We hear from two speakers of the language: first, my Dad, who remembers hardly any Irish these days but studied it at school for many years. Today, many decades later, he wishes he’d paid more attention. Then, a conversation with Manchán Magan, who made a documentary series for Irish TV about his attempt to travel around Ireland speaking only Irish. (That’s him in the picture, praying that he’ll meet someone who speaks Irish.) He was verbally abused in Dublin — a reaction Magan thinks has to do with the past, and feelings of guilt and shame. In Killarney, he asked people, in Irish, to help him rob a bank. In Galway, he sang filthy songs in public and was applauded by uncomprehending old ladies. He also tried — and failed — to buy food and clothes, and to hire a mechanic. Middle-aged Irish people like him, Magan says, never really were interested in keeping up their Irish skills. But the young are different: for them, learning Irish doesn’t have an agenda attached to it. So there may be hope yet for this language.

Then, it’s Alexander McCall Smith. His latest offering in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is a children’s book in the Scots language. McSmith and other participants in a BBC round-table program (also featured in the podcast) discuss books in translation. English is now so dominant and so widely understood, that many books written in English simply aren’t translated into the likes of Dutch, Danish or Swedish, let alone Scots. So, publication of this book in its translation a full year before it is published in the original English is a quite a statement from McCall Smith.

Finally, we profile hip-hop artist Boomer Da Sharpshooter. Boomer, who is ethnic Cambodian, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in California. He grew up speaking English but now raps in Cambodia’s main language, Khmer. It’s not out of choice: in his late teens he was gang-banger, and was sent to prison on weapons offenses. On his release, the US deported him to Cambodia. That was seven years ago. Today, he’s a reformed character, and his Khmer raps are considerably softer in tone and content than his English ones used to be.

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Relaxing under the bridge (Photo: Hana Baba)

On a breezy Sunday afternoon, Sawsan Adam and her friends sip black cardamom tea. The students bought it from a woman selling hot drinks in the shade of Tuti Island’s new suspension bridge. Although their university is only 15 minutes away, this is their first time in Tuti.

“Look at the view, it’s relaxing and beautiful! I can’t believe we’ve never been here before today.”

Before the bridge, rusty overcrowded ferries were the only connection with Khartoum. Over the years, Tuti Island remained isolated and underdeveloped. And for many islanders here, that was just fine.

This song is sort of Tuti’s unofficial anthem. It tells the story of the Nile flood of 1946, when the Islanders refused to evacuate. Khartoum historian Yusuf Fadul says They rolled up their shirt sleeves and sandbagged the riverbanks around the crescent-shaped Island.

“So they have that spirit of being a solid group against whatever other danger that comes- including modernizing Tuti itself.”

About a 10 minute drive from the bridge lie Tuti’s lush fruit groves. 70-year-old Siddeeg Hasabarrasul grew up around here. He says Tuti residents did agree to the construction of the bridge, but they’re still wary of what it will bring.

“Nobody is against development, we want better roads and a better place to live- but the investors want more than that!”

Tuti Bridge with the new Elfatih Tower in the background (Photo: Hana Baba)

The investors he is referring to is actually one main developer – A Khartoum businessman named Elfatih Abbouda. Abbouda set up an office in a shiny blue-glass building a short walk away from the new bridge. Abbouda shows me a map of his plans for the Island.

“This area will be the residential area, and this is the business district, and this is the recreational area, with hotels, restaurants and a resort…”

He points to pictures of office towers, a golf course, restaurants and sleek condos. But first he has to win the support of Tuti’s landowners. Sideeg Hasabarrasul says Abbouda didn’t start off on the right foot.

“He put up this huge sign that said Tuti Tourism Project. We tore it down and threw it in the river!!”

Then an enraged mob stoned Abbouda’s glass building. He says that’s when he knew he had to initiate a dialog.

“I felt we had to prove that we share the same values, so we set up a committee with the elders and influential personalities, to talk about how to develop Tuti in a way that can benefit and be acceptable to everybody…”

Sideeg Hasabarrasul (Photo: Hana Baba)

“It sounds like a place where men and women are frolicking around in their bathing suits all over the beaches – he says he wants to build resorts like in Lebanon- This is Tuti not Lebanon!”

Back at the bridge, it is late afternoon, and the sandy beach is dotted with beachgoers- fully clothed, of course. If you look up, you can see a steady stream of young people strolling across what’s now called Sudan’s Golden Gate bridge. So whether residents like it or not, it looks like tourism is here to stay. For the World, I’m Hana Baba, Tuti Island, Khartoum, Sudan.

Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Pantheon Books, 256 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Reading memoir can resemble a Tolstoyan train ride, one of those satisfying trips during which a passenger, a stranger to the others in his compartment, tells a tale filled with fascinating characters, intimate relationships and detailed pictures of the sociology and culture of his personal world. This month, I’ve been enjoying that kind of extraordinary ride with Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a stranger to me until now.

His tone is conversational, his story compelling, and the Kenya-Uganda train that runs from the port of Mombasa across what was then called the White Highlands of Kenya, a constant presence, a symbol and reality both fearsome and alluring. Built by Indian labor, the railway was an important pathway for colonialism. We glimpse the tracks first in April of 1954 when Ngũgĩ’s older brother Good Wallace, who has joined the Mau Mau, flees the police. They remain a significant part of the landscape until 1954 when, after a rigorous academic exam, Ngũgĩ finally rides the train to Alliance High School, the best high school in Kenya – and ends his memoir.

Ngũgĩ –- as he is known internationally — is the East African playwright, journalist, novelist, and academic now based at the University of California, Irvine. Born in 1938 near Limuru, in what was then Kenya Colony, he was baptized James Ngũgĩ. In 1962, as a student at Makerere University College, he made his formal debut as a playwright at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda. “Weep Not, Child,” the first novel in English by an East African, was published two years later, followed by his acclaimed fiction “The River Between” and “A Grain of Wheat.”

In 1967, Ngũgĩ became lecturer in English Literature at the University of Nairobi and began championing African and third world literatures. Together with colleagues, he wrote “On the Abolition of the English Department,” a piece of postcolonial literary theory. “If there is need for a ’study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” the authors asked. Ngũgĩ pursued this question and his interest in oral tradition and performance in books such as “Decolonising the Mind” (1986) and “Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams” (1998).

He was almost as critical of the government and society of the Republic of Kenya as he was of British colonial rule and, in 1977, he finally ran afoul of the government with his novel “Petals of Blood” and a play Ngaahika Ndeenda (“I Will Marry When I Want”), that was performed by workers at a community theater in Limuru. Ngũgĩ was arrested and during his year in prison wrote “Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.” During that time, he decided to write in Gĩkũyũ his mother tongue.

