Back to Aceh

In the days preceding her death, Therese Marie Schiavo became a daily headline her countrymen and women woke up to and felt compelled to tra...

In the days preceding her death, Therese Marie Schiavo became a daily headline her countrymen and women woke up to and felt compelled to track through the day. She was the wan and unseeing woman in the video insistently replayed on networks around the world. Amidst the frenzy, the feverish latching on to every and any piece of Terri8217;s story, it was as mediaperson Tina Brown wrote in the Washington Post: 8216;8216;The earthquake off Indonesia this week was like the sudden recriminating cry of the tsunami victims who lost our interest: 8216;Remember me. I8217;m still here8217;.8217;8217;

But some had returned to the site of devastation without the prompting. To see how Asia was faring, three months after the tsunami. Time, for instance, found that a semblance of normality was settling back in but difficult problems remained.

The problem is not the lack of money8212;there8217;s too much of it in fact. It flows from the fact that unlike in past natural disasters, the single largest share8212;roughly a quarter8212;comes from private donors. Private donors are more exacting about where their money goes and how it8217;s spent. The problem is, said Time, 8216;8216;corruption, or, rather the potential for it8217;8217;.

This is amplified in the moment when relief gives way to rebuilding. Particularly in a country with as unhappy a record on corruption as Indonesia, and in the construction industry that teems with kickbacks. Aid agencies may be dealing with this problem by by-passing local and central government officials. This creates tension. A few days ago, the government in Jakarta insisted that the UNHCR leave Aceh even though the organisation protested that it still had about 33 million to spend on building new houses.

The kid stuff

Last week, the Guardian hosted a debate on whether women writers are 8216;8216;dull, depressed and domestic8217;8217;. It all began with the introduction to a prestigious collection of new writing in which authors Toby Litt and Ali Smith wrote: 8216;8216;On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking8212;as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell8217;8217;.

Litt and Smith protested that their remarks were blown out of context. But the furore raged on, nevertheless. What about George Elliot, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters? And the works of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Woolf8212;who says domestic is dull? There were indignant reiterations of the excitements of the domestic.

Some seized the opportunity to restate their objections to the very idea of a separate Women8217;s Writing. Others though, wondered whether Litt and Smith may have put a finger on something after all. 8216;8216;Women writers have yet to develop that sense of entitlement that many male authors possess: The right to exercise the power of their imaginations to the utmost,8217;8217; wrote writer Yvonne Roberts, in the debate that billowed through last week.

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This week, another article in the Guardian made an announcement less contentious: We8217;re in a Golden Age and we don8217;t know it, wrote Dina Rabinovitch. This is an extraordinary era in children8217;s literature, that 8216;8216;goes way beyond the fact that grown-ups read Harry Potter on the tube8217;8217;. Suddenly, children8217;s fiction has a dazzling array of talent on board and a horde of others clamouring to climb on.

It happens in certain moments, marvelled Rabinovitch, that one literary form comes to dominate and all the other artists are attracted to the dominant form.

Remembering Marechera

As the country Robert Mugabe has ruled for 25 years voted, amid the unbearable hopes for change, writer Brian Chikwava turned for answers to the work of another writer. In the Guardian, Chikwava, winner of the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing, revisited the legacy of Dambudzo Marechera, Zimbabwean writer and poet, who died in 1987 aged 35.

Marechera8217;s work refused to either submit to or aspire to the ideal of 8216;8216;an African grand narrative,8217;8217; wrote Chikwava. 8216;8216;Instead of a grand public voice articulating an African reality, he chose a private, often anarchic, voice that magnified his personal experience and ideas8230;8217;8217;. This went against the diktat of his time8212;that all African thought must necessarily be drafted into the post-colonial project to create the authentic African Perspective8212;a single and irrefutable African Reality.

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Marechera8217;s individualism was disdained in his time. And in this disdain, suggested Chikwava, lies an explanation of Africa8217;s contemporary malaise. 8216;8216;Today the African8217;s reality is in the safe ownership of governments, perhaps nowhere more so than in Zimbabwe, where the individual has been squeezed out by an obsession to force the 8216;African experience8217; into the liberation movement8217;s interpretation of what this should be8217;8217;.