Murasaki of Japan

Long ago in the mists of time in feudal Japan a daughter was born to a provincial governor and his wife. They named her Murasaki Shikibu.

Not only was the governor an official, but he was also a scholar. The traits of the enjoyment of learning and curiosity was passed on to his daughter who from a young age showed a remarkable ability to grasp and understand literature and languages. This was a miracle and a source of pride and disappointment for Murasaki's father who once said to her, "If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!"

Murasaki's brother, unlike her, did not display her swiftness in learning. In ancient Japan, women were allowed to do some basic learning, but the realm of the classics which were in Chinese was the province of men. Being a man with an open mind and appreciating his daughter's singularity, Murasaki's father allowed her to sit in on her brother's private tutoring sessions.

When Murasaki came of age, she was married off to a distant relative. She bore him a daughter. In time, plague appeared in the land, and Murasaki's husband was carried off in the epidemic. Alone, except now for her daughter, Murasaki began to write a book. Since she was the daughter of a prominent man and quite a curiosity herself, she captured the attention of the empress. She was brought to court, where she became the special companion to the empress, even teaching her Chinese in secret. She is given the title of "lady."

Lady Murasaki continues to write her book which is about a prince named Genji, getting ideas for the plot from her surroundings. She also keeps a diary which is a vivid description of life at the Japanese court and also expresses her distaste for what she sees as a vapid existence of nobles intriguing, backbiting, and focusing mainly on the silly and trivial. She writes one day in her diary, "Pretty and coy, shrinking from sight, unsociable, fond of old tales, conceited, so wrapped up in poetry that other people hardly exist, spitefully looking down on the whole world-such is the unpleasant opinion that people have of me. Yet when they come to know me they say that I am strangely gentle, quite unlike what they had been led to believe. I know that people look down on me like some old outcast, but I have become accustomed to all this, and tell myself, 'My nature is as it is."Despite her indifference and dislike of court life she becomes a reluctant celebrity when her novel, The Tale of Genji, is discovered. It is presented as a serial and read orally. Lady Murasaki writes this in her diary, "His Excellency saw The Tale of Genji laying about in the Empress's apartments. He made his usual stupid jibes, and then handed me a poem written on a piece of paper to which he had attached a branch of plum-blossom: 'What with these ardent tales of love, little can I think that men have passed you by, as they might this plum-tree's sour fruit.' And so I replied, 'If no man has tasted, who can say if the fruit is sour, or if the writer of these tales herself has known such love?'' Is the novel's hero, Prince Genji, Lady Murasaki's alter ego?

Unlike most at court who live only for the moment, Lady Murasaki knows winds of change are moving inside Japan. The decadent lifestyle of the court will eventually be swept away by the samurai who will install a military dictatorship ruled by a shogun.

At age 50, Lady Murasaki asks to retire from the court, leaving it for the peace and serenity of a convent. Finally, she is at peace.

This is my personal rendition of the life of Lady Murasaki (973-1025?) She is believed to have written the first modern novel, The Tale of Genji. Both Genji and the Diary of Lady Murasaki can be purchased on Amazon.com. The quotes listed in my tale are from Lady Murasaki's diary.

In 2001, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist and the only westerner to have been trained as a geisha, wrote the novel The Tale of Murasaki which is a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu.

Ideas for the writing style in this post were inspired by entries in the blogs The Victorian Era and Emma Alvarez Site, Hans Christian Anderson, The Brothers Grimm, and The Thousand and One Nights.

Africa's Tragic Romantic: Bessie Head

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk"
----Bessie Head

It is my desire that this blog will never become stale in its' subject matter, and even though my blog has a theme, there is a world of Romance out there both past and present to be written about.

Ardent's latest blog entry got me to thinking about my very first international sojourn, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Botswana. African nations south of the Sahara get such bad press. It is always about disease, war, poverty, or genocide. There is little mention of the good of the extraordinary. The most recent case of bad news are the elections in Kenya. It has hit home with one of my neighbors, because presently he is hosting a student in his home who is Kenyan.

Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa because of its' diamond resources. It does not get much attention because the people are quiet and peaceful with their neighbors. Also there are not a conglomeration of tribes there, so no tribal problems. The Batswana are very tolerant. I used to silently laugh when some Batswana would tell me, "Botswana is not true Africa. You have to got to West Africa, to see true Africa."

I was in Botswana when apartheid was running its' course in neighboring South Africa. In fact, depending on where I was, I sometimes lived as close as 15 miles from the South African border. As a non-white person I went to South Africa only once, because the climate there was very tense and even some British friends of mine who went were harassed by white South African soldiers.

There were a number of people both black and white whom the Batswana like to talk about when I was there. One of them was a person they held in high regard, the writer, Bessie Head. Bessie Head is one of Africa's greatest authors, dying at age 49 just when she was about to come into her own and get the recognition she deserved. Her life was short, difficult, lonely, and tragic. Nevertheless, out of her hardship, she birthed writing of get power and sometimes disturbing beauty.