Amnesty International helped secure his release but Ngũgĩ was barred from teaching by the dictator Daniel arap Moi, his work was banned from Kenyan bookshops, and he was forced to live and teach in exile, first in Britain and then at a succession of universities in the U.S.

Like all good memoirs, “Dreams in a Time of War” is imbued with the reflections of the adult author yet hews closely to its time-frame of Ngũgĩ’s childhood in Kenya Colony, which begins with his birth in 1938 and ends with his coming-of-age circumcision in 1954. His dreams center around obtaining an education. The wars are World War II, in which Africans are conscripted to fight for the colonial powers on each side and the Mau Mau War of Independence against the British.

But there are many more personal wars in this memoir: conflicts between fathers and sons; mothers and daughters; psycho dynamics between siblings and friends. Although this book will be compared to Wole Soyinka’s 1982 childhood memoir “Ake,” Ngũgĩ’s unblinking candor about human behavior reminded me more of Czesław Miłosz or I.B. Singer, also iconoclastic, unsentimental writers who recreate a vanished world in their remembrances.

Ngũgĩ begins his memoir in April of 1954 with a vivid personal memory embedded in African political and cultural history. He is a young teenager walking home from Kĩnyogori Intermediate School with his friend Kenneth when they come across groups of people excitedly discussing the arrest and escape of an unnamed African man. Some say he was caught carrying bullets, a treasonable offense for an African; others that he was shot at but flew into the sky.

Kenneth attempts to sift out fact from fiction but Ngũgi tries to piece together a coherent narrative. He has heard stories about Mau Mau guerrillas before but never from eyewitnesses. When he gets home to his family compound for dinner – he is one of 24 children born to his father and his four wives – his mother tells the true story: “Wallace Mwangi, my elder brother, Good Wallace as he was popularly known, had earlier that afternoon narrowly escaped death. We pray for his safety in the mountains. It is this war, she said.”

War is the backdrop for Ngũgi’s colonial childhood, starting with a war that readers born in Europe like myself will most likely be startled to see from a new perspective: “When the mother country coughed, the colonial baby contracted the flu,” so when in 1914, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering World War I “the two colonial states, Tanganyika and Kenya, fought on the side of their mothers, hence against each other …They drafted many Africans as soldiers [and] the African soldiers died, in combat, from disease and other ills, out of all proportion to the European soldiers.” When the war ended in 1919, some of the white soldiers were rewarded with African land, “some of the land belonging to surviving African soldiers, accelerating dispossession, forced labor, and tenancy-at-will settlers, such tenants otherwise known as squatters.”

Although this particular wave of dispossession occurred before the author’s birth, it was part of a continuing tide. “Things changed,” he writes. “I don’t know how gradually or suddenly, but they changed … I was aware of trees being cut down, leaving only stumps … It was strange to see the forest retreating as the pyrethrum [chrysanthemum flowers cultivated as a source of insecticide] fields advanced … somehow, in time, I learned that our land was not quite our land; that our compound was part of property owned by an African landlord, Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu, or Bwana Stanley as we called him; that we were now ahoi, tenants-at-will. How did we come to be ahoi on our own land?”

The author’s father, Thiong’o wa Naducũ, had been drawn to the city and worked as a domestic for a white employer in Nairobi as a young man. This employer may have pulled some strings to keep him out of the war and had certainly taught him the English words ‘bloody fool,’ ‘Nigger,’ and ‘Bugger’ which he Gikũyũnized as mburaribuu, Kaniga gaka, Mbaga ino, and “used freely to address any of his children at whom he was angry.” He managed, however, to save up enough money to buy land and livestock in Limuru where his rural and traditional brother lived. “He bought his land under the traditional system of oral agreement in the presence of witnesses,” but the owner then sold it a second time to Lord Stanley Kahahu, a graduate of the Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu and his brother.

This sale was registered with the colonial authorities and kept the author’s father in court until finally “orality and tradition lost to literacy and modernity” and Thiong’o lost his land. He never forgave Reverend Kahahu and this incident is an early example of the way British colonialism, African legal and religious practice, missionary activity and religious affiliation thread through and intertwine in Ngũgĩ’s childhood.

Despite his loss of land, Thiong’o had four wives and a compound of five huts. The four women Ngũgĩ calls “Mother” were, as he remembers it, fiercely loyal to one another and constituted a kind of family government in his eyes: Njeri was “the defense minister of the household” who “brooked no nonsense from anyone;” Gacoki, “shy and kind” was “the minister of peace;” his hard-working, laconic mother Wanjikũ was “the minister of works;” and the calm and beautiful Wangari “the minister of culture.”

When the author once asked his mother why she consented to becoming the third wife of a polygamous man, she replied It was because of his first two wives…They were always together, such harmony, and I often wondered how it would feel to be in their company, And your father? He was not to be denied.”

Ngũgĩ’s biological mother was a determined woman, responsible, at great cost to herself, for making possible and financing his education as well as once acting on her intuition and saving him from asphyxiation as a child. But his mother Wanjikũ was the accomplished storyteller and most evenings the children and their friends gathered around the fire in her hut for entertainment. In that vanished time of no electricity or mass media, Ngũgĩ took part in a kind of ritual happening in which the narrator/soloist/performer and her audience took turns in listening, in which dance and music often alternated with speech, where debate might follow story, where content was a blend of fact, folktale, myth, gossip and news.

Some of the stories told might be, to our ears, pointless. Some might be deeply pertinent, like the ones about “Harry Thuku, whose political fire of the 1920s had become cold ash” after seven years of exile from Kenya. “Some sounded stranger than fiction: like the case of a white man called Hitler, refusing to shake the hands of the fastest runner in the world in 1936 because the man, Jesse Owens, was black.” Repeated during the day, the stories told by the fireside seemed less powerful. “Daylight, our mothers always told us, drove stories away.”

African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: His memoir shows readers the psychological costs of the colonial experience.

In Ngũgĩ’s rendition of his family dynamics, I found his descriptions of traditional African explanations for medical and psychological problems particularly interesting and admired his no-fault way of straddling traditional and modern, Christian and secular, African and European bodies of knowledge. In terms of stories, Ngũgĩ saves his best ones for last. His coming-of-age ceremony, his interrogation by soldiers searching for Mau Mau and his dramatic train journey to boarding school read like performance pieces.

Throughout, as he moves from encapsulating history to drawing portraits of family members like his regal grandfather, embittered grandmother, his brother Good Wallace or community members like Reverend Kahahũ’s decidedly unchristian wife and the master storyteller Ngandi, Ngũgĩ maintains a comfortable, sometimes wry, conversational tone and only rarely betrays bitterness or self-indulgence – although he has ample cause for both.

