BAD KARMA: CONFESSIONS OF A RECKLESS TRAVELLER IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
By Tamara Sheward
Forthcoming from Academy Chicago Publishers in November 2007
316 pages, ISBN 978-0-89733-565-2, paperback, $17.95

“Bad Karma” review by Gillian Dooley for Writers’ Radio, Radio Adelaide

Tamara Sheward does her best in her book Bad Karma to convince us that she’s
crazy, inept, unattractive and insensitive, but in the end I couldn’t help liking
her and, in a bemused way, admiring her as a writer. Tamara and her friend Elissa are backpackers who can’t stand backpackers. Bad Karma relates their three-week journey through mainland Southeast Asia. They storm their way through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and
Cambodia, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke and obscenities. They reserve their worst invective for the other western tourists they meet: this is the scene at a backpackers’ hostel in northern Thailand:

A German woman with hairy armpits and a turban was extolling the
virtues of nude pottery to a group of serious-looking twenty-something
girls in belly-dance pants and sarongs, while two bearded guys …
hunched over their guitars, belting out a Garcia-esque version of ‘Hello
Mary Lou.’ A tall black guy in orange African robes and matching pill-
box cap read poetry from a notebook to a tiny Japanese girl, who
covertly dragged on a joint and nodded sagely .. etcetera.

Tamara and El are in the same age group as these would-be enlightened ones, but have no patience with new-age pieties, dreadlocks and tai chi, though they’re not averse to a bit of chemically-induced euphoria. Their favourite occupation is drinking too much, followed by eating like pigs (known as schnarfing), and lying around doing nothing. They’re definitely not into travel for the sightseeing. Tamara’s philosophy of travel is ‘if I could see it in a book, then I didn’t have to see it in real life. … I simply wasn’t interested in things like ancient citadels and royal tombs. Nup. I was more interested in scruffing around local markets, retching at what passed as food in these far-flung places and pestering the natives in out-of-the-way bars.’

Sheward writes with Rabelaisian gusto. She and El tower over the inhabitants of Southeast Asia, just like Gargantua and Pantagruel. They encounter the most disgusting food, the filthiest toilets, the most bug-infested hostels, the most unroadworthy buses and the most excruciatingly embarrassing situations imaginable. But, although literal filth abounds, the girls remain
determinedly chaste throughout their adventures.

They never laugh at anyone more than they laugh at themselves. They ridicule the irritatingly-bearded, guitar-toting types mercilessly, but they give generously to beggars, and while protesting vigorously at being ripped off by bureaucratic minor officials, would never dream of cheating or doing down any of the people they do genuine business with. Tamara is a warm-hearted soul. She and Elissa are often severely tried by cruelty to animals, and by poverty and
suffering, and it shows through all the hyperbole and flippancy of her truly amazing prose style. No holds are barred – no simile is too outrageous, no digression too wayward, no joke too tasteless, no slang too crude.

But then, when it comes to describing the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum – the former Security Prison under Pol Pot in Cambodia – all the baroque extravagance of the language drops away and she writes movingly and powerfully. This is where it struck me most forcibly that this book is more than the ravings of an eccentric with an exaggerated relish for colourful expressions.
It is a clever, wry, expressive and engaging work which, almost despite itself, shows a perceptive and sympathetic grasp of all kinds of people and places, plus an attractive and healthy measure of self-mockery and self-knowledge.

From The Ethiopian American

Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia
By Rebecca G Haile
Category: Memoir / TravelPaperback, 200pp, ISBN: 0-89733-556-2 / 978-0-89733-556-0Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2007
Price: $17.95 http://www.academychicago.com/heldatadistance.html

A Review
By Ayele Bekerie, PhD

Rebecca Haile’s Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia is a well-crafted and captivating autobiographical, historical, and diasporic narrative. It is also a memoir of dislocation, migration, and rediscovery, primarily inspired by and based on her four weeks trip to Ethiopia after twenty-five years of absence. Rebecca meticulously narrates how she and her family succeeded in overcoming traumatic experience and rebuilt their immensely productive lives. Her narrative is indeed therapeutic and, hopefully, it will encourage thousands of silenced Ethiopians to voice their sufferings from the state sponsored violence of the Derg period (a repressive military regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1976 to 1991). Rebecca’s initiative in this regard is commendable.

Rebecca initiates narrowing the distance that kept her away from the country of her birth as a result of the repressive years of the Derg era. She also celebrates her successful and empowered life, a life that has risen way up beyond the punitive, vindictive and destructive power of the military regime. Rebecca’s innocent and ideal childhood was rudely and violently violated by a reckless and murderous regime – a regime that massacred thousands of Ethiopians, young and old, in the name of an ideology that it barely understands or able to describe it beyond stupefying and yet deadly slogans. Those who disagreed with the slogans or refuse to shout them at every meeting paid with their lives. Rebecca, by taking advantage of what she calls the healing passage of time, thinks and writes about the horrific outcome of state-sponsored violence as well as about the healing, perseverance and triumph of the human spirit.

