The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

The Blood of Flowers

by

Anita Amirrezvani

 

A young girl and her recently widowed mother, without a male family member to tend their fields, have to leave their home village to seek the protection of her father’s half brother, a carpet maker, in 17th century Isfahan.  He and his wife taken them in, but they are treated like servants.  The aunt is manipulative and resentful of their presence but the uncle recognises the young girl’s talent for carpet design and teaches her because he has no sons to pass his skills and business on to .

Her skills increase and he lends her money to craft her own rug for sale, the sale of which will start to raise money for her dowry. In a moment of frustration with the quality of her work and choices of colours she cuts all the knots, shredding and wasting lots of expensive wool. Without dowry money her marriage prospects are non-existent and she ends up in a secret, although legal, temporary marriage, a sigheh, with the son of a horse trader. Effectively her family have sold her virginity for money on a renewable 3 month contract. She gradually realises just what is really required of her in this arrangement and her contract is extended for a second period securing her and her mother’s wellbeing for a bit longer.

However, she has always been a headstrong child and realising that she is being used by her husband who has no intention of making her a proper lifetime wife, declines the next extension. Retribution by her husband’s new wife and their social circle, the consequences of having kept the sigheh secret from everyone not directly involved,  see strains put on the family’s rug business and without male protection and without money, the girl and her mother find themselves on the street without  money having been tricked out of the payment for her rug by a Dutchman buyer.  Finding shelter with a poor family and with her mother becoming sick, she risks everything in an attempt to keep them alive and to survive.

This a coming-of-age tale which sees the girl, unnamed throughout the book, transform from a headstrong child, doing the rash and impulsive thing without thinking of its consequences, into a bold and determined young woman in charge of her own future. It has all the twisted turns in fortune as seen in the knotted threads of one of the carpets so vividly described in the book – her change in circumstances in her uncle home, the vindictiveness of her aunt, the opulence of her husband’s home, the squalor of loom worker Melaka's one room shack, her insightful relationship with Homa the woman who runs the hamman, her friendship with the neighbour's girl Naheed, how she learns the tricks of how to survive begging from the blind beggar – all these experiences knot together to form the up and down pattern of her life. That life story is interspersed with folk stories, told mainly by her mother, to build up as rich a storyboard as any Persian carpet’s design.

I absolutely flew through this book, loving not only the story the author had put together but also the interspersing Iranian stories. Each of these begins with “First there wasn’t and then there was. Before God, no one was” which in  an Author’s Note to the edition I read is described as a rough translation of the Iranian equivalent of “Once upon a time” expression used at the start of European folk and fairy tales.  Of the seven such tales in the book, two are the author’s own and five are retellings. I was also intrigued to read that the book’s title is taken from a poem called “Ode to a Garden Carpet” by an unknown Sufi poet c 1500 which portrays the garden carpet as a place of refuge that stimulate visions of the divine, whereas within the book the blood of flowers is the dye created from flower petals. This poem is so beautiful I reproduce it here:

Ode To A Garden Carpet – By an unknown Sufi Poet (Circa 1500)

Here in this carpet lives an ever-lovely spring; Un-scorched by summer’s ardent flame, Safe too from autumn’s boisterous gales, Mid winter’s cruel ice and snow,’Tis gaily blooming still. Eyes hot-seared by desert glare find healing in its velvet shade. Splashing foundations and rippling pools, In cool retreats sore-wearied limbs restore, And tired hearts awake with joy once more. The way was cruel.

Baffled by monotony and mocked by phantoms delirious, Beset by stalking Death in guises manifold; The dreaded jinns, the beasts ferocious, The flaming heat and the exploding storms; Form all these perils here at last set free; In the Garden all find security.

Here the long-laboring Earth at last gives birth. From apparent death, a new and lovely world is born; Below the desert’s dusty floor, the jacinth imprisoned lies. The stony wilderness so bleak and bare, In ageless patience broods, aware of a life within, the promise of fertility and abundance. Ever longing for deliverance. The world at last reveals its destiny.

Can we not then capture and restore The loveliness that gave us hope, Still brightly mirrored on memory’s gliding waters Or snared in the poets’ invisible net, So wide, so fragile, Yet captor and conqueror of realities elusive?

Wrought in gold and azure, bright as carved metal. Dream-like foliage in sparking tones is caught, Or else, in sumptuous shades of glossy lacquer, Quiet but intense; in muffled browns and honey pure, Jasper cool and mellow cinnabar, That fairy land comes real again.

In sudden collisions find sweet embrace; In rhythms enchanting, with stately pace, Or rollicking speed; emerging, retreating, Reversing, in peaceful finality . Their conflicts reconcile, All in confederation blending Like a chorus in part-song gladly singing, In contrapuntal play rejoicing, Floating soft or wildly free; Yet anchored in eternity

ashramblings verdict : 4* This rapid read will ensure that you’ll never look at a Persian carpet the same way again!

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
by
Maaza Mengiste

In 1974 the Ethiopian Marxist Derg, Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, staged a coup against Emperor Haile Selassie. The resultant Civil War lasted until 1991, left around 1.5 million people dead and imprisoned thousands of others without trial. This novel charts the fortunes of an Addis family - Hailu, a doctor, his sons Dawit and Yonas, Yonas’s wife Sara – through the build up to the Civil War and through part of it.