But he doesn’t make things easy for even the super-attentive reader. I could have used a good map, a clear chronology of historical events, a glossary of terms, and a family tree. Following the many characters and fitting them into the complex world Ngũgĩ creates is hard work for the reader unfamiliar with Gĩkũyũ. But complaints, complaints. The effort is worth it. I feel richer for having read this memoir.

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Helen Epstein was born in Prague and is the author of the memoirs “Children of the Holocaust” and “Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History.”

• BBC coverage
• Global Economy podcast: The Financial Problems With Greece
• Joanna Kakissis’s website

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

DAVID BARON:  In Greece, it’s been another day of nationwide strikes. [SOUND CLIP] Tens of thousands went out to protest sever wage cuts. Those government cuts are aimed at pulling Greece out of a debt crisis that’s threatening other countries in the Euro zone. But the Greek public say the plan is threatening them. And as JOANNA KAKISSIS reports, young Greeks fear it’s leaving them with no future.

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  MYRTO AGIAKATZIKA is 16.  She speaks three languages and loves economics and music. She’s standing outside her high school, but she can’t get in. All the teachers are on strike today. She says things don’t look good for her country.

MYRTO AGIAKATZIKA:  I think they are going to be much, much worse. How are we supposed to live without money when all prices are too high to buy anything? It’s very difficult to live in Greece now.

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  Greece has a reputation as a place where people can expect to get steady government jobs and retire early on generous pensions. But that’s not the case anymore for younger Greeks. College graduates are having trouble finding work. Many are just scraping by. KOSTAS ALEXANDRIDIS is 26.  He makes about 13-hundred dollars a month as a teacher.

KOSTAS ALEXANDRIDIS:  It’s not enough, especially if you have a family. I don’t have a family nowadays but for a family [LAUGHS] that’s very little money.

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  His parents both have steady pensions.

KOSTAS ALEXANDRIDIS:  They had security. At 35 years of work, you get a pension. There was social security. The hospitals were all free, and education was free.

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  Young families, working couples with children, are having an especially hard time.

[SOUND CLIP]

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  Konstantinos Skoufis is 39, and the married father of two young girls. He’s a government-employed driver for a near by Athens suburb. Together he and his wife Natasa [SOUNDS LIKE: Pirgopoulu] earn about 25-hundred dollars a month. But under Greece’s latest austerity measures, their pay will probably go down by a quarter. Natasa says she’s worried.

NATASA PIRGOPOULU:  [SPEAKS IN GREEK]

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  “In the past,” she says, “everyone made less but had more because everything wasn’t so expensive. Now, we can barely make it.” They save money on heat by lighting the fireplace. Sometimes Natasa and her husband talk about moving to Canada.

KOSTAS ALEXANDRIDIS:  [SPEAKS IN GREEK]

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  Konstantinos says it’s hard to live the Greek dream. “I always imagined things would be better, much better,” he says. “But the truth is, every year that passes, my dreams fade.” This kind of talk upsets Natasa’s 64-year-old mother Kaiti. She’s a psychiatric nurse who retired on a very good pension. Greece takes care of her, Kaiti says. But it’s not taking care of her children, or her grandchildren.

KAITI: [SPEAKS IN GREEK]

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  “What’s going to happen to my grandchildren?” She says, “I’m already worrying about them.”

[SOUND CLIP]

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  Back at the high school, students have ditched their books and are playing basketball. MYRTO AGIAKATZIKA says she’s tired of everyone being angry and worried here.

MYRTO AGIAKATZIKA:  In Greece I don’t think there is future, that’s why I’m not going to stay here. I’m going abroad.

JOANNA KAKISSIS:  She plans to study and work in Spain, her mother’s country, even though Spain has its own economic problems. Her Greek father hates the idea, she says, but her mind is made up. She says Greece has a long way to go, and she doesn’t have time to wait. For the World, this is JOANNA KAKISSIS in Athens.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Jeffrey Gettleman’s story in the New York Times
• World Food Program – Somalia
• BBC World Service Africa

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Nearly two decades of fighting and humanitarian suffering has left Somalia a failed state.  More than a third of the people in the east African nation are hungry.  Now it appears that much of the food aid intended for them is being stolen.  A U.N. Security Council study reportedly concludes that corrupt contractors, Islamist militants and even local U.N. workers are taking up to half the aid meant for the needy.  Jeffrey Gettleman is east African correspondent for the New York Times.  Jeff, to start off with here, what makes food distribution in Somalia so difficult?

JEFFREY GETTLEMAN:  Truly a perfect storm of problems.  For starters there’s no government and as a result, the place has been lawless and chaotic for the last 20 years.  Then you have this new problem of kidnapping of aid workers and threats to Westerners so it’s very hard for any aid agency to monitor what’s going on in Somalia because there’s almost no foreign presence there.  There are no diplomats, there are no aid workers.  Very few journalists go in there and then on top of that you have a country that has been struck by drought after drought, crisis after crisis.  You have millions of people who have been displaced and displaced people can’t farm, they can’t fend for themselves, they can’t feed themselves so as a result you have great need and then on the other side great difficulty in meeting those needs because of the lawlessness and the chaos.

WERMAN:  So in other words, because there are no aid workers there to kind of receive this shipment of aid, the West is essentially sending all of its food aid and not knowing how it’s kind of arriving or where it goes.

GETTLEMAN:  There are local aid organizations and some of them do very heroic work.  Many local aid workers have been killed by different militant groups.  These people are considered spies by some of the militant groups just because they’re working with an American or a British or a foreign aid organization so they’re taking huge risks just to be there.

WERMAN:  Well take us through briefly, Jeff, what happens when that food arrives in Somalia.  Someone in Nairobi rubber-stamps a multi-ton shipment of food aid.  Take us through what happens before it actually gets to the people who need it, once that food aid comes to the port.

GETTLEMAN:  You know I think it’s a really interesting topic.  Once the ships land in Somalia, they have to subcontract the delivery of the aid to a whole bunch of different actors, some with ties to militant groups, some that don’t have the best business reputation but they’re the only guys in town that have the trucks, that have the manpower, that have the experience delivering aid.  Then in between you know, the port and the hungry people are a hundred different checkpoints often, landmines, you know, pirates, militant groups and there’s just a lot of challenges to actually get the aid from the port to the people who need it.

WERMAN:  In other words, the number of potential windows of fraud that that food aid has to pass through are really unknown.  We just don’t know essentially what happens to it once it gets to the port.

GETTLEMAN:  No and some of this is really a cost of doing business.  It would be impossible to hope that all the aid would get to the people who it’s intended for, without some of it being you know, siphoned off by the various actors along the way.  Some of these militant groups like the Shaba, which is a hard-line Islamic group that’s chopped off hands and stoned people to death and has lynched Al Qaeda, they demand payments at the checkpoint.  They might say, hey give me a couple packs of grain so I can sell it in the market for money or so I can use it to eat it so to get the aid through, there’s often, you know, often some of that aid disappears and this isn’t unique to Somalia.  This is true in many consoled zones that if you want to get the aid to the people who need it, you have to play ball with the authorities on the ground.

