Always, he said, one should carry three wigs. He had just removed the one she most associated with his hair. She hadn’t seen it coming. Now he looked like a clown. Odd how it most affected the look of his teeth.

He demonstrated the red one.  A dyed, greasy look, to wear to the club. Under the glitterball. When midnight is a colander. Little mirrors spreading holes of light. Maybe with specs.

(Meanwhile, every room in the house has been utterly re-arranged—“to create a sense of depth”—even the cast-off lampshades polished and assembled like a collection of vases on top of the bureau—silent, gleaming orbs. And she can’t remember the quiet words that join things.)

—from The White Bride

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Nujood Ali and Delphine Minoui

—Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

High-profile divorces are usually thrilling tabloid fodder. But in Nujood Ali’s case, the act of asking for a divorce — not to mention getting it — shook the Muslim world, caused the Yemeni parliament to raise the age of consent to 17 for boys and girls, and earned the then-10-year-old international press attention, including being named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2008. It also gave Ali a chance to attend school, escape subjugation to sharaf — a patriarchal Bedouin honor code — and nourish dreams of one day becoming a lawyer and helping girls like herself.

Nujood is not only the subject of the story, but the narrator. She tells her tale with the assistance of co-author Delphine Minoui, a Le Figaro reporter who covers the Middle East. But the text does not go beyond Nujood’s childlike impressions of the world, sketching a general impression of an impoverished family with loving but strict parents. When one sister brings an unnamed shame upon the family, they move from their village to the capital. For Nujood, though she takes simple joy in the smells and bustle of Sana’a, it is all confusion and vague acceptance.

Poverty drives the family to turn to begging, and eventually, to arrange Nujood’s marriage. Her husband is three times her age, hails from the same village as her family but is still essentially a stranger. He promises not to touch the girl until after her first period; Nujood’s father repeats the thinly-veiled lie to console his wife. Nujood’s wedding night resembles nothing like her fantasies of a lush dress, celebration, and henna tattoos. She speaks of the comfort she would take in writing the one word she knows — her name—  during the cruel time with her husband. Throughout, the book repeats the Yemeni tribal proverb: “To guarantee a happy marriage, marry a nine-year-old girl.”

Unfortunately, the book’s childlike perspective doesn’t do the complexity of the story justice. I am Nujood reads like an extended women’s magazine article. Its simplicity — and its attachment of the young Nujood to a broad and complex phenomenon — make the story accessible. It is well-suited for a young adult audience looking for an introduction to the subject of feminism in the Islamic world. But one wishes for even a fraction of Anne Frank’s power of perception (though of course, Frank was older when she wrote her famed diary).

A redeeming point, at least, is that proceeds from the book go to supporting Nujood’s education and her family. If for this reason alone, I am Nujood and its author, whom Hillary Clinton has called “one of the greatest women I have ever seen,” deserve support.

Excerpt: “Looking around, I spy a group of men in olive-green uniforms. They must be policemen, or else soldiers. I’m shaking — if they see me, they might arrest me. A little girl running away from home, that just isn’t done. Trembling, I discreetly latch on to the first passing veil, hoping to get the attention of the unknown woman it conceals. Go on Nujood! It’s true you’re only a girl, but you’re also a woman, and real one, even though you’re still having trouble accepting that.”

Further Reading: Sisters in War and Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes.

Saskia Vogel writes a lot. Visit her at http://SaskiaVogel.com.

*Photo courtesy eesti.

Obsolete

Eight track: A music promoter wants a museum for the format.
Curtsy: Should the gesture come back?
Late night: Will there ever be an heir to Johnny Carson?
Passage: Studying the men who searched for a way to link oceans.

Tragic

McQueen: On the designer’s sudden death.
Twitter: Should one update one’s account in the midst of a tragedy?

*Photo courtesy yatenkaiouh.

Ted Conover, author of several books including Newjack and Rolling Nowhere, spans the world in The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, his study of six crucial roads in Peru, East Africa, the West Bank, India, China, and Nigeria. In the excerpt below, Conover, who visits Zócalo on March 15, considers the history of speed – -from the first teenage driver Phaeton to the first woman to drive the Indy 500 to his own four-hour teenage trek through Colorado in his dad’s Porsche to meet a girl.

