Under the skin

Dan gave me this little metal bird for Christmas. My mother commented that she found it strange that we still gave each other African things. Well, it is in fact a robin, THE English bird, and Dan bought it at a Victorian market in Gloucester. But actually, it is a "junk metal" bird just like the ones sold in Zimbabwe and Uganda.

To me, it is not strange though. Even though we have been back two and a half years, and the memories don't pop up anything like as often as they did at first, still feeling for our homes and lives in Zambia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Uganda are just beneath the surface and our roots there go deep.

I still can't get away from reading books set in African countries. I only read "Heart of Darkness" because it is set in Congo, and now I am, very appropriately, in the middle of "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz" - which is Michela Wrong's account of the fall of Mobutu and the beleagured history of Congo. Reading stories and descriptions of Africa makes me feel like I am glimpsing a very loved home - even if the events described are sad or terrible.

Sometimes a nostalgia or a pang will come out of the blue and stop me in my tracks.  The potted Christmas poinsettia on our kitchen table still reminds me of whole enormous poinsettia trees in our gardens in Africa. And today  when I walked into the supermarket, there was a display of potted jasmine plants. Seeing the pointy white buds in their distinctive sprays, about to open out into the most fragrant blossoms imaginable, made my heart suddenly clench - we had a hedge of jasmine in our garden in Harare, and its beauty and pungent scent accompanied the happy early years of our marriage and the births of our babies - as well as the difficult months before we left Zimbabwe.

Out of the blue.

Heart of Darkness

So many words have been written about this book over the years. But I have only just read it, so my thoughts are fresh - to me - , if not new. Having recently read the dystopian MaddAddam,one  of my reactions reading this was, it is not as graphic as the same book written today would be. The evil is hinted at, the suffering of the Africans forced to work for the colonialists is only sketched in. But in my view the horror is all the darker for that.

One way of thinking about the book is that it depicts a man's journey into his own soul, by journeying towards, first physically and then in understanding, another man, Mr Kurtz. And the ultimate revelation is that what lies within a person is "the horror, the horror"... The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke out against Conrad and this book, criticising it at one point for using Africa and the exploitation and suffering of Africans, as a mere backdrop for the story of the mental collapse of a petty white man. It is true that the Congolese people are kept very much in the background, their behaviour seems parodied, they appear out of the forest on the river banks almost as a wallpaper for the journey. And they are called savages and so on. There is some truth in Achebe's criticism. But on the other hand, I wouldn't say this is the story of the collapse of one white man - it is a description of the collapse into madness, futility, and evil, of all the white people involved - and Conrad does seem to link this to the whole evil of colonialism and the wickedness of using its people, stealing from them, stripping the Congo of its resources using the very sweat and blood of the Congolese people to do it. It is really the story of the fall into evil of the whole human race. But the Congolese people are not being blamed, they are the victims, and so they do appear as the props. And clearly Conrad didn't have much understanding of them.

It is true the Congolese people in the book are dehumanised, except for one or two glimpses of genuine interaction - such as at the helmsman's very moment of death - and that is sad, and leaves the book feeling dated. I felt the same reading Graham Green's The Heart of the Matter, where there are no African people included in the story at all. But Conrad was writing at the end of the colonial period and he was writing to show the evils of the colonial enterprise, not condoning it. He objects manifestly to the ignorance and self-seeking greed of the various agents and station managers his character Marlow encounters. He seems to prefer Kurtz's complete madness to their hypocrisy and stupidity, which is why Marlow sides with Kurtz in the end. I would see the book as a step in the right direction, a first awakening to what was going on in the "Scramble for Africa".

Conrad ends the book with the none-too-subtle message that the heart of darkness is not in far off "uncivilised" places, but just around the next bend of the river,  - for all of us.

This made me wonder about our capacity for evil, again. As Christians we know the source of light, and He is real to us. And I said in my recent post on this, that we have the responsibility of being that light to other people. But still sometimes I am touched by fingers of that darkness, that sense of horror at the heart of it all, even hints of despair. When the evil that goes on seems too much, too prevalent. When the news shows young blood-covered Syrian men lying in hospital, no living relatives left, no solution to the fighting, the beautiful Syrian cities shot and bombed to rubble. When fighting in south Sudan goes on, and on. When the flood waters damaging our farms, homes and churches sit and sit and sit, and it still rains and rains. When I then think of Bangladesh flooding worse than this every year...