WERMAN:  The U.N. Security Council study that you reported on today will be presented publicly to the Security Council next Tuesday.  What follow up will there be?

GETTLEMAN:  I think people are going to put pressure on the U.N. Security Council to make more specific action to either open up more investigations into the WFP operations, the World Food Program operations, maybe to hire outside contractors to come in and monitor the aid convoys to make sure this food is getting to where it needs to go.  I think there’s also going to be a lot of criticism and more scrutiny on the Somalia government because it’s basically, the world feels, the Western world feels they don’t have an alternative to the transitional federal government right now and therefore they have to support these guys, no matter what.  Well, this report indicates there’s a lot of corruption going on within that government and there’s going to be some questions raised and then you have this ongoing piracy issue where it looks like some local Somali officials are helping the pirates and there’s going to be a lot more pressure on them to crack down on piracy because it’s really becoming a menace to global trade.

WERMAN: Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa correspondent for the New York Times.  Thank you very much.

GETTLEMAN: Glad to help.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 266 pages $25.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Upon putting down J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, “Summertime,” one can be forgiven for running straight to the computer and calling up the Wikipedia entry on its author. After all, when a novelist as critically successful (two Bookers and a Nobel, for starters) and famously reclusive as Coetzee writes a posthumous “biography” of himself, how can you help but wonder how much of it is true?

Coetzee has written two volumes of lightly-fictionalized autobiography before this, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” each of which is written in a close third person, so “Summertime” isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Yet the primary way in which it differentiates itself from the previous two books (aside from the fact that it actually says “fiction” on the cover)—the fact that the protagonist John Coetzee is dead—makes all the difference.

“Summertime” is a finale, a summing up of a life, and the portrait Coetzee (the author, now, whom I’ll refer to by only his last name) paints of his fictional avatar is so unforgivably cruel and insulting that it borders on the parodic. If this book is to be taken as fact, Coetzee sees himself as a talentless failure who has contributed almost nothing to the world at large. But the very writing of the novel seems to contradict that claim. So how much of it is true?

“Summertime” is comprised primarily of interviews with women who were significant in John Coetzee’s life during the mid-1970s. First we hear from Julia, a married woman with whom John had a brief and unsatisfying affair. Then there is his cousin Margot, with whom he shared an awkward night on the South African Karoo when their car broke down. Next comes Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher and mother of one of John’s students. Finally, we hear from Sophie, a fellow professor who also was briefly involved with John romantically.

What binds these women together is their unflagging disdain for John Coetzee. Over the course of the novel, he is maligned in every manner possible. Julia, in-between describing John’s shortcomings as a lover, posits that it would’ve been impossible for any woman other than his mother to love him. Margot calls him a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic…Failed son.” Adriana, who rejected John’s obsessive attentions after accusing him of lusting after her teenage daughter, describes him as “a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.” She also mocks his abilities as a dancer. Sophie dwells less on the person than his work, claiming John Coetzee “had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition.”

The overall tone of this roast is aesthetic masochism. One could put a serial killer in a room full of his victims’ parents and expect to hear more empathy and understanding. So what is the point of all this abuse? Obviously, there are plenty of people in the world—including this reader—who have the greatest respect for Coetzee.

J.M. Coetzee: An unsmiling, difficult, and dark author?

This question is part of a more general one, which leads us back to Wikipedia. Unlike “Boyhood” and “Youth,” “Summertime” is heavily fictionalized. For example, during the decade at issue in the book, Coetzee (the character) lives alone with his father in a suburb in Western Cape Town. They are a sad, silent Odd Couple, pitied by pretty much everybody who knows them. But in reality, Coetzee (the real person) spent the 1970s with his wife and two children. What gives?

I don’t know exactly what Coetzee’s game is, but my guess is that “Summertime” lands somewhere between C. G. Jung’s “Red Book” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Coetzee is airing his deepest fears—that he has wasted his life, that he has never loved or been loved, that he is delusional about his own abilities—admitting that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope. At the same time, he is recreating himself as a monster, imagining how the world would respond to his worst vision of himself. John Coetzee is what J.M. Coetzee might have been, or what he might still become.

In this way, like many of Coetzee’s recent novels, “Summertime” is primarily experimental. While it lacks the lecture structure of “Elizabeth Costello” or the entertaining split-screen hijinks of “Diary of a Bad Year” (a humorously dark and portentous sketch of which is described in the John Coetzee-penned notebook entries that bookend “Summertime”), Coetzee’s newest is an exploration of the self as seen through the lens of fiction. He is able to leave behind his true personality, his true history, even his true abilities as a stylist (the book’s interviews are narrated and administered by John’s biographer, Vincent, who has all the poetic sensibility of the DSM-IV). From this null-place, Coetzee imagines an alternate-reality Coetzee, and tears him to shreds.

Perhaps that explains the incongruously sunny title of the book. There’s nothing like a little time with a monster to make you appreciate the human. “Summertime” is an affirmation of Coetzee as he actually is, unsmiling and difficult and dark. For anyone who is interested in the inner-workings of one of literature’s greatest living minds, “Summertime” will prove satisfying. Just don’t confuse the protagonist with the author. They’re like night and day. Or like winter and summer.

• BBC coverage
• Internat’l Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp.  This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Uganda is facing condemnation for a bill under consideration there.  It’s an anti-gay measure that would impose the death penalty in certain cases.    Western countries and many Ugandans have expressed outrage.  Even Uganda’s president has asked that it be withdrawn.  But all that outrage doesn’t seem to have had much impact.  Today, the Ugandan lawmaker who proposed the bill said he wouldn’t withdraw it.   Maria Burnett is the Uganda researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York.  Maria, remind us what’s in this bill.

MARIA BURNETT:  The bill, which was tabled in Uganda’s Parliament in October of 2009 is mostly duplicative of Uganda’s laws:  homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda, though this bill ups the penalties for homosexual conduct.  The new aspects of this bill involve the death penalty for same sex relationship with a minor.  An HIV positive person who has any same sex relationship would face the death penalty, whether that relationship was consensual or not.  And if the person that you have a same sex relationship with is disabled, for example.  So it’s a couple of provisions that would get that person the death penalty.  The other new aspects of this bill are provisions relating to anyone who supports or promotes homosexuality or sexual minority works.  And what’s more, there is an extremely important measure in the bill which calls for anyone to inform police of anyone they believe to be a homosexual or to have committed a homosexual act.  So parents, doctors, lawyers, activists, local government officials, I mean, anyone in the country who’s aware of any homosexual conduct would be required to turn those individuals in to police within 24 hours or face criminal penalties themselves.

