Bedouin Salt: A Review of Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt

Books with more than six-hundred pages have always scared me worse than monsters under my bed. Gnashing teeth and claws always seemed less dangerous. On one hand, long books have room for development of feelings, of movement, they can approach the velocity of epiphany and return — but they also have room for digression, for boredom, for too much inclusion of too little important stuff.  I dread the long novel for these reasons.

Yet there comes a time when walking through a secondhand bookstore when fate lunges forward and a book literally lands on your head. Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt struck me. Its book cover was dark colored, its main design looked like more of a smudge rather than a thought out or stylized drawing, and it exceeded six-hundred pages — but I ended up buying it anyway.

It began as some kind of folk tale of Bedouin in the desert of Saudi Arabia, yet somewhere in the shifting of characters emerging and disappearing, mirage like, Cities of Salt lays down an entire history of a people and a region coming into contact with Western Modernization. How is it that for so many pages I remain held in rapture?

For a novel imbued with modernity coming to a region, particularly with oil politics, it doesn’t let on about it. Rather, the narrator behind the storytelling is never revealed, it haunts the reader’s mind to think of where this real feeling and overwhelming voice fits into the tale.  It lulls the reader into the world of those thousand or so Arabian night tales — the politics being present, but happening as part of a larger telling.

Salt is an old seasoning, one we turn to for its power to amplify sweetness or contrast sourness. It has been integral to the way of food preservation, and is needed by the human body for adequate fluid regulation.

But sowing salt into the earth kills it. The edenic scene rich with water and life where this story begins is not the same prosperous industrialized city with which it ends.

In terms of novels and storytelling about oil and oil culture, Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie There Will Be Blood comes to mind, as well as its inspiration Upton Sinclair’s Oil!. These oil epochs shed light on the happenings in the United States in driven narrative form, yet Cities of Salt take the perspectives of a mass of people as threads of different lives woven together in loose knit fashion give the shape of what has passed.

It is not a single kind of protagonist which drives this story — actually, on close inspection Cities of Salt may not have a protagonist at all — as this unwinding and unspooling detail of change by modernity’s implementation and construction in the Arabian Peninsula falls into place. This story is very much invested in the politics and culture surrounding the advent of oil, and the coming of foreigners to collect it.

The people begin to believe that the depths of the earth are better than its face, when oil is worth more than life giving water. The people give up their old selves in the coming age. Beginning in the desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun, the family of Miteb al-Hathal cracks the porcelain perfection of gold and oil, and scatters the remains as Miteb rides away into legend and myth.

The Wadi is destroyed and disappears forever.

It is not a single kind of antagonist which drives this story, because the unbraiding plot powerfully captures the spirit of the people—their flaws and evils being integral parts of who they are.  Modernity is not the enemy here, it is rather a vehicle of change.

Days pass slowly, the heat grows, and the people caravan to Harran, the new industrialized city for work and for trade.  But it isn’t the same as the same as the Wadi, and the people know it. There are two parts to Harran, American Harran and Arab Harran, each constructed with its own problems. The story takes flight there and catalogues the series of misfires and abuses on both sides of Harran, until the sandstorm rises, and the tempest arrives.

Conflict rises and falls, people rise and fall—no clear rising action gives way to climax — yet, there is a feeling of inevitability in the tempest. All that remains is the sand of the desert and the crystalline structures of cities, fashioned of salt.

Abdelrahman Munif was of Saudi Arabian heritage, and spent the majority of his professional career within the but his Saudi citizenship was revoked for political reasons — brought to a front in his writing as it critiques the way in which modernity came to the region. Hypnotically, I became the little kid listening to this story unfold from the narrator’s lips, waiting to see how it ended. What is certain is that the changing world of globalization and multicultural exchange confirms that the vistas of a thousand Arabian nights had to meet modernity at some point, but Munif’s novel carefully analyzes how they may have met under different circumstances with different ends.

"Keep This Post-Black-Boy Running": The Problem of James Baldwin

1.

Why Read Baldwin Now?

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings gathers writings not published in the Library of America’s 1998 volume, James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Far more than a rattle bag of leftovers, scratched drafts, or airy ephemera, the book brings together the kind of rich, bold, and brilliant essays we’ve come to prize from Baldwin even more than his revolutionary fiction.

Edited and introduced by Randall Kenan from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the collection includes some sixty essays, speeches, letters, profiles, and reviews dug out of newspapers, journals, and private holdings and representing Baldwin’s prodigious output from the late 1950s to his death in 1987.

Baldwin’s reflective essays about writers and writing are never merely about literature; or, to be more accurate, they expand and ennoble the idea of what literature is: literature is race is politics is culture is humanity is the future is the world.

As a writer, he saw that after the Second World War, “the ocean, inconceivably, had shrunk to the size of a swimming pool.” Young American writers were therefore “compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are.” He takes his own dictum seriously with every new story and essay, becoming an ever-bolder thinker and writer, as fresh and incisive now as he must have seemed when he was publishing. And that precisely is the problem.

2.

Move Forward or Die

Many of his pieces about literature are prickly and contentious, and he wasn’t shy about criticizing elder white novelists. Looking back, how could it have been otherwise? If Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man bounced the black novel back onto the tracks from where Native Son’s “unsavory” depiction of a black murderer had derailed a decade earlier, Baldwin could hardly avoid chafing under the strain of all the “go-slow” cultural politics coming from both races. He had to clear some ground in order to breathe and write.

