the River. I've now finished Small Island, but in spite of persevering with the other book, I think I'm going to move on and leave it unfinished. It's so gloomy and dour, has absolutely no humour whatsoever (not that that's a particular requirement for a novel with me) and is obviously going to go increasingly downhill. At the moment I don't really need another book in that vein, so it's going into the 'sadly, regrettably unfinished' status. I understand it has a certain status as a book, but life's too short to finish books that I'm not enjoying.

Small Island, (which, curiously enough, is much more like the only other book by Naipaul that I've read - A House for Mr Biswas) was a joy to read. Even though it seemed for a long time not to have an end in sight, the progression towards the end was always there, and when the end does come it manages to be both deeply serious and humorous and warm and wondrous all at the same time.

When I commented on the book the other day I hadn't got to the point where the fourth main character, Bernard, had really come into his own. We have a quite long stretch of story from his point of view telling us why he's been 'missing' for so long, (he doesn't get home from the War until it's been over for two years) and we see him not just as the dull and pedantic little man who first appeared earlier in the story. He still remains an uptight character, bigoted, and fairly unflexible, but by the time the story ends we've developed a lot more sympathy for him than would have been expected early on.

Not only this but the story rounds on itself in a surprisingly satisfactory way - a fifth character who appears only occasionally but is vital to the story is the cause of what happens in the climax (I'm not going to give the details, since you need to read and enjoy this book for yourself).

You can read this book as an anti-racist story - and it is, although it's never as simple as that. You can read it as a love story, and it's certainly that, in more ways than one. You can read it as a history of a particular time, and it's full of fascinating detail about the people who went through this particular part of the War. You could see it as a grim diatribe on the sinfulness of man - and woman. There's that in it too, but the grimness is constantly lightened by Levy's humour which undercuts the gloom and highlights the resilience and quirkiness of human nature.

Narrative and detail

With a little more space in my life, because of being retired, I'm reading more fiction. I'd got to the point where non-fiction seemed to be all I picked up at the library. Anyway, on the last couple of trips to the library I've wound up coming home with a bunch of novels.

I want just to focus on three here, because of their similar approach to fiction writing.

First is V S Naipaul's A Bend in the River, a book I'd never heard of, and had just grabbed off the display stand at the library on spec. The second is Andrea Levy's Small Island, a book I began in a Wellington bookstore earlier in the year, and thought would be worth carrying on with. And while we were travelling to Roxburgh and back again last weekend, we listened to a book whose title has escaped me and whose author I don't know. It's on my wife's iPhone, and I'll catch up with the details alter.

All three are what you'd call narrative fiction, I guess, in the sense that there doesn't seem to be any particular 'plot' or even story in the sense that we start at A and finish at Z.

The iPhone one I only heard the later part of, because my wife had already listened to a good deal of the earlier section. I said to her, after a while, that there seemed to be no 'story' as such; it was all detail. And she agreed. It was a kind of fictional biography about a woman in Texas who survives a number of incidents that I missed hearing plus the ones I did hear: the arrival of an oil-well on their property, a terrific dust storm, a drought, betting wisely or unwisely on an inexperienced racehorse, and the advances of a widower whom she does eventually marry.

It shouldn't have been interesting, because the characters were rather loosely drawn, and not given much individuality. What made it interesting was the detail: at first it seemed as though the book was nothing but detail, but the vividness of that detail was what drew you in. I now have a much better idea of what it's like to wait for oil to gush from the earth, how it feels when it does, how scary that is, what a disaster it might be as it blows out the pipes and drill in its rush to reach the surface. I know much more what it's like to sit in an abandoned train passenger car while it shakes and shudders in a dust storm that seems to suck the very air out of your body, and what it's like to go looking for water after the storm has passed. Later the rains come, and one little example of the sort of interesting detail from that was the people standing out in the rain without umbrellas (to listen to Roosevelt, who stood up to show solidarity, even though he was normally in a wheelchair) because the drought had been with them so long they'd forgotten where they stored their umbrellas.

I almost put Naipaul's book aside because there's virtually no story as such in it, and I wondered if it was ever going to go anywhere. It's more focused on characters, and certainly the ones in this book have more presence than those in the previous one, especially the narrator, who, in spite of being an almost non-starter in life, still comes across as interesting. But again above the characters is the detail. If you want to knowwhat it's like to have gone through life in a former French colony in Africa, through a small-scale revolution, through the long rebuilding afterwards, and to have the sense that the man in charge of everything is becoming increasingly godlike in his view of himself (the country is unnamed - it's not Uganda, as that gets mentioned as being somewhere else a number of times) then this book will give you that sense. I'm not enjoying it anywhere near as much as Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, which is a brilliant and beautiful book - this one has a dour tone that is almost offputting - but it still enriches the imagination.

Of the three novels, Small Island is the one that's most appealed to me. Again, there's little sense of story, though there's more suspense that in either of the other two: will Queenie's husband ever turn up again (when we finally meet him in the book, we think it might be better if he didn't); will Hortense and Gilbert actually consummate their marriage, or will their cross-purpose natures always push them apart; will we figure out where everything is going by the end of the book, or will Levy just keep on adding more and more to the detail. Small Island has the benefit of being wildly funny in places; it's the sort of book you can imagine Dickens might write if he'd lived in this century rather than the 19th. It's full of vivid major characters, and of dozens of sharply-drawn minor characters, some of whom get barely a sentence before they leave. Just one very small example from the beginning of the book, "Emily [who appears only in the introduction] had been our outside girl for two months. She had a kindly foster-mother, who lived in Kent and made pictures from spring flowers, and a father and two uncles in London, who drank so much that they had not been awake long enough to take part in the war." Five characters who get a brief moment in the sun and vanish again.

The story weaves back and forth in time: pre-war, during the war, after the war. The chronology is mixed-up but never confusing. Sections are often headed, 'Before', and they take us back to earlier days in the three main characters' lives. (Queenie's husband does turn up in due course - I haven't actually got to that section yet - and becomes a fourth main character.)

But apart from the characters, and the humour, this book stands out even beyond the other two for its emphasis on detail. No page goes past that without relevant detail building up the world in which these people live, and it's detail that is so well-written you want to keep noting down the sharpness of the similes, the aptness of the metaphors, the subtlety of the insights.

I'll write more about it when I've finished....