Suffering witches and Arabian nightmares

This in a recent NYT tragic news item titled African Crucible: Cast as Witches, Then Cast Out brought to mind a book I read years ago. But first, the true story. It takes place in the Congo and is about children being accused of witchcraft and either killed or cast out from their families. The accusations tend to come from within the families and sometimes arise out of the unexpected death of a sibling. In other cases, this explanation is used by people wanting to lessen the everyday household load. Whether honestly or dishonestly thrown, the children end up on the street or dead. Years earlier a similar story came out of Tanzania but with old women rather than children being targeted.

The following picture I found on richardooling.com, the site of author Richard Dooling who wrote White Man’s Grave, one of the most surprising books I’ve ever read. Surprising in that it caused that most rare of things, a schism in my sense of reality.

A young man goes to Sierra Leone to try to find a missing peace corps worker, encounters the local belief systems, at first dismisses them, then finds them intriguing and finally finds them threatening. The book starts with the idea that these things (witchcraft) affect those who believe in them only and moves on to find the opposite is true. That someone can be possessed and controlled without their direct knowledge of it. It also plays with the idea that this witchcraft is exportable beyond the domestic dark places.

For a more benevolent (and also not) African witch story Ben Okri’s Booker prize winning Famished Road is quite an achievement. For those of us who love magic realism, here is a unique variant, a rural world where the dead walk among the living and problems are often solved only by negotiating with the dead. Beautifully written and utterly engrossing.

Okri has described his gift as arising from his Nigerian background where everyone told stories and the novel does seem to have that sense of integrity in that it seems to reflect rather than escape its culture. In this interview though he has something to say about the internationalism of literature:

I think Ben Okri is a writer who works very hard to sing from all the things that affect him. I don’t know if he’s an African writer, a British writer. I never think of myself in terms of any classification.

Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens’ characters are Nigerians. Do you see what I mean? Literature may come from a specific place but it always lives in its own unique kingdom.

That was a bit of a diversion from the theme of books that shook me up. The other one that comes to mind is Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nightmare. A longtime Arabist, Irwin was able to create an internally consistent picture of a very different culture. What jolted me though was his motif of the “arabian nightmare” This was the most horrible of dreams, of drowning in blood, with no recollection upon awakening. The horror came from the fact that the dreamer would unknowingly fall asleep only to find themselves in the same hell night after night.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• The African Novel
• Harry Potter vs. The Christians (ex parte The Devil)
• Buffy… Christina Aguilera… Witches?