Rebecca’s book has three parts. Part one focuses on the story of her family. Part two retraces the historic north or as she puts it, “The Remains of an Empire”. Part three is labeled intersections of a globalized life. These three parts are accompanied by prologue and epilogue that allow the reader to see the interconnectedness of the parts as well as the perspective of the writer. Rebecca is an independent thinker and she does not mince words in expressing her opinion on many and diverse issues, including political issues.

Rebecca supplements her insightful narrative with great black and white photographs of her family and the historic north. The cover of her book carries a smiling and confident self-portrait. The picture of her aunt, Iteye Ityobia, moves me. I am not sure if she succeeded in obtaining a visa to travel to the U.S. to see her brother, Professor Getachew Haile.

Rebecca, who is the daughter of the distinguished scholar, the winner of the McArthur Foundation Genius Grant for his research on ancient Ethiopian manuscripts, the speaker of several languages, the author of several books on the literary, religious, linguistic traditions of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s representative to the World Council of Churches, the Cataloguer of the Ethiopian Manuscripts, the champion of the Liberal Social Democracy principles and practice, not only pays a moving tribute to her father, parents and extended family, she is also coming of age in her own right to claim her motherland.

Rebecca, a graduate of Harvard Law School with honor (she was on the Law Review with Senator Barack Obama for two years!), a former clerk of a Federal Judge and a lawyer who work in major law firms in Washington D.C. and New York, is eager and willing to return to Ethiopia in a meaningful way, to become part of a new Ethiopia where the rights of all citizens are guaranteed by law and respected, where the rights of women, including the right to participate in the political decision making, the right to live free of sexism, sexual abuse and exploitation, abuse in the work place , both locally and globally, particularly in countries, such as Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf States, to promote the rights of free speech and solving political difference by peaceful means. She wants to bridge the gap that held her at a distance for more than two decades, the gap that forced her to seek new life in America.

Rebecca is now a proud mother of two children, happily married to Jean Manas, a Greek Armenian (the Ethiopian orthodox church maintains one of the longest relationships with the churches of Greece and Armenia). Jean accompanied Rebecca in her historic journey to Ethiopia, a journey that took her back to her family and to the northern part of Ethiopia. Rebecca’s memoir is also remarkable in combining her family’s story with the story of the motherland. It is clear that she has become a woman of substance, integrity. She is articulate, assertive and open-minded.

Rebecca limited her reflections on Ethiopian history and historical sites to the northern part. I hope in due course she will be able to visit the southern part and be able to expand her rediscovery.

Rebecca’s narrative on her uncle is moving. His determination to continue to live and build bridges in Ethiopia, even under the most trying moments of the Derg, is quite exemplary.

Rebecca’s interaction with her grandmother and aunt also provide ample examples of the strength of family values and its capacity to sustain and nourish the family members.

Rebecca made several observations during her visits of Ethiopia: narrow policy in Aksum, misguided racial myth of the Ethiopians, the crude policy of the American Embassy in Ethiopia.

Held at a Distance is a great accomplishment. It certainly presents a balanced life of the author, a balance in which she displayed an American face to the world while she nurtured a private identification with Ethiopia that she kept mostly to herself.

Ayele Bekerie (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Cornell University. He has written and published in scholarly journals, such as , ANKH: Journal of Egyptology and African Civilizations, Journal of Black Studies, The International Journal of Africana Studies, and Imhotep.

From Progressive Historians
History and Politics Of, By, and For the People

Broken by the Badlands: A Review
by: delicatemonster
Mon Jul 02, 2007 at 22:50:45 PM EDT
FEVER & THIRST A missionary doctor amid the Christian tribes of Kurdistan
By Gordon Taylor Academy of Chicago Publishers, 354 pp., 2005, ISBN: 0-89733-537-6

