HISTORY OF ASH, debut novel from Moroccan civil rights campaigner and literature professor via American University in Cairo Press

HISTORY OF ASH
KHADIJA MAROUAZI (tr. Alexander E. Elinson)
Hoopoe Books|American University in Cairo Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now

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Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unforgettable and eviscerating novel of human frailty, brutality, and resistance as told through the first-person prison narratives of a man and a woman

History of Ash is a fictional prison account narrated by Mouline and Leila, who have been imprisoned for their political activities during the so-called Lead Years of the 1970s and 1980s in Morocco, a period that was characterized by heavy state repression.

Moving between past and present, between experiences lived inside the prison cell and outside it, in the torture chamber and the judicial system, and the challenges they faced upon their release, Mouline and Leila describe their strategies for survival and resistance in lucid, often searing detail, and reassess their political engagements and the movements in which they are involved.

Written with compassion and insight, History of Ash speaks to human brutality, resilience, and the power of the human spirit. It succeeds in both documenting the prison experience and humanizing it, while ultimately holding out the promise of redemption through a new generation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kafka meets de Sade in Morocco.

Cruelty is such a defining trait of human beings that I really don't understand why it still shocks me to what depths the forces of social control will sink to enforce hegemony, specifically in this case the hegemony of Morocco's royal government. It was a desire to experience the chaotic good of democracy and cultural self-determination that motivated the narrators of these separate prison stories to resist, at long last, control from above. Morocco lived with this both as a colony of France then as an autocracy. Generations of pent-up frustration on the parts of millions whose lives weren't in significant ways their own led to a repressive response. It's now called The Years of Lead, and the details of it events and abuses are stomach-churning.

What most histories forego is the personal costs of repressive regimes to their victims. As History is supposed to be academic and impartial, not immediate and visceral, this makes some sense...the issue is that history is never impartial and "academic" is coded language now for sanitized and watered down, attenuated enough to avoid letting real experiences in. This, then, is why historical novels must exist, why we must read them, and why they ought not be held to an artifical standard of "impartiality" like historiography is.

The role of fiction by academics is often a marginal one, one not centered in the commercial world for many reasons. One of them is very clear here. While Leila, an academic, relates her torture a bit more viscerally than does Mouline (the male narrator), she also uses more allusions to the vast literature of imprisonment, resistance, and injustice than does the younger, but still culturally very literate Mouline. This presupposes either familiarity with or curiosity about this body of literature in the reader. Commercially oriented publishers on the order of Simon & Schuster, to take an example much in the business news of late, can't trust this interest to exist and are certain their consumers haven't read those kinds of books. While I am not at all sure that's a reasonable thing to be certain of, I'm aware that the economics under which publicly-traded companies operate demand aiming for the lowest common denominator. Luckily this is not the only avenue for readers with either familiarity or curiosity or both to get their fix of enriching, exciting, challenging works like this one.

Hoopoe Fiction is a line of works, mainly in translation, centering Maghrebi and African more broadly voices. The American University in Cairo Press does us a great service by bringing these works to market. August being Women In Translation Month, I've centered works like this by women, and/or translated by women. My purpose is to alert the audience for book reviews that I'm grateful to say continue to find me here in their hundreds about. The Press offers great opportunities for discovery of reads that expand and furnish one's mind with viewpoints we don't come across with any regularity in US capitalist culture.

This book's deeply personal take on the prison narrative is based in the author's generational identification with the Years of Lead. She's also personally acquainted with resistance figures and prisoners of conscience, and has included details of the experiences she's learned about in this work. It is, as one can readily imagine, very hard to read the accounts of torture. It's far more difficult for me personally because I know the author isn't inventing them but transmuting the real experiences of people she's met into fiction. This is not a story for the faint of heart's amusement and delectation. It is a very hard read but one that is, in so many ways, urgent for the complacently comfortable to discover. This is what totalitarians do. Heed the warnings implicit in the existence of these two characters' narratives. They're fictional and based on fact; resist with EVERY FIBER the increasing possibility of experiencing, or knowing someone who experiences, these horrors. Learn the stakes you're risking when you don't believe political rhetoric coming from those you might agree with about some things. They mean it. And somoene will be paying an awful price for your mistake.

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND, decades lost in drawers because white people

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
RICHARD WRIGHT
Library of America
$19.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.
Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.

People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.

Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.

Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.

It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.

In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.

Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.

There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.

What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."

The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.

They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul.