Unexpected Pleasure
As I was leaving Seattle, my niece, Little Diamond, passed a book along to me. It’s part of our family culture – we read, and we pass along.
When my son was in university, I remember him telling me that I had addicted him to books. His first memory of books was living in Tunis, and when we would be going on a long trip, or when he had done something particularly good, I would pull down a new book from the shelf high up in my closet. Knowing he was approaching reading age, I had stocked up on books before we left.
As a student, he told me that as he approached final exams at university, he would motivate himself by telling himself that as soon as his last final was over, he could go to the bookstore and buy whatever the newest book out was that he was eager to read. Reading – for fun – during his school breaks was his great reward.
It’s that way for all of us. Before any trip, we stock up on good books to read. Before I left Seattle, I stocked up books for my Mother to read! We seek out places like Half Price Books (I do NOT own stock in Half Price Books) and Amazon.com to feed our habits. In our concern against running out of good books, we all have piles by our bed of books we intend to read. Some of my books have been there almost a year – since I moved to Kuwait!
So I accepted the book, Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love, although I looked at the cover in dismay, and actually took it off for the trip. It’s about a Lebanese-American girl who goes in search of her ethnic roots. While at first I didn’t like her, I kept reading in spite of myself – the book drew me in. Little Diamond reviews the book here, (as well as several others that sound really good.)
This book was an unexpected pleasure – as are many of the books my book-voracious niece reads. The main character in this book has an unexpected wryly objective view of herself, is painfully honest, and you find yourself hoping she will find herself, and true love, in spite of her clumsy attempts.
Rape in Kuwait
This is a very difficult post. Rape is a terrible subject. Coolfreak in his blog IheartKuwait wrote a heartbreaking post about a young woman raped recently in Kuwait, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Rape has been the subject of several editorials in the Kuwait Times. Rape of children, abduction and rape of young women, abduction and rape of domestic servants, rape of domestics on the job site, abduction and rape of young men. . . rape is prominent DAILY in the crime column. Rape is epidemic in Kuwait, so common that people seem to think that there is nothing that can be done.
People can wring their hands. People can moan about how wrong it is. But what is being done for the victims of rape?
In California, volunteers put together rape crisis centers. At first, these centers were totally staffed and funded by volunteers and volunteer fund raising. The volunteers, with their own funds, established a 24 hour hotline, with an answering service, that rape victims could call and reach a rape counselor.
Counselors would accompany victims to the hospital, explain procedures, and explain the victim’s options. Counselors would help the victim on the long journey to feeling safe once again, and to feeling some remnant of control over their lives.
Members of the rape crisis centers created education programs, and worked with both police and hospitals to establish procedures working with rape victims. Police were counselled on how to work with the traumatized victims, and police worked with the crisis workers to create new, enforceable laws against the rapists. It was the beginning of the victim advocacy program that is now common in most western countries. Most law enforcement agencies now have paid staff to work with crime victims en route to criminal procedings against the “perp” and subsequent counselling. Victims can testify at parole hearings against probation.
Rape is an outrage – against the individual, and against the community. Rape is less about sex than about power and humiliation. Have you noticed when serial rapists are caught, they turn out to be pathetic losers? They carry a huge burden of inadequacy combined with feelings of entitlement. The most appropriate penalty is their exposure through the court systems, and imprisonment, with those who, like themselves, think like predators.
But we must do what we can do to help the victims, to provide them with counselling and resources to speed their recovery. To create strong laws which protect the community by keeping the predators off the streets. To create procedures where evidence can be gathered and stored, and DNA samples compared so that offenders can be charged, and tried, and convicted.
Hats off, by the way, to the young man Coolfreak with the courage to first blog about this outrage. I find his blog brave and creative and refreshing and amusing and stimulating. Check it out.
Virginia Hall: A Modest Heroine
The Good Shepherd, a new movie with Angelina Jolie, and Matt Damon, directed by Robert DeNiro (!), will open Friday, a story of the beginnings of the American intelligence services, the OSS and the CIA. I can hardly wait.
Earlier this week, there were some small news articles about Virginia Hall, who served her country risking her life time and time again, fighting the Nazis in the allied clandestine services, facing the possibility of torture and death if she were caught. Hall didn’t let anything hold her back. She believed that what she was doing was worth doing, and when WWII ended, she continued working quietly for the greater good. I would have loved to meet this woman. What a pistol!
