Dreaming the Karoo: A people called the /Xam

 

Dreaming the Karoo: A people called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn is the author’s account of her time in the karoo region of South Africa. Blackburn conducted her research at the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and her chapters alternated between hiking through the semi-desert visiting the /Xam and their historical sites, and scrambling to find out what was happening back home with the world in a rapid state of lockdown. Ironically I found the chapters about COVID more interesting than those about her field research. Blackburn consulted the resources of linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from the 1860’s and 1870’s and reproduced Bushman artworks and their photos, and included their quotations on every page. Colonialism decimated the Bushman way of life, forcing the people off their land and their landscape was looted of its flora and fauna. One of the most moving quotations came from a Bushman called Dia!kwain:

“We shall see whether we make those people cry as we do, for they do not seem to know that we are people.”

I remember when in senior kindergarten in East York reading about the quagga. It was from an encyclopedia or large book of animals we had in our classroom. I was sad to discover that the quagga was extinct, and at the time I first read about it, the species had been extinct for only 88 years. This animal which resembled a zebra in the front and a horse in the back was often mentioned in the cited Bushman tales. At the time Bleek and Lloyd were conducting their research, there were still quagga roaming the karoo. The species was made extinct by the late nineteenth century.

What I found particularly interesting is that some of the interviews Bleek and Lloyd conducted were with Bushmen who were confined to the Breakwater prison. Some of these Bushmen, trapped in a new society that made them feel like foreigners in their own land and unable to grasp the laws suddenly imposed upon them, had a special arrangement to leave Breakwater to live with the Bleek and Lloyd team, where they could study them at length. The name of the prison sounded familiar, as I stayed there, now known as the Breakwater Lodge, in 2013 on my first visit to South Africa. My room was a converted prison cell, and perhaps I walked the same halls as ǀAǃkunta and ǁKabbo.

Blackburn fortunately had established good contacts that enabled her to get around South Africa when she was all too often confronted by yet another locked gate. The karoo of today–cordoned off by electric fences into private estates owned by white settlers–stood in sharp contrast to the karoo in the time of ǁKabbo, when he used to roam freely to hunt springbok with poison-tip quartz arrowheads.

COVID took its toll in those early months of 2020 and Blackburn wrote of the friends and colleagues she had lost during that time, which seemed to parallel the losses the Bushmen faced 150-160 years earlier. The alternation of timelines made it seem as if no one was ever safe, as a mysterious virus had the power to kill as mercilessly as the settlers who stormed through the karoo and pushed the Bushmen out.

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A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps

A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Suprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps [1] by Jonn Elledge covered some of the world’s border-freak zones, as well as the boring straight lines such as those that separate Canada from the US and the Australian states from each other. The book was divided into three parts, Histories, Legacies and finally Externalities. I learned about what could very well be the first political border in history, that between Upper and Lower Egypt, and their eventual unification. Elledge also covered the Great Wall of China, the borders of Great Britain, the Mason-Dixon Line, the American invasion of Mexico, Schleswig-Holstein, how Britain and France carved up the Middle East, Ulster, the partition of India and the Iron Curtain and the division of Berlin. Those were only about half of the topics covered in the Histories section. I was always glued to the pages as Elledge managed to turn what I might have anticipated as a dry five or six pages into a stimulating read.

Unfortunately there weren’t as many maps as I would have hoped there’d be, a revelation I knew in advance because the beginning of the book had a list of the maps, which totalled only 23, so only half of the chapters had cartographic accompaniment, and even then, the maps were quite small. I used Google Maps to learn more about the places that provided no maps, as well as to see more detail in the places that did have them. As per usual with books on maps, I took plenty of notes to do more research later. Elledge made repeated reference to The Atlas of Unusual Borders, which I also read yet didn’t find very informative. That atlas though did live up to its name and supplied the required maps.

Exploration of empire and colonialism led to the “discoveries” of new places and the carving up of the land amidst the people who already lived there. I liked how Elledge phrased the process from the British point of view:

“The words of British prime minister Lord Salisbury–which, in best British tradition, manage to be amusingly ironic about the terrible thing while also making clear he had no intention of stopping it–sum up the results best: ‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.'”

