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| Obama's half-brother writes book 'inspired by father's abuse' Obama's father beat me and my mother, Mark Ndesandjo says, as he launches self-published semi-autobiographical novel阅读中文 | Read this in ChineseBarack Obama's half-brother in China has broken his media silence to launch a semi-autobiographical novel, which he said was partly inspired by their father's abuse.Mark Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern city of Shenzhen for the last seven years and is married to a Chinese woman, said he plans to meet the US president during Obama's official visit to Beijing this month. "My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She is his biggest fan," Ndesandjo said.His self-published novel – like the president's memoir Dreams From My Father – focuses on Barack Obama senior."My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don't do that," Ndesandjo told Associated Press (AP), saying he wrote Nairobi to Shenzhen in part to raise awareness of domestic violence."It's something which I think affected me for a long time, and it's something that I've just recently come to terms with."With tears in his eyes, he added: "I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds."I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn't know where to go."Ndesandjo, who works in strategic marketing, had previously refused all interviews. He declined to answer many of AP's questions and would not even give his age, saying only that he was younger than his brother. The news agency said the two men had a "strong resemblance".Several relatives of the president have books due out soon. Ndesandjo said he did not want to touch on any political themes in his novel. "I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job and I really don't want to cause him additional heartburn," he said.A White House spokesman declined to comment on the interview or discuss Obama's relationship with his half-brother.Barack Obama senior met Ndesandjo's mother Ruth Nidesand while studying at Harvard University, shortly after divorcing the president's mother.The couple returned to his native Kenya, where Ndesandjo and his brother, David – who died in an accident some years ago – were born and grew up. But they divorced some years later, amid allegations of domestic abuse, and Nidesand returned to the US. Ruth Nidesand took the surname of her second husband."I see myself in many ways as a person who has many places, has feet in many places," said Ndesandjo, an American citizen who studied and worked in the US before leaving his corporate job after the September 11 attacks.Obama senior, who died in 1982, also had four children with his first wife. He was largely absent from the life of the president, who saw his father only once after his parents' divorce, when Obama was 10 years old.In his memoir, the president portrayed his father as a gifted but erratic man with an alcohol problem, who failed to live up to his family responsibilities. The book quoted Ndesandjo saying: "I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough."Ndesandjo said at a press conference today that his brother's election victory, among other recent events, helped "peel away the hardness" that he developed during his childhood."I became proud of being an Obama," he said.He told AP that the two men met in Washington and Texas last year, adding: "He came up to me, and we hugged ... I was just thinking of how happy I was and how proud and how much I loved him."Barack ObamaChinaUnited StatesKenyaFictionTania Braniganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
UK lawyers fight to save nine-year-old boy from deportation to Iran Mother says family faces jail in Tehran for possessing extracts from Satanic Verses and criticising regime Lawyers for a nine-year-old boy set to be removed from the UK tomorrow are urgently trying to stop his deportation.The Iranian boy, known for legal reasons as Child M, has been locked up in Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire, the UK's main immigration removal centre for women and families, since he was arrested with his mother and older brother in Manchester this week. They are due to be put on a flight to Iran tomorrow at 6.30pm.Child M's mother has been trying to claim asylum, saying her life is in danger if she returns to Iran because photocopied extracts of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses were found in her house and business.Richard Jones, Child M's lawyer, has given a new report to the UK border agency in which an independent expert testifies that the arrest warrant is genuine and states that the family would be in grave danger if sent back. If the agency discarded the report, the child's lawyers would make an urgent application to a high court judge for an injunction to prevent the deportation and allow the fresh evidence to be considered, he said.In April this year, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children's commissioner for England, said children refused asylum should no longer be detained while awaiting deportation. He warned in a report that children found time spent in Yarl's Wood "like being in prison".Child M spent several weeks in Yarl's Wood last year and suffered serious physical and mental health problems as a result, said Jones.Speaking from Yarl's Wood yesterday, his mother, 48, who cannot be named for her own safety, said about 10 immigration officers came into her house at 8.15am on Monday and took her and her two sons, Child M and his brother, 19. She collapsed and was taken to hospital before going to Yarl's