A Flickering Flame of Hope: One Mother's Faith in the Future Sheds Light on the Bleak Reality of Modern Zambia

The cover of “A Cowrie of Hope” states that the author, Binwell Sinyangwe, “captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value”, these qualities are mainly encapsulated in the main character, Nasula:

Nasula (mother of Sula) is a young widow struggling to make ends meet for herself and her daughter. Her daughter who recently passed her grade 9 exams has been accepted into an all girls secondary school but she lacks the money required for fees, supplies, and other things required for Sula to continue with her education. Though illiterate herself, Nasula, understands the need for her daughter to be educated and she feels the burden acutely.

As a young bride, she and her husband live in Lusaka where he works as security guard. He’s shot to death by the police while trying to escape a crime scene, leaving his wife widowed with an infant daughter. After his funeral, Nasula is ordered by her father-in-law to marry his other son, Isaki. She refuses to marry Isaki on the grounds that he is a polygamist and known womaniser. In retribution the family disowns and dispossesses Nasula and her daughter all of their earthly goods but the clothes on their backs. Homeless and stranded in Lusaka, she spends many nights at the bus depot trying to find her way back to Swelini, her home village in Luapula.

She makes it home to Swelini with the help of a friend, where she appeals to the headman for land to cultivate and build a home for herself and her daughter. She toils on her plot of land and also does piece-work to supplement the meagre income from her crops. Sula is enrolled in school, where she excels, rising above the taunts and ridicule she experiences because of her poverty. "The child was a cowrie of hope. A great gift from the gods to one who was so poor and lowly to wear round one’s neck for inspiration, and, above all, hope”.

Faced with the dilemma of her daughter possibly dropping out of school because of lack of funds, Nasula faces a seemingly hopeless situation until an exuberant friend proposes a solution. If she sells her last bag of Mbala beans, which are on high demand in Lusaka, the money will more than adequately fund Sula’s schooling. Re-energised with this new hope, Nasula sets out to earn this money.

Lusaka immediately strikes her as a “place of madness” and Kamwala market, in particular, is a “mound inhabited by huge, hungry tribes of termites in search of a livelihood”. Nasula has single minded goal, and draws often from her spiritual strength to take her that extra step needed.

Her naïveté is touching, and her boldness inspiring – crucially, despite the desperate situations Nasula finds herself in, she loses neither her dignity nor her sight of goal.

“But a power she could not overcome, which was from a bleeding heart, told her not to listen to the whispers of discouragement, or give up when she had already suffered so much. It urged her on. To this power she yielded while at the same time allowing the ghost of defeat to haunt her. She struggled on, a thin valiant, invisible thread pulling her along in the direction of nowhere”.

Nasula’s exuberant friend from Lusaka, Nalukwi (mother of Lukwi), is also a great character. She and her husband live in three room shack with their eight children and dependents, and yet she opens both her home and heart to Nasula offering help and advice at every turn. She’s street smart, and yet she does not use this as a means of duping her young friend – in a way, she embodies the ‘hope’ of the title of this book.

The key message of this harrowing story is that despite the predicaments many face in the world today, hope still exists. There is also value in friendship, honesty, and community. It should be remembered that while this book is a work of fiction, it draws many parallels from real life situations that many Zambians still face such as property grabbing, school dropouts from lack of funding, crop failure, corruption, lack of markets in rural areas, poor access to financial products for small-scale farmers, etc.

Direct buses between Lusaka and Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, are infrequent and slow, so I do this trip in stages. From the BP petrol station on the main street in Chipata (capital of Eastern Zambia), regular minibuses (US$2) run the 30km to the Zambian border. Once I pass through Zambian customs, it’s a few minutes’ walk to the Malawian entry post from where I get a shared taxi to Mchinji for US$1.50 followed by a minibus to Lilongwe (US$2). My ultimate destination in Malawi is Masitala; a small village in the Kasungu region.

To reach this place I decide to hire a car, and opt for a 4x4 from Apex Rent-a-Car, who are based in Lilongwe, for $80 per day. Compared to its neighbours, the main roads in Malawi are in surprisingly good shape: the volume of traffic is low and most people drive reasonably slowly. Also, like most other former British colonies, traffic moves on the left in Malawi with my car being right-hand drive, which is a bonus for me. However, road travel after dark is not advisable as road markings are poor to non-existent and not all cars have headlights.

I encounter a couple of police check points along the major roadways, but they just ask me where I am going and check my documentation (passport, driver's licence, permission to use the vehicle, etc.), and I am on my way without any issues.

And so, with a sense of hope I travel to Zambia’s diminutive neighbour Malawi and another story of hope against adversity – “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”: this time a true memoir by Malawian, William Kamkwamba.

OUT NOW!! "Reading the World Volume 1: A Global Journey Through Literature"

Ironically, my literary tour of the world by reading books is now a book itself!

I have now written up my travel experiences of my first year of the journey from 2009 to 2010 - which took me from England to Russia.

Because I wished to convey a real sense of travelling to and through these countries I determined to do at least some background research on each country before reading its accompanying book, as well as looking into exactly how one might travel from place to place. I have detailed these elements along with my reviews of each country’s book in the publication, and it has been fascinating to note the often convoluted means that one needs to take to travel across a simple land border due to a region’s politics (prime examples being between Israel and Palestine, and Kosovo and Serbia).

As a result, in my book you will join me not just in the written accounts by each country’s host author; but in interminable journeys in rickety buses, meandering river cruises through dense jungle, off road excursions in unofficial ‘taxis’ and numerous flights in planes of varying airworthiness...

The book is available for purchase from Amazon as a paperback or Kindle eBook. Click on links below to order!

Paperback version

Kindle eBook version

Reading the World website

PS: Currently in Swaziland on my journey - more updates soon!

Purple Hibiscus: Hope Blooms in a Bittersweet Tale of Nigeria

Adichie’s debut novel is a thoroughly engaging and exquisitely crafted piece of work. As a first novel it is nothing short of astonishing. To the outside world, fifteen-year-old Kambili, her seventeen-year-old brother Jaja, and their self-effacing mother Beatrice, are living the dream life in Enugu, Nigeria.

However, behind the enviable gates of the estate, provided by their benevolent businessman, father, and husband, Eugene Achike, life is less than rosy. Eugene’s religious fanaticism and overbearing hand end up imprisoning and incapacitating those whom he professes to love the most. He metes out severe punishments for minor transgressions, leaving in his wake physical and emotional scars. As if the pressures of home life are not enough, the children must deal with the social and emotional ups and downs of adolescence, peer relations, and petty rivalries.

A ray of light enters this grim picture in the person of Eugene’s widowed sister, who invites the children to spend time with her family in the university town of Nsukka.The visit to Aunty Ifeoma’s modest home in the university apartments begins a series of life-changing experiences with far-reaching consequences for everyone in the Achike family. In the end, the most decisive actions come from the least expected sources.

'Purple Hibiscus' is a multi-dimensional novel. It is a tender first-person narrative of a teenage girl who finds her own voice, despite years of abuse and intimidation that have left her stuttering. It is a story of love, the strange love in her nuclear family that generates no laughter, the nurturing love that holds her extended family together, and the personal turmoil and excitement of her first crush. Kambili’s narrative voice is fresh and authentic, her English enriched with local Igbo expressions and peppered with Nigerianisms such as: “the girl is a ripe agbogho! Very soon a strong young man will bring us palm wine!”

Set in the Igbo region of eastern Nigeria, the story draws the reader into the environment and cultural experiences of a significant segment of Nigerian society. From the scenic hillsides of Enugu and Nsukka to the unpaved rural roads of Abba and Aokpe, each locale is essential to the main characters’ well-being, providing a much needed balance between the busy urban centres and the ancestral and kinship base of the countryside. The author, herself an Igbo, is obviously familiar with her terrain and the urban-rural balance. One gets a taste of the shades and nuances of contemporary Nigerian life: the rich diversity of its peoples and their traditions, their staple and snack foods, and the variety of their religious beliefs.

In telling the story of Kambili and the extraordinary events that transform her world, Adichie manages to present and explore a number of important issues rather intricately. Her characters are complex and credible. On the question of domestic abuse, for instance, Eugene is at once the most courageous, generous, and compassionate citizen - receiving recognition from locals as well as world organizations - and the most unforgiving tyrant. His loved ones - ironically, his victims - are dazzled by his enormous persona, thus perpetuating the cycle. Adichie courageously raises other poignant questions without ever resorting to preaching. Mandatory celibacy in the Catholic clergy is a logical issue when a young priest becomes the object of romantic affection; the legitimacy of Igbo traditional religion is obvious when observed close to Catholic ritual.

She captures the resilience of the citizens faced with political instability and series of military coups; the struggle to maintain intellectual freedom and autonomy in higher education; and most of all, the preponderance of poverty and want in the midst of so much national wealth. Bright intellectuals and educators flee the country to avoid rising autocratic rule, intimidation, and deteriorating social services.

One minor criticism is the absence of a glossary for this novel. Adichie does a good job of placing most Igbo expressions in comprehensible context, but this leads to frustration with the reader wanting to find the translation of a term, the meaning of which is, at best, ambiguous, for instance: “’Will the fuel make it, Mom?’ Obiora asked. “Amarom, we can try”’.

This is, however, a very minor criticism of what is a wonderful debut novel.

Citation: Ruby A. Bell-Gam. Review of Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus. H-AfrTeach, H-Net Reviews. December, 2004.

My next destination is the neighbouring country of Chad, linked to Nigeria by a narrow border in the north east, alongside Lake Chad. Despite its proximity however, this is no simple journey, starting with the need for a single-entry visa costing US$100 for 1 month.

Worse still, however, decades of civil war following independence from France in 1960, along with more recent rebellions and rebel incursions from neighbouring countries, have left Chad’s transport infrastructure in tatters.

Rail travel into the country is impossible, and roads are in disrepair and are typically unpaved. Equally perilous on the roads are the coupeurs de route (road bandits). Ex-pats were attacked in two separate incidents in 2005 on one major stretch, resulting in the death of one Catholic nun. The rickety and poorly maintained buses are scarcely less of a danger on these roads... and it is equally impossible to reach Chad by boat from Nigeria unless crossing illegally through Lake Chad.

