Category: Intellectuals

Categories
Book Reviews Espana Europe Intellectuals Moslems Philosophy, World politics Uncategorized World Affairs

A Christian hero warrior who lived among Arabs, a book review.

Pérez Reverte, Andrés. Sidi. Un relato de frontera (Miami: Alfaguara/Penguin Random House, 2019), pp. 371.

[Spanish below] El Cid Campeador, Spain’s favorite Christian warrior, appears here with the Arabic name that his own comrades in arms gave him, according to the author. And, indeed, it is a frontier tale, as the subtitle claims, referring to the imaginary line in the Iberian Peninsula that separated the Christian Goths from the Islamic Moors in the eleventh century, before Spain emerged.

The author warns us that Sidi “is a fictional story… that combines history, legend and imagination.” And, for me, that combination was satisfying because I think I can understand something of the past, trusting that he investigated enough before executing the final drafts. He relied on his understanding of the historical trends that slowly unfolded over centuries serving as a background for the actions of his characters. There is no doubt that integrating in the twenty-first century events from the eleventh century with legends embellished by the imagination demands certain caution for us readers. Worse in this case when historians warn of us of how little documentation remains of this warrior who continues to enjoy mythical glory. Perez Reverte includes gory descriptions of throat slicing and beheadings but medieval history in general confirms the enormous sacrifices of life that occurred often enough in the name of loyalty to man and god.

But the fact is that, despite the fiction woven into his tale, I have been able to confirm, for example, more than anything else, the social intertwining that must have existed between Christians and Muslims at that time. The fact that Pérez Reverte baptized his novel with the Arabic name of the famous warrior says a lot. I believe he hit the mark in choosing the title for his novel. I think that this social and economic intertwining represents the main argument in this book, better than a historical essay. It was a very good read. An English version is quite probable.

El Cid Campeador aparece aquí con el nombre árabe que sus propios compañeros en armas le pusieron, según el autor. Y, efectivamente, es un relato de frontera, como reza el subtítulo, la línea imaginaria en la península ibérica que separaba los godos cristianos de los moros islámicos en el siglo once, antes de que surgiera una España. Pérez Reverte incluye descripciones sangrientas de cortes de garganta y decapitaciones, pero la historia medieval en general confirma los enormes sacrificios de la vida que ocurrieron con bastante frecuencia en nombre de la lealtad al hombre y a dios.

El autor nos advierte que Sidi “es un relato de ficción donde…combina historia, leyenda e imaginación.” Y, para mí, esa combinación me ha satisfecho porque creo poder entender algo del pasado, gracias a este autor que investiga algo antes de escribir sus borradores finales. Confió en su haber entendido las tendencias históricas que se desenvuelven lentamente a través de los siglos y fungen como trasfondo en el comportamiento de los personajes. Es innegable que el compaginar en el siglo veintiuno hechos del siglo XI con leyendas embellecidas por la imaginación requiere exigir cierto cuidado para nosotros los lectores. Peor en este caso cuando poca documentación queda del domador de la frontera tal como nos avisan los historiadores, en contradicción a la gloria mítica que le asignan los españoles.  

Pero el hecho es que, a pesar de la ficción entretejida aquí, he podido, como lector, confirmar, por ejemplo, más que nada, el entrelazo social que debió haber existido entre los cristianos y los musulmanes en esa época. El hecho de que Pérez Reverte bautice su novela con el nombre arábico del insigne guerrero dice mucho ya. Intitular su novela de esta manera me parece una decisión acertada. Por último, pienso que ese entrelazado social y económico representa el argumento principal de este libro y de esto el autor ha hecho un excelente repaso, mejor que un ensayo histórico. Fue una lectura muy buena.

Categories
Book Reviews Central America Current Events Humanities Washington Talks Intellectuals Latin America Philosophy, World politics Talks and other events World Affairs

The Monkeys Have No Tail in Zamboanga–A Growing Up Story (a book review)

Wolfe, Reese. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959) pp. 169.

An old friend, gone by and by, wrote this wonderful memoir a few years before I met him. He confessed he was an author when we worked together, but I did not read his work until decades later. Now I’m glad I finally read this part it; it may have been his most satisfying.

The Monkeys Have No Tails is Reese’s memoir of growing up and becoming a man. He told me, when I knew him, that he had grown up in the Berkeley-San Francisco area in a well-heeled family, an assertion confirmed in this book. I discovered I was vaguely familiar with his growing up years, as chronicled here, most probably because we talked about his early life when my wife and I visited him and his wife, Dorothee, and I started learning the little matters that underpinned our work. We were cultural attaché’s in Central America, he the older, I the younger (much younger).

Reese tells us in his book that he became a man at sea. That is what this memoir is about; that at the age of eighteen he left home and made it to the old wharfs in San Francisco where he committed himself as an apprentice mariner on a rusty old merchant marine ship. He thought it was the beginning of an exotic adventure but was soon put to work cleaning and polishing the entire ship, day after day, then later shoveling coal into the steam boilers. This is how came to sail the briny blue for countless weeks. He became overwhelmed with regrets when the fabled ports of call turned out to be a big disappointment.

He couldn’t get back home quickly enough.

In between, he discovered, among other things, that in Zamboanga monkeys have no tails but more importantly he learned lifelong lessons: who he was and who he wasn’t. He admired the first assistant engineer so much that he began aping him, but soon came to terms with himself, with who he was—and to return to finish up college in Berkeley.

He writes in a light and friendly manner and includes songs he sang on the ship’s foc’sle, strumming his banjo-ukulele to ease the long days on deck.