A blocked road is a thwarted intention.

A good road — smooth, straight, free of roadblocks — allows us to go fast. Speed, in fact, is not only the advantage of a good road but one of its great pleasures.

In the pre-Hispanic Americas, speed was a fast runner. Spaniards introduced the horse, which, according to early chroniclers, the Aztec saw as an intelligent being, even a god. Larger and faster than any other creature they knew, a horse with a soldier on its back formed a huge, intimidating fighting machine.

With time, Native Americans came to understand, breed, and ride horses with a skill commensurate with that of the cowboys and soldiers they battled. Around the world, in Mongolia and Scandinavia, in Australia and Argentina, pastoral people used horses for transportation and, yes, for the pleasures of racing.

Earlier, though, other civilizations had taken it to the next level. Four-wheeled chariots appeared in Mesopotamia between 3000 and 3500 B.C., pulled by oxen or tamed asses. As their use spread to India, China, and Europe, they became more nimble with the use of spoked wheels, and by 2000 B.C., they were pulled by horses, two, three, or four of them — a potent innovation for battle. They could go faster than a single horse ridden by a soldier in full armor, and they allowed soldiers better access to weaponry. As we know from sources including the movies, Greeks and Romans put them to use in races and other pageantry.

The Greeks, in addition, found a place for chariots in their mythology. Phaeton, challenged by his friends to prove that Helios, the sun god, was his real father, asked to drive his chariot (the sun) for a day. Helios tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Phaeton, reins in hand, quickly lost control: the chariot came too close to earth, setting rivers and oceans to boil; “whole cities burn,/ And peopled kingdoms into ashes turn.” Libya became a desert and the Moors’ skin blackened.

Finally, Zeus, god of the sky, intervened, striking the runaway chariot with a bolt of lightning. Phaeton, perhaps history’s first teenage driver, plunged to earth with his hair on fire and perished.

Horses pulled carts and wagons of various kinds for centuries, but not until the eighteenth century did a combination of better roads and better cart technology result in vehicles that brought wheeled speed to large numbers of people. The French were leaders in this development, with the horse-drawn cabriolet, a lightweight, two-wheeled, open-air cart for two, sturdier coupés, and the turgotine, a narrow stagecoach. The convenience, excitement, and utility of these innovations resulted in a boom: the number of vehicles in Paris went from 320 in 1658 to 20,000 by 1765. “Everyone has become a driver,” wrote the Chevalier d’H. in 1819. “It’s the fashion of the day.”

England, too, was transformed. Over seventy-five years the number of carriages shot up from 18,000 in 1775 to 106,000 in 1840. Roughly corresponding to the French conveyances were the English curricle (two wheels, one axle), phaeton (four large wheels, minimal body), and mail coach. Like the French vehicles, and like the fallen god, and indeed like the modern sports car, all were known as fast and dangerous, thrilling to drive but a peril to pedestrians. With vehicles “came efforts to widen and straighten out streets, regulate traffic, differentiate sidewalks from roadways…efforts that had the effect also of encouraging a further acceleration of motion.”

A significant enabler of speed, of course, was [John Loudon] McAdam’s better pavement. In combination, smooth pavement and horses pulling lightweight carriages brought the pleasures of speed to a larger number of people than ever before. As angry as pedestrians were with the newfound perils of the street, drivers and passengers became ecstatic with motion…..

Meanwhile, travel in England was being transformed by a system of fast government mail coaches. Pulled by four horses, they could carry four passengers inside, but mail delivery took priority. Danger courted the coaches: a post office guard stood outside in the back, on the lookout for highwaymen. And they were prone to accidents, the driver’s seat being the riskiest. An additional passenger was allowed to sit with the driver. An Oxford student who was fond of doing so, Thomas De Quincey, famously recalled his experiences in his essay, “The English Mail Coach”:

The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.

These sensations of speed, De Quincey wrote, had a large role “in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams,” by which he appears to refer to the experiences behind his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The idea of velocity as a sensation-heightening narcotic is not new.

The mail coach system had stopped by 1846, largely replaced by railroads. Looking back, De Quincey doubted whether this was progress: not only do you not feel the velocity of a train, he complained, but the visceral connection between passenger and horse was gone, replaced by “the pot-wallopings of the boiler.” Jeffrey T Schnapp, a Stanford professor who spent years as a serious motorcycle racer, adds that the mail coach was invigorating because it was irregular, an experience of speed that defied tedium because it always contains “the promise/threat of accident.”

Commercial airliners likely would have bored De Quincey. Perhaps even space travel would: as the fastest human beings to date, astronauts orbit the earth at 17,500 miles per hour while looking perfectly relaxed. (the more potent symbols of speed in the twentieth century are the faces of test pilots like Chuck Yeager, who were photographed in the late 1940s breaking the sound barrier while g-forces grotesquely wrinkled and pulled back their cheeks, exposing their teeth.)

But the future was not devoid of promise. With the rise of horses and carriages, argues Schnapp, individuality became “identified with administration of one’s own speed” as never before. This trend only continued with the rise of the automobile, and its domination of roads around the globe.

At a writers’ conference in Aspen, I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop that included Janet Guthrie, the first woman to drive in the Indianapolis 500. She was working on a memoir, since published; here is the ninth paragraph, describing a moment from the Indy of 1977:

The Lightning had long since become an extension of myself. I was melted into it, centrifugal force smearing me like putty against the torso support and headrest as the side loads rose in the turns. My nerve endings extended out to the contact patches where the tires gripped the pavement, like the fingertips and toes of a rock climber.

Guthrie’s racetrack experiences remain extreme, the province of a few talented drivers. But from the free falls of sky divers ad bungee jumpers to the theme park roller coasters so beloved of teenagers, people are finding ways to go faster and faster.

There remains, however, something singular about the accelerator, about controlling it yourself. I suppose this is one reason that traffic so thwarts driving pleasure: it effectively caps acceleration, and subtracts most of the skill from driving. Similarly, repetition — of driving the same route again and again, in the same car, even if it’s a Corvette — kills the thrill. The road must be open, and winding, and you can’t be headed to work.

I grew up a passenger in a Rambler station wagon, and then an Oldsmobile. My first experience of incarceration was being buckled into the back seat of that Oldsmobile as my father drove the family across the seemingly endless American West on a “fun” summer vacation.

But then, in addition to a station wagon, we got a second car: my father, like so many other dads, wanted something fast. He bought a blue Porsche 912. The excitement he felt for it was infectious. At thirteen, I loved riding in that car with him, seated so close to the ground, accelerating so quickly when the light turned green, touching the wooden shift knob and smelling the leather interior. There were two vent windows in the rear; I’ll never forget my dad repeating what the seller, Glen Somebody, had told him: that leaving them ajar “creates a nice cross-breeze.” It was like gospel. As was the wisdom that the noisy, air-cooled rear engine liked running at high RPMs  — that’s what the tachometer was for, to make sure the Porsche got the sports car equivalent of exercise.

Dad had a client up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, about an hour and a half from Denver if you ignored the speed limit. Which I must conclude Dad did, and who could blame him? One night he returned home from Wyoming after dark. I was the first one outside in the morning, and the first to notice the pelt of an entire rabbit dangling from Dad’s car, partly embedded in the grille. Damn, I thought.

In high school the car I drove was the current station wagon, a Pontiac Catalina.  But the spring of my senior year, a girl from Florida I’d met while teaching skiing on weekends wrote me to say she’d be up in Aspen for a week with her family. It corresponded with my spring break. I asked my parents if there was any chance I could borrow the car and go up there for a couple of days.

I got a “no, sorry” — my mom needed the wagon for various errands. But then, the day before break, Dad took me aside. Would I like to take the Porsche to Aspen? he asked. Was he kidding?

He handed me the keys with a bit of trepidation, murmured something about downshifting on the hills to save the brakes — but it was all just ceremony. The main thing was he had handed me the keys. It was the closest thing I’d ever have to a teenage rite of passage.

