novel

The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 2

Yes, I knew Robert Mugabe. I wrote to him in the bush.

I made a small contribution to the arming.

He thanked me on his election.

I went there to teach and to make theatre. I saw the body bags go by my house and my son’s nursery school.

However you spell it.

I heard the night screams.

I left with regret, powerless.

I saw something begin.

I saw only the wrong things continue.

At first, Robert could write pragmatically and could conceal the sectarian.

Isn’t it time to read The Bush of Ghosts?

But I did not make the revolution.

Nor did he.

There was hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKfwIJSp7bc

A lot of it was made by children who I later had to teach a truer history. First, I had to teach it to myself.

It was a pleasure.

The decline, the sectarianism, the racism that developed, was so obvious. The pedantic cultural nationalism, the scams for thugs and murderers. The deliberate deceptions and populist rants to appeal to the lowest.

Does it need to be MCMXLV forever?

I have tried with many others to support a change. I went back a few times to try a few things. I have tried to support the celebratory and glorious resistance literature that Robert hasn’t.

So Canadian.

Probably like you, I thought things were of cosmic and universal significance and of personal reference to me, my narrative, destiny and self, in completely banal events, as the latest number one.

You and I were thinking like Robert.

As I became antiques, I found, as a matter of fact, obvious truth and common sense; that I was wrong about everything important: love, family, significant persons, art, and common sense.

It doesn’t help that I wasn’t the first.

Like Robert.

We’re all on the carpet now.

Now, I am in the best shape ever, I am as sharp as a wasp nest attack, I am as funny as a dancing baby camel on being set free in the yellow desert.

A tragic-comedy.

Transcultural adventure novels, on the other hand, are game parks. They are managed by transcultural guards, hired from local communities of readers and trained in literary weaponry. Transcultural literary novels resemble modern diplomatic processes.

They seek to create results similar to those sought by applied neuroscience.

They do not have a familiar structure.

They do not seek closure.

Transcultures themselves lack classic architecture. They attempt to lead their readers outside of patterns of thinking and preconceptions.

Mopane Worms, Anyone? There’s lots here for all.

They bring fluidity to genres and instability to characters. They require co-creation with their readers.

Call that trust.

ARE YOU IN?

Pale light.

Like pain.

Now the rain.

Grotesques: Part 2

The writer is decomposing. You can view the initial decomposition here.

I ran outside with my reeled tape recorder to get the instance of the deluge to send to my sister far away in Ontario.

She was beginning her slow death from disease that meant she would never travel.

It was to remind her of leaving the house as I did as a summer storm came across the lake.

We sat on the hood of my car and talked of our future.

The thing is, people are going through cultures.

They travel from one in transition to another.

In this form of architecture, culture is not in statements.

This is not a statement.

Barbaros
It is in the flash of an eye between them.

I am haunted by Africa.

Andros

The cultural nationalists, the ones who are burning down schools, are not going to end up with the rebirth of a tradition.

They will make a tradition.

I was hired to build those schools. I built a mosque instead. Eventually, they burnt that, too.

anoitos

The ideologues among the oppressed or even their representatives are not going to make new women and men in a work of art.

They are, however, expressing a transcultural encounter.

For example, when I wore a literary mask, I was bullied into defining and redefining the obvious over and over again without qualification:

I should have moved to Switzerland.

race, gender, ideology, the cultural nationalist industry that evolved from the unequal development of oppressive globalization and the mirror development of, for example, the novel on different continents and in different cultures, needs to protect its product.

We would do well to say these things.

The aspirant tribunes of the people need to protect their publications and jobs. For this, they need to create people.

Marx should have mentioned that.

Identity is the product.

Identity is the subject.

Identity is the object.

It is all they can think of.

It won’t help to blame Hitchcock.

People!

Grotesques: Part 1

I have frightened my peers.

Yes, I am starring in Dante’s Inferno now. Here I am demonstrating the first rule of the transculture: taking off my self and lugging it around like a garden Buddha. A Moai on Rapa Nui would do just as well.

There is no certain knowledge to which I may return.

I lectured about transcultural observation in Prague, Lisbon, Swaziland and even at Oxford. I wrote a novel particularly to illustrate it. It did.

Will the Real Richard Rathwell please stand up.

Especially the writing of it. The book is hitting the streets any day now.

It’s a visual work, designed to read itself to you. Language is just another of its visual effects. In return, its images are sound.

I became a fable.

At Oxford, they failed to see this pose as a novel. I guess they mistook this narrative for the gravestone of Robert Graves, who trained Nassar to read, well, Robert Graves. The Egyptians have revolted ever since. I thought they’d get the reference. Instead, John le Carré got credit for the plot in The Night Manager. Good on him.

In this package, I was bullied, as if I were a proverbial ass. Then I was expelled from my PhD course, because transculture wasn’t based on gender, class or race interpretation of cultural phenomena. ‘O.K.’, I said, that too, but also this.

I joined the police in Nice to prove it to you. You’re welcome.

Torn out of that package, I learned that the politics of culture, like sex, resemble the politics of my own memory.

I was still trying to figure out which is the memory of my years as a chicken in the colonies and which one is remembering, then I forgot why it might matter. They don’t respond to close invocation.

When I was more distant, I was in Nigeria, at the foot of the mountains near the Cameroon border. The mountain was aflame from the fires of “those people.” The school was still smoking from the fires of the first fundamentalists.

That’s when I realized that we needed a new culture, and a new literature. Even John le Carré is dead. Come on.

It was a new world. I was a teacher of women teachers. None were fundamental. Some were Madonna-like, demanding purdah, second wives, some were fifteen-year-old liars in too-tight uniforms, who had to be kept from the fences at midnight when the gowned boys came to howl and the old men in government Peugeots with offers.

Here I am at the first day of creation.

The rain was coming in a wall across the horizon then. Dust cast before it in billows reddening skies.

These are my memoirs of the transculture.

It is time to prevent men from becoming books and books from becoming men.