Wood in a wheelchair.She said her son was reacting very badly to the experience. "He wet himself last night. He has nightmares. He feels very defenceless," she said.She added that she and her family would be sent to prison not only as punishment for being in possession of The Satanic Verses, but for publicly criticising the Iranian regime.Her 23-year-old daughter was not at the house when the raid occurred and is now in hiding. She said Child M was receiving psychiatric help and had only recently begun to sleep in his own room. During his last incarceration he had a rash and his hair had begun to fall out, according to his lawyers."He was getting better, but now this is going to take him back to square one," she said. UK border officials had removed her clothes as well as personal items from the house.The family say they came to the UK in the summer of 2007 to visit relatives and recover from the death of Child M's father, who had died in a car accident. They say they intended to stay only for one or two months, but then received a phone call from Iran saying their home and business had been raided by police.Lawyers have previously produced a copy and translation of the arrest warrant, which said the arrests were "with respect to disseminating fabrication and propagating against the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran through printing and publishing the noxious book Satanic Verses".Immigration and asylumIranSalman RushdieAlexandra Toppingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Leaving Fingerprints by Imtiaz Dharker Identity and a sense of place ground this collection. By Sarah CrownIf the poet pitches it right, a collection's title can be made to act as a shop window: a place to signpost intentions, gesture at the frame of mind in which the poems were conceived, the wider landscape to which the poet was referring. They tend, of course, to be suggestive rather than prescriptive (think of Larkin's High Windows, or Don Paterson's Landing Light), but if you're after a quiet hint on how to approach the poems inside, this is the place to start. In Imtiaz Dharker's latest collection, however, the title doesn't so much hint as holler. From its subject matter and imagery right down to the pen-and-ink sketches of whorled, undulant landscapes with which she punctuates the poems, this volume is larded and smudged with fingerprints.Clearly, for her, the symbol is a resonant one. Dharker is a definitively diasporic writer (born in Pakistan, she grew up in Glasgow and now shuttles between Mumbai and London), and it's easy to see the appeal of the fingerprint – with its suggestions of permanence, immutability, above all of ownership – to a woman in exile, unsure of her place in the world. It stands as a counterpoint to the nagging fear of effacement that lurks around the foundations of this collection and bubbles to the surface in poems such as "Her footprint vanishes", which begins "She disappeared without a trace, / they said. If there were footprints / on the sand, the sea got there / before anyone saw and wiped / her off the face of the earth." This bleak, blank image of annulment – the nameless woman, the unreliable no-man's-land of shoreline, the second-hand reporting that turns even absence into a negative, a rumour of absence – contrasts tellingly with a series of poems set on the south coast of England around history-steeped Hastings, in which images crisp up and colours deepen in terrain that has acquired stability from the stamp of the past. Sea frets and shifting sands are replaced by dense reds, blues and greens and a reassuring litany of solid station names, told like beads on a rosary: "Tonbridge passes. High Brooms. Tunbridge Wells, / Wadhurst and Stonegate". In the place of the washed-out footprint of the earlier poem are concrete historical "dates" that mark the ground like "bigger bootprints, / pressed in harder".This sense of a landscape imprinted ripples through the collection. The links that Dharker draws between identity and landscape are physically apparent in countryside that takes on the contours of fingerprints, cresting and diving in "folds of soil and mud", and in the scrolled, mazey objects (honeycomb, coral, seashells, the "wrinkling tissue" of poppy petals) that collect here (the parallels reach a climax in "Someone else", which begins "Today the tips slipped off my fingers. // They rolled themselves across a field, / dug down, came back as furrows / in the ground . . ."). And the resemblance is more than skin-deep: like fingerprints, too, Dharker's landscapes are also capable of yielding clues to our ancestry. The soil beneath our feet conceals "the earth's deep squirm / around an anklet or an amulet, a broken cup", and the earthworm's discovery of "an ivory handle, copper, / . . . the remainder of kings, / clean bone, potatoes, her jewelled hand . . ." Everything is connected in this universe: fingerprints to landscape, landscape to ancestry, ancestry to identity – and identity to fingerprints again.It's the endless interweaving of a handful of symbols and meanings that gives Leaving Fingerprints the coherence that distinguishes it as a collection. Like a fingerprint – the image is inescapable – each poem here is a representative fragment of the whole; each exhibits a facet of the themes of the collection and explores it through the plain but robust iconography of rivers, hands, trees and soil which Dharker establishes. Individual stories trace through the collection like lifelines on a palm: the awful legend of Anarkali, a slave-girl who became the lover of a prince and was buried alive for her