In which Sarah Palin vows to fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the Governor's office

Here, in all its glorious weirdness, is Sarah Palin's resignation speech, and here is the weirdest bit.

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In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life - my children (where the count was unanimous... well, in response to asking: "Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the Governor's office?" It was four "yes's" and one "hell yeah!" The "hell yeah" sealed it - and someday I'll talk about the details of that... I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig - I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT - that time is precious... the world needs more "Trigs", not fewer.

The pram in the hall: A guest entry by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

I promised you lots of guest entries by writers that I like and admire. Meet Nuala Ní Chonchúir, an Irish writer who blogs under the name Women Rule Writer. She has published two story collections, The Wind Across the Grass and To the World of Men, Welcome. She is also an established poet with two critically acclaimed anthologies to her name. She has represented Ireland at the Tokyo International Poetry Festival(!) She has also won several awards for her writing, including the Cuirt New Writing Prize, RTE radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Jonathan Swift Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. Her new book, Nude, is out in September from Salt Publishing.

I met Nuala first online before I met her in Galway, earlier this year, and to my delight found that I liked her in the flesh as much as in the word. Nuala, already a mother of two boys, recently welcomed baby Juno to the family and, here, taking inspiration from a quotation by Cyril Connolly, she reflects on writing and being a mother.

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"There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall."

Cyril Connolly 1938

I had decided to write about how Connolly’s famous pram in the hall was in fact no barrier to creative activity – in my case, writing – but, guess what? I have found it very hard to grab half an hour away from my new baby in order to write down my thoughts...

OK, she’s only five weeks old, so I shouldn’t be trying to run before I can walk, but I had absolutely forgotten how little a mother can achieve with a brand new baby in the house. My life now consists of breastfeeding, sleeping, school runs, food-on-the-fly, and endless rounds of ‘Cash in the Attic’ and ‘Bargain Hunt’ on the TV. I can’t even manage to read a book, which is unheard of for me. But, I’m keeping my daughter alive with my breast milk and that – not writing – is the most important thing right at this moment.

However, I still don’t think that the pram in the hall is a barrier to writing. Especially not for men. I couldn’t help being irritated by Roger McGough in a recent Sunday Times interview in which he spoke of his worry that the new pram in his hall, when he was in his fifties, would have “an adverse affect” on his writing. He said that it didn’t – “it actually worked in the opposite way” – but I can’t help thinking that that was because Mrs McGough was the one pushing the pram, rather than Roger himself.

It is still the woman in most households, after all, who takes on the childcare duties. As a full-time writer I work from home, so it’s natural that the duties fall to me. Also, I want to breastfeed my daughter so I have to be available for her. It doesn’t mean, though, that I have suppressed my personality and am suddenly a serene and accepting Earth Mother, slave-to-baby type. I was more like that 15 years ago when my first son was born. Now, at nearly 40, I want to be cleverer about how Baby fits into our lives and that means I must create time to write.

After my second son was born I wrote a novel (unpublished, as yet); my first poetry collection was published, and I completed my first short fiction collection. Ideas and publication flowed to and around me. Since then, my productivity has slowed in general but I don’t fear that the pram in the hall and its tiny occupant will be any barrier to my creativity. It’s just a matter of patience; in time both Baby and I will find ways to work around each other.

Welsh writer Rachel Trezise wrote on her blog in 2007 about her worry that a child wouldn’t fit into her busy writing life. “Where would a baby go?” was her plaintive cry and she listed her endless writing duties to illustrate the point. She also quoted from Clare Potter’s poem ‘A Pram in the Hall’:

‘I have not stroked my belly
imagined you in sun slats
kicking in my
extended arms
I’ve worried where I’ll put you when I write
I can’t clear
space for your arrival
imagine that smell they talk of
the joy I’m
supposed to feel
I can’t see your little feet
the, apparently, button nose, only blank panicky pages’.

When you are creative by nature nothing stands in the way of that – not time issues, not full-time work and not babies or bigger kids. Creativity is a compulsion, as integral to who you are as your eye colour. As a writer, I am always writing even if I haven’t got a pen or laptop to hand. There just isn’t any other way for me to be.

Yes, with a new baby, time becomes an issue. Yes, babies are notoriously demanding and don’t leave you with arms or brain-space enough for much. But, with tenacity and a bit of juggling, it is possible to be creative while the pram sits in the hall. And anyway, babies have a lovely habit of growing up and gaining independence, leaving you freer than you might want to be to create to your heart’s desire.

I’ll wrap up with a quote from one of my very favourite writers and one of my favourite Irish women, Anne Enright. She was writing in The Guardian about the historical rejection of the notion of having a family by writers:

“When I had children, I was delighted to find that procreation posed no fundamental or necessary threat to the business of creation. There is always the problem of time...but I have written more since becoming a mother, not less. This is a mark of a wonderful social moment – I don’t think such productivity would have been possible for a woman 20 years ago. It also came as a complete surprise.”