SHARP: And this bill doesn’t come out of the blue, right?  Homophobia, as you point out, is alive and well in Uganda, so why now?  What’s going on?

BURNETT: I think it’s a couple of things. I think that certainly the work on HIV/AIDS has prompted sort of more dialog with groups about how their needs could be addressed.  Uganda’s national HIV/AIDS policy does not include any provisions for lesbian and gay and transsexual people, transgender people.  Last year we also saw a conference which took place in Kampala, sponsored by the Family Life Network, a Ugandan organization who claims to try to protect Ugandan family values.  It was attended by several American evangelical Christian groups who preach that through prayer and consultation with your pastor, you can be reformed from a homosexual lifestyle.  So that event certainly crystallized more homophobia in Kampala, and just a few months later, we saw the presentation of this bill.

SHARP: The American evangelicals you mentioned have actually distanced themselves from this bill, correct?

BURNETT: Mm-hmm, yes, they have.

SHARP: What about the strength of this bill.  Is this bill actually coming up for a vote?

BURNETT: We don’t know when this bill might come up for a vote.  Uganda has presidential and parliamentary elections in about a year and one month.  We should see those in the end of February 2011, and so there is an emphasis right now in Parliament on passing some electoral laws.  It should be noted that Uganda has a lot of bad laws coming up, including a bill that criminalizes HIV transmission.  So we’re not sure when we’ll see this bill presented for plenary debate.  It could certainly happen in the near future.

SHARP: Now what about Ugandan President  Yoweri Museveni?  Does he have the power to intervene and stop this from going forward, this bill?

BURNETT: Well, certainly he can not sign it into law if it’s passed by Parliament, but currently the argument goes that because this bill has been presented by an individual member of Parliament, he can’t intervene in the democratic process and insist that the bill be withdrawn.  He has to allow the legislative process to take shape.  Frankly, the member of Parliament who presented the bill is a member of the ruling party and the President wields tremendous power to influence what members of the ruling party do and don’t do.  And so certainly he could stop this bill from going forward, though it wouldn’t at this point be a formal maneuver.

SHARP: I mean, presumably the threat by western donors also to pull out and withdraw support to Uganda and programs there is significant leverage as well.

BURNETT: To the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t actually been a threat by the United States or the United Kingdom, or the EU to actually pull funding if this bill passes.  The only country that’s been alleged to have made that threat is Sweden.  The United States, the EU and the UK are by far Uganda’s largest donors, and I think at this point, they are not willing to condition aid on this basis.  But Ugandan government officials, including the parliamentarian who presented this bill, respond negatively to those kind of threats.  They argue that this is Ugandan values and that this is about protecting the Ugandan family.

SHARP: Maria Burnett is with Human Rights Watch in New York.  Her focus is Uganda.  Maria, thanks so much for talking to us.

BURNETT: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

By Bill Marx

Some of my favorite books from around the world this year raise the thorny issue of the relationship between literature new and the old. The critical and commercial reception of a translation in English often depends on the quality of the translation. Thus the reputation of many works of international literature has been hampered by their ham-fisted or inexpert debuts into English, an issue compounded by the corruption of texts because of political or social censorship. Ironically, when superior, unexcised translations appear later they tend to make surprisingly little impact, as if art was simply a matter of timing. American publishing puts a discouraging spin on Ezra Pound’s much-quoted adage: here literature turns out to be yesterday’s news that stays yesterday.

For example, how should we evaluate Robert Chandler’s compelling rendition of an unbowdlerized edition of Andrei Platonov’s masterpiece about Soviet authoritarianism “The Foundation Pit”? Is this a new book? Or, after two earlier versions, is this volume mainly of interest to scholars? The flip side of the translation question touches on the influence of economics. How many versions of Franz Kafka in English do we need? Oxford University Press has just released new versions of “The Castle” (translated by Anthea Bell) and “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories” (translated by Joyce Crick). Both read well, but are they really necessary? Shrinking column inches for book reviews in newspapers and magazines means that there will be few (if any) meaningful critical comparisons among competing versions.

This preamble explains the presence of “old” new volumes on my holiday list.

As with last year’s literary stocking-stuffers, keep in mind that these are rough times for publishers, especially small presses specializing in publishing challenging books in translation, which is why I have done my best to choose volumes from presses located some distance from the mainstream. At this point, placing books on your gift-giving list becomes an act of cultural investment, along with the considerable readerly playbacks of stuffing your stockings with international fiction and non-fiction. Each year the paradox grows increasingly absurd: cultural pressures mount on American publishing to shed its provincialism, yet the number of books translated into English remains relatively small.

Fiction:

1) “Memories of the Future” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated by Joanne Turnbull. (NYRB Classics) A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem. Little of Krzhizhanovsky’s work was published during his lifetime because it was simply too bizarre (and politically incorrect) for the Russia of the 1920s. I think we are more than ready for him now – an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.

2) “Your Face Tomorrow Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell” by Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (New Directions) The final installment in Marías’s super spy novel extraordinaire, a final playing out, to the point of demonic exhaustion, of the last century’s obsession with double agents, secret codes, voyeurism, and betrayal. An epic dramatization of backstabbing on all levels – from the psychological to the metaphysical – comes to a fascinating if complicated end.

3) “The End of Everything” by David Bergelson. Translated by Joseph Sherman. (Yale University Press) First published in 1913, Bergelson’s prophetic novel makes use of a surprisingly nervy minimalism to tell the tale of a beautiful woman from a privileged background whose life is shattered by a marriage of convenience – a searching diagnosis of the anxious hollowness at the center of Jewish life during the turn-of-the-century.

4) “Orlando Furioso” by Ludovico Ariosto. Translated by David Slavitt. (Harvard University Press) An at times intentionally zany new version of one of the literary high points of the Italian Renaissance, an epic crowded with jousting men and monsters that influenced Spencer’s “Faerie Queen,” that Shakespeare lifted a plot from, and that Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges admired. Slavitt’s spiffy translation entertainingly reinvigorates the melodramatic, satiric, battle-heavy antics of Ariosto’s prolix fantasy. Orlando’s impossible passion for the pagan princess Angelica is conveyed through playful iambic pentameter and rhyme:

A wonderful horse, but a horse is a horse and it’s not
a hippogryph. Still, in a joust or fight
his courage and strength could never be forgot.

I await Terry Gilliam’s movie version.

5) “The Salt Smugglers” by Gerard de Nerval. Translated by Richard Sieburth. (Archipelago Books) This volume is the rib-tickling oddity of the year: the first translation into English of an experimental novel that, back in 1850, appeared in a French newspaper masquerading as reportage. The powers-that-be had passed a law essentially banning serial novels; Nerval engagingly took up the challenge and concocted this deliciously subversive piece of “journalism,” a humdinger of humbug that scrambles fact and imagination amid a swashbuckling quest for an elusive book. Of course, Nerval deftly lampoons notions of authority, fiction, and censorship along the way.