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about her:
Virginia Hall MBE DSC (April 6, 1906 – July 14, 1982) was an American spy during World War II. She was also known by many aliases: “Marie Monin,” “Germaine,” “Diane,” and “Camille.”[1]
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended the best schools and colleges, but wanted to finish her studies in Europe. With help from her parents, she traveled the Continent and studied in France, Germany, and Austria, finally landing an appointment as a Consular Service clerk at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland in 1931. Hall hoped to join the Foreign Service, but the loss of her lower leg was a terrible setback. Around 1932 she accidentally shot herself in the left leg when hunting in Turkey, it was later amputed from the knee down, which caused her a limp.[2]
The injury foreclosed whatever chance she might have had for a diplomatic career, and she resigned from the Department of State in 1939.
The coming of war that year found Hall in Paris. She joined the Ambulance Service before the fall of France and ended up in Vichy-controlled territory when the fighting stopped in the summer of 1940. Hall made her way to London and volunteered for Britain’s newly formed Special Operations Executive, which sent her back to Vichy in August 1941. She spent the next 15 months there, helping to coordinate the activities of the French Underground in Vichy and the occupied zone of France. When the Germans suddenly seized all of France in November 1942, Hall barely escaped to Spain.[3]
Journeying back to London (after working for SOE for a time in Madrid), in July 1943 she was quietly made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. The British had wanted to recognize her contribution with a higher honor but were afraid it might compromise her identity as she was then still active as an operative.
Virginia Hall joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Special Operations Branch in March 1944 and asked to return to occupied France. She hardly needed training in clandestine work behind enemy lines, and OSS promptly granted her request and landed her from a British MTB in Brittany (her artificial leg kept her from parachuting in).
Code named “Diane,” she eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France. She mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England, found safe houses, and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the Allied Forces landed at Normandy. Hall helped train three battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans and kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops overtook her small band in September.
For her efforts in France, General William Joseph Donovan in September 1945 personally awarded Virginia Hall a Distinguished Service Cross — the only one awarded to a civilian woman in World War II. (emphasis mine)
In 1950, she married OSS agent Paul Goillot. In 1951, she joined the Central Intelligence Agency working as an intelligence analyst on French parliamentary affairs. She retired in 1966 to a farm in Barnesville, Maryland.
Virginia Hall Goillot died at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, MD in 1982.
Her story was told in “The Wolves at the Door : The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy” by Judith L. Pearson (2005) The Lyons Press, ISBN 1-59228-762-X
She was honoured in 2006 again, at the French and British embassies for her courageous work.[4]
Evening out: Learning to be Flexible
A post from Little Diamond on having passport photos taken in Lebanon reminds me of how differently we live in our foreign adventures. She tells how patiently the photographer dealt with her, encouraging her to comb her hair, and finally, after showing the first photos, convinced her to clean up her act for a second, more glamorous, round.
I read a book Almost French by Sarah Turnbull, in which she describes her arrival in Paris, dressed in typical Outback Australian style, and her adventures learning that in Paris, you don’t even leave the apartment in sweatpants to run to the baker because “it might hurt his eyes.”
I remember returning home from life in Germany and thinking “the women here are so COMFORTABLE in their own skin. They wear jeans, even into their 80’s, they go hiking, they go without makeup, and they look happy!” and I wanted that for myself. In my neck of the woods, too much make-up is a big no-no. And too much is anything beyond mascara.
Identity photos in the USA are simply expected to be awful, so no one thinks too much about it, and we all just avoid showing our ID’s if we can help it (maybe that’s why we drive so lawfully, so that we don’t have to show our dismal drivers’ licenses?)
So when I had to have my first residence card done in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t go to a lot of effort. I cleaned up, combed my hair, put on my abaya and scarf around the neck, and went to the local photo guy and got the photo taken. It happened to fall on the day of a significant birthday, you know, one of those with a zero in it. Later that day, when we picked up the photos from the beaming photographer, I looked, and I mentally gasped. The photo looked fabulous.
What to do? I know the law says photos are to be unretouched, but this photo is clearly a little doctored. As any woman would, I decided to just go with the local customs. I even bought a few more enlarged versions to sent to my family. I still grin when I look at that photo. Yes, I even framed one for myself.
Here in Kuwait, I have had to had these photos taken several times, I don’t know why, for several different cards, and then the cards take time and someone loses the photos and I have to have them taken again. There is a very nice man, he takes them and I can get them almost instantly from him. I even got to pick out the one I wanted, and then, he started airbrushing.
“What are you doing??” I exclaimed, as he brushed broad strokes across my face.