Long may mother-writers be surprised by their output and by their increased, not straitened, creativity. With patience, I know I’ll get there soon too

Easterly on the short list of the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

Some great and surprising news: my book has been short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award which is funded by the Cork City Council and organised by the Munster Literature Centre. I have been shortlisted along with Charlotte Grimshaw from New Zealand, Shi-Li Kow from Malaysia, Phillip O Ceillaigh from Ireland,  and Wells Tower and Simon Van Booy from the United States.  

This news was broken to the world yesterday afternoon not by a newspaper, but by a blogger, Women Rule Writer, at 13.14.   All bloggers hail thee, o fair Nuala.  See also the Munster Literature Centre website and this report from the Guardian.

The award has in previous years been won by my girl Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July and Jumpha Lahiri, so it is a real honour to be on the short list.  

This means that I get to go back to visit my new love, Ireland, of valley green and towering crag. Until I went to Ireland, I was always amused by those white (and African-American) tourists who go to one African country or city and come back proclaiming their love for Africa, all of  it, but I am telling you, I  went to Galway for two days and I fell in love with Ireland.  And I fell in love with the Irish. Well, not all of them, I mean, not the murderers, or thugs, or men who hit women or kids who throw litter everywhere -  unlike the Western tourists who love all Africans, I am more discriminating in my taste. 

So I am really pleased to be going back to  Ireland, to Cork this time. 

I am looking forward to meeting the other writers, and reading them, the only one whose work I know is Wells Tower, whose book (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned ) I really liked. You will recall that he was one of the five writers reviewed by James Lasdun in his brilliant examination of the state of the short story a few months ago in The Observer.  I also like what I have read about him, I loved this statement, from an interview in the New York Observer:   

Being a human being isn’t just all misery and despair.  There’s a lot of available joy out there, even if we don’t often find it. I think that fiction should find opportunities for joy.   I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in. 

I will drink to that. And to the Frank O'Connor award too. Cheers all round!

"The surprise is not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all": Germaine Greer on Michael Jackson

Like all of you, I spent the weekend remembering the genius that was Michael Jackson and reading some lovely tributes . This heart-squeezing picture of a very young Michael Jackson in a garden is from the Guardian, and accompanies a piece by Germaine Greer which is one of the most beautiful tributes to Michael Jackson that I have read. Here is an excerpt, but be warned, serious tearing up ahead.

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Ever since Dionysos danced ahead of his horde of bloody-footed maenads across the rocky highlands of prehistoric Greece, dance and song have been the province of boys. Like Orpheus, Jackson was destroyed by his fans, whose adulation and adoration prevented his living in any kind of normal society. The creativity ebbed away day by day. He became a parody of himself. It is time now to forget all that and salute the miraculous boy who will triumph over death as Dionysos did, becoming immortal through his art.

Nowhere will his contribution be more obvious and his influence more strongly felt than in the world of dance. No choreographer of the last 30 years has been unaware of Jackson's achievement. He rewrote the vocabulary of dance for everyone, from kids competing in talent shows to the royal ballets of Europe.

If the dance establishment did not often acknowledge his influence it was because there was no need. His shapes, his moves were everywhere.

Nijinsky and Nureyev also died young. They, too, were transcendent dancing boys, but they chose to interpret the choreography supplied to them by others.

By contrast Michael Jackson's art was astonishingly innovative. No one could dance like him, until he showed them how, and then they were never as good as he was. His concept of the dance was utterly 20th century, extravagantly multi-dimensional, and not in the least middle class.

Nijinsky may have been the greatest Spectre de la Rose, Nureyev the greatest Corsair, but these two candles pale in the light of Jackson's blazing star. The surprise is not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all.

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Photograph of Michael Jackson: Henry Diltz/Corbis, via the Guardian.

Of the Prime Minster's Southwark experience, the importance of talking about sausages to butchers and the pernicious influence of donors

The Zimbabwean blogosphere and internet papers have been awash with discussion of the Prime Minister's call to Zimbabweans to return home, which led to him being booed in Southwark Cathedral in London last week.

Now, people, let's get one thing clear: the MDC is a political party whose main reason for existence is to come into power. To achieve this, its leaders and members will say and do what is necessary. When they needed international support, they played the human rights card for all it was worth. This is not to say that there was no repression, and torture, beatings and killings, of course there were: they simply used those violations for their own purposes. Now that the very same international supporters are offering money only if the situation in Zimbabwe stabilises and the rule of law is established with human rights being respected, the MDC would like the world to believe that this is being achieved. Hence the call for Zimbabweans to return.