6) “The Golden Calf” by Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov. Translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. (Open Letter) A satire of political and economic corruption in 1920s Russia whose delicious blend of the daffy and the acidic resonates today. A larger-than-life con man, Ostrap Bender, leads a crew of scallywags on a surreal rampage of chicanery. This is the first complete version in English of a 1931 novel whose charmingly jaundiced view of avariciousness is worthy of David Mamet and Ben Jonson.

Non-Fiction:

1) “Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time” by Joseph Frank. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz. (Princeton University Press) Not a translation but so what? Frank’s monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography’s obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject’s personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer’s enduring greatness.

2) “Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter” by Ingar Sletten Kolloen. Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. (Yale University Press) This biography doesn’t have the intellectual heft of Frank’s but its tortured subject, Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, offers a life of Dostoevskian complexity, a manic mix of genius and moral blindness. A celebrated writer (his fans included Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway) who won the1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Norway. He never renounced his wartime actions, including a much-publicized visit with Adolf Hitler. “If there is one thing I have learned in this work,” writes Kolloen in the book’s Preface, “it is the following: each of us contains more fateful contradictions than we can ever fathom.”

3) “Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings” by Natsume Sōseki. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. (Columbia University Press) The nerdiest pick on my list, but for fans of one of Japan’s greatest novelists (“Kokoro,” “Kusamakura”) this volume of his literary criticism offers insights into his fiction as well as some prescient ideas about realism and multiculturalism. Much of the volume is made up of excerpts from Sōseki’s science-minded “Theory of Literature” – some of which are dated and dense. I suggest reading the informative introduction and skipping around until you hit pay dirt. For example, this interesting passage on the value of individuality from Sōseki’s essay “Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts”:

It is only when one has an ideal that is new, profound, or broad, only when one tries to realize that ideal in the world but finds the world foolishly prevents this – only then does technique become truly useful to the person in question. When the world prevents us from developing our ideal in real life, then the only avenue remaining is to use technique to realize that ideal in the form of a literary work.

4) “Woman from Shanghai” by Xianhui Yang. Translated by Wen Huang. (Pantheon) An oddly titled but fascinating book whose fables of humanity shed gruesome light on the horror of the Chinese gulags. Author Xianhui Yang spent three years talking to survivors of a prison camp that had been set up in Jiabiangou (China’s northwestern desert region) during the late 1950’s. Over three thousand Chinese citizens, condemned as “rightists” by the Communist Party, were sent for “reeducation” in the compound, which still cannot be spoken about without fear in the author’s homeland. To escape censorship, the interviews were published as works of fiction in China, though they are based on fact.

5) “On the Life and Death of Languages” by Claude Hagège. Translated by Jody Gladding. (Yale University Press) A polemic by a noted French linguist alarmed at the accelerating death rate for languages around the world – he claims that at the current pace half of the world’s five thousand languages will fade away within the next century. The book proffers a passionate and often eloquent argument against efforts to establish English as a single world language: “To defend our languages and their diversity, especially against the domination of a single language, is to do more than just defend our cultures. It is to defend our life.”

6) “Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya” by Wojciech Jagielski. Translated by Soren A. Gauger. (Seven Stories Press) This riveting work of reportage by an award-winning Polish journalist supplies an overview – flinty, empathetic, and complex – of decades of warfare in Chechnya. In 2008 the volume’s memorable vision of violence as Sisyphean absurdity won the international Literatura Frontera Award in Italy.

In Western countries people mostly take for granted that the police are there ‘to protect and to serve’. The BBC’s Caroline Duffield has found this might be quite different in Nigeria – at least in one city. A hospital in the south-eastern city of Enugu has experienced an overwhelming flow of dead bodies in recent months, so many that mass burials have taken place. There are suspicions that the police might be implicated, particularly the feared SARS unit – the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. This has been denied by the authorities.

• Read Caroline Duffield’s online story
• Amnesty International: Nigerian police “kill at will”
• Nigeria’s police say Amnesty brutality claims are unfair

• Read the report at AIDS-free World
• Jeb Sharp on rape as a weapon of war (Sep 29)

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  In his speech, President Obama also paid tribute to reformers who brave repression from their own governments.  He singled-out those in Zimbabwe who cast their ballots in the face of physical violence.  A report out today, lays-out in detail the nature of some of that violence.  The report alleges that during last year’s elections President Robert Mugabe and supporters orchestrated a campaign of rape against the opposition.  The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP:  The report is called, “Electing to Rape:  Sexual Terror in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”  It documents, in chilling detail, the rape of women affiliated with the opposition, MDC Party, by supporters of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party.  Stephen Lewis is Co-Director of AIDS Free World, the organization that produced the report.

STEPHEN LEWIS:  The rapes, we recorded through affidavits from seventy women, occurred in every single province of the country; and the patterns were unmistakable.  The rapists all wore ZANU-PF T-shirts; they all sang ZANU-PF songs; they told the women as they were raping them that they were raping them because the women supported the opposition party, MDC.  I mean, I must say that I have never heard of an instance where you had extreme sexual violence unleashed against women because they happened to be members of a political party.

SHARP:  AIDS Free world engaged the pro bono services of a major American law firm to take sworn affidavits.  The lawyers made six separate trips to the region, interviewing dozens of survivors.  The victims range from children to the elderly.  According to the report, the 70 women were raped, collectively, 380 times, by 241 different ZANU-PF loyalists—many were gang-raped.  Stephen Lewis says the alleged atrocities constitute crimes against humanity because of the orchestrated nature of the violence.

LEWIS:  Even the same language was used, by rapists in different parts of the country, while they were raping the women; and so was the torture that was inflected.  You know, the women were always beaten on the soles of the feet; always beaten on the buttocks; always with the same instruments.  And as we accumulated the affidavits with some considerable horror, we realized he’s using it as a strategy to win an election—that was his total purpose, was to hold on to power—and he was prepared to sacrifice women’s bodies for that purpose.

SHARP:  There’s been no response yet from Mugabe, but in the past he’s dismissed allegations that he’s responsible for political violence.  As for the scale of the alleged crimes, AIDS Free World believes these 70 women and their stories could represent thousands more.  Zimbabwean author and human rights advocate, Peter Godwin, does too.

PETER GODWIN:  I’ve spent months during the violence there, and everything—the cases that they’ve got here—completely chime with all the information that I was getting; with all the people I was talking to.  We have this problem with rapes, specifically, in that it’s so stigmatizing, and that people are …  It’s terribly underreported that the victims are–in many, many cases—unwilling to come forward.  And in Zimbabwe they’re still scared, because often they are living still in the vicinity of the perpetrators.