troubles; the magical daily doling-out of tiffin boxes in Mumbai (the only objects in her world that are never mislaid), the power and significance of cooking (she's good on succulence and savour). All join together in the late long poem "Breath and shadow", in which her symbols jumble and blend with one another and she winds lines from other poets' work into the river of her own poem. Even the final breakdown of meaning (the palm reader, who's been dogging the poet's steps through the collection, loses her grip, crying "I can no more read this hand / than I can read running water") feels like part of the story: a transcending of the question of identity; a recognition that it's what the hand does, not what it says, that matters.Unfortunately, though, this integrity is only clearly visible in the overview. Consider the poems individually, and the picture tends to dissolve. Sometimes meandering, occasionally overblown (as in "Multiple Exposure", in which the speaker claims portentously of a photograph "It could alter / your view of all that is human // passing like you / passing through / passing through a frame // knowing we may all pass / this way again"), they lack the purposefulness and drive of the grander narrative. There are moments of excellence – the poems on Anarkali, the series on Hastings – and some glorious images (the picture of a fingerprint as a "mortal coil" is particularly graceful). But the sum here is unavoidably greater than the parts. PoetrySarah Crownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of The Times: A Hospital How-To Guide That Mother Would Love Atul Gawande’s provocative new book explains how a technique used by pilots — the simple checklist — can dramatically reduce patients’ deaths in hospitals. feeds.nytimes.com |
Falling in love with Anna Karenina It took me a little while to square up to Tolstoy's forbiddingly mighty reputation. I shouldn't have hung backI've owned it for less than two weeks, but I'm already taping up the collapsing spine of Anna Karenina. Unputdownable isn't the word: I can't remember when I last felt like this about a classic author I hadn't previously read. Especially one as forbidding as Tolstoy. And that in itself is a relief.We Tolstoy virgins know that the bearded one justly perches near the top of our lifelong reading list, yet somehow the right time is never quite right to rise to the occasion. (I've felt like that about William Faulkner for ever.) Even my terrifyingly well-read historian father only found time to finish War and Peace when he was 70. Three factors, however, recently edged me towards the giant of Russian literature. The first is the renewed interest in him sparked by the centenary of his death this year; the second, that I've been devouring serial novels (Anna Karenina was published over four years in Russian Messenger magazine) as I'm writing one myself; and the third – the real catalyst – was a terse endorsement in Ernest Hemingway On Writing (edited by Larry Phillips). Tolstoy, declared the Nobel prize winner, was simply the author every writer should read. Without further delay, I visited my nearest secondhand bookshop and dug out a 1969 Penguin Classics edition of Anna Karenin, translated by Rosemary Edmonds (her choice of Karenin naturalised the Russian name into English; more popularly, publishers use Karenina, a direct transliteration of the actual Russian.) With its evergreen themes of jealousy, pity, fidelity, ambition, success, power, lust and society, Anna Karenina – regarded as more human than War and Peace – seems to me the perfect place to have begun my Tolstoy odyssey. The modernity of the characters is dazzling: how they all, from young Kitty to the author's alter-ego Levin, strive for meaning; how they so often fail (as the cuckolded husband Karenin does when he confronts Anna's adultery) to put into words what they want to say; how one society princess is "awfully, awfully bored" and bemoans the "same everlasting crowd doing the same everlasting things" (foreshadowing Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon … and the day after that, and the next thirty years?")Although I'm a long-term fan of Chekhov, particularly his short stories, I'm excited that Tolstoy's appeal is less oblique. Chekhov reputedly said, after visiting his hero: "When you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone."In her introduction to my edition, Edmonds suggests that the idea for Anna Karenina arose after Tolstoy picked up a tale by Pushkin in 1873, which began with the line: "The guests at the country house …" Tolstoy observed that the way to begin a novel was to "plunge readers right into the middle of the action. Others would describe the guests, the rooms, but Pushkin at once gets down to business." This is borne out in Anna Karenina: the opening chapter plunges us into themes that will be explored fully later. We learn in the first paragraph that "everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out about her husband's relationship with their former French governess and had announced that she could not go on living in the same house with him."Part One's most enduring scene, however, is Anna's arrival where, just after she has exchanged eye contact with Vronsky (her fatal attraction), a guard is crushed by a train: "A bad omen," she says to her brother, tears streaming down her face. As readers, we know she is doomed. We are hooked.So, has anyone else recently discovered Count Lev? And where should I go next? The Cossacks? Boyhood? Or War and Peace?Leo TolstoyFictionClassicsStephen Emmsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |