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(More than) five facts: Majok Tulba
Majok Tulba was born in Sudan and lives in Western Sydney with his wife and children. His debut novel is Beneath the Darkening Sky (read my review). Tulba is CEO of the charity SudanCare, made a film that was a finalist at Tropfest, and has been a recipient of the NSW Premier’s CAL Literary Centre Fellowship.
Facts:
My favourite place in the world is my village, because of the memories and the beauty of the sky and the smell of the fresh air.
I’m currently reading Six Months in Sudan by Dr James Maskalyk.
The best thing about being a writer is sharing my ideas and stories with others.
When I was a child I wanted to be a storyteller, but no one makes any money by telling stories in the village. So I wanted to be a cattle keeper.
My favourite cocktail is American champagne—Coca cola.
My favourite artwork is a photograph by Kevin Carter showing a vulture and a child in Sudan. Because it captures the enormous tragedy of so much loss of life there. It’s haunting.
When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I take a walk to a park or grab my saucepan and make myself a BBQ.
The first thing I ever wrote was a recount about a lion attack in Sudan when I was sixteen. It had a great influence on me, because I realised I could tell a story and entertain people.
I hope that in/by reading my work, people will learn the power of courage and human spirit.
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Majok Tulba will be discussing The Other Africa with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Uzodinma Iweala, Sefi Atta, and Arnold Zable on Friday 24 August at 2:30 pm, and will be reading from his work in The Morning Read session on Saturday 25 August at 10:00 am.
Book review: Beneath the Darkening Sky by Majok Tulba
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
9781926428420
July 2012
It’s taken me a little while to get over Majok Tulba’s unflinching novel about a young boy kidnapped by rebels and forced to become a soldier. On the cusp of adolescence Obinna is forced to witness unimaginable horrors, from murder to rape, starvation, and children being blown up by landmines.
Obinna, whose (first) nickname is Baboon, dares to continue dreaming, remembering, and questioning. But the rebels continue to break him, to beat him down. My heart ached. Sometimes I had to put the book down, to walk away.
But Majok Tulba manages to extract some beauty from this horror. How does he do it? Maybe it’s because the love of his own South Sudanese village is so strong. Tulba imagines, in this novel, what would have happened had he been tall enough to have been recruited. Tulba came to Australia when he was 16, and it’ll be amazing to hear him speak about Beneath the Darkening Sky at the festival, about the choices he made in the novel: what to show, who to focus on.
The dream sequences often centre around Obinna’s lost village and the people in it (many also gone). For the reader, the dreams are welcome relief from the horror, but they are not entirely full of hope—they are sweet but often twisted. In an early dream sequence, the villagers, including Obinna’s mother and father, sing and clap around the bonfire. No one dances except his friend Pina:
Pina jumps and spins, turning her body sideways as she flies. Her dance is frantic. Pina moves faster than I thought anyone could.
Even though everyone is smiling, a bad feeling cramps up my stomach. Like I’m watching a car engine rattling, until it explodes. My village, singing for Pina’s crazy dance, looks like it’s shaking, about to erupt. Everything is about to fall apart.
Tulba’s prose is striking. Obinna’s voice is strong—he deals with much of the horror, at least for a time, through the heartbreakingly innocent eyes of a child. When he first sees a woman beaten, for example, he thinks: ‘Maybe she’s sleeping.’ The first time he witnesses a boy being killed by a landmine, which happens almost in slow motion for the reader, he notes: ‘Landmines don’t kill you, they eat you.’ There are some incredibly memorable lines.
Looking at my notes now I realise, in my memory, I have transposed the dream before the ending for the actual ending. There’s just so much you don’t want to happen, but it does. It must, for this story to be so powerful. While reading the book, I thought it would give me nightmares, but instead I dreamt of children dancing. Like Obinna, I dreamt of something that was a life buoy, keeping hope afloat.
