Serhiy Zhadan wins Peace Prize for the German Book Trade

Hello Gentle Reader,
 
The Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels or the Peace Prize for the German Book Trade, has a lengthy history, being awarded to some of the most remarkable writers throughout the mid-20^th Century into the early 21^st Century. Previous recipients included the minute but exceptionally mighty Nelly Sachs, whose mournful poems exist between the existential nodal points of the moths mourning despair and the butterflies’ transformative powers of personal change and breathtaking forgiveness; the truly philosophical parables and conundrums of Herman Hesse, whose exploration of an individual’s pursuit of authenticity, self-knowledge, and the greater worlds perplexities were not only engaging in their literary value, but masterful exploration of societies continued progression away from absolute and dogmatic principles of bygone eras, into more personal spiritual and philosophical considerations; the revolutionary classic children’s author Astrid Lindgren whose work engaged with children on a complex and moral level, never questioning, doubting or underestimating their ability for comprehension and unyielding empathy; the great Israeli public intellectual Amos Oz, whose political stances and expressive literary work provided a panoramic perspective of Israeli society, and the complicated clash of cultures, perspectives, and forces of Israel and Palestine. Other writers include Assia Djebar, Margaret Atwood, Claudio Magris, Chinua Achebe, and Svetlana Alexievich. Needless to say, the winners of the award are often high profile and socially conscious writers, who oppose tyrannical perspectives and encourage (as the prize would suggest) peaceful cooperative measures between people. This inevitably means there will always be a slight political edge to the award, when tempered with literary merit.
 
This years Peace Prize for the German Book Trade, topically will be awarded to the Ukrainian resistant poet, Serhiy Zhadan. The award is not without its merit, as Zhadan, has been a prolific and adamant critic of Russia’s aggression and Putin’s amalgamation and annexation ambitions, which have already cost Ukraine the Odessa peninsula, and now has erupted into a full on war between the two countries, which have become the battleground testing the West’s tolerance of Putin’s aggressive tactics. In turn, however, Serhiy Zhadan has become Ukraine’s rockstar poet, an upstart who without sentimentality bucks’ authority, Soviet era nostalgia (so typical of Putin’s politics), and continues to protest, criticize, and denounce the baseless murder, torture, and bombings of Russia on Ukraine, who has shown their spirit and their resolve is steely and iron hard, when pushing back against the Russian bear. Removing the political context and connotations of Serhiy Zhadan’s literary output, one sees a striking respect for language and a complex understanding of its abilities to motivate, change, and inspire individuals. After all Shadan’s background is in philology. This provides Serhiy Zhadan the ability to move between Russian, Ukrainian, Soviet-speak (era propaganda and language), as well as German and English with a playful flare; proving that the poet doesn’t rely on a reputational of political charged firebrand protest poetry. In fact, much of Serhiy Zhadan’s work traces the post-Soviet era individual and their disenfranchised abandonment in the larger world after the collapse and dissolution of the wall. His novels—especially his major breakthrough “Depeche Mode,”—continues to pull back the layers of the post-Soviet society, and the youth who were lost in a disconcerting instability of the times, which also includes postmodern tropes into punkish cultures, drinking, and apparently a recipe to make a bomb.
 
It is the Ukrainian East, where Serhiy Zhadan continues to find inspiration and understanding of the post-Soviet individual, and the disillusionment of the modern era. Here in post-industrial rustbelt cities, whose manufacturing has dried up, whose economy has run aground, whose lives have collapsed, the desolation and despair can poignantly be felt. This is also the region, which Russia currently occupies the most. The famous steel mill of Mariupol immediately comes to mind of resistance in this era of Soviet nostalgia. It is here, and these roots in Eastern Ukraine, that separates Serhiy Zhadan from other contemporary Ukrainian writers, is his understanding of the psychology and language of the post-Soviet landscape of Eastern Ukraine, its abandoned factories, its diminished place, it’s a landscape of the lost and what has been, and therefore becomes more palpable to understand why this region seeks benefit and appeal in strengthening ones ties with Russia, if not an outright occupancy. This, however, does not mean that Serhiy Zhadan does not promote and advocate for resistance—as he clearly does; but with more of a Charles Bukowski understanding, and an impassioned revolutionary at his core, who seeks Ukraine not necessarily as a completely post-Soviet state, but one still grappling with the haunting echoes of its Soviet past.
 