The second section in the book, Legacies, is devoted to freakish border zones, enclaves and explanations behind some areas which, on the surface, might seem to have pretty boring borders. The most interesting chapters in this section were on Kaliningrad, Bir Tawil, the Korean DMZ, Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, the Canada-US border, Italian and German exclaves within Switzerland, European micronations, Washington, DC, Australia’s states and “Some Accidental Invasions” (which more often than not seem to involve Switzerland marching into Liechtenstein).

The final section was on Externalities, which was devoted to such topics as the history of the Prime Meridian, time zones, the International Date Line, maritime boundaries, landlocked countries, Antarctica and, most interesting, boundaries in the air. Within that chapter I hoped Elledge would write about the rare vertical frontier created by the Stahnsdorfer bridge in Steinstücken, but instead he wrote about international flight paths.

Elledge included numerous footnotes, almost all of which were comic asides and, after reading only a few of them, became annoyingly self-referential. I know that this book was not an academic read but I don’t think Elledge wanted his audience, including captive readers such as myself who love reading about borders, to roll their eyes at yet another annoying footnote.

I enjoyed the final section on further reading, where Elledge went chapter by chapter, revealing the sources he used. I took plenty of notes about future books to look at and read.

[1] The full title page (which is the source that counts when citing a book’s title, not the front cover) commits the embarrassing error by misspelling Surprising as Suprising.

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Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once

I came across Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once by Tristin Hopper from a popular on-line reading list. When I saw the book I was surprised that it was only 97 pages long, supplemented by 29 pages of endnotes. I had no idea who the author was, but I falsely presumed that he must be an American. I was wrong: Tristin Hopper is a Canadian who writes for the National Post.

Hopper covers eight topics such as euthanasia, the legal distribution of drugs to addicts, gender identity, bail and prison sentencing. As a conservative old-school gay I can side with Hopper on most of his points. The author is not a fan of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. While I myself am (or was), I was often exasperated by what cause Trudeau was going to apologize for next. I was surprised Hopper never mentioned feeling the same way about the steady flow of Trudeau tears. The Liberal policies regarding gender, bail, prison sentencing and health care are major targets of Hopper’s for what Canada is allegedly doing wrong.

The tone is often whiny, and the brevity–in spite of the voluminous endnotes–makes the book come across as one big bitchfest. I agree with Hopper on the sad state of Canadian health care where long waits may lead to patient deaths, but his take on euthanasia is tabloid-level ludicrous, where doctors are left shrugging to their patients who, when faced with the wait of over a year for a vital operation, are offered the choice to do themselves in instead.

Gender identity is covered in the chapters entitled The Transing Canada Highway and A Whiff of the Orwellian. Hopper covers the foolishness of supplying women’s sanitary products in men’s washrooms and the non-binary and transgender hysteria affecting workplaces and schools. Trans activists Jessica Yaniv and Kayla Lemieux are profiled, two femmes fatales whose multiple court cases tested the legal system, often with nuisance cases. Hopper portrayed Lemieux as more of a legal monkey wrench while Yaniv was painted as a simpering nutcase who is never happy being out of the public eye, always demanding Insta-attention for her legal battles.

Hopper supplied two apt quotes in the book’s conclusion. They reflect what happened to our country when we decided to let criminals get instant bail, or when we decided to give drug addicts free fentanyl. Euthanasia as a health option? Putting biological males in women’s prisons? Hopper says we’re going to Hell:

“If I can sum up over what went wrong with Canada over the past decade or so, it’s that the country decided to run absolutely everything on the honour system and didn’t have the imagination to consider why this would be a bad idea.”

and:

“There were vanishingly few safeguards in place, and many Canadians lacked the imagination to conceive that their system was capable of such dysfunction. A national faith that ‘this can’t be happening in Canada’ ended up yielding a whole bunch of ghastly scenarios that were only happening in Canada.”

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The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie was a pleasant read about some of the three thousand people who volunteered their time and effort to help create the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fifteen years ago I read another book about the making of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, yet that book only profiled two people: one of the dictionary’s editors, James Murray, and a prolific contributor of words to the dictionary, Dr. William Minor. In Ogilvie’s book, she wrote about over two dozen classes of people, sorted according to letter of the alphabet. Thus the book starts A for Archaeologist and is about Margaret Murray. Chapters can get gruesome, such as C for Cannibal and M for Murderers (where most of the information on Dr. Minor is contained) but the lighter side of dictionary making is also covered in chapters such as D for Dictionary Word Nerds and H for Hopeless Contributors. Ogilvie even has a chapter Q for Queers. I am thankful she used that term instead of the ridiculous initial overload beginning with any permutation of LGBTQ+.