However, I am keen not to rely too much on anonymous air travel (itself a circuitous route between these countries) so I take my life into my hands and go by road... Although there are no official border crossings between the two countries, it’s possible to make a quickish – if hair-raising - transit across Cameroon.

In Nigeria, I take a bush taxi from Maiduguri in north-eastern Nigeria to the border crossing into Cameroon at Ngala. On the Cameroon side I ask for a laissez-passer whichs to allows me to make the two-hour traverse of Cameroon (where I will be returning soon).

We head to Maroua (the capital of the Far North Region of Cameroon) where I pick up a rickety minibus to the Chad border point at Kousséri. Here I pick up a motorcycle taxi over the bridge into the border town of Nguelé, stopping once more to catch an even more rickety minibus to N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. Finally, I take one of the eregular buses in the capital on a bumpy six hour journey to Moundou. Thus I arrive, tired, dusty, shaken and relieved, in the second largest city in Chad, and the next leg of my journey 'The Plagues of Friendship' a novel by native author Sem Miantoloum Beasnael, a tale of childhood friendship that goes tragically sour...

An apology, an update and some exciting news....

Firstly let me start with an apology. Whilst I have been regularly updating my website with my travel progress (and also revamping the design and layout – you can see it at: www.readingtheworld.co.uk – let me know what you think!), I have let my blog get a bit out of date.

In fact, I got a shock when I realised my last post was back in April 2012 – I hope my followers are still out there!!

Rest assured I am still forging on with my literary expedition around the world – and loving every minute of it.

Since my last post (Libya), I have been making my way around the West of Africa, taking in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Gibraltar, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Cape Verde, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and am currently in Nigeria (courtesy of the wonderful novel ‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

So you can see I have not been slacking in my travels – I just need to catch up with myself with all of these reviews for this blog!!

There is also another, exciting, reason for the lag in updating these reviews; as I have been working on volume one of "Reading the World: A Global Journey Through Literature.” This book will be published around early 2014, and details my experiences in preparing for and setting out on my travels through literature... Volume 1 will cover my journey from 2009 when I started out, through to the end of 2010. More volumes will follow...

I will update this blog with more details on this soon (as well as some of the reviews of the visits listed above), and you can also check for updates on my new FaceBook page: http://tinyurl.com/mgs4m7d

Back to Nigeria now, see you soon!

Outside Looking In: Letters From Togo

Susan Blake's essays — her “Letters from Togo” — are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lomé, the West African capital where she spent a Fulbright year teaching American literature from 1983 to 1984, with return trips in 1990 and 1991. As Blake begins the process of making sense out of a vibrant, seeming anarchy, we are pulled along with her into the heart of Togo—a tiny dry strip of a country sandwiched between Ghana and Benin.

In the course of her letters Blake introduces us to Mahouna, her housekeeper, who runs a cold drink business from his refrigerator in a country where electricity is unreliable; to American Lee Ann and her Togolese family, who works at the American school to earn the fees for a private education for her children; and to the suave René, with whom a relationship briefly flourishes and who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds.

Since Lomé is both an overgrown village and a cosmopolitan city, Blake's often humorous experiences range from buying a car to attending a traditional tom-tom funeral, from visiting people who hunt with bows and arrows to enduring faculty meetings, from negotiating the politics of buying produce to lecturing on Afro-American literature at the English Club. Together, her letters trace the pattern of adjusting to a foreign environment and probe the connections between Africa and this curious, energetic American. Not "out of Africa" but within it, they take advantage of time and perspective to penetrate the universal experience of being a stranger in a strange land...

All in all an engaging memoir of an engaging country, but one which – as Blake herself acknowledges – is written very much from an outsiders perspective.

From Togo I leapfrog neighbouring Benin (where I have already visited) and head to Nigeria.

Passenger trains into Nigeria being virtually non-existent I am forced to part with the best part of £350 for a flight ticket. I make my way to the nearby Lomé-Tokoin airport and catch a flight on Togolese airline Asky, leaving at 13.30 and arriving an hour later in Lagos’ Murtala Muhammad airport at 15.30 (allowing for the time difference).

There is a rather inconvenient fifteen hour stopover (compared to just two hours flight time in total between destinations!) so I spend a night in a nearby hotel, the Deskyline Hotel. It is just a couple of minutes around the corner from the airport, and there is a restaurant where I am able to grab a beer and a meal of local fare. However, my room (which sets me back $100) is basic to say the least, still it is a bed for the night...

The next morning I catch the onward Arik Air International flight at 7.20. Again, this flight lasts just one hour before I am landing at my next destination – Enugu in Nigeria and the novel "Purple Hisbiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Murder in Ghana: An Ideal Marriage of Suspense and Location with the ‘Wife of the Gods’

Kwei Quartey's compelling debut mystery, 'Wife of the Gods', introduces Ghanian Detective Inspector Darko Dawson investigating the murder of a medical student in a village some distance from his home (and jurisdiction) in the country's capital of Accra.

The crime is unusual and the government authorities have requested help from the capital, whose forensic knowledge far exceeds that of the local police force. The victim has no obvious injuries and is found posed as if sleeping in the woods. Dawson, however, has mixed feelings about accepting the assignment and returning to the village of Ketanu. He has been there only once, over 25 years ago, to visit his aunt and uncle. On a later visit, when just his mother went, she disappeared on returning home. Whether she is alive or dead, no one knows. Still, the case interests him and he's certain that the young man, who has been arrested for the crime, is innocent. He's equally certain that another popular sentiment in the village is also not true, that a purported witch living nearby struck her down using herbal magic.

'Wife of the Gods' is written with a quiet elegance, often lyrical in its narrative. Sound actually plays an important part of the story, Dawson having a particular affinity for distinguishing subtle variations in speech patterns. Consider this passage from early in the book:

Darko felt the silken quality and the musical lilt of Auntie's voice. He had always had a peculiarly heightened sensitivity to speech. Not only did he hear it but he often perceived it, as though physically touching it. He had on occasion told [his brother] Cairo or Mama that he could feel "bumps" in a person's voice, or that it was prickly or wet. They were mystified by this, but Darko could not explain it any better than he could describe the process of sight or smell.

The mystery itself is rather intricate, made so in part by the customs and beliefs of the villagers. The author incorporates these cultural references into the story in a seamless, natural manner; they are a part of Dawson's investigation without necessarily being the cause of it. Furthermore, their very being is not a hinderance and Dawson's knowledge of them may help him find the solution to the young woman's murder.

There are a number of familiar elements to the story including the wise mentor to Dawson. At one point he says to Darko, "You remember what I told you about solving mysteries?", to which Dawson replies, "That it's a matter of making a few of the connections and the rest will fall in place." And that is really what 'Wife of the Gods' is all about.

An outstanding effort overall to be sure, but there are a couple of minor points that may resonate with readers. Darko Dawson is given to occasional, violent outbursts which seem at odds to the intellectual character that he seems most comfortable being. These scenes don't really add much depth or interest to his character, and seem discordant in a somewhat disturbing way. And the investigation seems to conveniently ignore a person's cell phone, and not the throwaway kind, that is the preferred way of communicating within the country — not surprising given the lack of infrastructure for wired service. Yet no one thinks to check cell phone records to determine where people (read suspects) might have been at any given time. Finally, the title, which rates a special author note, is not terribly relevant to the crime or its solution, and serves more as an introduction to a tangential subplot. These comments, however, are at most quibbles for this truly remarkable mystery that unfolds in a most unusual setting.

Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books

Before setting out on my journey to neighbouring Togo, i make a relatively painless trip to the Togolese embassy in Accra for my entry visa (10,000CFA for a single entry 30 day visa).

Actually getting to my next destination is also fairly straight forward as there are bush taxis everywhere in Accra. These are basically four door cars, with four people in the back, and two sharing the front.

These are mainly reconstituted European cars with the seats stripped out and benches added in. I select a battered Peogeut 505 which still retains its back seats, and negotiate with the driver to have the taxi to myself for a reasonable $20 (it is usually $5 per person).

From Accra we head straight to Lomé, capital of Togo, on the pleasantly paved and un-bumpy Trans African Coastal Highway that crosses Togo, connecting it to Benin and Nigeria to the east, and Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to the west.

Thus I arrive fairly un-dishevelled for my stopover courtesy of ‘Letters From Togo’ by Susan Blake...

Growing up in the ‘Country of Men’: Libya under Colonel Gadaffi

"In the Country of Men" is a novel set in Tripoli during the rule of Colonel Gadaffi. It is not however, primarily a political novel; it's about the relationships in one family and about a boy struggling to make sense of events, both public and private, that he has been exposed to far too soon.

The story begins in 1979, eight days after 9 year-old Suleiman’s neighbor, Ustath Rashid, "vanished like a grain of salt in water" after being carted off by Revolutionary Guards. Suleiman's baba, Faraj, is away on a business trip, and his mother is getting over an "illness." But when Suleiman goes shopping with his mum, he sees his baba downtown, wearing unfamiliar sunglasses and disappearing into a strange building. Nor is his mother's illness anything so straightforward as a cold.

His mum is only "ill" when his dad is away, Suleiman explains. She gets her "medicine" in bottles wrapped in black plastic bags that the baker keeps hidden under his counter.

On those nights, Suleiman is afraid to leave her alone, and she regales him with stories, like his hero Scheherezade. Only instead of Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba, his mom, Najwa, tells him about how, at 14, she was forced to leave school and marry an older man she had never met as a punishment. Her crime was holding hands in a cafe with a boy.

But much of what Najwa tells her son is difficult for a 9-year-old to bear. "The things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible to carry on living without spilling them. I didn't want to break my promise – the promise she always forced me to give, sometimes 30 times over in one night, not to tell, to swear on her life, again and again...."

And when Suleiman can't hold the words back she reproaches him, saying, "I beg you, don't embarrass me.... A boy your age should never speak of such things."

Although a compulsive storyteller while drunk, Najwa has little patience for Scheherezade. "Scheherezade was a coward who accepted slavery over death," she snaps at the son she calls her "prince," retelling the final chapter with feminist fury, as Scheherezade gathers her three sons about her and begs to live.

