The Leaflet presents to you a curated list of books from 2023, perhaps for 2024. Happy reading!
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Read Part 2 here.
A review of books read and enjoyed in the previous year is a nod to what books can do. Broaden the imagination, help one cope with difficult circumstances with humour, provide a new lens to view an old problem and give one a sense of continuity with a distant past.
Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.
They can also reverse a Gramscian dictum and be about cultivating the ‘optimism of the intellect’.
Here is a list of 2023, perhaps for 2024.
Seven moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka
This book is a fictional coming to terms with the modern Sri Lankan history of disappearances, murder and civil war told by Maali Almeida, a young queer man who worked as a war photographer and was killed.
As a war photographer, Maali documented the atrocities perpetrated by some of the senior politicians during the 1983 killings.
After his death, as a ghost, Maali tries to find out why he was killed and seeks to intervene to prevent the killing of people who are still alive and whom he loves.
Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.
He now inhabits the world of spirits which are “perched on graves”, “hover behind mourners” and “occupy the trees and the railings”. They “lurch like the damned, with eyes of every shade and a talcum hue to their peeling skin”.
The killings by the Sri Lankan State as well as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) (the LTTE took out Dr Raneee Sridharran, the government took out Richard de Zoysa and JVP took out Vijaya Kumaratunga) mean there are many funerals and the funerals are “attended by a throng of spirits” as “ghosts love funerals more than humans love weddings”.
The tragic history of Sri Lanka emerges through the journey of the ghost of Maali Almeida. The ghost of Maali remembers “drinking at the bar”, the last night before he was killed, but has no memory of “being thrown to his death”. Maali wants to find out how he was killed and who killed him as he is motivated by the belief that “forgetting cures nothing. Wrongs must be remembered. Or your murderers will roam free. And you will know no peace.”
What is it like being a ghost? For Maali, “being a ghost isn’t that different from being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror”. Being a ghost means that you have feelings and thoughts but no ability to act. Your power lies in “whispering in other people’s ears” and hoping that they act.
Shehan Karunatilaka approaches the dark history of his country with humour and imagination and gets us to think about how in Milan Kundera’s words, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.
Oh, by the way, Milan Kundera passed away on July 11 this year.
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians And Their Battle For The Future, Ian Johnson
This book derives its title from a magazine started by young people from China which sought to bring attention to the failures of the Communist Party in the 1950s, especially the great famine which resulted in millions of deaths.
They started a magazine called Spark, which derived from the Chinese proverb made popular by Mao Zedong, that ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’. After the first issue of the magazine was released, all those involved were arrested and sentenced to long years in imprisonment for being members of a ‘Rightist counterrevolutionary clique’.
The story of the courageous group which started Spark would have disappeared without a trace, if not for the convicted having access to their case records on release.
Some of those involved were executed in prison during the next campaign by the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. The poet Lin Zhao survived both the anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution and was released but re-arrested later. She wrote in prison using pen and ink and when she was denied writing implements, she wrote with her blood on her clothing.
The story of the courageous group which started Spark would have disappeared without a trace, if not for the convicted having access to their case records on release.
One of them, Tan Chanxue, who was part of the magazine’s founding and spent fourteen years in labour camps, found that in her file were the issues of Spark as well as confessions under torture and love letters between two of the founders. She copied it out and used it to write her memoirs. So did other family members.
An underground filmmaker Hu Jie interviewed most survivors and made the film Sparks. Parts of Lin Zhao’s file including, “ink copies of her blood letters home”.
Lin Zhao’s grave has become, “one of the most visited pilgrimage sites for China’s human rights activists”, with the area being locked down on the “anniversary of her death”. Her grave is constantly monitored by “closed circuit TV”.
Lin Zhao herself has become an iconic representation of the ideal of freedom and rights lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, christened her, “a martyred saint, a prophet and a poet with an ecstatic soul, the Prometheus of a free China”.
Ian Johnson archives such stories of a search for a freer China right from the very founding of the Communist Party. China is not the totalitarian black box it is made out to be, but rather, resistance is very much part of its history.
Retelling the story of those who founded the Spark is not an example of ‘stored memory’ but ‘functional memory’ when the collective memory becomes a way to talk about the contemporary moment, be it the protests against the hard lockdown during Covid or any other moment of resistance.
Sparks is a documentation about the tribe of China’s underground historians, “counter historians, journalists and filmmakers”, those who seek to build a collective memory of realities that the Communist party would rather bury.
From these narratives, Johnson concludes that, “people still resist”, “independent thought lives in China” and one should not fall prey to the “banal” point that, “an authoritarian regime is authoritarian”.
The sources of inspiration for China’s dissenters are both Chinese literature as well as the heroes in China who have resisted in very difficult circumstances.
What serves as a frame for the entire book is the quotation from Hannah Arendt’s book, Men In Dark Times, which serves as an inspiration for journalist Jiang Xue’s work as a counter-historian.
Arendt profiles the lives of figures during the Nazi holocaust who kept alive the flame of thought and action figures such as Bertol Brecht and Walter Benjamin.
Arendt profiles the lives of figures during the Nazi holocaust who kept alive the flame of thought and action figures such as Bertol Brecht and Walter Benjamin.
As Arendt puts it “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on Earth.”
Whether the illumination is the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun, only the future will tell.
Johnson concludes that for China’s underground historians, Arendt’s quote is “apt because it is open-ended”. One does not know in which way the future will end, but what is clear is that “in dark times, light is precious; it always matters”.
Read Part 2 here.