The trip to Aspen took four hours that time of year. I’d never driven so far from home by myself. But I knew how to go. An after-school job kept me from leaving until dinnertime. By the time I reached the mountains, it was dark. The national seeped limit at the time was fifty-five, but even going faster I could seldom put the Porsche into fifth gear, had to stick with fourth, the engine roaring satisfyingly as I climbed hills in the passing lane.

Then I came to Glenwood Canyon. The interstate highway ended there (later it would go through, in a magnificent feat of engineering that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and involved lots of dramatically elevated roadway). At the time, the mid-1970s, the road turned into a curvy two-lane highway that ran alongside the Colorado River. High rock walls rose on either side of the narrow canyon, softened by willows at road’s edge and the occasional waterfall.

I drove as fast as I possibly could, pushing around corners as the engine roared. It was late March; there was no snow and the road surface was clear. I had the windows open and the heater on. My heart beat fast because of the chance I could crash. The Blaupunkt radio played a song I loved. There was a girl from Florida at the end of the road. All was motion, moment, potential, thrill.

Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc.

*Photo courtesy miss_blackbutterfly.

Surviving

Cities: Charlotte’s daily paper considers how smaller cities can live through the recession.
Europe: Can it be a big power?
Workers: The youngest will make it through.
Food: McDonald’s is managing better than rivals in economic hard times.

Girls

Barbie: The dolls go ‘Mad Men.”
Mean: How young do girls have to be to get mean?

*Photo courtesy DaSon’e.

The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
by Deborah Brautigam

—Reviewed by Angilee Shah

If the headlines are any indication, it’s time for a proper China scare. A sampling from recent news stories on China’s involvement in Africa include: “China throws birthday bash for Zimbabwe’s Mugabe” (Reuters), “Namibia Bans Chinese Investment in Beauty Salons” (Bloomberg), and “China Unicom Denies African Expansion” (Forbes).

But Deborah Brautigam’s exhaustive account of Chinese aid and investment in the continent is by no means part of this trend. China is neither wholeheartedly supporting corrupt dictators, nor filled with ambitions of empire. The Dragon’s Gift, by her account, is no Trojan horse. Subtitled The Real Story of China in Africa, the book is the culmination of some 30 years of research and experience in both places.

At one point, Brautigam warns her readers, “The level of detail on the history of the [Chinese aid] system and its component parts may be more than you want to know, particularly over the next few pages.” Though she is referring to one chapter, this lesson is true for the entire work. As Brautigam moves us beyond assumptions of exploitation and control of natural resources, a more complex story emerges.

The truth is that China is itself a developing country that has successfully reduced its poverty from 53 to 8 percent over twenty years, while Africa’s poverty persists despite 60 years of aggressive foreign aid. Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party leader who is credited with opening up China’s economy, once declared, “To get rich is glorious!”
Chinese policymakers believe in this not just for themselves, but for Africa. Foreign aid to the continent has been part of China’s strategy since the end of World War II, as they sought allies who would recognize Beijing over Taipei. But Chinese aid to Africa is different that the West’s. China insisted on “infrastructure, production, and university scholarships at a time when the traditional donors downplayed all of these.” By 2000, China was pursuing joint ventures with African companies and new business that has been mutually beneficial. China is certainly buying up land and offending labor unions and environmental activists, Brautigam acknowledges, but it is also transferring knowledge and, in many cases, reviving otherwise stunted manufacturing sectors.

Part of the anxiety over China’s presence in Africa comes from the challenge they pose to traditional ideas about aid. The Chinese operate with low costs compared to Western aid projects that pay high salaries to foreign experts and put them up in fancy hotels. A 2008 Oxfam study, for example, estimated that donors to Mozambique hire 3,500 “technical experts” at a cost of $350 million per year, an amount that could provide 400,000 local salaries. While Chinese projects do import labor and management, workers live in simple housing and are paid modest salaries, minimizing overhead and allowing the Chinese to greatly underbid Western donors. The Chinese also avoid imposing restrictions on their zero-interest loans for infrastructure, preferring to give African governments agency and complete buy-in. They do not demand economic or democratic reform, and they invest and emphasize profitability in sectors that have been all but abandoned by traditional donors — the messy business of industrialization is not on the agenda of the Millennium Development Goals.

