Art in the mohalla

This is Shacklewell Lane.

On the corner of Shacklewell Lane, London E8, where Kingsland curves into Hackney this advertisement for Boyd Pianos has long remained. Peeling wallpaper from a time past. And then overnight this graffiti/art arrived. I believe it is Fidel Castro who made his first official appearance in four years yesterday, warning of the threat of nuclear war.

The very modern advertisment above is for the Pekünlü mini-market where I often shop.

'An Elegy for Easterly'

Petina Gappah and her debut collection of short stories 'An Elegy for Easterly' deserve a follow-up (see last Sunday's post). It really is quite a wonderful collection. The 13 stories are set (with only one exception) in Zimbabwe - the Zimbabwe of the last two generations, the Zimbabwe of Robert Mugabe. This would not ordinarily draw me to a book; it was in fact the personal connection of having seen Petina speak with such liveliness at a festival that made her, and her book, remain in my mind. There is a lightness of touch, despite the tough, often brutal, tragic, world she shines her light on. The way she crafts these stories is so exquisite - like being kissed by the wind or unearthing woven gossamer. The stories are full of mysteries and secrets, and there is a mishieviousness in the writing as surprises are sprung on us, or on the characters, or as we fumble around in the prose to catch up with the world we have just creaked open the door onto.

There is a profusion of sex and death, the stuff of life. A politician's widow watches on as her husband's coffin is buried empty; a maid is found drowned after being cast pregnant from the house she has served for 2 years, the best nurse-maid they ever had; on the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom Aids is all too evident for all the wedding party to see, and it is in those lips Rosie's own fate is sealed. The people of these pages are in many ways like any other; they love and laugh, and they have as much capacity to endure suffering as inflict it. But they find themselves living in an extraordinary world, where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars and the news is always good news, no matter what. Here we find humour and irony, as well as tragedy.

It was in these characters and in the beauty of the crafting of their stories that I found hope. There is anguish here, yes, but in pages of such fineness of touch and vision and in the characters that lift gracefully from them, I couldn't find myself fully or perpetually crushed. There must be hope, I thought.

"For people who read all the time, reading has a quest to it"

Candia McWilliam - writer & reader, who found herself suddenly struck blind in 2006 whilst judging the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Optimism

This week I have experienced the reignition of my love - nay passion - for books, literature, the word. My desire is to socialise in the worlds I find in pages, with the characters and ideas that dance across them. I am currently with Petina Gappah in 'An Elegy for Easterly', a collection of short stories set in contemporary Zimbabwe. The first two were delicious. I encountered Petina for the first time at the Free the Word Festival at The Globe theatre in March 2009. (At this year's festival I saw Nawal el Sadaawi who I have also been thinking about again - the word "resistance" in the poem below instantly brought her to mind). Petina was one of four upcoming writers at the session titled "International Futures". 'Easterly' as she often refers to it on her blog - and which is a good place to encounter her sparkling personality - was on the eve of being published that week. Six months later it won the Guardian First Book award.

Well so far I am impressed and it is the sort of book that makes me want to write - and read. The cover is beautiful, so I leave you with that; and also the epigraph to the novel. This is a poem called 'Optimism' by American poet Jane Hirshfield. I loved these words. Petina sets them before her unravelling world of resilience against Robert Mugabe's regime. But they are words that speak to us all, and of the world itself since the beginning of Time.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the
. . . . . . sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked
. . . . . . on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs - all this resinous, unretractable
. . . . . . earth.

Jane Hirshfield, 'Optimism'