“Oh Madam, I am just evening out your makeup a little bit,” he said, as freckles, crow’s feet, shadows, and any blemish totally disappeared. I wasn’t wearing any makeup, only mascara.
Hypocrite and vain as I am, I just rolled with it. It’s another culture, and I know, because I asked, that everyone gets the same treatment, the re-touch, so all the ID photos look pretty good. Mine would draw attention if it weren’t retouched, I tell myself.
Cross Cultural Flummox
Scanning through the blogs yesterday, I saw one I almost didn’t check. It seemed to be a no-brainer. LaialyQ8 asked if you would share your password with your husband/wife.
Sheerly out of idle curiousity, I checked. And I was stunned to see the responses. Almost every person said they WOULD.
I’ve thought about it all day. It has to be a cultural difference. Hands down, I bet most of my friends would say “no way!” It isn’t a question of how much you love someone, to me, I just need some areas of my life that are private. I don’t keep secrets from my husband – I share things with him gladly.
But do I think he needs access to my correspondence with old girlfriends, friends I knew before I knew him? If they confide details of some crisis to me, does he need access to that information?
He trusts me. He should! And he would never, never ask me for my password, and I wouldn’t ask for his. Of course we share passwords for financial records and access, but not for our e-mail accounts.
It never for a heartbeat occurred to me there was another way of thinking about it. I was flummoxed (that’s for you, Zin!) And it is good information; I need to think about this and integrate it and try to understand it. That’s one of the things I love about living in a foreign country; challenges my assumptions and forces me to think differently, outside the box.
The Kuwait Beauty Sisterhood
We love the Kuwait Airport. I love it that you can get a cup of coffee and just sit and wait for your arrivals to make that long long walk as you exit customs and head toward the exit. We love watching the families so excited to see one another. We make up stories for ourselves to explain what we are seeing. Sometimes, we cry, too, because it is so moving. We love it when the women ululate on seeing a new arrival, when brides arrive with their husbands, when Moms come back from Hajj.
A few nights ago, my husband was meeting late arrivals at the airport and he saw something we have NEVER seen before. He saw four women, all with identical bandages over their noses. He figures they must have gone somewhere for plastic surgery. All four at the same time? We figure they must be sisters, or cousins, or very very good friends, all having their noses trimmed at the same time. He said they weren’t at all self-conscious about it, rather they were grinning with pride. I think when there are four of you with the same big bandage, it must take the self-conscious factor WAAAAAYYYYY out.
We’re always laughing at what we call “buying hope in a bottle.” For me, it might be the next luxury face cream that promises me “visible results in 7 days”. For my husband, it is always the next super camera. For some, it is the hot motorcycle, or the next hot car. For some, it is the hottest new computer, or the tiniest, biggest gigabyte iPod with all the bells and whistles. We’re all looking for a little hope. It just gives me a big grin thinking of those four brave girls going under the knife together for better noses.
Still Learning – Alhamdallah
Another Side of Thanksgiving . . .
My friend asked about my father, and when I told her he was slipping away, losing a little more every day, she said “Alhamdallah!”
I was caught up short. Her face was smiling. I had just told her my father is dying and she says “Thanks be to God?”
I know this woman like my own sister. Her daughters are my own daughters. I am welcome in every corner of her house, I pray for every one of her children, and being in her home is like being in my own home, we are all so comfortable together.
“No,” I said, “You’ve misunderstood what I said!” and she hugged me and said “I understood, but no matter what happens, we say ‘alhamdallah’. If you father is dying, we say ‘alhamdallah’. If Hurricane Katrina strikes, we say ‘alhamdallah’. All things come from Allah, and He knows all things. It is his will, so we say ‘alhamdallah’.”
We are both religious women. My faith says the same thing, to give thanks in all things. In my daily life, I sometimes forget. Truly, in my culture, you would never say “thanks be to God” if someone had just told you something very sad.
Being exposed to the Islamic world has complemented my own faith. No, I don’t need to be a Muslim; I think the differences between us are much smaller than the similarities. But truly, I thank God for all that I learn about my own faith by living is Moslem countries.
I love the call to prayer; nothing wrong with being reminded during the day – and night – to love and honor God. I love living among people who give thanks to God so many times a day, even for Hurricane Katrina, even for my failing father. I love watching the fathers and sons headed to the mosque on Fridays. There’s even a very gentle station with Moslem films in English that I watch from time to time because it is so peaceful, and tolerant and sweetly loving.