In the middle of the nineteenth century an international callout was made for people to read books, journals and newspapers and submit individual words with citations for possible inclusion into the new dictionary. This grand crowdsourcing effort didn’t seek only participation from academics but all kinds of people without prejudice:

“The response was massive. In order to cope with the volume of post arriving in Oxford, the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box outside Dr Murray’s house at 78 Banbury Road to receive post (it is still there today).”

A quick check at Google Maps does indeed show that pillar box outside the editor’s former home, which at the time the Google photo was taken, shows that the house needs a bit of work, such as a fresh coat of paint on the garage, weed removal from the driveway and a hedge trim.

Ogilvie gave credit where it was due, and did her research to find out more about these word nerds. She took pride in profiling some heretofore unknown women contributors. In the middle of the nineteenth century in England, women were kept out of academia. They could not ascend the ladder of the intelligentsia if universities would not even admit them. The author raised a good point: all people who were shut out of universities for whatever reason could be made to feel worthy and part of an elite circle of academics by contributing to the dictionary. No one on the editorial board had to know if you were a dropout, a junkie or a resident in a lunatic asylum (as those institutions were called then). Many were autodidacts and polyglots. Some were hoarders and obsessives. As long as you submitted entries according to the specified format, you were a welcome (but often unthanked) part of the wide dictionary team. That said, the chapter H for Hopeless Contributors was a riot to read, as Murray recorded the negligible input from some people and their deliquency returning (or sometimes not returning at all) prescribed books for reading assignments.

All too often, and much to the contributors’ disappointment, Murray never credited them for their work. It was a rare mention of thanks in an introduction that anyone could hope for. People were rarely paid yet some of the obsessives contributed tens of thousands of word submissions, and a handful even over one hundred thousand.

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mortal monarchs

mortal monarchs [1] by Suzie Edge tracked the deaths of the past millennium of monarchs who ruled over the British isles. In addition to all of the kings and queens, some others, like the six wives of Henry VIII, were also covered. Chapters were short, with the final page on Elizabeth II being only page 312. The front cover illustration certainly made the subject matter intriguing, as beheadings were not uncommon in the first six centuries of the last millennium for doing away with inconvenient royals. The very first years of royal deaths, though, were more likely as a result of dysentery or battle injury. Thus the same reasons for death, over and over, made the beginning of the book a dull read. With already short chapters telling much the same story, I grew bored, until the monarchs started demanding their rivals or wives have their heads chopped off.

Edge is a doctor who spent part of each chapter analyzing the physiological processes that each royal body underwent at the point of death. So for deaths caused by dysentery, she wrote about a lot of diarrhea. From heart attacks to just plain old age, all were analyzed from the medical point of view. I have a weak stomach for blood and gore and at times I found her descriptions of royal decapitations to be so off-putting I didn’t want to turn the page. Court documents recorded the circumstances of these ordered decapitations, and how successful each blow of the axe was each time the blade struck skin. The author did have a sense of humour, thankfully, and injected amusing asides when writing about kingly autopsies or queenly rivalries that could have come straight out of a soap opera.

During the nineteenth century there was a trend to open the coffins of kings and queens and poke around inside. Edge reported on the states of decay and adipocere for each monarch. Sometimes the contents of these coffins were pilfered for souvenirs and icons.

modern monarchs was a short read told in a pop historical narrative by a doctor who only changed tone when writing about disease and death. In these postmortems Edge opted for a more academic tone. I found that the pace slowed down whenever she used lengthy medical terminology. Scientific terms were always in italics, which are difficult to read in a cursive font.

[1] Of course there’s a footnote. The title is entirely in lowercase on the formal title page and is in lowercase on the header of each page thereafter. The subtitle is not included on the formal title page.

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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

 

I heard about Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney after listening to a radio interview with the author. Spinney captivated my attention throughout the entire broadcast as she mapped the spread of our common Proto-Indo-European ancestor throughout Eurasia. Scientific advancements such as DNA analysis have enabled linguists to discern with more accuracy the migration patterns of various tribes, and established more precise times when peoples moved about. Thus the timeline of Indo-European evolution can be set in stone in some regards, where we know with certainty which migrations and thus which languages must have entered a certain area first. Archeological discoveries also aid in the ordering of these events. These details were the foundation for the subtitle of this book.