Reese Wolfe and his daughter, Mimi.

Categories
Book Reviews Current Events Intellectuals Nazis Philosophy, World politics Prisons in the U.S. United States World Affairs

Walla Walla Penitentiary in the 1970’s, a book review

Stastny, Charles and Gabrielle Tyrnauer. Who Rules the Joint? (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1982) pp. 234.

The authors of this book, a man and wife team, write that they were personally affected by the violent uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, in 1971, in part because they lived nearby. As professional scholars, they had previously studied survivors of the Nazi regime. Coincident with Attica, they learned of the unusually progressive changes that were being reported at the first Washington State Prison (WSP) also known as Walla Walla. Determining that these were exceptional circumstances they turned their investigative capacity to the goings on in Washington State, producing this book as a result.  

Who Rules the Joint? begins by offering a perspective on what appeared to be significant reforms at Walla Walla in the late 1970’s. One of their findings is that the prison policy revisions there in those years were among the most progressive in the United States.

To help the reader grasp the meaning of this assertion the authors review the growth of prisons in the United States. Their analysis allows them to develop a typology of “power configuration” in American penal institutions. In other words, they sort out their understanding of the application of authority in a prison and come up with the following categories: unicentric (“keepers over prisoners”), bicentric (“keepers vs convicts”), tricentric (“keepers, remediators and inmates”) and polycentric (“Mass society, Prisoners, keepers, guards’ unions, courts, legislatures, mass media, etc.”). Authority exercised by the “keepers” of a prison is most strict in a unicentric situation because the power is concentrated in one place, it is unified at the top with the wardens. At the other end of the continuum, authority is polycentric because it is spread among several actors, or in many places, theoretically, at least.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain the key findings of the study and the information most specific to Walla Walla. Spurred by Dr. William R. Conte, reform-minded administrators endorsed new ideas at a time when progressive change was rising in American society. WSP saw the rise of a polycentric arrangement of authority that endured from 1971 to 1973, a condition not seen anywhere else. A Resident Governing Council (RGC) made up of elected prisoners who could sit down with the superintendent to decide how the prison was going to be run is a remarkable example of this period. The fact that inmates published their own newspaper also stands out as a notable demonstration of inmate influence. In the chapters noted, the authors weigh and analyze the relative strength of inmate power, but they also report the decline of the experiment. The RGC was eliminated by 1979 and things returned to a more authoritarian configuration, somewhere between unicentric and bicentric. A multitude of factors intervene in the process and they are discussed in detail. The manner of reversing the “power configuration” from many points of influence to only one or two is punctuated with reports of significant violence taking place all the way to 1979.

One of the final conclusions I make is that the late 1970’s were undoubtedly the toughest years in Walla Walla for everyone concerned. Another is that penal directors at the very top along with high state officials necessarily took stock of the situation and decided to reinstate the fullest control possible.

The authors of this seemingly neglected volume include copious end notes filled with important explanatory notes and a bibliography about prisons that appears quite comprehensive up to the point of publication. I consider Who Rules the Joint? a primer for anyone beginning to understand prisons in America.

Categories
Book Reviews Central America Current Events Humanities Washington Talks immigration Intellectuals Mexico migration u.s.-mexico border United States World Affairs

LIVING AS AN UNDOCUMENTED PERSON IN AMERICA, A BOOK REVIEW

Marcelo Hernández Castillo. Children of the Land: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), pp. 362.

Every American should read this memoir because it offers a real, personalized story about what it means to live as an undocumented person in the United States. Most Americans have no idea.

The author was brought to the United States in 1991 as a youngster by his undocumented parents, making him a DACA person. This means that, like his parents, he too was undocumented but received protection from deportation in 2012 from President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (hence DACA). He was one of a great multitude in similar circumstances, but different from most of them because he obtained a green card visa later, after all, as he explains.

Like most DACA folk, Castillo became Americanized to the point of losing fluency in Spanish, relying on over the counter drugs, wearing a nose plug, and even getting tattooed. And, like many of his fellow Dacas, he also achieved what most mainstream Americans do not: a master’s degree from a leading university. He does not expound on the challenges he encountered doing this, but they must have been enormous. Instead of becoming a lawyer or a doctor, he became a poet. Here are the reasons he admits for this:

I wanted to write poetry because I believed any practice in the English language would distance myself from my identity as an immigrant and I thought (naively ashamedly so) that the farthest association from an immigrant was a poet How foolish I was. Little did I know the lineage of immigrant poets I came from…(p. 75).

Then, again he explains regarding learning English:

I wanted to write and speak English better than any white person, any citizen, because in the unthinkable case of ever getting caught by immigration, I thought I would impress them enough with my mastery of English to let me go. What a stupid idea. (pp.75-76)

Castillo’s memoir is framed around the agonizing challenges of obtaining his own residential visa, then trying to get his father’s and later his mother’s. I found this part particularly gratifying because he unabashedly divulges the psychological and social strains involved. Just driving to be interviewed at the ICE offices to qualify for the visa he became fearful of committing a mistake that would get him pulled over and arrested obliterating his dream of holding a visa. Paranoia and trauma are words that he uses to describe his feelings—and those of his family. The rest of us would be better Americans if we could appreciate these experiences.

He is a poet writing his memoirs, so the biographical elements mentioned in the paragraphs above are veiled in his often florid text and fluid structure. Reading the text with care will help.

Why Castillo’s family chose to immigrate without documents in the first place is a crucial point addressed only tangentially because it is, after all, a memoir, not a history book. He works as a professional poet.