SHARP:  Godwin is writing his own book about human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.  He’s impressed with the rigor of this particular report.

GODWIN:  Nothing’s been done on rapes, specifically, that’s this detailed.  And a lot of the stuff that comes out tends to be journalistic, and some of it sort of impressionistic to some extent.  I mean I’m not saying it’s not accurate, but here what we’ve got—you know, high-powered legal teams going over there and taking affidavits that are “water-tight.”

SHARP:  The hope is to use the document as the basis for a legal case against Mugabe, and to put pressure on countries like South Africa to withdraw their support for him.  The report’s authors say, for now, women are terrified the same thing will happen again in the next round of elections.  For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Web extra: Katy Clark also got an earful from Mount Holyoke freshmen Samah Majadla (left) and Sarah Tulimat about the thing they hate most about life at an American college.
Download audio file (whatIhate.mp3)
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Mount Holyoke students Samah Majadla (left) and Sarah Tulimat (Photo: Katy Clark)

• More of Katy’s photos

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Many colleges and universities here in the United States compete fiercely for foreign students.  Those schools tour the world on recruiting drives—many even have offices abroad.  But here’s one group of potential students, that until recently, went largely untapped—women from the Arab and Muslim world.  More of them are now attending women’s colleges here, as The World’s Katy Clark discovered.

KATY CLARK:  Wellesley College–just outside Boston—proudly claims Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright among its graduates.  These days, the college also touts its growing International student population.  Junior, Sarah Shaer, is from Jordan, but now lives in Dubai.  She’s part of this “new wave” of Wellesley women.

SARAH SHAER:  Those are clean clothes.  I’d just like to point that out.  My mother [OVERLAPPING] …

CLARK:  Which ones are …

SHAER:  … Yes, on the floor and in the basket.  My mom would kill me if she knew.  She’d be, like, they’d think that “I didn’t teach you right.”  Ha, ha, ha.  Buy yeah—if it helps—I do laundry.

CLARK:  Another thing that might alarm Shaer’s mother is something called the “all gender bathroom” down the hall.  Wellesley is technically a women’s college, but Shaer says that doesn’t make the school “a convent.”

SHAER:  You could do whatever you want, so long as you don’t do anything illegal.

CLARK:  Shaer’s fairly typical of the students coming from the Arab and Muslim world to study at women’s colleges here.  They come from families that place a value on girls’ education; and interestingly, a lot of them sound American.  Samah Majadla is a freshman at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.  She’s Arab/Israeli.  Majadla says both she and her parents always expected that she would move to the United States one day.  Still, Majadla says her father hesitated when she started applying to women’s colleges in the U. S.

SAMAH MAJADLA:  At the beginning, he didn’t want me to apply to Mount Holyoke, because he thought that if it’s an all-girls school, it’s very conservative.  But he talked to my high school counselor, and she told him that it’s really not the case.  So it’s kind of funny that he wanted me to be more liberal, I suppose, than what most people would expect.

CLARK:  It definitely takes a different kind of father to encourage his daughter to go to college half way around the world, which likely explains why most of the students I meet are deeply proud of their fathers.

FATIMA BURNEY:  I didn’t realize it first, but I think my father is quite feminist.  I think my mom is too, but my father is much more outspokenly a feminist.

CLARK:  Fatima Burney is a Wellesley Senior.  Burney is Pakistani, but her family moved to Kuwait when she was four.  Burney’s two older sisters also went to women’s colleges in the States, and her younger sister just started at Mount Holyoke.  Burney eventually plans to return to Pakistan.  She knows it could be a tough readjustment.  Burney realizes the empowerment she feels at Wellesley won’t be the norm back home.

BURNEY:  I once had a classmate say, “Your father must be a really strong man;” and I said, “Why is that?”  He said, “Well, because he had four daughters.”  And I was like, “Well, what does that mean?”  He said, “Well, you know, if someone has four sons and no sons daughters he’ll be happy; but if a person has four daughters and no sons, then you know …”  And he kind of left it at that, and I was horrified!

CLARK:  Women in many of the countries these students come from have fewer freedoms than men.  They’re often expected to cover their heads in public—that’s something most of them don’t do here in the U. S.  Some of the women interviewed for the story were reluctant to have their pictures taken.  They worry that the way they now dress might offend more conservative relatives back home.  Jennifer Desjarlai is Wellesley’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aide.  She says it’s definitely a challenge for students who are trying to “keep a foot in both worlds.”

JENNIFER DESJARLAI:  It’s a conversation we have often with our students, “How do you balance who you are with who you’re becoming and where you come from, and how do all those pieces fit together?”  It’s an incredible journey, I think, for many of our students.

CLARK:  It’s been quite a journey for some of the colleges too.  Desjarlai says it was only a short time ago that women’s colleges here realized that the Middle East was fertile recruiting ground.

DESJARLAI:  A few years ago, my colleagues and I from the four of the other sister colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Smith) had been at an International conference with a number of colleagues having dinner; and over dinner, in conversation with a group of counselors from the region, they shared with us that there weren’t all that many U. S. colleges and universities visiting their part of the world, and they were working with some really wonderful students, and it was area of tremendous growth, and expressed interest in having us come visit—particularly, I thin too, because of the focus on the liberal arts and sciences, which is particularly a kind of uniquely American in the educational system.

CLARK:  There are things, though, that happen on college campuses in the U. S., that can make someone from a predominantly Muslim country uncomfortable—public displays of affection and drinking alcohol are things these women now see a lot.  Sarah Tulimat insists it’s no big deal.  Tulimat, who’s from Syria, is a Freshman at Mount Holyoke.  She says nothing shocked her—not even her openly-gay classmates.

SARAH TULIMAT:  I’ve probably seen that before, like on TV; but I’m a person who completely agree that anyone who wants to have any kind of sexual relationship is entitled to do that.

CLARK:  Most of the women express similar views.  One student, though, says she’s having some trouble adjusting.  Lubna Saqran is from Yemen.  She hopes to study medicine after graduating from Mount Holyoke.  Saqran says she hasn’t talked to many American men since arriving in the U. S. this past summer.  She’s uncomfortable at parties because of the kissing and drinking, and she says she especially dislikes the way male visitors wander around the dorms.

LUBNA SAQRAN:  In the dorm I don’t put the scarf on.  So I was going to the bathroom, and there was this guy; he had long, fair hair, and I thought he was a girl; and he was just like standing in the [SOUNDS LIKE] dorm with a couple of girls; and I was just [SOUNDS LIKE] holding besides them; and I was looking at them; and then I just noticed that he had a beard; and I was just, “Oh my God!”  I just went into the bathroom; I mean like they’re supposed to keep their boyfriends inside their rooms or just outside dorm, not [SOUNDS LIKE] on the hallway.