My friend took time from her very busy life and made a special trip to the bookstore to buy me a book called Don’t Be Sad. It’s a wonderful book by ‘Aaidh ibn Abdullah al-Qarni with chapters like “How to deal with bitter criticism,” “Do Not Carry the Weight of the Globe on Your Shoulders,” Do Not be Shaken by Hardships'” “Jealousy is Not Something New” and one of my favorites – “Do Not Be Sad – Do Good to Others.” This book is helpful to me in so many ways, including giving me good sura that are very similar to writings in our own book. This helps me clarify to others in my culture how alike we are, and how similar our faith is. My friend loves me, and I know she wants only the best for me. I give thanks to have her as a friend.
Every now and then, I come across something that shakes me – like when my friend said “alhamdallah” about my Father . . . but in the end, I learn something and my understanding broadens. Alhamdallah!
Philippa Gregory and Catherine of Aragon
Being sick has one advantage. . . you can catch up on some of your reading. Philippa Gregory is one of my favorite writers of historical fiction.
To my great shame, I have a very difficult time reading history. Unless it is vigorously written, it puts me to sleep. It is particularly embarassing when my husband has a degree in History, and his eyes light up discussing battles and strategems and who said what to whom and why it matters. It has to do with my hard-wiring, it’s not even a gender thing.
So I gravitate toward historical fiction; give me people and motivations and interactions any day, and I can remember it. Sometimes, I even learn something. Philippa Gregory never lets me down. She researches, she documents, and she might speculate, but you always have a clear idea what is real (historically documented) and what is a good story, putting meat on the bones of the history.
Out of sequence, I read The Queen’s Fool and The Other Boleyn Girl. Each of these books is peripheral to the story of Catherine of Aragon. The first features a woman chosen to be a Fool at the court of Queen Mary, Catherine’s daughter. She is of Jewish descent, hiding as a Christian, escaped from the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. She lives in fear of being caught out in her deception. With her father, a printer, she tries to secrete and maintain many of the books of Moorish Spain, the knowledge of the ancients, which the church begins to declare heretical in England. The second book, The Other Boleyn Girl, is about Anne Boleyn, but told from the perspective of her sister, Lady Mary, who was also mistress to Henry, King of England, while he was married to Catherine of Aragon. The Boleyn girls are portrayed as mere pawns in the great game of power in the English court.
So this newest book, The Constant Princess, opens in Spain, as Queen Isabella of Castile, Catherine’s mother, and King Ferdinand of Aragon fight to eliminate the Moors and to unite their lands into one Kingdom. The little girl, whose mother is the chief strategist and who fights in armor alongside her husband, learns battlefield tactics at her parent’s feet and in their camps and learns diplomatic skills in their throne rooms.
We follow Catherine to England, married first to Arthur, then after Arthur’s death, to Henry. She assures them her marriage to Arthur was never consummated, that Arthur was too young, and impotent. Gregory assumes this was a lie. We don’t know. I would guess that it was one of those lies that nobody believes but was convenient to all to pretend to believe, for money, for power, for alliances.
We stand with Catherine as she sends Henry off to fight the French, then leads her own troops up to vanquish the Scots. We agonize with her as she strives to become pregnant, to carry an heir to the throne full term to birth, and as she loses a seemingly perfect baby boy to infant death. We sit with her in stragegic councils, watch her balance the budgets for court and state, and scheme to protect the English borders against all threats. Whew! Being a Queen of England is hard work!
The book ends with Catherine facing the eccliastical trial as her own husband disputes the validity of her marriage to him and seeks to set her aside for his freedom to marry Anne Boleyn.
I don’t review every book I read, but I was captivated by the cross cultural threads in this book, and by the fact that while we all know the basic facts of the story – Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boeyn – Catherine’s history, her talents, her strengths and victories were news to me. The influence of her upbringing in Moorish Spain and the influence it played on her growing understanding of the world is a golden thread woven throughout the story.
Early in her first marriage, the young princess tells her beloved husband of her childhood in Grenada:
” . . . We walk in their gardens, we bathe in their hammams, we step into their scented leather slippers and we live a life that is more refined and more luxurious than they could dream of in Paris or London or Rome. We live graciously. We live, as we have always aspired to do, like Moors. Our fellow Christians herd goats in the mountains, pray at roadside cairns to the Madonna, are terrified by superstition and lousy with disease, live dirty and die young. We learn from Moslem scholars, we are attended by their doctors, study the stars in the sky which they have named, count with their numbers which start at the magical zero, eat of their sweetest fruits and delight in the waters which run through their aquaeducts. Their architecture pleases us: at every turn of every corner we know that we are living inside beauty. . . . We learn their poetry, we laugh at their games, we delight in their gardens in their fruits, we bathe in the waters that have made flow. We are the victors, but they have taught us how to rule. . . .”