Language nerd that I am, yet I found it hard to get into this book at first. The enthusiasm I felt after listening to Spinney’s radio interview did not translate to my experience with the printed page. While I do read theses and academic texts on language–knowing full well what I’m getting myself into–Proto was not, as I was led to believe, an “accessible” introduction into the greatest-grandparent of our common language families. It was a slow read, which for me meant six days to cover its 325 pages. I am glad Spinney did not write a language history full of exclamation points and pop culture references, yet from the interview and praise on the back cover I expected this to be an easier read, since one of the critics stated that it was “lightly written”. What made it less accessible was its scientific structures, which entailed long sentences that always required me, ever the perspicacious reader, to stop reading once I finally encountered the final period, gather together all the clauses and endnote addenda from each sentence, then piece them together to read through them again in an unbroken free flow of text. That’s just the way I read; I do not stumble through a sentence where I treat each break independently, whether it’s a dependent clause or a footnote interruption. Each interruption is dealt with then the entire sentence is reread as it should be, in one continuous string of information. For those readers who are expecting a “lightly written” history of our language’s common ancestor, they will be disappointed. Proto is closer to an academic read than a transcript of Spinney’s radio interview.

Spinney divided the book into eight chapters where the first two dealt with the origin of Proto-Indo-European and the remaining six with specific Indo-European language branches. I enjoyed the chapter on Tocharian, the easternmost branch of the family, the most. The final chapter dealt with Albanian, which linguists believe must be the last member of a specific branch whose siblings and cousins have all died out.

The author provided maps that showed migrations and the languages each tribe brought and left behind. She hardly touched on non-Indo-European languages, naturally, but did devote a few pages to the Uralic family, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. Modern research now shows that the tribes that eventually settled in Hungary then moved on to Finland originated closer to Siberia than in central Asia as was previously thought.

I was surprised by the end of my read that I barely wrote down any notes to inspire my own further research. The reason could be that Spinney’s research was so thorough that she dealt with any anticipated supplementary questions and explanations in the form of 21 pages of endnotes as well as footnotes. Surely one ought to pick one form of notation over the other, and not use both.

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Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

 

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller was a brutal read, covering thirteen gay men and one lesbian who either led unexemplary lives, or, as was most often the case, committed some “dastardly deeds” which were swept under the rug of pink history. The authors state:

“Bad Gays is a book about such characters, a book about the gay people in history who do not flatter us, and whom we cannot make into heroes: the liars, the powerful, the criminal, and the successful.”

I found the title to be misleading. I was expecting the book to be full of chapters dedicated to people the likes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but he wasn’t mentioned in the book, even in passing. The authors did cover J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, the only two people I knew before I picked up this book who were both “dastardly” and queer. The others, ranging from Hadrian, Frederick the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Mead, Yukio Mishima, Philip Johnson, Ronnie Kray and Pim Fortuyn (whom I had just read about in Why the Dutch Are Different) were names I was already familiar with. I didn’t know, though, that some of them were queer (like Kray and Johnson) and I certainly didn’t know that the latter was an American Nazi, fascist and racist.

Lemmey and Miller however could not capture my interest, even in reporting about the notorious sexual Black Diaries of Roger Casement. Their biographies were bogged down with too much unnecessary detail which I felt only served to pad the pages. I started this book with a feeling that I would like it, as the introduction certainly captured my interest, but I was immediately overcome by a sense of dread once I started the first chapter on Hadrian. As I read each chapter, I hoped that I would see the end each time I turned the page. The authors were occasionally catty and dropped enough F-bombs to keep the work from being a genuine academic read. However it was page after page of minutiae which did not enhance my perception of the subjects as being bad gays. I just wanted to end the book and shove it across the table.

The conclusion contains this paragraph:

“The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure–failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion. It is also a history of dead ends; of movements like the Uranians or the masculinists, trying to find new ways to express same-sex desire. It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.”

Thankfully Lemmey and Miller did not include the alphabetical mouthful, the password that never ends, the one that usually starts with LGBTQ+. Perhaps they didn’t include it because it isn’t a word. The authors ended their evolution of shifting language with the preferred queer. I am sure that the tongue-tripping initialism will fall out of favour within a decade, as I cannot imagine LGBTTIQQ2SA+ ever catching on. How can it? It is a ridiculous term that fails in its attempt to be all-inclusive.

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