Bessie Head was the daughter of a white South mother of patrician background and a black South African father who was a stable hand to her mother's family. The relationship was totally illicit because it broke apartheid laws which applied more to white women and black men than to white men and black women. According to my Batswana students and friends who related Head's story to me, when Bessie Head's white grandparents learned that their daughter was pregnant by their black stable hand, they had her committed to an insane asylum. There Bessie Head was born in 1937. Life was tough from the beginning. Of course, her mother's family did not want her, and neither did her father's family. Therefore, Bessie was placed in an orphanage where she grew up.

Having showed strong intelligence, Bessie went to school to become a teacher. Later she married a journalist and had a son, but she eventually became a divorcee.

Unable to tolerate life under apartheid, Bessie Head went to neighboring Botswana where she became a refugee. Even in Botswana life was hard, and Head lived in extreme poverty. She ended up in the village of Serowe, one of Botswana's most famous villages one reason of which is because it is the home of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, another person common on the lips of many Batswana. In Botswana, Head found her calling and began writing. Also in the process she became an alcoholic and died of hepatitis in 1986.

Bessie Head's work is hard to classify under one genre. Unlike many African writer's her work is not very political. Her novels tend to be semi-autobiographical, with Biblical and classical imagery. She was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence.

Here can be seen an online project by students at the University of Botswana (which was spic and span and new when I visited it) concerning Bessie Head.

Kenize Mourad: A Romantic Heritage Discovered

From time to time here I will continue to compose posts about books that have made a profound impression on me. In her bestselling memoir on books, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi wrote about the freeing power of books in an oppressive society. Books can free us and change our lives.

A few years back before a planned trip to Turkey I decided to read Regards from the Dead Princess: Novel of A Life (1989) which I had taken off the shelf several times at our public library over a two year period, but had not pushed myself to reading. One day I finally decided to check it out it and read it. Once I got it home, I devoured the novel.

The author of Regards from the Dead Princess is Kenize Mourad. Kenize Mourad is a French journalist and writer with an extraordinarily Romantic background that she learned about when she was 20. She discovered that she is the daughter of an Ottoman princess named Selma who was the granddaughter of the last Sultan of Turkey, Murad V. Mourad's father was an Indian rajah. Regards is Kenize Mourad's fictionalized effort to sort out her background. It must have been earth moving to find out as an adult that one is descended from royalty and one of the longest ruling familys in world history, the Ottoman or Osmanli family who ruled Turkish for 500 years.

Mourad's mother Selma grew up in Ortakoy Palace in Istanbul. She is pampered and spoiled by family and servants. Her mother is a princess, and her father is her mother's second husband, a magnificently handsome man which Selma's mother picks for his manly beauty. Inside this insulated environment, Selma is unaware that her country is in turmoil. She hears of a man whom everyone is hoping will be Turkey's saviour, a general named Mustafa Kemal. People call him "the Golden Rose," because unlike most Turks he has blonde hair. Selma dreams that one day she will marry Mustafa Kemal who will become known to world history as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern day Turkey. Little does she know that in a very short time once he assumes power, in order to drag Turkey into the modern world and the west, Mustafa Kemal will erase from his country most links the Turks have with their Ottoman past. He sends Selma and her family into exile. Selma and her mother go to Lebanon. Her father decides to seek his fortune alone and becomes a drifter and adventurer cutting all ties to Selma and her mother.

As a young woman, Selma discovers that she can rather relate to the French community in Lebanon. Still there is the aching feeling that she is an outsider. Her mother retreats further into herself and her memories. Though they are losing their wealth fast, she is determined that Selma makes a good marriage. First she looks to European nobility. When hopes there fade, she turns to a Muslim rajah in India. During this time, Selma lives with the hope that her beloved handsome father will return. He writes occasionally, promising to see her, but he never keeps his promises and never sees his daughter again. Feeling rejected and the emptiness of the exile, Selma suffers a nervous breakdown. She eventually recovers and goes on to India to marry a man she has never seen before.

Her Indian husband is handsome and kind, but for years Selma had lived freely, going out to parties and socializing in western dress in Beirut. Though her mother lived the life of a recluse, she allows Selma to have a degree of freedom. In her husband's house, Selma is put in purdah. Though her husband is kind and patient, she is sexually frigid. She tries with all her power to adjust to being in this restrictive world. She learns about the poverty and squalor of so many people who live near by and dreams of helping the poor. In her own way she tries, but she is so terribly unhappy and restricted that her husband agrees to let her go to Paris on a vacation. Selma does not tell him she is finally pregnant because she knows he might not let her go and breathe if he knows her secret.

In Paris the Nazis are near and they finally occupy Paris. Selma meets an American business man who falls in love with her. She decides to never return to her husband. But under the occupation it becomes a struggle for survival, and Selma has her baby one day. She dies nearly alone with only the baby and an aging black eunuch who had become her surrogate father.