So down go Hemingway and Faulkner (with respect and a sense of reverence: “the man who wrote Light in August”), Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and others, along with the celebrated loosening of ties with his former mentor Richard Wright. Critical assessment and dismissal seemed not only right and proper for him at his time of ascendance, but for all American writers, no matter what decade or color of skin he or she happens to be in.

“We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake American into what we say we want it to be.”

And what generation isn’t? Even accepting that writers his own vintage would have been overthrown two or three times already, which no doubt he would have relished, his point remains valid. We have to move forward or die.

Was anyone listening? A few, perhaps, but Baldwin was often as ahead of his time in racial thinking as he was in literary criticism. With its brief disquisition on the strain of racial color in American fiction, specifically the opposition of the Redskin (native) with the Paleface (white), a piece like “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” anticipates Toni Morrison’s motif of the white American writer’s fixation on “blackness” in her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

3.

That Bitterness Is Our Only Hope

Perhaps because it is so ephemeral, one of the most telling pieces Kenan give us is “The Nigger We Invent,” a transcription of an interview Baldwin gave before a House Select Committee in 1969 in support of a bill to establish a national commission on “Negro History and Culture.” It is a devastating alarum about the near total absence of black history in education after the era of civil rights and the beginning of the Black Power movements.

In response to a question about the lack of education about black history, Baldwin says,

“I think one of the stumbling blocks is that the nature of the black experience in this country does indicate something about the total American history which frightens Americans. . . . It brings up the real history of the country — the history of our relationships with Mexican and slaves. All these points contradict the myth of American history. It attacks the American identity in a sense. . . .

“If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you [white society], and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me, and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it. Am I making sense to you?”

Apparently not enough sense for anyone to listen. We weren’t listening then and we aren’t now. For as powerful a statement as he makes, after forty years we have done nothing about the problem. In fact, we’ve gone in reverse.

4.

Un-Teaching the Movement

When the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Program last month delivered its report, “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011,” the truth of our inattention truly was bitter, though not because the truths told are as hurtful as Baldwin predicted, but because no truths are being told at all.

The SPLC’s report tells the shameful story about our children’s ignorance of civil rights and black history, an ignorance that remains one of the fundamental issues of our society. Thirty-five states received a grade of F on their efforts in teaching civil rights. Sixteen states do not require any instruction at all. Most of those who do, concentrate on “heroes” whose biographical instruction to children tends toward hagiography and is often as useful as a biography of Batman might be. Our education system has failed at precisely the time when living witnesses of the civil rights decades are aging and dying.

5.

How MLK Freed the Slaves

To go a step further, while it’s common knowledge that teachers burdened with lesson plans centered on mandated testing rarely have time to teach the post-World War II era, it’s also true that the roots of the society in which those students live were planted in that same period more than in any other. It’s precisely when people are young and impressionable that the seeds of prejudice are sown, or not, and when they are, they take root deeply. By making history a study of “the past,” no more than a vague lesson plan we teach and put away, we are in grave danger of losing the world that formed us, the adults, and them, our children.

Firsthand data is available as your nearest teacher. I had occasion recently to do a quick and informal survey of teachers and librarians across the country about how civil rights is taught. The responses varied, ranging from there being little formal teaching to reports of excellent student projects. Most telling to me was a response from Arizona:

“I tried, as a school librarian, for two years to impress upon the intermediate students that Martin Luther King, Jr., had NOTHING to do with freeing the slaves. For the most part, they firmly believed that nothing happened between the 1860s and the 1960s . . . and then Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus and Martin Luther King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech and all the slaves were freed!”

6.

The Time a Black Man Became President

Yet if Baldwin could have imagined our current ignorance, he might not have been able to predict how this sad assessment dovetails so neatly with the concepts of Post-Blackness and Post-Racial identity floated from time to time, and again recently in Touré’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Now, the concept of a new world of African-American identity is not at all the same as dampening the study of black history in our schools, and yet the dying off of the witnesses to that history put such post-racial trends in a different light altogether. In his review of Touré in the New York Times Book Review, Orlando Patterson says:

“Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president.”

How does one read this on the eve of an election virtually assured of making the Obama presidency a four-year anomaly? When the euphoria of election night three years ago has dissolved along with everything else in American politics to the recurring and painful image of Barack Obama as the Joker, a landmark presidency of such potential is already being redesigned and relegated into a glitch on the landscape of American political history, something to be taught someday as, “the time a black man became president.”

Where does one put the idea of Post-Racial next to this? How will we deal with multiculturalism when the next lot of bankers muscles its way into the Oval Office, chuckles about how successfully they’ve kept the black/Hispanic/Native underclass running, and buries the poor even deeper?

7.

The Problem of James Baldwin

Baldwin was as much an artist as the next person, black or white. He admired his elder Ralph Ellison’s great novel, though he not so secretly relished the idea of replacing Ellison in prestige. Ellison had the approval of the white press; Baldwin’s support by black journalists and critics was enviable, but less culturally persuasive, and like all writers Baldwin sought the biggest audience for change. But talk about bitter. Baldwin’s main problem was that he was much too hard to listen to.

Had he seen what was happening twenty-odd years after his death and nearly sixty past Ellison’s Invisible Man, he would have seen that its refrain — “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” — is as bitterly true today as it was then, no matter how veiled it has become. We fail to educate. We practice election sleight of hand. We toy with Post-Blackness. We neither read nor listen. What would Baldwin say?