In awarding Serhiy Zhadan the Peace Prize for the German Book Trade, is an apparent political statement, it’s a denouncement of Russia’s occupancy and aggression in Ukraine and the continued battery and war taking place there. It also recognizes Serhiy Zhadan’s acute understanding of the Eastern Ukraine’s crisis with its past, identity, culture, and disillusionment with the present, which is expertly displayed in both his poetry of resistance, and his novels of psychological examination of a land left behind.
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

– V –

Political Correctness is the most puritanical virtue currently on offer. Political Correctness is a bloated concept. A demonic spawn of the word care. It’s a pugnacious practice. Its practitioners are priggish in their polemic deliberations. In their evangelical certainty of their moral superiority, baptizing the uninitiated through a trial by fire. Through public burnings, the uninitiated are immolated at the stake, with spectators surrounded cheering with glee. After all who doesn’t love a public execution? Public discourse is no longer an aspect of public thought. Discourse and dissention against the principal pillars of pollical correctness are acts of heresy. At which point you either retract your statements or you are immolated into cancelation. Erased and obfuscated. Redacted from thought.

Former Permanent Secretary, Sture Allen dies aged 93

Hello Gentle Reader,
 
The Swedish Academy’s membership is once again going to experience further change at the recent death of computational linguist and former Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sture Allén who died earlier this week at the age of 93. Through the latter half of the 1980’s and the vast majority of the 1990’s, Sture Allén held the position of Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, functioning as the academy’s spokesperson and operational face. Throughout Allén’s exceptionally lengthy reign, the Swedish Academy went through a series of controversial turbulent times, beginning in 1988 during the Rushdie Affair (or “The Satanic Verses,” Controversy) when the Swedish Academy remained silent regarding the fatwa issued against Saman Rushdie. The incident was a standing point where writers and activists across the world, rallied against the death threat and sentence issued against Rushdie, with many citing decrying the order as a baseless attack against freedom of speech, expression, thought, and one’s ability to have oppositional or opposing views to others dogmatic decrees. As a literary institute, there was a reasonable expectation that the Swedish Academy would condemn the death threat issued against Salman Rushdie. Under Sture Allén, however, the Swedish Academy remained inactive and silent, which resulted in three members (at the time) symbolically resigning from their positions on the Academy, these three members were: Werner Aspenström (Chair No. 12), former Permanent Secretary Lars Gyllensten (Chair No. 14), and Kerstin Ekman (Chair No. 15). This could be described as Sture Allén’s first example of moral failure. In the 1990’s, Sture Allén would receive a letter detailing sordid allegations of sexual assault committed by a husband of a former committee member (Katarina Frostenson); Allén disregarded the letter, which in the coming decades would come back to haunt the Swedish Academy with the 2018 scandal blowing apart the institution which was known as being stoic and secretive, and in turn revealed an archaic organization with a rotting festering underbelly of moral and ethical ineptitude, but could hide behind the gold, the gilding, and the Nobel Prize to hid their own putrid realities. In the end, the late and former Sara Danius suffered the negligence and inattentiveness of Sture Allén’s inaction. Yet, during the late 80’s and 90’s (with minor exceptions) the Nobel Prize for Literature was aptly awarded to some of the greatest writers and most recognizable laureates of the time: Naguib Mahfouz, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, and the marvelous Wislwa Szymborska. It was also during this time; the Nobel Prize for Literature truly began to take on a more global perspective. In this Sture Allé can be praised for finishing the job of taking the Nobel Prize for Literature to further global reaches and achieve some sense of synthesis beyond its own provincialism and centric view of literature in a very narrow confines, and instead take a holistic approach to the application of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Alfred Nobel’s will and testament, while treating the award as if it were a traditional literary award. In turn, Sture Allén’s reign would not be described as one without corrupting questions of lacking moral probity and ethical consideration. In fact these two facets remain the darkest and deepest blemishes on computational linguists legacy and memory.
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary
 