If you look at it from the MDC worldview, therefore, what the PM said makes a lot of sense. But it was certainly not the right message for that audience, the PM may well want to work on his tone deafness. I recommend that he take some advice from Jacob Zuma, who, whatever you may think of him, is the consummate politician. As someone said of him once: when talking to butchers, he speaks of sausages, and when talking to bakers, of bread. The PM, by contrast, chose to talk of bread to butchers, and as they would have rather been talking about the meatier subject of meat, the result could only be mutual disappointment.

I was struck by Farayi Maruzani's defence of the PM in The Zimbabwe Times mainly because of a number of paragraphs in which he talked about the influence of donors on his entire life. His message, I think, is that donors are important to Zimbabwe, and we need to get them back in again. He is right about the differences that donors have made in the lives of the poor in Africa, but he also, albeit unintentionally, paints an entirely depressing picture of government failure. I have many points of divergence with Dead Aid author Dambisa Moyo, but on one issue we agree, which is that the reliance on foreign aid makes African governments abdicate their responsibility to their own people.

And Mr. Maruzani provides the evidence.

Here is what he had to say.

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I was born in Buhera South at Muzokomba Clinic. The clinic was built by donors. My father and mother survived on food donated by foreign donors. I grew up doubling breast feeding and donated powdered milk which was donated to the Ministry of health by the European Economic Community in Brussels, Belgium. When I was one year old I started feeding on donated cereals from the department of Social Welfare at Murambinda Growth Point.

I received free medical immunisation and I do not even know where all those vaccines came from. My mother does not know who donated the vaccinations that saved my life either. From the age of two to seven I had food at feeding points and we ate very highly nutritious porridge donated by the Kellogg Foundation based in London. At the age of seven I went to Primary School. Here again there was popular mahewu donated by the Red Cross Society whose Headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. That was my main diet. The water that all the school children drank was wholly pumped and piped to school by donors who provided the funds to DDF.

I had this donated mahewu for seven years at Primary School. I then went out to secondary school. The secondary school was started by missionaries but all the important building like the laboratory, the administration block and dormitories were built by funding donated by the Japanese government. The equipment and chemicals in the laboratory were also donated by the Japanese Embassy in Harare using funds from Tokyo.

After this I went to the University of Zimbabwe. The donors paid my fees and payout. There were many other students whose fees were paid by donors, both local and international ones. We preferred foreign donors to local ones although The Harare City Council was actually a better donor than some foreign sponsors at UZ.

After graduation I went to work but there again my office and all the safes, vehicles, tents, were donated by UNICEF. All the fuel I used was donated. My salary and the salaries of my eight subordinates came from donors. Even my boss’s salary was paid by donors.

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First published in The Zimbabwe Times, 26 June 2009. For the rest of the article, click here.

Books that Made a Difference to me, Part Two

Four more books that made a difference to me.

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Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

'We three Fossils vow to put our name in history books because it's our very own and nobody can say it's because of our grandfathers.'

The story of Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil who were adopted by the fossil-hunting Great-Uncle Matthew (known as Gum) took hold of my imagination when I was ten and never let go. I longed to be a dancer even though I had never had a single ballet class in my life. I used to rewrite Ballet Shoes in my mind: Gum would come to Zimbabwe looking for fossils and instead, he would find me and take me back to the big house in the Cromwell Road and make me a Fossil, Petina Fossil, which was just as it should be, as I was already a P like the others. To be adopted, I had to be an orphan, and so I conveniently killed off my parents and brothers and sisters – thus I learned early how to dispose of characters who are superfluous to my plots.

The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster

I am delighted to have only recently discovered Paul Auster, which means that I have books and books to read still before me. I absolutely loved Moon Palace and In the Country of Last Things, but this touching memoir about his relationship with his difficult father, and his own identity as a father, is my favourite of his books so far. I love the deep intelligence he brings to all his subjects, and the clean spareness and musicality of his writing. I was profoundly astonished, and not a little disturbed, to discover that the second part of this marvelous book is called The Book of Memory which is also the working title for my novel in progress.


A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

I wish I had read this short story collection before I started writing my own stories. On the other hand, I am glad that I didn't because I might not have written it at all. Yiyun Li illuminates the lives of ordinary Chinese people in Mao's China with compassion, intelligence and beauty. This is quite simply the best short story collection by a contemporary writer that I have read. You can imagine my delight when she told me how much she liked my book: it is perhaps a form of vanity that the best kind of validation is from writers that I admire.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

My five-year old son Kush has many favourite books, but this children's classic is his favourite, and mine too. It is a wonderfully-illustrated story about love and loneliness and the power of the imagination. Kush and I read it together at least once a week, and like the best rereading, each reading is different from the previous one. Through this book and others, I hope to pass to my son a love for reading which I believe to be one the most precious gifts that I can give him.

Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly?

"Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? 

The chameleon gets behind the fly and remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then another. At last, when well within reach, he darts out his tongue and the fly disappears.  

England is the chameleon, and I am that fly."

Lobengula, the second King of the Matebele, just before his kingdom was swallowed by the British Empire. 

Image from Animal Discovery.