Is the human race a messy, selfish disaster, and our world a ruined, warming planet heading inevitably to its man-made end?

That would be one way of looking at it.

Another way is that God made our world, and made us, male and female, in his image. When he made it, it was all good (Genesis 1). When we messed up, he sent his son to show us the right way to go about life (John 3:16). And at the same time, to give us a way to be saved from our own personal particular sins. And he also sent his Spirit to be in us, to give us the strength and ability to live right. And he also promises that he will return to reign on earth, and that then the evil and all the pain will be No More. This painful, sometimes dark time, is the grace period God has allowed us, for as many as possible to get to know him. Also, the world is not hurtling downward to disaster and ruin like a run-away train. It may be heading towards its end, but, only at the pace and timing allowed by God, and under his control.

That gives me a lot of hope to hold onto. And we do need hope.

Twelve Years, MaddAddam, Romans

We went to see Twelve Years a Slave, expecting not to enjoy it but knowing it was an amazingly well-told and moving story. Two things affected me the most: the cruelty of people to their own fellow human beings, and the strength of the will to live, partly through the ability to cling to a tiny shred of hope. Before we even see the way the plantation owners use and dehumanise the slaves, we see how two profiteers blatantly befriend and entrap a happy, normal family man and musician (the main character), and sell him to slavers, in full knowledge of what they are doing to him. What makes people able to misuse each other so baldly?

While I do sometimes feel like punching somebody (not saying who...!) out of anger or frustration, I'm not sure I could actually cause physical harm to another person cold-bloodedly, for my own gain. But we hear about this kind of cruelty and misuse of others all the time - young girls being trafficked, women held captive and raped for years on end in a suburban house, drugs cynically sold to teenagers, etc etc etc.

(But, what about the harm I cause others without seeing it? As when I buy a cheap T-shirt which was made by a child-labourer somewhere? Just because we don't see the effects of our actions doesn't mean they don't have that effect. I worry about that.)

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, the third part of her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy. (The first book was Oryx and Crake, the second The Year of the Flood.) As with the film, this was an uncomfortable read, but giving some enlightenment. It is set in a dystopian future, where the human race has been almost entirely wiped out, through a drug hidden in a pleasure-pill called "Blyssplus". In this future world, people have become obsessed with leisure, self-image, and gain, and society is controlled by corporations who are developing more and more extreme ways of using technology to make money. Consumerism gone completely mad. For example, Paintball has become Painball where people literally fight to the death, watched online by any who want to. Corporations kidnap their rivals' employees and strip their brains of the information, rendering them brain dead. The depths of cruelty and cynicism in this world are phenomenal. But much of what the author imagines, has been done, or is now possible to do, and actually, the cruelty we see in our entire human history is only being projected into a more technologically able future.

Margaret Atwood does give a glimmer of hope, in that a very small group of humans survive, along with some human hybrids made by one of the corporation geniuses. The survivors are mostly former members of a quirky religious cult called The God's Gardeners. Whilst they are not really Christians, their religion is a hotch-potch of Christianity, Judaism, and conservationism. What I like is that it is the people of faith who still love the natural world and try to conserve it, who do recycling, grow their own food, avoid harming others. And they are the ones who survive, mostly (not taking the Blyssplus) and who know how to make a go of living in community, and without electricity or supermarkets. (By the end of the trilogy they are actually still using commodities raided from the falling-down malls. But there are some hints about them learning to make their own ink and paper for when those things run out.)

It is not as simplistic as I have made out here, the characters are complex and among the God's Gardeners there is all the nominalism, doubt and division that we see in our churches. I think it is the understanding of the deep-seatedness of faith in God, the wisdom of living his way, and as part of that, a hope for creation and a mandate to love it, that I really warm to.

Thinking about the cynicism and greed in our society, the terrible things that people do to each other in war or for financial gain, can make me pretty depressed, and sad in general for the world, and for God who must feel so let down, so disappointed. But reading the biblical book of Romans in our home group, I have been reminded that evil is nothing new, God knows and has always known what his people are capable of. And he is light. The light of goodness and love does shine, although sometimes it feels very small. But, it won't be overwhelmed. The hope we have is that evil practices will end, and that there will be justice, that God does reign. In the meantime, we have to hold on to the hope, not get too sad, and more importantly, keep doing our bits of goodness and kindness, being that light to others.