A.B. Yehoshua Dies Aged 85

 Hello Gentle Reader,
 
Contemporary Israeli prose literature has been dominated by the three mountains of the late Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua. All three writers were noted for the gravitas they applied to writing as a literary expression of the highest linguistic and cultural appreciation, but also as a platform in which social and political concerns and atrocities can be routinely autopsied and examined for public consumption and lead to a sense of inspiration to change, enlighten, or at the very least provide some empathic understanding and extend the basic principles of human kindness. For Amos Oz, this often met provide political commentary, lectures, articles, and essays proposing and actively advocating for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. David Grossman maintained a staunch unbiased perspective regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has encouraged peaceful resolutions, though rarely discussed it in his literary writings, but has been an outspoken public figure on these issues, as well as unflinching journalist whose maintenance and pursuit of truth and probity cannot be overlooked. In between Amos Oz and David Grossman was the institution and monolith of A. B. Yehoshua, who’s unapologetic and left leaning sympathetic perspectives were well known and documented but also endeared him to the political softness of Western academia, while his complex Faulkerian narratives provided a dynamic portrait of the Israeli individual, their experiences, their landscapes, their complexities, and their humanity; but was also highly appreciated for his mastery and accomplishment of the Hebrew language, tapping into its natural incantations for poetry, quenching the need and desire for an enriching language of beauty. It is here that A. B. Yehoshua would be able to occupy the position of moral authority and public conscious when it came to the exasperating continuation of political follies within the Middle Eastern country. In his passing, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog lamented Yehoshua as one of these greatest authors of his generation, whose presence will be felt for generations of Israeli writers to come, and whose work will be the testaments, the anchors, and the foundations for generations yet to come, while adding:

“His works, which drew inspiration from our nation’s treasures, reflected us in an accurate, sharp, loving and sometimes painful mirror image. He aroused in us a mosaic of deep emotions.”

A. B. Yehoshua is that special kind of writer, one of technical expertise, appreciation for language, a love of narration and storytelling, but also a writer who is able to grapple with humanistic and moralistic concerns without falling into cliché or needless pontification. A. B. Yehoshua was able to turn the moralistic concerns of the Israeli and Palestine situation into a palpable concern that is complex and multifaceted.
 
There is no denying that A. B. Yehoshua is a contemporary classic writer, who along with Amos Oz, was often considered one of Israel’s foremost contenders for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
 
Rest in Peace, A. B. Yehoshua.
 
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

George Lamming, Dies Aged 94

 Hello Gentle Reader,
 
It is difficult to imagine what the Caribbean Literature would look like without the tutelage and advocacy of George Lamming, who remained the silent giant of Caribbean Literature, operating as both foundation, lodestone, whose unyielding support paved the way for numerous acclaimed Caribbean writers to come from the forefront both during and beyond the shadow of colonialism and waning imperialistic attitudes. Throughout his earlier career, George Lamming provided a great love for the island paradise and homeland of the Caribbean, growing up in Barbados and first teaching at the Port of Spain in Trinidad, before eventually emigrated north, to the grey skies and green fields of a rain worthy England, where initially Lamming worked in a factory. George Lammings perspective of the England of the time was more of an idea then it was a physical geographical feature. England to Lamming and many others who were leaving the West Indies for work or in the case of George Lamming to make it as a writer, all envisioned a world of civility and responsibility, complete with a sense of welcome. As George Lamming also pointed out, this journey was not unique to himself as a writer but was in the heritage of colonial literature of the time, from the far-flung islands and exotic lands of the commonwealth and the empire: Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittleholzer, and John Hearne. While in London, Geroge Lamming worked as a factory worker before finding a listenership with the BBC Colonial Service (and then the Caribbean Voices radio programming) and readership within the now defunct Barbadian magazine BIM. It was during this time, George Lamming began to read and encourage the writings of other writers from the Caribbean, which include the early poetry of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. As a writer, George Lamming is renowned for his first novel “In the Castle of My Skin,” which remains Lamming’s most acclaimed novel recounting the experience of the Barbadian psyche, soul, and perspective, which has been described as both a coming of age and autobiographical narrative, while also taking a broader and encompassing view of Barbados. Though previous novels were acclaimed, none came close to rivaling “In the Castle of My Skin.” Yet, perhaps the greatest achievement of George Lamming’s life and work came to encapsulate was his dutiful encouragement he provided to many young writers from the Caribbean, paving the way for writers such as the aforementioned Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, (contemporary) the late Kamau Brathwaite, and Grace Nichols.
 
George Lamming, sadly died just four days before his 95^th birthday.
 
Rest in Peace, George Lamming.
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

P.S. It is interesting to think what kind of world George Lamming has lived through, from a nation which existed on the curtails of colonialism, a Caribbean paradise of the upper class to dream of; then a postcolonial and fiercely independent nation existing within the Commonwealth as an equal partner, who had both spirit, heart and voice; and now more recently a nation which has entered into its infancy on a new journey as an independent republic.