Still, China’s relationship with Africa is shifting as China becomes more concerned about its reputation abroad. In 2007, a Chinese envoy convinced the President of Sudan to allow a peacekeeping force into Darfur, and China is paying more attention to the environmental impact of their projects. Still, if Brautigam’s study is correct, contrary to popular belief, China’s brand of engagement could be just what sub-Saharan Africa needs.

Excerpt: “In the waves of misinformation and hasty conclusions, it became very clear that no one was answering the central questions: what are the Chinese doing in their new wave of aid and economic cooperation across Africa? What will this mean for the West and our own approach to development and aid? This book takes on that challenge.”

Further Reading: The Aid Trap, and China’s New Role In Africa.

Angilee Shah is a freelance journalist who writes about globalization and politics. You can read more of her work at www.angileeshah.com.

*Photo courtesy BW Jones.

Scandal

Enquirer: The tabloid earns some respect after breaking the John Edwards affair.
Reporter: Why does Hollywood always have them sleeping with their sources?
Publisher: In the age of the Internet, how necessary is the book publisher’s quality control function?

Elect

Grant: The much-maligned president deserves his $50 bill.
Palin: Who would Reagan elect?
Iraq: Elections may be over, but forming a government is just starting.

*Photo courtesy krossbow.

John A. Rich, Professor and Chair of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, applied to Dartmouth on a whim — at the advice of his eye doctor. When he was accepted early decision and went to visit campus with his father, Rich learned that going to Dartmouth had been his father’s hope as well. “My dad had gone to Howard undergrad, and that was really the only choice he had, being an African American man in Washington, DC,” Rich said. “He got an application to Dartmouth, but the tuition at the time was $400. It was unimaginable that his family could pay.” Rich, author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time, told us more about himself before taking to the podium to talk about the impact of violence on the lives of young African American men.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I’m a fan of musical scores. I particularly like Thomas Newman, who wrote the score to The Shawshank Redemption. I usually have that as my background music.

Q. When do you feel most creative?
A. I feel most creative when I am around people who are not afraid to say what’s true.

Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Someone who cares about justice.

Q. If you could be anyone in history, who would you be?
A. This is going to sound paradoxical, but I would want to be someone in South who was marching against injustice in the 1950s and 60s. It’s easy to say that now, I know, but I’m fascinated by the costs that people have to reckon with to be courageous. I wonder where I would have stood in that fight.

Q. What is the best advice you have ever received?
A. My dad died of a type of leukemia. I was running a marathon for charity, for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I was nervous about whether I would finish the race. A psychiatrist who was also running said he could help me with anxiety. He developed a mantra that got me through the race, and I just said it ontinuously to myself: “I’m running my race.”

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Riding the sleeper train with my father from New York to Washington, DC to visit my grandmother. I remember walking into Grand Central Station at midnight, I must have been five years old and I wasn’t supposed to be up that late.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. I love food.

Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?
A. Making lists for everything. Now I have one iPhone list, so I don’t have little stickies everywhere.

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?
A. Give up the salaried job and just live the modest life.

Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?
A. Professor William Cook at Dartmouth College. He was an English professor and one of the few African American professors that I had. It was he who led me to want to major in English, and he taught me that writing was about memorable language.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you most want to meet for dinner?
A. Nelson Mandela.

To read about Rich’s lecture, click here.

*Photo by Francisco Arcaute.

It’s Over

Marriage: On how to save a marriage and when to quit trying.
Swindling: The last of the upper-crust criminals.
Cars: Is our long love affair with the automobile finally ending?

Oscar

Awards: Separate statues for male and female actors makes sense says Denis Dutton.
Show: The Oscar telecast goes big.
Fashion: Recapping who wore what.

*Photo courtesy chadmagiera.

honesty exists in the midwest—
what is said if asked: there are horses
and they encourage moments
of self-reflection. old men are temporary.
time the precision of a compass;
imagine a semi-circle or

some summer spent in mississippi
drinking apple juice out of jam jars.
in this moment we don’t have jars
for anything. instead, we cup our hands

there are actually two people here
(if composed then) collapsed onto you.
where is it coming from? the eye.
easily seduced to keep going