This book is devastating, but it isn’t relentless. And it is important. One reason it is important (among many) is that it reminds you that the person sitting next to you on the tram, standing by you on the street, sitting at the bar—whether a refugee or not—could have endured horrors you couldn’t even fathom. It’s a reminder of the importance of kindness, of generosity, of listening, in a world that can be both spectacularly beautiful and overwhelmingly cruel.
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Majok Tulba will be discussing The Other Africa with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Uzodinma Iweala, Sefi Atta, and Arnold Zable on Friday 24 August at 2:30 pm, and will be reading from his work in The Morning Read session on Saturday 25 August at 10:00 am.
Five facts: Sloane Crosley
Sloane Crosley is an international guest of the 2012 Melbourne Writers Festival, joining us from New York. She is the author of the personal, funny essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. Her essays, interviews and criticism have appeared in countless publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Elle, Glamour, Vogue, GQ,and Esquire.
Five facts:
One of my favourite authors is Nora Ephron. I miss her already.
My favourite cocktail is bourbon and ginger ale, and I like it neat/all the time.
The best thing about being a writer is that you’re expected to focus on the awkward and telling details of other people. It’s not rudeness, it’s research.
When I was a child I wanted to be an archaeologist
My greatest ambition is to give as much as I receive.
Catch Sloane Crosley reading from her work at The Morning Read session on Saturday 25 August. She’ll be talking about reading with Drusilla Modjeska, Antoni Jach and Sir Andrew Motion later that afternoon. She’ll be exchanging some Friendly Fire with Marieke Hardy, Benjamin Law and Estelle Tang also on Saturday the 25th, and on Sunday 26 August she’ll be joining an excellent cast for some New York Stories.
Five facts: Sefi Atta
Sefi Atta is an international guest of the 2012 Melbourne Writers Festival. She is the author of Everything Good Will Come, Swallow, News from Home and A Bit of Difference. She is also an award-winning short fiction writer and playwright. Sefi was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2004, she was awarded PEN International’s David TK Wong Prize; in 2006, the Wole Soyinka Prize for Publishing in Africa, and in 2009, the NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa. She currently lives in Mississippi.
Five facts:
I’m currently reading No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer.
When I was a child I wanted to be a playwright.
The first thing I ever wrote was a play.
Last night I dreamt I could scat like Ella.
My favourite cocktail is a mojito, and I like it in Miami.
Sefi Atta will be appearing on the panel The Other Africa, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Uzodinma Iweala, Majok Tulba and Arnold Zable on Friday 24 August. She will be launching her book A Bit of Difference on Saturday 25 August, and will be be reading from her work at The Morning Read session on Sunday 26 August.
Writing & playing Dickens: Q&A with Simon Callow
Simon Callow is an actor, writer and this year’s festival keynote speaker. At the festival he’ll be talking about the great storyteller Charles Dickens, the subject of his latest book Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World (Australian title: Dickens). I asked him a few questions about his work…
You’ve not only played Dickens’ characters, but you’ve played Dickens himself. Was this part of the reason you became interested in writing about him?
The whole reason. I felt very close to him. I wanted to tell the world about this wonderful person that I had come to know. It was as if he was my best friend, or my brother.
You’re well known as an actor, but you’re also a musician, theatre director, and have written several books, including Being an Actor, Love is Where it Falls, and biographies of Orson Welles and Charles Laughton. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process and how it fits into your busy creative life?
In a way, the work on the biographies is not unlike the work one does in preparing a role. I try to figure out what it was like to be him, and what it was like to be around him. In addition, I have to account for his life—why did he and it turn out the way it did? Which is also true of playing a character.
What is your favourite Dickens’ work? Has that changed since you began writing the book?
My first, which was also his first, The Pickwick Papers. I love its freewheeling, 18th century quality, the vastness of the canvas, the profusion of sublime comic characters, and above all, Samuel Pickwick, Esq., one of the few utterly credible decent human beings in literature. And, no, much as I love Bleak House, Drood and Dombey, my loyalty to Pickwick has remained constant.