The first part of the book introduces the family as it deals with private tragedy (the death of Selam, Hailu’s wife, the sickness of Yonas and Sara’s only surviving child, Tizita) amidst increasing instability in the city caused by the mounting pressure on the emperor to do something about the famine in Wollo/Wello, Tigre and Shoa/Sewa provinces and rebellions amongst soldiers.  Dawit becomes increasingly involved in the student movement whilst his childhood friend Mickey is exposed first to the horrors of the famine and then to the brutalism of the Derg commanders.  I was particular struck by the writer’s sensitivities such as when she writes about the imprisonment of the Emperor  I thought she encapsulated both the awe in which ordinary Ethiopians held their Emperor and the endlessness of solitary imprisonment - “He’d been taken to the great hall that had once belonged to the late Emperor Zewditu.All of the furniture had been emptied out of the big room and onlu a small cot with thin sheets and a blanket sat in its center. Soldiers were posted outside his door, which was locked in triplicate and then chained. Their fear of him was heartbreaking, compounding his loneliness and the largeness of this empty space he was trapped inside. They walked backwards into the room whenever they escorted his old servant inside with his food, doubly armed and wearing sunglasses. They scurried out as quickly as they could, too afraid to glance his way. The mournful whispers of his old lion, Tojo, lulled him to sleep, and he tried to make himself forget about the garden just outside his window which he was no longer allowed to walk in. Under the weight of this solitude, all the emperor’s hours, minutes, and seconds blurred and ran together like a slow, dying river.” Similarly at the end of Part One when we see Mickey being threatened at gun point, one of his comrades having already been so threatened and killed, to force him to perform the execution.

In the second part, realities of the Derg regime begin to hit home, Dawit becomes increasingly involved in the production and distribution of opposition pamphlets which causes friction with his father and brother. He witnesses the dumping of the body of a neighbour ‘s daughter and cannot do anything about it. Mickey, having confessed all to Dawit and having handed over his pistol, appears to be continuing to work for the authorities and to be rising in their ranks. Hailu has to care for one of the horribly beaten victims of torture who was required by the regime to recover. Instead of permitting the terrified girl to go back to suffer further torture Hailu gives her a cyanide pill and “wanted to think that last look before she closed her eyes was gratitude” As a result he is summoned to the jail and by the end of Book 2 he is alone in a cell in the dark.

In Book 3 the family try in vain to find out what has happened to Hailu: they go to the jail, they try to see Mickey, Yonas and Sara’s relationship feels the strain. Meanwhile, Dawit builds up his support cell with the help of Sara and Melaku, the man who runs their local kiosk. During the curfew hours, they undertake the unpleasant and dangerous work of collecting victims bodies dumped roadside and returning them to their families. In a horrid turn to the story line their neighbour’s young son, just starting to work the streets selling newspapers, witnesses the assassination of a Derg official and is taken into custody. Being a child offers no protection against the brutality of the Derg and he becomes one of the victims. Dawit graduates in the ranks of the opposition and is transformed into a legend, Mekonnen, killer of soldiers. 

Hailu’s torture continues. As a doctor he realises his jaw is broken and he is swallowing his own dislodged teeth, that his assailant is good at accurately placing blows to get no blood on his own clothes. He tries to stick to his story that the girl was dead, but of course finally cannot.  Finally Hailu is freed, after a real twist in the tale when the truth behind the interrogator’s fervour to find this girl is revealed, and somehow find his way home to the warmth and safety of his family.

The final part of the book brings Mekonnen’s legend to its peak, with the attempted assassination of the Derg leadership. Somewhat predictably, the storyline has Dawit primed to target the vehicle in the convoy of dignitaries in which Mickey sits. But their previous friendship is no  protection in civil war. The regime retaliates by mounting an exhaustive search for and elimination of all opposition in what became known as the Red Terror period of Ethiopian history. With no where left to hide Dawit goes home and in a final ‘family stand together against terror’ scene is successfully hidden from the authorities, this time.

I think the author writes very compassionately about the horrors, although in places they may be a bit too graphic for some sensibilities, they seem well researched and grounded in reality. The New Yorker writes. “But the real marvel of this tender novel is its coiled plotting, in which coincidence manages to evoke the colossal emotional toll of the revolution: on a crowded street, soldiers force the doctor’s elder son to drag away a prisoner whom they shot, and who turns out to be a family servant’s long-lost child; the younger son becomes a legendary resistance fighter, killing soldiers and collecting civilian bodies for burial, while his fumbling childhood best friend thrives under a senior officer of the junta”. By bringing together all these coincidences into the life of this one family the author encapsulates all the tribulations of the whole of the opposition and ordinary people of the country during this time in a highly credible first novel.

ashramblings verdict 4* a very readable account of a family’s journey into the horror’s of a civil war which set brother against brother, father against son, husband against wife.

My childhood landmark

Public Weighing Machine

In the bustle of the Woolworths store. amidst the polished mahogany counters and the shoppers’ stockinged legs, it was unmistakable. Rising over 6 foot high, it towered over everything and everyone to be see from far and wide.

Standing like some erect, stationary guardsman in his household cavalry livery, the bright red “lollipop” shape shone and sparkled.  At its foot was a square, polished, silver metal footplate, dotted with raised rivets and floating like a weighbridge pontoon over the heavyweight base.

From there, its trunk rose up like some giant redwood sequoia, wide enough to play hide and seek behind, except that it was placed flush against the shop wall, close by the shop’s main doorway, strategically positioned to catch people on their way out . Of course that was why mum had chosen it too.

I’d always been fascinated by its face of concentric circles and its slot which ate coins. The inner circle was full of the machine’s mechanical innards of interworking cogwheels, then there was the numerical middle circle and finally, encasing them both, the pillar box red outer coat. Crossing these, one gigantic, forked clock hand always rested in the noon position to show zero stones. This  hand would only swing round after someone had stepped onto the footplate and fed the machine’s small mouth with requisite amount of coins. As a three year old, my fascination to see this happen again and again would guarantee I’d stand there and wait, wait for mum to find me if we’d been separated in the crowd and not to be tempted to go of exploring, wandering off into the town traffic to get lost or worse.