" 'To live,' she repeated. 'And not because she had as much right to as he, but because if he were to kill her his sons would live "motherless" ... My guess: five, maybe ten years at the most before she got the sword.' "

But in daily life, Najwa makes the same choice as the scorned queen.

"Here it's either silence or exile, walk by the wall or leave," as she explains to Moosa, an Egyptian friend whose business schemes (Polish tires, chickens) are a source of much amusement. She drinks because she's terrified: Suleiman's father is a political dissident. During his "business trips," he writes the prodemocracy pamphlets Suleiman and his friends see people ripping up on their doorsteps.

Now that their neighbour has been interrogated on live TV, Najwa is certain that Faraj will be next. She burns all his books (except one that Suleiman hides in his own room) and hangs a giant picture of "The Guide" on their wall. And when Faraj doesn't come home, she bakes a cake and goes to a high-ranking neighbour to beg for the life of the man of whom she once fainted at first sight. Matar's writing is strikingly poetic. He brings as much detail to a boy's whimsical thought of mulberries as a crop planted by angels to remind Adam and Eve of paradise as he does to a public execution. And that detail helps to bring to life a place where the TV programs shift from interrogations to a still life of pink flowers, and where people are hanged in stadiums from basketball hoops, to the cheering of crowds.

While it's never a good idea to read too much autobiography into a novel, author Hisham Matar does share certain characteristics with his narrator. Both were 9 when they left Libya – although Matar was accompanied by his parents, and Suleiman is sent abroad alone. Matar's father was also a dissident, although he was not politically active until after the family was living in Egypt. In 1990, his father was kidnapped from Cairo and returned to Tripoli, where he was imprisoned and tortured. The family hasn't heard any news since 1995.

"Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded," Suleiman writes years later from his home in Cairo, where his "stray dog" status means that he can't return to Libya and his family isn't allowed to leave.

The too-hasty coda is the only weak part of the novel. The grown-up Suleiman glosses over the experience of exile in a way that seems at odds with the sensitive, confused child he once was.

That said, "In the Country of Men" is an eloquent and absorbing account of life in this benighted country during a particularly dark period of its recent past....

From Libya’s Tripoli International Airport (now back in action after the civil war), I pay the princely sum of £96.60 for a flight on Tunisair to Tunis’ Carthage Airport in Tunisia. The flight takes 1 hour and 10 minutes, leaving at 3.25pm, but I arrive in Tunis at 3.35pm due to the hour’s time difference, for the next leg of my round the world trip...

Taxi to Cairo: Viewing Egypt from the Back of a Cab

“Taxi” is an interesting patchwork of a novel by the freshly-minted Egyptian journalist-commentator-filmmaker cum writer Khaled al-Khamissi. The fifty-eight chapters that comprise this unusual book represent fifty-eight separate taxi rides taken by the narrator, who is merely the guise of a thinly-veiled al-Khamissi. This work is, in some sense, an ethnographic novel in that it attempts to portray the working lives of Cairo's 80,000+ taxi drivers through punctuated scenes (chapters) which are a cross-section of that part of society.

Al-Khamissi's portrayal of the Cairene cabby is definitely sympathetic though not patronising. While giving due credence to the unique social and political perspectives that taxi drivers maintain by virtue of their near-constant physical presence on the maddening city streets, he does not shy away from revealing some of the wackier encounters with those drivers who spout conspiracy theories, conservatism and tales of faux poverty.

There are moments of knowing and astute political irony in Taxi. An example of the meta-critique of Egyptian government that pervades the book occurs in chapter seven, where the driver laments Egypt's arcane statutes regarding seatbelts and the myriad laws and tariffs and cost of it all to be borne by the poor taxi driver. At the end of that particular encounter after mentioning how he skirts the law by only installing a decorative rather than functional seat belt to appease the authorities, the driver tells the narrator: "We live a lie and believe it. The government's only role is to check that we believe the lie, don't you think?"

Mr. al-Khamissi works hard at being representational of the whole of Egyptian society through the work of the commentary and dialogue offered by his characters. Yet in his desire for a complete cross-section of Cairo taxi culture all of the offstage laboring by the author began to seep into the text. The first twenty-five episodes are interesting and insightful but they eventually began to feel like a gimmick and came perilously close to monotony. If it were a television series it would have been canceled after half a season.

But it is not episodic television, it is is a book, and its annoyances do not detract from its originality as an interesting new voice in pop-Arab fiction. The chapters provide often captivating nuggets of insight into the concerns and ebbs and flows of daily life in one of the world's largest cities, and most important countries. A helpful glossary in the back is included for readers less familiar with details of the culture.

Jonathan Wright's English translation of the colloquial Egyptian Arabic is good though a bit uneven. Yet Wright is to be commended for taking a frenetic text and rendering it into something readable and perhaps appealing for an English-speaking audience. We ought to have more popular fiction in translation and not just higher-brow literary novels (“Taxi” has been on Arabic language bestsellers lists for more than a year).

Credit to D. Chaudoir for this review.

In reaching my next destination, again, I go for the flight option, given the overland issues in this region. Therefore, for around $300, I take an 8am Royal Jordanian flight from Cairo International Airport, arriving back in Amman, Jordan at 10.15am (allowing for the time difference). After a short stopover there, where I take a quick lunch break, I am on the 11.40am flight to Tripoli, touching down at 1.45pm, and visiting Libya courtesy of “In The Country of Men” by native author Hisham Matar, of which more in my next post…

Leap of Faith: the Queen of Jordan’s Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

The Jordanian book on my journey is an autobiography of Queen Noor al Hussein (born as Lisa Halaby into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege in the US, while visiting her father in Jordan she was casually introduced on the airport runway to King Hussein. After a whirlwind, secret courtship Lisa Halaby became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan).

The sub-title of this engaging book is Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. For a young American woman to marry an Arab king was indeed unexpected but not entirely unpredicted. At a farewell dinner at a restaurant in Tehran, an acquaintance told Lisa Halaby her fortune in the traditional Middle Eastern way, by reading her coffee cup. He turned over the cup, flipped it back, and studied the patterns within. "You will return to Arabia," he predicted. "And you will marry someone highborn, an aristocrat from the land of your ancestors." That man turned out to be King Hussein of Jordan.

Halaby was born into a prominent Arab-American family. Her father, Najeeb Halaby, was a successful businessman and public servant but a demanding and difficult individual. The father's relentless perfectionism could not be reconciled with the mother's quest for family peace and the marriage was dissolved.

As a child Lisa was earnest and introverted, a loner by temperament, and she was to remain impatient with small-talk and gossip. Part of this social awkwardness, she confesses, is rooted in her relationship with her father. One of the positive results of growing up in this "moderately dysfunctional American family" was self-reliance. Lisa joined the first freshman class at Princeton to accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban planning.

Leap of Faith is the story of her remarkable journey into Hussein's heart and their 21 years of marriage, ending with the king's death in 1999. For Hussein it was evidently love at first sight. For the young, independent-minded American woman, the courtship, over long evenings in the palace, involved some doubts. The king was a widower with eight children from three marriages and a reputation as a playboy. "I will not deny that the idea of being his fourth wife, or anybody's fourth wife, was troubling to me," she writes. But the king was an assiduous suitor and would even sing to her. Though she was not as drawn to the Swedish group Abba as he was, she was charmed when he would croon "Take a chance on me".

Having accepted the royal proposition of marriage, Lisa Halaby changed her name to Noor Al Hussein, the "Light of Hussein". She also converted to Islam and began in earnest to learn Arabic. The love affair with Hussein developed into a love affair with his desert kingdom.

As well as being an intimate portrait of a marriage, Leap of Faith reflects a deep commitment to the people, culture, and natural beauty of Jordan. "I had found myself spellbound," writes Noor, "by the serene expanse of desert landscape washed golden by the retreating sun at dusk. I was overwhelmed by an extraordinary sensation of belonging, an almost mystical sense of peace."

There was precious little peace, however, to be found inside the royal palace. Noor knew she had to make some adjustments to her new environment but she found the lack of privacy irksome and unsettling. Court officials were ubiquitous and they constantly intruded on her private space. Over the years she came to realise that some of this dissonance was cultural - "the difference between a western sense of privacy and personal space and an eastern emphasis on communal identity and space". This was a characteristically charitable explanation for the conduct of the courtiers.

Noor also had to fight to carve out a meaningful role for herself. Many in Jordan thought a queen should be a glamorous figure on a pedestal, perhaps engaged from a distance in charity work. Noor had no intention of being a mere figurehead and spending her time simply opening bazaars and expositions. On the contrary, she wanted to be involved in tackling real problems.

Through the United Nations and other organisations, Noor became involved in issues that were important to her, such as global peacekeeping, refugee assistance and the Land Mine Ban Treaty. Most of her time and energy, however, were taken up with work in the areas of women's and children's welfare, human rights, health, education, and the environment.

She became acutely aware that all these problems, tackled in isolation by individual ministries and charities, were fundamentally inter-related. Her role, as she saw it, was to serve as a catalyst for consensus-building and action. In 1985, the Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established. Its aim was to provide strategies for sustainable development and integrating efforts to tackle these problems in a concerted manner.

While King Hussein supported his wife's domestic initiatives, he himself was mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs and more particularly with the quest for peace in the Middle East in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. Politics thus became a constant companion to Queen Noor throughout the 21 years of her marriage.

She is a highly sophisticated political animal with strong liberal leanings, and a perceptive judge of personalities. In writing this autobiography, she relied not just on her memory but also on a journal she kept intermittently. Her book contains fascinating accounts of encounters with American, Arab, Palestinian and Israeli leaders. It also sheds a great deal of new light on inter-Arab relations and on the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One theme that crops up again and again in Noor's narrative is the frustration and anger she feels in the face of American double standards towards the Middle East. From Jordan she began to see the land of her birth through new eyes - and the image that America projected was not a positive one.

Noor had grown up believing in America's commitment to freedom, justice, and human rights, but she gives many examples of Washington's failure to uphold these principles in its treatment of Jordan. She complains, with justice, that America's support for Israel has too often been at the expense of Arab human rights and in violation of international law and United Nations resolutions.