CLARK:  Moments like that notwithstanding, Saqran said she loves college.  She’s especially excited about a recent African-Caribbean dance night at Mount Holyoke.

FEMALE STUDENT PERFORMER:  [INAUDIBLE].

CLARK:  Of course, college isn’t the first time the first time these women are being exposed to other cultures.  Many of the places they’re from are extremely Cosmopolitan.  Wellesley student, Sarah Shaer, shrugs-off suggestions that her experiences at a women’s college in the United States will help change society in Dubai when she returns there.

SARAH SHAER:  I think that it’s happening regardless.  I go home every summer, and things are changing.  Some people argue rapidly; some people argue slowly, but things are changing nevertheless.

CLARK:  Now, though, it’s time to plan for the weekend.  Some of the students will be going to holiday parties.  One or two will be avoiding them.  And Sarah Tulimat has plans to go to a hockey game with a couple of American friends.  I suggest, “That has to be something really new and different for someone from Syria?”

TULIMAT:  No.  This is my first hockey game.  This is Dorothy’s first hockey game.  This is Kelsey’s first hockey game.  It’s not only my first hockey game.  But no, I’ve seen hockey on the TV.  I like it, so this is why I’m going to see it.

CLARK:  Tulimat left the Middle East to attend a women’s college in the United States for much the same reason.  She likes it—period.  For The World, this is Katy Clark.

WERMAN:  And we have photos of the students in Katy’s story on our website, theworld.org.  You can also hear Mount Holyoke Freshman, Samah Majadla and Sarah Tulimat ranting about the thing they hate most about life at an American College.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

For the latest podcast, five language news stories from the past month:

5. African languages to get their versions of Windows.

Microsoft says by 2011 it will release versions of its new Windows 7 operating system in ten African languages: Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Afrikaans, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, kiSwahili and Amharic. It’s a big boost for those languages, as well as for the people who prefer to speak and write in them, rather than English or French.

4. The government of Moldova moves to change the name of the country’s official language.

Most people who live in small eastern European nation of Moldova speak a dialect of Romanian. But in Moldova, the language is known officially as Moldovan. This is an act of placation: it placates non-Romanian- speakers in Moldova and, more importantly, in Moscow. Calling the language Romanian is seen by some in the Kremlin as tantamount to a vote for unification with Romania. Russia, of course, doesn’t want that: it views Moldova, a former Soviet republic, as part of its “Near Abroad”. But Moldova recently elected a pro-Western government. One of its first acts was to change the name of the language on its official website from Moldovan to Romanian. What’s more, the President-elect has declared himself a speaker of Romanian. (He also declared himself “a Romanian.”) That’s in sharp constrast to his pro-Moscow predecessors, who insisted on translators when they had meetings with Romanian officials.

3. South Korean birthing centers go multilingual.

South Korea doesn’t have much of a history of immigration; very few foreigners have learned Korean, at least with a view to settling there. Now though, there’s a shortage of women, especially in the countryside. So South Korean men have starting marrying women from other Asian countries. And they’re having children. Most of women speak very little Korean, so doctors and nurses are learning a few words in Chinese, Thai and Tagalog. That’s just the start of what appears to be quite an ordeal. Even with Korean speakers in their families, the women and their children have a hard time integrating, linguistically and otherwise, into Korean society.

2. Unfortunate foreign meanings of baby names and how YOU can protect yourself (should you wish to).

A London-based translation company with an eye for publicity is offering what appears to be a unique service: for about $1,700, it will run a translation check on the name you have chosen for your baby. It will, of course, alert you if that name means say, pickpocket in Japanese (“Suri”) or shut up in Yoruba (“Kai”). Maybe the celebs, with their surfeit cash and zany name choices will be tempted. For the rest of us, there’s Google Translate. Or we could just call our firstborn, I don’t know, Jessica. Or John.

1. Na’vi, invented for the silver screen, hopes to emulate Klingon.

Klingon’s been in the news a lot recently. There was the (recycled) story of the man who tried to raise his son bilingually — in Klingon, and just to be on safe side, English. Then there’s the story of a new Klingon dictionary in the works. Now, there’s another nod to Klingon. James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar is scheduled to annex and occupy the cinematic world on December 18. Much of the movie takes place on a planet whose inhabitants are 10 feet tall, have tails and blue skin, etc etc. And they speak their own language. Tolkein created Elvish . Star Trek came up with Klingon. And now Avatar has midwifed Na’vi. Cameron commissioned University of South California linguist Paul Frommer to dream up a new language. And he did.

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A year ago, inflation in Zimbabwe was a mind-blowing 231 million percent. (And that was before the government stopped bothering to update the figure!) A new government came to power in February and life has much improved. The Zimbabwe dollar, or Zim dollar, is gone. But that has spawned problems of its own.

Stories from Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa, Bangladesh, India and Peru on Part II of this two-part podcast about econonics and business in the developing world.

Bank bailouts and Wall Street bonuses may enrage many in the United States, but they’re hardly top of mind for most people in places like Nicaragua, Senegal, and Peru. The majority of people in the developing world were poor when the Great Recession began, and they’re poor today. Do the ebbs and flows of the banks in London and New York impact their daily lives? Part I of this two-part podcast looks at econonics and business issues in the developing world.

If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know I have a soft spot for the late Douglas Adams’ monumentally satisfying Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I love it in pretty much all of its forms (OK, I’m partial to the radio version…for slightly obvious reasons), and I love all of the characters (OK…I’m partial to Marvin the Paranoid Android, again for slightly obvious reasons). Like many fans, I have been waiting anxiously to see if another author would be given the chance to write Book Six of the Now Completely Unaptly Named Trilogy. Well, folks, it has been done. Irish author Eoin Colfer (who you might know from the Artemis Fowl series) got the nod a while back, and the new book is out. It’s called And Another Thing…, and on this week’s podcast Colfer talks about Adams, technology, and the popular cult that is H2G2.

We’ve also got the amazing tale of William Kamkwamba, who at the age of 14 built a windmill…by himself…from scratch. WTP first heard of Kamkwamba three years ago via Afrigadget. Now, he’s the co-author of a new book called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. He’s a great interview, as you can tell from this video of his appearance on The Daily Show.

Rounding out WTP this week, we have an interview with Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN, the California non-profit that ensures that when you type our web address into your browser, you end up here, and not at some Russian porn site. Beckstrom was in Egypt to represent ICANN at the Internet Governance Forum, a UN-sponsored annual shindig designed to provide a space for “multi-stakeholder discussion” about various aspects of global online life.

Last, but certainly not least, is a report from the Czech Republic on the company that makes plastic explosive Semtex. The company’s name is…and we’re not making this up…Explosia.

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