I can hardly wait for a trip to Spain!
Lisey’s Story: Stephen King
Mostly I wait for books to come out in paperback, so that they don’t hurt me if I fall asleep while I am reading (!), but for a few authors I will make an exception. One, James Lee Burke, I told you about in a previous post He Had Me From Hello.
My most recent exception was for Lisey’s Story, the newest novel out by Stephen King. It’s a departure from Stephen King as we know him, and yet, there are resonances and echoes of earlier writings. Stephen King is brilliant at capturing the terrors of childhood, and the diaphanously thin membrane separating reality as we know it (not that we agree on what “reality” is! 😉 ) from the “otherworld”. In the Dark Tower series, the otherworld was where all the bad things were created and passed over to this side through leaks, places where the membrane holding worlds apart thinned and even disappeared.
This book is covered with flowers, bright pink and fushia and purple peonies, lupin and daisies, shading into blacks, whites and greys at the top, so that the holleyhocks are only faintly blue. It’s a very odd cover for a Stephen King book, but this is a very odd book. Early reviews say it is about as autobiographical a book by Stephen King as he has ever written, and I believe it. Stephen King writes what he knows – from Misery, written shortly after his nearly fatal accident as he was walking along a road near his Vermont farm and was hit by a van and nearly crippled for life, to this one, Lisey’s Story, in which we spend a lot of time in a dead author’s writing loft in an old barn in – you guessed it – Vermont.
As Lisey’s Story opens, we learn that she is the widow of an author (an author a whole lot like Stephen King) who has made a fortune writing fantasy/horror books. As the book unfolds, we walk with her through her devastating grief, bitter anger, and the endless exhaustion of trying to clear out her husband’s study. Every time she tackles the task, she is distracted by vivid and disturbing memories, memories she has tried to keep deeply buried because of their troubling implications.
King is writing on multiple levels. On one level, it is about a widow coming to terms with the death of her life partner. On another level, it is about a woman who doesn’t know her own strength and who comes to understand more about herself and about her relation to the world, and to her family of sisters. We’re there. We walk with her. If you’ve ever had sisters, you will particularly appreciate King’s treatment of how sisters relate to one another, and how that relationship both stays strong and loyal, and also evolves as sisters become adult people facing adult crises.
Throughout the book are whispers reminding us that the dead are all around us, leaving hints and reminders that their reality, too, is only a thin membrane away from our own.
And, on the most obvious level, King is writing about a boy and the source of his nightmares, the same source of his healing powers, the real life nightmares that haunt us all, and how with bravery and goodness and tools we don’t even know we have, we can triumph over evil.
Stephen King taps into the child within us all. He knows the terrors of our childhood, and he knows that evil gains power from the ability to terrify. Stephen King believes good can triumph over evil – when good people band together, evil can be beaten. In every book, there is a moment when one has to make a choice to stand against evil or be crushed by evil, and while his heroes and heroines are flawed and human – they are good, and they choose to stand against the evil. They may come out scarred and bloody, but they also come out triumphant.
It may not be great literature, but it’s a fine read. Stephen King’s books also are great vocabulary builders. He uses unusual and precise words to paint his word pictures.
Big Diamond and Little Diamond
Today is my last day here, before I leave to go back to Kuwait. This morning, I packed everything except what I am wearing today and tomorrow. I know myself too well. I have to go to one of my favorite stores today to buy my father some soft cotton gardening gloves. I will have to face one last temptation.
No, I did not make it out of the store without buying something for myself. It’s the smell. . . You walk into a hardware store and something in the air gets to you. I love hardware, I love new bathroom ideas (glass block makes me shiver in anticipation) and oh! a new magic tool! A storage solution! Hardwood flooring! New countertop options. . .! New shades of paint! steel wool! Oh! Oh! Oh! The problem is I know I still have a little room in my suitcase. . .Yes, I am a hardware junky.
My sister, Big Diamond, is in town and called me to ask if we could have lunch together with her daughter, Little Diamond. They like Vietnamese food too – I have to have one last portion of Vietnamese salad rolls with shrimp, and a “small” bowl of vegetarian Pho. I picked them up nearby. I know you have a lot of curiousity about me and my family. Here is my sister and her oldest daughter:
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