The most impressive feature of Fever & Thirst, Gordon Taylor's meticulously researched study of the misadventures of a 19th Century doctor and missionary in the remnants of the Ottoman empire, is the grudging sympathy we come to feel for Asahel Grant, the erstwhile hero of this tale. By current standards of tastes, he is not an entirely endearing character: stoic, overly pious, headstrong and something of a quack. There is little to recommend him. Indeed, the opening chapter seems contrived to lower our expectations. This upright Victorian appears to be something of a masochist or a fool. Rousing from a hard night out of doors in Chumba, very close to what is now the border between Turkey and Iraq, our man finds his face swollen "into a bubble of pain." The night before he had slept on an azraleh: a platform rising some ten to fifteen feet above the ground to avoid mosquitoes. The particular azraleh that Grant slept on rose only a few feet above a roaring cataract whose cold waters he presumes have caused the swelling. Near the end of the first chapter, entitled "Remedy" we are introduced to what Grant-an M.D. by the standards of the 19th century-determines is the appropriate cure: a lancet, thrust fiercely into his jaw again and again to drain off the swelling.
"Grant found relief," Taylor writes, "`only by a desperate plunge of his lancet into the very roots of his teeth'. The blade, Grant admits, had struck so deeply into his gums that the labial nerve was severed, leaving his upper lip numb for nearly two weeks."
Gordon Taylor delivers this striking moment with such casualness that I found myself wondering if we weren't verging into satire, or spoof. But no: "This was not the act of a madman or quack" Taylor is careful to note; "Grant was a competent and conscientious physician, a man who never acted with anything but the best of intentions. No one can read about his desperate thrust of the lancet without the queasy realization that little had changed since alchemists stalked the earth. In some parts of the United States, doctors continued to draw blood up to the beginning of the 20th century, and the potions they dispensed lingered even longer in their black bags and in apothecaries' chest. Such was the staying power of an illusion; such was the world of Asahel Grant."
Indeed, Gordon Taylor devotes page after page to the leech gatherers of that time and the paradoxically effective powers of violent emetics. In retrospect what is most curious about this passage is how pronounced that word `illusion' stands out. Calling to mind Freud's Future of an Illusion and the indictment of superstitious belief patterns in general. And yet, it's a credit to Taylor's art, perhaps, or at minimum, his sympathy, that Asahel Grant's world stands on its own: horrific, primeval and heroic, even for modern day readers far removed from both Grant's cures and his beliefs.
In addition, I found myself reading this book in awe of its encyclopedic knowledge of the medical and religious practices of that geographic area and era. The main thrust of the story, however, is simple disaster. At twenty five years old, Grant's wife, Judith Campell Grant, dies in the relative wilderness of Urmia among the Nestorians, a group of primitive and semi-heretical Christians that Grant has come to cure and convert. She had "toiled like some super human being. She bore a son in the summer of 1836 and twin daughters in 1838. She taught school, she learned Persian, Turkish, and ancient and modern Syriac, she nursed the sick." Of course, soon she fell ill herself. Taylor notes that it was probably Malaria. He ends by eventually abandoning his children to conduct his missionary / medical work. The work itself Asahel Grant has no doubt about, but a modern reader lingers over certain questions of efficacy and judgment. Why abandon your own children? Are cures of leech bleedings and vomit inducing emetics the best possible thing to bring to these mountain primitives? And, as if that weren't enough, must you introduce your own prejudices to them: railing against the Papists ("sons of perdition") and Anglicans alike, while trying to dodge the advances of the latest band of Kurdish thieves?
Taylor manages to illuminate and discuss these questions while still maintaining a large and sympathetic heart for our doomed doctor. Along the way we learn about the value of Gall nuts-how gall-wasps actually make the necessary `tanning solution' by swelling the Oak trees of Aleppo with their own larva, the tediousness of sitting minutes on end for a daguerreotype, the reptilian politics of the Nestorian and Kurdish mountain tribes-and perhaps -- not so surprising-that Mosul, Iraq has always been a fetid, dangerous place. Both violent time and weathered country come to life in layer after layer of carefully researched detail. We know from the beginning, of course, how it will end. There can be little doubt: Grant is doomed from the moment the lancet pierces his gum. And yet, Taylor invests this last, almost ridiculous scene with grandeur and sympathy: he is ordered by his own mission board to `go home' and take care of his children. "from the weary doctor there now issued a great sigh of relief. It was the best thing that could have happened. `On reading this,' Grant wrote, `my heart was full, and I passed almost a sleepless night.'"
His heart is full, Taylor is careful to explain, because he can now return to tending for his children, relieved of his missionary duties. There is only one problem. He is in Mosul; and there is a typhus epidemic. "With too many refugees and too little room to house them, Grant's makeshift hospital had bred the germs that would destroy him."
The end comes quickly, ironically, within days of the notice that he must return home.
"Sometimes in his delirium he spoke Turkish, other times Syriac. He conversed with his mother and his children. He spoke with his Savior."
He dies, imagining he is on a ship, traveling to his home.
On April 24, 1844, by the banks of the Tigris, in the city of Mosul, which is even now the scene of horrific battles, Asahel Grant was buried. Even the Turkish governor at the time attended. The other Christian missionaries-his comrades-- lingered on for a time, as was their pattern, but soon even they departed, driven like Asahel Grant, and like our own violent effort today, by their own loss of illusions.