Throughout the 1980s Noor undertook several intensive speaking tours in America, grueling two-week marathons of speeches and interviews. The American media offered few perspectives on the Middle East other than that of Israel. Noor was uniquely placed to educate her fellow Americans about the problems of the region but it was an uphill struggle.

The warmest reception Hussein received in America was in 1994 when he and Itzhak Rabin went to the White House to issue the Washington Declaration, ending the conflict between Jordan and Israel. Members of the Jordanian delegation could now see first-hand the magical hold that Israel had on the American political psyche.

On at least one issue Noor was at odds with her husband and the leaders of her adopted country: press freedom. From the first years of their marriage, she lobbied her husband and his key officials to reconsider personal and institutional freedoms. The press in Jordan, though privately owned, was effectively government-controlled. Truly independent reporting did not exist. A combination of conservatism and insecurity made the rulers wary of allowing the people to read dissenting opinions. By her own account, Noor's pleas fell on largely deaf ears. In this respect she was a bit like a lighthouse in the desert: brilliant and illuminating but of little use to her immediate environment.

However, politics aside, there is also a very human story here; and the final chapters that deal with the King’s death after a long struggle with cancer are genuinely moving.

All in all, I felt this was a fascinating insight into a rarified element of Jordan – whilst not representative of the day to day lives of most ordinary citizens, did at least give an insight into the wider politics of the country and, through Queen Noor al Hussein’s work with various charities, an insight into some of the wider issues affected the country’s populace…

From Jordan I head to Egypt. Whilst this country has been making international headlines of late due to its political and government issues; I shall be taking a change of focus and spending my time there in the company of various Cairo cabbies, through fictional monologues contained in the book, “Taxi” by native author Khaled Al Khamissi.

Having researched overland routes to Cairo from Amman, it seems all of these involve travelling back into Israel and out again, which given the problems encountered in my last two trips I decide to avoid! So, once again I take to the skies with Royal Jordanian airlines and fly from Amman Queen Alia International airport, leaving at 9pm, and arrive 1 and a half hours later at Cairo International Airport at 9.30pm (allowing for the hours’ time difference); for the princely sum of US $239. The travel to my final destination in Egypt is easy – I just get into a taxi!

Israel: Amos Oz finds Poetry in a Sea of Humanity

On arriving at a book to represent Israel, I was in two minds. One cannot consider Israel without considering Palestine and the wider Middle Eastern ‘problem.’ However, whilst I chose a book on the conflict’s impact upon Palestine in my previous trip as I felt this was a story that needed to be told, I felt that maybe more would be achieved by - rather than a mirror story set in Israel – picking a work that went beyond the conflict and into a more personal account of this country. As such, I am delighted that I came across “The Same Sea” by Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most renowned authors, and one who has been heavily involved in his nation's issues, critical of the wrong turnings on the road to a settlement, and ever hopeful of a humane solution.

In this respect, you might say that “The Same Sea” is the most timely of books to come out of Israel. Not because it addresses the issues of conflict, but rather, as Oz suggests at one point here, because it steadfastly does not: 'At times like these, quiet is the most precious commodity in the country,' his narrator observes. 'And let there be no misunderstanding, I'm talking about quiet, definitely not about silence.'

“The Same Sea” is a novel in verse - though some of the poetry is possibly lost in translation. Nevertheless, the presentation - brief chapters of varying length (and form), each a 'poem' in and of itself but, as different threads of one story, all connected - is very effective, and makes for an impressive whole.

The story is fairly simple. The central character is Albert Danon, a recently widowed accountant. His son, Enrico (called 'Rico') is travelling abroad - in the Himalayas when the book begins, then making his way through South-East Asia - reluctant to return to Israel. Rico's girlfriend, Dita, gets ripped-off by a film producer (she's written a movie script) and turns to Albert for help - and moves in with him. Albert fixes things, and the movie producer turns out not to be such a bad guy after all. Albert still misses his wife terribly. Dita's presence in the household is welcome but also causes him some inner turmoil - and then there's the other woman in his life, Bettine, who feels more strongly for him than he does for her.

Even the narrator pops up:

The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story. Bulgarian, Bat Yam, written in verse and even, here and there, in rhyme.

It's all fairly simple, the short episodes moving back and forth among the characters, looking towards the past, present, and future. Yet for all that - or because of all that, because of the glimpses rather than detailed, continuous narrative, and the somewhat lighter touch of poetic rather than prose renderings - it is a completely gripping tale, these lives and what happens to them all of great interest. In true-life form, the story meanders back and forth, among the characters and in time, the everyday and the exceptional easily mixed, occasionally confused, yet with Oz never trying to explain too much.

“The Same Sea” seems almost unambitious, and yet in these small, intertwined fates and in this presentation is a more powerful and effecting work than many far longer novels. Very impressive, highly recommended.

(Complete Review)

And so, happy to have found such an extraordinary - and unexpected - gem on my travels, I leave Israel for neighbouring Jordan. I also leave fiction for a while as the next work is an autobiography of Queen Noor al Hussein (born as Lisa Halaby into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege in the US, while visiting her father in Jordan she was casually introduced on the airport runway to King Hussein. After a whirlwind, secret courtship Lisa Halaby became Noor Al Hussein, Queen of Jordan).

Having gone through the palaver of travelling in and out of Israel and Palestine over the past few weeks, I decide to pay a bit extra and fly direct to Amman in Jordan for my next leg. I take a Royal Jordanian flight from Tel Aviv Yafo airport at 8.25 in the morning (for US$281) and 45 minutes later I am touching down in Amman, the capital of Jordan…

Palestine: A Graphic Account

If the mention of comic books still calls to mind images of caped crusaders and anthropomorphic mice, the graphic front-line reportage of Joe Sacco should upend your preconceptions. While the comic-book form typically deals with fantasy of a lurid and questionable kind, Sacco's cartoons address the extremes of an altogether different world - our own.

Originally published in 1993 as a nine-issue comic series, ‘Palestine’ is an illustrated account of the cartoonist's visit to the Occupied Territories during 1991 and 1992. Focusing on how private lives are impacted by public policies, Sacco depicts a retaliatory loop of routine horror, while navigating the region's infernal history and political sensitivities. Now republished in a single 300-page volume with a new introduction by the critic and historian Edward Said, Palestine remains, in light of recent events, as pertinent as ever. With luck, the graphic novel format will afford some measure of contact with booksellers beyond the ghetto of specialist comic stores and introduce Sacco's work to the wider audience it undoubtedly deserves.

Drawing on first-hand experiences, extensive research and more than 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews, Sacco has gained access to unusually intimate testimony, giving space to details and perspectives normally excluded by mainstream media coverage. The enthusiasm and frequency with which Sacco is hauled into the homes of those he meets - to listen, take notes and drink endless cups of tea - underlines the desperation of the people he encounters; their hopes are pinned not on political promises but on telling their stories to a stranger who writes comic books.

Although the critical response to the American edition of Palestine has been overwhelmingly positive, a number of stridently Zionist web sites have, perversely, accused Sacco of 'Jew-bashing' and his Seattle publisher receives the occasional piece of hate mail. Yet Palestine is a remarkably even-handed work and essentially humanist in tone: 'What can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power? What becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?'

The original Palestine comic series won the 1996 American Book Award and the illustrations have since been exhibited across the US. The book's imagery is vivid, memorably atmospheric and faithful to the landscapes and cities of Palestine. It also evokes an almost surreal routine of bureaucratic harassment, roadblocks and tear gas, punctuated only by moments of mordant humour.

Despite the careful characterisation of those around him, Sacco's cartoon self is slightly unreal - a grotesquely exaggerated figure, complete with enormously elastic lips - a formlessness that, curiously, invites identification. However, his draughtsmanship is perhaps best demonstrated by his complex crowd scenes, with their differentiated faces, pointed detail and disjointed snippets of overheard speech and interior narrative.

Although Palestine is both visually engaging and a labour of artistic love, at its heart lies a commitment to hard-edged journalism and a challenge to the objectivity of the Western (and particularly American) media: 'I came from the standpoint of "Palestinian equals terrorist". That's what filtered down in the course of watching the regular network news.' Sacco makes no pretence of the observer's invisibility and depicts his own initial disbelief of reported detentions and torture. Nor does he shy away from revealing his own ambiguities as a visiting Western journalist. (As a street demonstration threatens to erupt into violence, we see him bolstering his confidence by repeating to himself: 'It's good for the comic, it's good for the comic.')

With Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco has assumed the unlikely role of the pre-photography war artist, while exploiting the narrative and textual devices of the comic book. Others have employed the comics form to tell political, non-fictional or biographical stories, among them Steve Darnall, Marjane Satrapi and Ho Che Anderson, but Sacco's work is unique in its scale and ambition.

Approaching such daunting topics with a disreputable and supposedly juvenile medium may seem futile, even absurd, yet Sacco's greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted contradiction, oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting. Palestine not only demonstrates the versatility and potency of its medium, but it also sets the benchmark for a new, uncharted genre of graphic reportage.

(edited review from The Observer, Sunday 5 January 2003)

From Palestine, I make my way back through the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Rafah Border Crossing to Egypt, as described in my previous review – just in reverse! Once back at Cairo I get a Royal Jordanian flight to Tel Aviv in Israel (for US$311), leaving at 15.30 and arriving 21.45 in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport (after a brief stopover in Amman in Jordan).

From the airport I take a taxi to Bat Yam, a city located on Israel's Mediterranean Sea coast, on the central coastal strip, just south of Tel Aviv, where I commence my next leg of my round the world trip with “The Same Sea,” a poetic novel by renowned Israeli author Amos Oz….

In the Lebanon: Loving Beirut (but not the book I’m afraid…)

Lebanon, and its capital city Beirut, has long been a source of fascination for me. As a young child growing up in the UK the news stories of this particular war torn country, for some reason made an impact which has always stuck with me. I was especially curious on this journey to read about the real experiences of people actually living in Beirut – a city that has gained an almost mythical image of anarchy and chaos in the West: people still refer disparagingly to local run-down or crime-ridden areas by saying “it’s like Beirut”…

As such I really wanted to like “Beirut: I Love You,”, the next book on my journey. But I’m afraid I didn’t…..and I did try!

It is not that the book is all that badly written, and there ARE some interesting insights into life in Beirut, but I just could not get on with the narrator; who comes across - in my opinion – rather too much like a self-absorbed and rather unsympathetic teenager.

Perhaps it is just me and for fairness I shall cover this book via the publisher copy on the book:

“This is the story of Zena, a young woman who has fallen under the spell of a city that threatens to engulf her in war, grief and love affairs. In the streets armed militias carve out their territories, while ragged construction workers rebuild the city. Refugees sleep five to a bed as bleach-blondes wend their way to the next drug-fuelled supernightclub. At any moment, the bombs will start falling. Meanwhile, Zena and her best friend Maya must try to make sense of their lives amidst the craziness, and negotiate the city's many obsessions including cosmetic surgery, husband hunting and Kalashnikovs. As honest as it is forgiving, this artist's memoir pits love and art against the ever-present threat of war.”

Other readers have seemed to like it, so I won’t discourage you from giving it a try. Just wasn’t my cup of tea I’m afraid…

And so I make my way from war-torn Beirut to another war-torn area – Gaza in the Gaza Strip area of Palestine. Whilst only 175 miles away, the regional issues of politics, war and terrorism make this one of my most difficult and frustrating trips…

The Gaza Strip has three crossing points; two are designed for civilian entry and exit. The first, ‘Erez’, is controlled by Israel and is under near-total lockdown. The other, ‘Rafah’, borders with Egypt and is essentially under Egyptian control.

The Rafah Border Crossing (‘Rafah’) is open at least 5 days per week and is the size of a small airport terminal. On each operating day, Palestinians and internationals attempt to enter and exit the Strip. Egypt caps how many entrances take place per day at around 500-700.

For Palestinians, entry and exit via Rafah is renowned as one of the most cumbersome and bureaucratically difficult crossing points in the world. Rafah also represents an often difficult crossing for internationals too, as I soon find out….

The first part of my journey is straightforward enough: I fly Egyptair from Beirut to Cairo in just one and a half hours for $206. Having already done my research on this journey I have realised that I need a pretext to enter Gaza. As the situation stands, you cannot simply visit Gaza for ‘tourism’. My cover for travelling is as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to help document human rights abuses. Please note: whatever the purpose of visiting, you need a signed letter from a notable Gaza-based organisation (like ISM) to personally invite you for a set period of time. This organisation is sometimes referred to as your ‘host’..

You then, via email, submit your personal details, the dates of your planned visit and the letter of invitation from your host to the Egyptian embassy in London. Within 2–3 weeks you will receive a permission letter from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry; this permission letter permits you to use the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing..

On arriving at the airport I purchase an Egypt entry visa (£10) in order to pass through the passport control stations, then take a taxi from Cairo’s airport to the centre of Cairo (for about £20). .

After a night’s rest in Cairo (cheap hotels start at around £10 per night) I take a taxi from Cairo to the Rafah crossing - this long-distance journey usually takes 6 hours so I hire a private driver, costing £50 (I use one recommended by my hotel). My driver, like many others, starts the journey early - at just after 3am - to arrive at Rafah as the crossing opens at 9am (stopping two-thirds of the way through the journey to have breakfast at a cafe-restaurant). .

On arriving at Rafah, I show my passport, the Egyptian permission letter and the Gazan-based organisation invitation letter to the guard at the gate. I wait for about 40 minutes while they authenticate my documents, and then I am ushered through the crossing through the gates..

I follow the flow of pedestrians and enter the Egyptian side’s Rafah terminal building. I go to the Passport Control desk and get a non-Egyptian entry form, fill it in and get it stamped (for about £10) then take the entry form, passport and two (permission and invitation) letters back to the Passport Control desk. My details are checked once again. Then after an hour my name is shouted out by a Passport Control agent. .

I am then given back my passport stamped with an Egypt exit stamp, I proceed through the terminal building, passing through another Egyptian guard desk; my passport is checked for an exit stamp and a guard reads my permission and invitation letters. I then need to pay £15 before I the Egyptian side’s terminal for an exit ticket..

Again following the flow of pedestrians, I purchase a coach ticket (£5), and board the coach, which takes me through to the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing. .

I then enter the Palestinian side’s terminal building and present my passport and two letters to an officer at one of the passport control booths. .

I sit down with security officers who ask me to be seated while they ask few questions on the purpose of my visit, the location of my Gaza accommodation and which Gazan will kindly act as my trip ‘guide’ person. It takes about 30 minutes to satisfactorily verify my story; the officers place a telephone call to my guide to validate my story and alert him of my arrival and invite them to the terminal (my ‘guide’ is someone I previously organised to act as such from the host organisation that ‘invited’ me to Gaza). On receiving the telephone call, my guide enters the terminal building and also answers a few questions..

We both then complete a form about my visit, and I also fill in an exit registration form, informing the authorities of the date on which they should expect to receieve me at the border to exit into Egypt. On the forms’ completion I then continue through the terminal. .

I have now successfully entered Gaza Strip!.

I then take a private taxi onwards to my destination in Gaza, courtesy of Joe Sacco, and a fascinating graphic novel, “Palestine,” exploring the first Intifada in Palestine in the early 1990s…

Tales of a Middle Eastern Hedgehog: Stories from Syria

“My mother went to visit our neighbour, Umm Bahaa, but refused to take me with her, on the pretext that women visit women and men visit men. So she left me alone, promising not to be gone more than a few minutes. I told my cat I was going to strangle her, but she paid no attention and continued grooming herself with her tongue.”

Thus we meet the five-year-old narrator of The Hedgehog – my stop-off in Syria - who introduces us to his world: his house (with the djinn girl who lives in his bedroom), his garden (where he wishes to be a tree), and his best friend the black stone wall. This tightly told novella confirms that Zakaria Tamer remains at the height of his powers into the 21st Century (having published his first stories in 1957). The twenty-seven short stories that follow were first published in the collection Tigers on the Tenth Day. Economical and controlled, they deal with man’s inhumanity to man (and to woman) and showcase the author’s typical sharply satirical style.

The stories are full of childish reasoning, as when he is asked what he wants to be when he grows up and he explains he wants to become a thief:

I'll steal from the poor and give what I steal to the rich so that everyone will become rich, and not a single poor person will be left.

And when he finds his older brother's stash of magazines with pictures of nude women (the wall told him where they were hidden ...) he wonders why his brother pays for magazines to see: "what I see for free when I'm at the public bath with my mother."

The remaining stories in the collection are much more varied, describing often harsh conditions and circumstances, but generally with a somewhat satirical edge. Some are very blunt, as in the effective allegory, 'Tigers on the Tenth Day', which describes how a tiger is tamed and concludes devastatingly:

On the tenth day the trainer, the pupils, the tiger, and the cage disappeared -- the tiger became a citizen and the cage a city.

In 'Death of the Jasmine' a woman becomes a teacher, but her class of seven-year-olds are preternaturally (and predatorily) adult - even while retaining elements of their childishness; it ends creepily with them pulling her clothes off as she lies on the floor and:

a frenzied sense of alarm suddenly seized her as the small teeth began gnawing her flesh and striking against solid bone.

Though the stories are short they tend to be very dense, too, and it often isn't clear from the start where Tamer will wind up going with his tale. Violence - political and personal -, sex, and politics mix in many of them, often to surprising effect. A story such as 'The Smile', in which a boy walks in on his mother having sex with a stranger and also imagines being executed is a typical impressive riff in the space of a single page.

Often unsettling, and rarely with anything like a conventional happy ending, Tamer's stories are weightier than most, and give an interesting, personal, sense of the traumas and tribulations of a wider Syrian society. It is timely that the inevitable outcome of such a repressive regime, in the form of public revolt and lethal government crackdown, is playing out daily in Syria on TV screens across the world as I read this book… it also shows that Syrian culture goes far beyond the stereotypical images of Middle Eastern conflict that we are shown via the media.

From Syria I travel to another country that has had it’s fair share of trauma (as have most in this region) – that of Lebanon, with the memoir “Beirut: I Love You” by Zena el Khalil.

For this trip I decide to take the quicker (and cheaper!) option of going overland. I head to the taxi station in Damascus and pick out three other people who look like they are waiting to head across to Lebanon.

The Syrian taxis that ply the 127-kilometer route between the two cities are almost all 1974 Dodge Coronets painted yellow. Some shine with new paint, others look like they're falling apart, but either way, ingenuity has kept them on the road.

The shared taxi costs a mere $10 and the trip over the mountains takes about 2 hours…the border stop off - where I get my Lebanese visa and pay my $10 Syrian exit tax - is surprisingly quick and easy, and in no time I am in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.

An Iraqi in Cyberspace: The Baghdad Blog

In the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the major international news channels invested many millions of pounds to guarantee the quality of their coverage. Ambitious young journalists flocked to Iraq, to make their names by reporting the dramatic events in Baghdad. Yet it was a twenty-nine-year-old Iraqi architect, posting a weblog in English ("blogging") from a middle-class Baghdad suburb, who became one of the most authentic voices chronicling the build-up to war, the invasion and its chaotic aftermath. Salam Pax, in a witty, sometimes catty monologue, managed to do what the combined weight of the international media could not. Using a cheap computer and unreliable internet access, he documented the traumas and more importantly the opinions of Iraqis as they faced the uncertainty of violent regime change. My book for Iraq, “The Baghdad Blog,” collects those blog entries together to form a diary of this key period.

"Blogging" was once an obscure activity dominated by those with too much time on their hands and an unhealthy obsession with the internet. Computer geeks would write weblogs detailing the minutiae of their lives, their day-to-day activities and strident opinions. This was a closed, insular and self-referential world, largely concerned with the consumption of popular culture as seen from a darkened bedroom. This is how Salam Pax's own blog began - as a letter to an absent friend.

His early dispatches from Baghdad were dominated by his enthusiasm for obscure pop music and his personal trials and tribulations. But as the US invasion became imminent, the blog was transformed. Pax, increasingly angered by the presumption of Western media who professed to speak for Iraqi public opinion, converted his chronicle, detailing with skill and insight a Baghdad on the verge of war.

The Baghdad Blog then became a window on a population living under tyranny. Risking certain death if discovered, Pax describes the attitude of his friends and family towards the US but also to Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship. For those seeking to understand Iraq, Pax's narrative, straightforward and sincere, is revealing.

If decision-makers in London and Washington had taken the time to consult Pax's musings before the war, their understanding about the country they are now failing to control would have been greatly enhanced. The dominant theme of the blog is mistrust of US motives. As early as October 2002, Pax berates his fellow bloggers outside Iraq who demand that he welcome the coming invasion.

Excuse me. But don't expect me to buy little American flags to welcome the new colonists . . . . how does it differ from Iraq and Britain circa 1920? The civilised world comes to give us, the barbaric nomadic Arabs, a lesson in better living and rid us of all evil (better still, get rid of us Arabs since we're all evil).

Having suffered American indifference in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War, when George Bush Sr urged the population to rise up and then left them to their fate, Iraqis have little time for US claims of altruism.

Informing this cynicism is a tenacious Iraqi nationalism. In popular punditry Iraq is all too frequently described as hopelessly divided by race, religion and clan. Yet any visitor to the country over the past decade has been confronted by an active and pervasive nationalism. Born of the eight-year war of attrition against Iran, it was solidified during the impoverishment caused by sanctions that followed the invasion of Kuwait. Iraqis now take a militant pride that their country survived all that the international community could throw at it. Pax laments the betrayal of this nationalism and all who fought for it, first by Saddam Hussein and then by what he sees as the quasi-colonial invasion of US forces. In late March this year, as he and his family watch Iraqi troops surrender, they are caught between the shame of seeing their own troops give up and a relief that in doing so they managed to save their own lives. Ultimately Pax and his family want Saddam to be consigned to hell, but quickly to be followed by George Bush Jr.

This sense of nationalism, combined with a deep scepticism about American motives, has proved the pre-war predictions of Washington-based exiles to be inaccurate. US troops were not welcomed into Baghdad by hordes of flag-waving Iraqis, but instead by a sullen mistrustful population. Pax argued that "No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said 'war', not 'a change of regime')". And in a comment that must now resonate with Tony Blair, "I think that the coming war is not justified . . .. The excuses for it have been stretched to their limit, they will almost snap".

Explanations for the nationalism that has increasingly come to haunt the occupation are not hard to find. The Baghdad Blog is full of moving examples of the damage done to Iraqi society during the twelve years of sanctions. A young couple that Pax knows became engaged but were unable to get married for lack of money. Finally they each resorted to selling one of their kidneys to raise the $500 needed to build two extra rooms onto the paternal house. Pax goes on to detail the stupidity of sanctions. They "had no effect on Saddam and his power base, (instead) turning us into hostages in a political deadlock between the Iraqi government and the US government". The result was a population swept up by bitterness and poverty that increasingly turned to the certainties of Islam and the mosque.

Despite setting up numerous offices around Baghdad, publishing party newspapers and spending large sums of money, the two main exile groups, the INC and the Iraqi National Accord, have not put down roots in society. Pax treats the exiled opposition with disdain, ridiculing their grandiose meetings in the run-up to war as irrelevant. Once back in Baghdad in the aftermath of the ceasefire, his attitude to them hardens:

What is it with these foreign political parties who have suddenly invaded Baghdad? Do they have no respect for public property? Or since it is the "season of the loot" they think they can just camp out wherever they like and -- ahem "liberate" public buildings. Out! Out! Out! Liberate your own backyard. You have no right to sit in these buildings.

In a highly armed country, Pax describes the rioting and disorder that swept his home city:

To see your city destroyed before your own eyes is not a pain that can be described and put into words. It turns you sour (or is that bitter?). It makes something snap in you and you lose whatever hope you had. Undone by your own hands. Close your doors. Shut your eyes. Hope the black clouds of this ugliness do not reach you.
Pax laments the actions of his fellow Iraqis who steal or smash up public property, "destroying what is theirs".

But he reserves his bitterest indictment for US troops, who stood by while this happened:

If I open the doors for you and watch you steal, am I not an accomplice? They did open the doors. Not to freedom, but to chaos, while they kept what they wanted closed. They decided to turn a blind eye. And systematically did not show up with their tanks until all was gone and there was nothing left.

Finally, by the middle of June, Pax is describing those events that have now come to dominate our television screens, the daily killing of US soldiers by the shadowy forces behind the insurgency. The attacks might be disorganised and sporadic but they achieve the desired result, making it nearly impossible for the American administration "to do anything good or to keep their promises or change people's sentiments. The 'coalition forces' don't feel safe and we don't feel safe either".

Since the publication of The Baghdad Blog, Pax has continued his intermittent chronicle of life in Baghdad under occupation on his own website
(www.dear_raed.blogspot.com). As usual it is well written, highly informative and traces the themes that come to dominate coverage of Iraq. Salam Pax realistically concludes that US forces cannot now withdraw. His great fear is that, having made this mess, they will wash their hands of it prematurely, leaving Iraq to slide into further chaos: "What we all agree upon is that if the Americans pull out now, we will be eaten by the crazy mullahs and imams. G. has decided that this might be a good time to sell our souls to the (US) Devil".

It is often said that journalists get the chance to write the first draft of history. In the US-led regime change in Iraq, the most insightful dispatches were not written by the crowds of well-resourced international journalists sitting in the air conditioned comfort of five-star hotels, but by a scared and irreverent middle-class Iraqi. He was communicating to the world from his bedroom, reporting the feelings of people just like him, Iraqis badly treated by their own government, the United States and the international community. Let us hope he has the chance to report better news in the future.

(Review by Toby Dodge, TLS, Sunday, November 2nd, 2003)

My next stop is Damascus in Syria – a country that has seen its own turbulence of late…the book for this stop “The Hedgehog” is a short novella and collection of short stories by reknowned Syrian author, Zakaria Tamer.

For my journey I shell out the princely sum of £444.80 for a one-way, nine and a half hour flight from Baghdad to Damascus.

Not as straightforward as it could be; this involves leaving at 13.00 from Baghdad airport on an Egyptair flight to Cairo. After a 2 hour connection I take another Egyptair flight to Amman, the capital of Jordan, from where I catch a Royal Jordanian flight that deposits me one hour later in Damascus, at the civilised time of 18.20…

A Nation Without Borders – Journeys Through Kurdistan

Kurdistan comprises a craggy, mountainous stretch through the epicenter of the Middle East and is home to as many as 30 million Kurds, the fourth largest ethnic group in the region. Long marginalized and brutally repressed--as in the late 1980s, when Saddam Hussein attacked Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons and destroyed more than 4,000 Kurdish villages--the Kurds are notoriously independent, passionate, and proud, and today they hold tremendous geopolitical importance, as evidenced by their role in building the new Iraqi government.

The author of the book that represents this region (“A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts”), Christiane Bird, first became fascinated by the Kurds during her 1988 visit to Iran. Here, she explores Iraqi Kurdistan - which, with a decade of protection as part of the "Northern No-Fly Zone," has flourished as a near-autonomous democracy - and makes stops in Syria, Iran, and Turkey, showing Kurdish history and culture along the way.

Though the Kurds played a major military and tactical role in the United States’ recent war with Iraq, most people know little about this fiercely independent people. Christiane Bird’s travels through this volatile part of the world, provide us with a glimpse of the Kurds’ story, using personal observations and in-depth research to illuminate an astonishing history and vibrant culture.

For the twenty-five to thirty million Kurds, Kurdistan is both an actual and a mythical place: an isolated, largely mountainous homeland that has historically offered sanctuary from the treacherous outside world and yet does not exist on modern maps. Parceled out among the four nation-states of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran after World War I, Kurdistan is a divided land with a tragic history, where the indomitable Kurds both celebrate their ancient culture and fight to control their own destiny. Occupying some of the Middle East’s most strategic and richest terrain, the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the region and the largest ethnic group in the world without a state to call their own.

Whether dancing at a Kurdish wedding in Iran, bearing witness to the destroyed Kurdish countryside in southeast Turkey, having lunch with a powerful exiled agha in Syria, or visiting the sites of Saddam Hussein’s horrific chemical attacks in Iraq, the intrepid, Bird sheds light on a violently stunning world seen by few Westerners. Part mesmerising travelogue, part action-packed history, part reportage, and part cultural study, this critical book offers timely insight into an unknown but increasingly influential part of the world. Bird paints a moving and unforgettable portrait of a people uneasily poised between a stubborn past and an impatient future.

The book's title comes from a Kurdish poem about the Kurds' determination to be masters of their own lands, an effort that brings about "a thousand sighs, a thousand tears, a thousand revolts, a thousand hopes." Bird deftly describes each of those aspects of Kurdistani culture, from the sighs and tears of women who offer Bird both flavourful dinners and wrenching stories of loss, to the hopes of Kurdish artists who believe their ethnic group's artistic traditions can survive beyond war. Where Bird focuses most, however, is the revolts that have plagued the Kurds for decades. The largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own, the Kurds live in an arc of land that stretches through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union. As Bird travels through Kurdistan (a country that isn't on any map), she meets an array of people, from scholars to bus drivers. Each story of conflict, poverty, homelessness and suffering is like a brushstroke in a larger portrait of the Kurdish experience.

The journey to my next port of call – Iraq – should be relatively easy, as technically I am already there! This trip is covered by “The Baghdad Blog” by ‘Salam Pax’. Salam Pax is the pseudonym of Salam Abdulmunem, under which he became the "most famous blogger in the world" during and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Along with a massive readership, his site "Where is Raed?" received notable media attention. The pseudonym consists of the word for "peace" in Arabic (salam) and in Latin (pāx). His was one of the first instances of an individual's blog having a wide audience and impact. In 2003 Atlantic Books, in association with The Guardian, published a book based on "Where is Raed?" under the title "The Baghdad Blog". It comprises Salam's blog entries from September 2002 to June 2003 - at the epicentre of the build up to and invasion of Iraq by Allied forces.

Rather than risk an overland journey through Iraq (still not advised for foreigners), I shell out £334 one a one-way MEA flight that takes me from Erbil (the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan), into the Iraqi capital itself, Baghdad (via Beirut on a 16.5 hour journey…leaving at 22.25 and arriving bleary-eyed at Baghdad International Airport (formerly Saddam International Airport) at 01.30 in the morning…

Censoring an Iranian Love Story

When a story comes to an Iranian writer's mind, he or she is doomed to think of two different versions: the story as it is, and a bowdlerised version that might avoid the scissors of official censorship. The latter is the one that will be submitted to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which vets all books before publication; but this is just the beginning of the odyssey for the poor writer.

In “Censoring an Iranian Love Story“, his first novel to be translated into English, Shahriar Mandanipour, who moved to the US in 2006 but had previously published dozens of stories in Iran, puts both versions in one book. In this playful tale, both writer and censor appear as fictional characters; while for his lovers Mandanipour has chosen Sara and Dara, jaunty figures familiar from first-grade textbooks that were pulped after the Islamic Revolution.

Dara first sees Sara in a public library, where she is looking for a copy of The Blind Owl, a banned novel by the acclaimed Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat. He falls in love with her, and poses as a street pedlar to sell her the book. When she reads Hedayat's novel, Sara notices a collection of purple dots - Dara has left her a message in code. The lovers use the technique to exchange letters, as first Dara and then Sara borrow from the library The Little Prince, Dracula, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and more, until they meet up for the first time on a street protest in front of Tehran University.

As their love story progresses, Mandanipour elucidates the history of censorship in Iran, dating back hundreds of years to the intricate metaphors and complicated allegories employed by such poets as Rumi, Hafez and Khayam. However, it was only with the Islamic Revolution that censorship became official. Under this regime it could take the ministry weeks, months or sometimes years to respond to a manuscript; and this response would range from a simple yes or no to a detailed list of contested chapters, dialogues, sentences or even individual words.

In Mandanipour's novel, the ministry censor, Mr Petrovich - named after the detective in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment - argues with the author about words and phrases he wants removed from the story on the grounds that they might sexually arouse readers, harm Islamic values, endanger national security or ignite revolution.

He underlines every word, every sentence, every paragraph, or even every page that is indecent and that endangers public morality and the time-honoured values of the society. In a further complication, Mr Petrovich has gradually fallen in love with Sara while censoring her story, and is now trying to persuade the author to kill Dara off and leave the field open for himself.

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is a brilliant novel about the complexities of writing and publishing in Iran. It will help to further understanding of the frustrating and sometimes perilous situation of the book industry in a country where copyright is not respected, where writers struggle desperately to publish and can be jailed simply for exercising their imaginations.

The above review is by: Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian, Saturday 15 August 2009.

My next port of call is a nation that does not officially exist – that of Kurdistan, courtesy of a book called “A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts” and account of journeys throughout the region by journalist Christine Bird. Kurdistan literally means ‘Land of the Kurds’ and is a roughly defined geo-cultural region wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population, and Kurdish culture, language, and national identity have historically been based

Contemporary use of Kurdistan refers to parts of eastern Turkey (Turkish Kurdistan), northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan), northwestern Iran (Iranian Kurdistan) and northern Syria inhabited mainly by Kurds. Kurdistan roughly encompasses the northwestern Zagros and the eastern Taurus mountain ranges, and covers small portions of Armenia.

Iraqi Kurdistan first gained autonomous status in 1970 agreement with the Iraqi government and its status was re-confirmed as an autonomous entity within the federal Iraqi republic in 2005. Some Kurdish nationalist organisations seek to create an independent nation state of Kurdistan, consisting of some or all of the areas with Kurdish majority, while others campaign for greater Kurdish autonomy within the existing national boundaries.

My first port of call in Kurdistan is in the Iraqi region is Duhok, the capital city the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan in the north of the country.

To get into Iraqi Kurdistan I take the Penjwin (Bashmak) border crossing, I am pleasantly surprised by the ease of corssing, and it takes me less than half an hour to pass. I then take a taxi from Sanandaj for 35 USD. On the other side I hitch a ride to the bus/taxi terminal 9 km away from the border. At the terminal a shared taxi costs less than 8 USD to get to Sulaimaniyah, from where I travel on to Duhok.

Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope

An insightful - and relatively unbiased - view of how geopolitics affects ordinary people, this book documents, in words and pictures, the lives of Armenians in the last two decades. Based on intimate interviews with three hundred Armenians and featuring Jerry Berndt's superb photographs, it brings together firsthand testimony about the social, economic, and spiritual circumstances of Armenians during the 1980s and 1990s, when the country faced an earthquake, pogroms, and war. At times shocking and deeply emotional, “Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope” is a story of extreme suffering and hardship, a searching look at the fight for independence, and an exceptionally complex portrait of the human spirit, written by Americans Donald E Miller & Lorna Touryan Miller.

A companion to the Millers' highly acclaimed work "Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide", which documented the genocide of 1915, this book focuses on four groups of people: survivors of the earthquakes that devastated northwestern Armenia in 1988; refugees from Azerbaijan who fled Baku and Sumgait because of pogroms against them; women, children, and soldiers who were affected by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh; and ordinary citizens who survived several winters without heat because of the blockade against Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The Millers' narrative situates these accounts contextually and thematically, but the voices of individuals remain paramount. The Millers also describe their personal experiences in repeated research trips, inviting us to look beyond the headlines and think beyond the circumstances of our own lives as they bring contemporary Armenia to life.

This book forms an interesting counterpoint to the other books I have read regarding neighbouring Azerbaijan and the disputed area the two countries have warred over, Nagorno-Karabakh.

From Armenia, I make my way into the Middle East and Iran, with the novel “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” by Shahriar Mandanipour.

As a UK citizen I need a visa to enter Iran, and I go for a tourist visa. Having not allowed the requisite 8 weeks to arrange for a visa at the consulate, I need to use an ‘Iran Visa Service’ (I opt for Magic Carpet Travel Ltd) in order to get a visa processed in 7 working days. The price for my disorganisation is a charge of £200 (excluding Consular stamp fees).

In order to save some money I opt for the slow – but simple – transport option of a bus from Yerevan to Tehran.

Often used by people conducting import/export business between Armenia and Iran, there are two buses a week traveling between Tehran and Yerevan in either direction. Tourists can also take the bus.

I catch the bus to Tehran in front of Hotel Erebuni. Hotel Erebuni is located behind the arch by the central Post Office on Hanrapetutian H'raparak (Republic Square), opposite the singing fountains, across the park from Hotel Armenia. The bus leaves every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday at 09:00 and a ticket is $35.

I am able to buy my tickets and get my bus information in the Persian bus office on the second floor of the Hotel lobby. After a gruelling 34-hour journey (which would have been much less without the lengthy border stop), I arrive in Tehran and am dropped off at the Russian Bazaar in Tehran.

Labours of Love: Childhood and Nostalgia in Abkhazia

The status of Abkhazia is a central issue of the Georgian–Abkhazian conflict. The wider region formed part of the Soviet Union until 1991. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate towards the end of the 1980s, ethnic tensions grew between Abkhaz and Georgians over Georgia's moves towards independence. This led to the 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia that resulted in a Georgian military defeat, de facto independence of Abkhazia and the mass exodus and ethnic cleansing of the Georgian population from Abkhazia. In spite of the 1994 ceasefire agreement and years of negotiations, the status dispute has not been resolved, and despite the long-term presence of a United Nations monitoring force and a Russian-dominated CIS peacekeeping operation, the conflict has flared up on several occasions. In August 2008, the sides again fought during the South Ossetia War, which was followed by the formal recognition of Abkhazia by Russia, the annulment of the 1994 cease fire agreement and the termination of the UN and CIS missions

As with South Ossetia, literature for this barely recognised state is thin on the ground, and so I have chosen a collection of short stories entitled “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules” by Fazil Iskander – arguably the most famous Abkhaz writer – which are largely childhood recollections of the post-WW2 era, although some are more contemporary.

The stories range over a great deal of territory--growing up, going to school, rembrances of eccentric characters from the Abkhazia of Iskander's youth. Like Bulgakov's satires, however, Iskander's stories also have a more political substrata. Several stories subtly aim their arrows at the Soviet regime. In one story, Forbidden Fruit, a boy who snitches on his sister for eating pork is punished for his actions. In another, One Day in Summer, the story a German tourist tells our narrator about his experiences under the Nazis seems a critique of Soviet responses to Stalin. In still another, Old Crooked Arm, an eccentric outwits both his friends and the Soviet state.

All in all these form an enjoyable collection of stories that build up a nostalgic - though unsentimental – picture of modern Abkhazia, although it is a shame that a more recent literary work dealing with contemporary Abkhazia is not available (at least not in English…).

From here I make my way back to another country racked by border wars in recent years: Armenia (I have already visited neighbouring Azerbaijan and the disputed area the two countries have warred over, Nagorno-Karabakh).

As an EU citizen I need to buy a visa first. You can buy a visa when you arrive at any entry point to Armenia. A 21-day visa costs 3,000 dram (about $8/EUR6). However, border guards do accept other currencies but they will not give you a good exchange rate and often won’t take high value notes, so I go for the simpler option of ordering the visa online.

There is no direct transport from Abkhazia to Armenia, so I retrace my steps back to Tbilisi in Georgia, via jeeps (a different one for each side of the border) to Zugdidi, then overnight train to Tbilisi.

In Tbilisi I am able to get one of two daily Armavia Airlines flights from Tbilisi airport to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, leaving at 19.15 and arriving a mere 45 minutes later, for $72 (economy). "Zvartnots " International airport is 10km north of Yerevan proper, though a taxi takes only 15 minutes at a cost of around $6.

I shall be staying in Armenia courtesy of "Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope", an account by Americans Donald E Miller & Lorna Touryan Miller of Armenia’s tribulations through earthquake and war during the 1980s, 1990s and into the 21st century.

South Ossetia: A Chronicle of Contract Murder

This book “South Ossetia: Chronicle of Contract Murder” is dedicated to the victims of the Georgian invasion of the disputed South Ossetia, during the 2008 South Ossetia War, which lasted from August 7-12. The book contains some striking photographs of the conflict, as well as survivors’ testimonies, and was released by human rights movement, Soprotivleniye (which stands for ‘resistance’ in Russian).