Many people encounter Dickens today via the screen. I’m interested to know if you think (as an actor and director) that anything is lost if the works are only in adaptation (or intertextually). Or can a good adaptation be as good—or even better—than reading the novel?
Never. But it can be a good thing in its own right. The problem with most Dickens adaptations is that they treat him as an essentially realistic writer, ignoring the fantastical, surreal element. This applies not simply to the physical productions (film or stage) or the adaptations themselves, but to the acting. Dickens requires a kind of comic-expressionist style. Many—most—of his characters are grotesques, gargoyles. Something pre-Shakespearean—Chaucerian, in fact—about them. Dickens is a carnival writer. It’s worth remembering, too, that one of the most profound influences on his writing was The Arabian Nights. The sense of Fairy Tale is never far from his work, and that should inform and inspire the acting of his characters.
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Click here to find out more about Simon Callow’s MWF events.
Happy (reading) trails
I’ve been hovering at the edges of the MWF team for a few years now, sitting on the programming committee (and yes, it’s as fun as it sounds). So, it’s great to become an official staffer this year, as the festival’s social media manager and an itinerant blogger.
What can you expect from me as a blogger? Well, my interests are pretty broad – when I’m not reading for work (which includes roles as books editor at The Big Issue, a regular reviewer for The Age and other outlets, and associate editor of Kill Your Darlings) I tend to follow reading trails. You know, where one book somehow leads to another, and an element of that leads to the next, and so on. In the past, those trails have varied from a thing for comic writing (Sloane Crosley, David Sedaris, Adam Gopnik, Michaela McGuire) to a series of Palestinian memoirs (sparked by Ghada Karmi’s amazing In Search of Fatima), to reading all the backlist of a recently discovered fiction author.
Ten years ago, when I was newly emerged from at-home motherhood and combining working in a bookshop with a university degree in media and politics, my trail was mostly political. I spent my first month of the job reading books on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, a subject that seemed to just be coming to the public consciousness. (Though, of course, it may just have been me who was new to it.)
Then, just a month into my new job, on September 11 2001, the World Trade Centre was attacked. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know about the situation in Afghanistan, a place most of us hadn’t much thought about, about this mysterious group called the Taliban that were behind the attacks; and the religion of Islam. My job was in the special orders department of my bookshop and I spent my days mostly tracking obscure books on these subjects, for customers hungry for information about what was going on in the world. I was drawn in, too.
Unsurprisingly, this year, on the eve of the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 World Trade Centre attacks, the festival will be exploring the aftermath of these events, as well as reflecting on the circumstances that led up to them. I suspect I’m about to pick up an old reading trail, or at least follow it through the festival’s discussions.
Maybe there’s something in the ten-year cycle, because another key strand of the festival’s political programming this year will be immigration. I guess it’s a subject that’s never gone away, though it seems to have re-emerged as a political hot potato and urgent topic for public conversation right now, with the Gillard government’s Malaysia ‘solution’, following the failure of the East Timor ‘solution’.
It’s another trail I’ve picked up again this week, reading Maria Tumarkin’s beautifully insightful essay in the current Meanjin, on the failure of our collective moral imagination when it comes to Australian attitudes towards refugees. She suggests – with reference to the hugely popular memoirs of Ahn Do and Alice Pung, the fiction of Nam Le and Arnold Zable, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival – that stories could be vital in creating much-needed empathy for those new to our shores, no matter their mode of arrival. She writes: ‘ We need stories that help us imagine how it is to make a life in a place that may be a thousand times safer, a thousand times kinder, than the place you just left, but is still, at the beginning at least, viciously foreign.’
Do you follow reading trails, or do you work your way through a bedside table pile? (Or do you have no method at all?) If you do have your own reading trails, what are some of the trails you’ve recently followed?
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 