Being only a few days old when her mother died, Kenize Mourad, of course, does not remember her beautiful, auburn haired mother. However, after writing Regards, she later had the opportunity to meet her Indian father, and writes about him in the second half of her family's life story, The Garden of Badalpur, which has apparently not been translated into English.

Regards From the Dead Princess is a magnificent portrait of several cultures, and a tragic tale of a young woman who is never really able to find her place in the world.

The Brutal Romance of Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was a Norwegian novelist born in Denmark who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 mainly for her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter about the life of a woman in 14th century Norway. Undset is largely unknown today outside of Norway and except by a few Catholic scholars which is a shame because her writing is truly some of the most powerful, beautiful, realistic, and brutally Romantic works ever written. She is my all time favorite writer not only because I revel bathing in the Romantic, obscure, and the beautiful, but because she is indeed one of the giants of western literature.

Sigrid Undset's power as a writer was influenced by several sources. Her father was an archaeologist, and she developed an extensive knowledge of the old Norse and Icelandic Sagas. She was also influenced by several prominent Scandinavian writers of the 19th century like August Strindberg , the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and other writers like the Brontes, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare. Though she became renowned for her novels set during the Middle Ages in Norway, Undset's early novels and short stories dealt with the lives of young women living and working in Kristiania, which is now Oslo. Her modern characters show an alienation and lack any spiritual base to help them survive life's often boisterous and brutal storms.

Her novel Jenny (1911) caused a scandal because of it dealt with sexual issues. The main character Jenny is a young artist living in a community of young expatriate artists in Rome. She is loved by a fellow Norwegian artist, but cannot bring herself to respond to him; still she becomes engaged to him. When she returns to Norway, she meets her father, a rather weak man who is hounded by his wife. Jenny feels sorry for him, but does not love him. After a brief liasion with the father, she learns that she is pregnant. The story ends tragically like most of Undset's novels and short stories. Jenny, unlike, Kristin Lavransdatter which is Undset's masterpiece, was out of print until 1997 when I had the longed for opportunity to read it in Tiina Nunnally's collection called The Unknown Sigrid Undset. The descriptions of Rome and the countryside outside the city are breathtaking. You can almost hear, breathe, and smell nature in Undset's stories. You can also relate to the character's feelings and passions.

For years Kristin Lavransdatter could only be read in an older version of English, but in 1997 Tiina Nunnally translated the it into simplier modern English. Kristin Lavransdatter is in three volumes and a must read. It is the story of Kristin the daughter of a wealthy Norwegian landowner in the 1300s, her passionate love affair with the darkly handsome, erotic, and reckless Erlend, who seduces her when she is taking a spiritual retreat at a convent, their turbulent marriage, her decision to become a nun after the death of Erlend, and her and a number of her children's deaths during the Black Death. This novel is a beautiful but difficult read because of the amount of tragedy. It contains passionate love scenes (without sex described in detail), violence, the death and injury of young children, and lush descriptions of nature. The saintly and the sinful are presented. Kristin's spiritual journey is told just as it is in Undset's other medieval masterpiece The Master of Hestviken whose protagonist is male, a highly moral person, who passionately loves the same woman from childhood, but even though he is a highly decent person, goes on to commit murder when the honor of the woman he loves is wrecked.

Sigrid Undset soaked up life. The realism, beauty, passion, Romance, despair, and raw brutality of her works are a reflection of her own life and spiritual journey. When her father died, she had to abandon her dream of getting a university education. For 10 years she was an diligent office worker and secretary, feeling frustrated in having to do work that really did not reflect her talents. Early on, she dreamed of being a writer, devouring works by her favorite authors, and trying her hand at writing a novel set in the Middle Ages. Her first published work was set during the modern era and dealt with adultery. Later she distanced herself from modern themes and placed her characters in medieval settings, but gave them range and emotions that people in all times and places can relate to.

Being rather shy and reserved, Undset probably did not have a relationship until she was 30 when she met a Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad during a trip to Rome. Svarstad was 9 years older and married with a wife and 3 children back in Norway. It was probably love at first sight, and they began to live together, marrying about 3 years later once he was able to get a divorce. The marriage produced children, but eventually broke up. During the time, Undset, because of the demands of being a wife and mother was not able to write. She also had the first rumblings of a spiritual crisis which would lead her to reject Lutherism and become a Roman Catholic.

When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Sigrid Undset fled first to Sweden and then to the US. While in America she pleaded for her country's liberation through her writings. After the fall of the Nazis, she returned to Norway, but for whatever reason never wrote again. Why she never wrote again is a mystery, maybe she was just too worn out and the creative juices had just dried up. So much had occurred in her life, that she was probably also rather disillusioned.

The article Reading Sigrid Undset gives more insight into her writings as also articles and speechs on Nobelprize.org which can be viewed here.

Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in 2004 (Boy, did I ache with thrills that an African-American woman would promote and recognize a classic of world literature!) helped it to be an bestseller even though Anna, the main character commits suicide and the novel was published in the 19th century . So like Oprah I endorse the Romance and realism of Sigrid Undset.

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