Along with Abkhazia, this is one of two disputed regions within the official borders of Georgia. South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia in 1990, calling itself the "Republic of South Ossetia". The Georgian government responded by abolishing South Ossetia's autonomy and trying to retake the region by force. This led to the 1991–1992 South Ossetia War. Georgian fighting against South Ossetia occurred on two other occasions, in 2004 and 2008. The last conflict led to the 2008 South Ossetia war, during which Ossetian separatists and Russian troops gained full, de-facto, control of the territory of the former South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast.

In the wake of the 2008 South Ossetia War, Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Tuvalu recognised South Ossetia as an independent republic. Georgia does not recognise the existence of South Ossetia as a political entity, and considers most of its territory a part of the Shida Kartli region under Georgian sovereignty, occupied by the Russian army.

The 2008 South Ossetia War claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Both law enforcement bodies and non-governmental organisations are now investigating circumstances in which those civilians died. Soprotivleniye was one of the first to take up the job. On August 15 2008 psychologists filed out to Russia’s Rostov region to assist refugees from South Ossetia. At this time a hot line was also launched for the victims of the conflict. Now professionals of the movement are helping to search for people, work out schemes for transfers of humanitarian aid to South Ossetia and assist people to get financial compensation.

“We believe that in the days of the Georgian aggression European media were flooded with deceptive information about what was going on in the conflict zone,” said the head of the Public Committee Olga Kostina. “Now the world community has got access to photo and video and other documents which prove that Georgian soldiers in South Ossetia were actually committing genocide against its people. We hope that our book will help European parliamentarians and ordinary citizens to understand what really happened”.

The publication of the book “South Ossetia: Chronicle of Contract Murder” is another step in the public investigation of crimes in South Ossetia. Dedicated to the victims of Georgia’s aggression, it also marks 60 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.

The book album contains three chapters: “Crimes”, “Victims”, “Witnesses”. The first chapter briefly presents historical background of Georgia-South Ossetia relations and chronicles events preceding and following August 8. The second chapter features testimonies of people who lived through the horrors of five-day war. The third chapter is dedicated to testimonies of witnesses’– journalists, doctors, clerics. All documents are accompanied by photographs taken during the fighting in Tskhinval and after the repulse of Georgia’s attack, when first aid was delivered to South Ossetia.

Whilst there are, of course, two sides to every story – and this is very much the South Ossetian side – one cannot deny the impact of the photographs and accounts here, which seem more linked to the horrors of the Second World War than a European country in the 21st Century…

From South Ossetia I travel to Abkhazia – the other disputed region within the official borders of Georgia. I take the (relatively) safest option of leaving South Ossetia and take a public marshrutka going back to Georgia, south on the main road from Tskhinvali towards Gori and on to Tbilisi.

However, public transport from Georgia to Abkhazia does not exist. So I take a chance – and a train – from Tbilisi to Zugdidi, close to the Abkhazian border (the train, a night train, costs 18 euro for the 318km one-way trip). In Zugdidi I am able to organise travel to Abkhazia via a local “travel agent.” As cars with Georgian number plates cannot cross into Abkhazia, this transport consists of a jeep to the border, then a change of jeep with different plates and then a 30 minute drive to Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, and a former holiday hot-spot located on the Black Sea.

As with South Ossetia, literature for this barely recognised state is thin on the ground, and so I have chosen a collection of short stories entitled “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules” by Fazil Iskander – arguably the most famous Abkhaz writer – which are largely childhood recollections of the post-WW2 era, although some are more contemporary.

Guns, Roses and Vodka: Stolen Stories from Georgia

Ex-Time journalist Wendell Steavenson's record of the ruin of Georgia in the 21st century, “Stories I Stole”, makes for a fascinating account of this benighted country – both heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measures.

When Wendell Steavenson was living in Georgia, she kept a collector's list of 'LAOs' - large abandoned objects. The Caucasus is littered with them: rusting tank hulls, gutted apartment blocks, the rustbelt of gigantic ruined factories that surrounds most cities. The biggest LAO is the late Soviet Union itself. Nobody wants to re-animate it. But nobody realised what the price of junking it would be.

A few decades ago, Russians assumed that if everything blew to bits, Georgia would still be a happy land. Wonderful fruit and vegetables, oceans of wine and brandy, a beautiful coastline; the Georgians would be even better off than before. Instead of which, the lights went off. There was a crazy civil war, two totally avoidable secession wars, which evicted a quarter of a million destitute refugees, and the economy collapsed.

Eight years after independence, Steavenson spent winter like most Georgians, sleeping in her clothes and reading by candlelight, in a flat where electric light, heating and hot water came on only for a few unpredictable hours of ecstasy each week. Children asked their parents what radiators were for. Adults, surviving on vodka and rotten cigarettes, asked what the Georgian government was for.

In spite of this, foreigners who visit Georgia are still entranced. Hospitality to strangers is a religion. Steavenson's life there began with one of those endless Georgian picnics that start as a lunch and end in the middle of the night, borne along by the endless toasts and speeches commanded by the Tamada (master of ceremonies). 'I was happy; charmed, drunk and beguiled like thousands of guests and invaders before me, in the land of hospitality.' But soon she understood that those who make strangers happy are not always happy themselves. Forcing guests to drink too much can be an act of aggression. What is it like to be a Georgian host?

Steavenson's friends incessantly told her stories about their country, and acted out its complexes in their lives. One shrewdly gave her Lampedusa's “The Leopard” and let her read 'Georgia' for Sicily. 'All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death... The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery... Having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they think they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.'

Two of her acquaintances, Dato and Aleko, were shady young 'biznesmen'. Dato was badly disfigured in a car crash; while he was recovering, Aleko seduced his wife. The two then confronted one another by a lake, accompanied by their friends and umpired by a minor 'godfather'. Aleko knocked Dato down; Dato pulled a gun and shot Aleko in the back, temporarily paralysing him. One of Aleko's seconds then shot Dato in the leg. Nobody won. Both men sank into terminal depression, deepened by heroin and alcohol.

A 'hankering for death'? Steavenson takes this gloomy little vendetta tale and turns it into a haunting, Chekhovian story about pride, futility and self-destruction. Stories I Stole is anything but a travelogue, although she moves through many landscapes and sick cities. It is not a hack's diary, although she is an experienced foreign correspondent and hunted with the little band of 'Caucasus Hands' who risked their necks in Chechnya or Nagorno-Karabakh. And the book isn't one more 'quest for the real me', although one strand in it is her account of an agonising love affair. This is the first published book of a practised and very gifted writer, a young Kapuscinski with a literary future ahead of her.

She made several expeditions to Abkhazia, the tiny country that broke away from Georgia in 1993 and which the world - as a punishment - has dropped into an oubliette: unrecognised, its communications cut off, its ruined towns unrepaired. Few strangers can enter, apart from Russian 'peacekeepers', UN agencies and an international corps of aid workers, from Oxfam to the Halo Trust - the quiet professionals who clear mines all over the Caucasus battlefields. Steavenson, used to Georgian resourcefulness (like the art of running an electricity meter backwards) was depressed by the stagnation of Abkhazia: 'its head was down and its listless subsistence gaze directed at the pavement'.

While she was living in Tbilisi, the second Russian war in Chechnya broke out, driving streams of refugees across the mountains into northern Georgia. Steavenson went into these kidnap territories and lived among the hard-drinking Svans and semi-pagan Khevsurs. She spent days and nights at remote border posts interviewing families escaping the war, and Chechen fighters - survivors from the hellish fighting before Grozny fell - crossing the frontier to rest and re-group.

One of the most intense sections here records a visit to the remote Pankisi valley, where she was protected by her friend the famous Chechen commander Arbi. (That lawless place has just been selected as a target in the 'war against terrorism' by US special forces; their move into Georgia and America's re-training of the Georgian army may well end in renewed war all over the region.)

Her lover, a Magnum photographer, came back to her from the war after nine months of silence and rejection, and proposed to her in a freezing hut in Pankisi. She cried, but found the strength to say no. Then he did a wonderful, Georgian thing (although he was a German): after days and nights scouring the flower-growers of the countryside, he sent her a thousand red roses. It became an instant Tbilisi legend. In that warm-hearted, ramshackle city, Wendell Steavenson will always be the girl who got a thousand roses and still turned the man down. For her readers, though, she will be remembered for this first book by an immensely talented writer.

(review by Neal Ascherson, The Observer, Sunday 14 July 2002)

From Georgia I make my way to yet another disputed territory – South Ossetia. Along with Abkhazia, this is one of two disputed regions within the official borders of Georgia.

South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia in 1990, calling itself the "Republic of South Ossetia". The Georgian government responded by abolishing South Ossetia's autonomy and trying to retake the region by force. This led to the 1991–1992 South Ossetia War. Georgian fighting against South Ossetia occurred on two other occasions, in 2004 and 2008. The last conflict led to the 2008 South Ossetia war, during which Ossetian separatists and Russian troops gained full, de-facto, control of the territory of the former South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast.

In the wake of the 2008 South Ossetia War, Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Tuvalu recognised South Ossetia as an independent republic. Georgia does not recognise the existence of South Ossetia as a political entity, and considers most of its territory a part of the Shida Kartli region under Georgian sovereignty, occupied by the Russian army.

It is a graphic account of the 2008 War – in both recollections and photographs - that forms my next journey with the eBook “South Ossetia: Chronicle of Contract Murder”.

As you might imagine, travel to South Ossetia from Georgia is not a straightforward activity:

To get in from Georgia, I hire a car in Tbilisi and drive towards the border until I come upon a Georgian Army checkpoint. The car is thoroughly searched (no doubt due to Georgian plates!), and there follows some questioning about my visit. Fortunately, the soldiers agree to let me through, and I drive another five kilometres until I reach the buffer zone, which is controlled by Russian troops in fortified positions and armoured vehicles. Again, I am stopped, searched, and questioned. Eventually the Russians decide to let me in, and I have to follow a Russian Army staff car, which takes me to the South Ossetian Foreign Ministry in Tskhinvali to register my arrival in this unofficial Republic…