BOOKS: AND WAR

I am ashamed of myself.  I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I had read a book about Guernica, and how ignorant I was about the Spanish Civil War: I followed that up by reading Guerra by Jason Webster, an autobiographical account of living in Spain today and travelling round to find out more about that war and about its lingering - but largely silent - effects.  I can highly recommend it, and as soon as I get into Carlisle I now have a 'proper' history book to pick up from the library about the war.

Not long prior to that I read a book about Afghanistan: my fear is that whilst that novel ends on an optimistic note, things may not be much better now in certain parts of that country.

I was then lent a book about the Nigerian-Biafran war, which I have not quite finished reading.  This war occurred within my lifetime.  I knew Nigeria was a troubled country: I knew that my in-laws were living out there in the late 1960s and that they rescued their houseboy (I wonder now how long he was safe for, and where they took him: was he Igbo?) - but otherwise again I have grown up in ignorance.  I worked with a lovely Nigerian man, Tunde, at Brent Council: but never thought to ask him why his family made the decision to leave their homeland.

The book, Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is set in the 1960s and about a fairly small group of people: it largely centres around a pair of twin sisters and their immediate families (in the case of one of them, a white British man).  There are parallels with Guernica: the story focuses on a happy family affected by events on a far larger scale than they can control or even necessarily fully understand.  Racial tensions - and the omniprescent religious differences which seem to go hand in hand with them, wherever you look in the world - and economic forces again cause the war in the same way that in Guernica the Basques want independence and see themselves as separate from the rest of Spain (and in Guerra you are given the clear impression that Spain is in fact a collection of racially-distinguished kingdoms, and also the economic state of Spain at the time is more obvious, and why and how Franco obtained the power he did).

Obviously I had heard the term 'biafra' and knew it was connected with starvation, but little had I appreciated what was going on in that part of Africa in the late 1960s.  The book states that the British are sending arms to the Federal government: reading articles in the press (a BBC piece about Biafra/Nigeria 30 years on in 2000, and an archive article from The Times written 10 months into the conflict), it is clear that we did send the Federal government arms, the Foreign Secretary of the time stating that he agonised over the decision and made the one he did because he felt a unified Nigeria was needed; the Biafrans grew to hate the British and it makes me wonder if they still do.  How could we, as a nation, have been unaware of the bloodbath that occurred in Biafra?  Similarly we stayed out of the Spanish Civil War....

Whenever I read a novel about a war I tend to approach it from a position of some scepticism: the author is, to a certain extent, bound to be biased.  You expect that as in many ways that makes a better story than something well-reasoned and rational (and don't journalists do that every day, making mountains out of molehills very often: for example the possibility of doing away with free parking in Carlisle: hardly a life and death situation).  However what saddens me is that going away and looking at the historical accounts, all too often it is clear that the most awful atrocities and hideous, senseless, loss of life does occur.

I am not, thank goodness, a politician: decisions about whether or not to step into conflicts must be tremendously difficult to take.  But as a human being I am shocked again and again at how obscenely violent man can be to man.  We have such beauty in us as humans, and can be so supportive and loving of each other: and yet we have this cruel streak as well which creates things like massacres, wide-scale rape, and concentration camps: just because someone has different beliefs from us or comes from a different blood-line.  Yes, partly it's a natural, self-defence thing: survival of the fittest.  But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could learn to negotiate and to compromise rather than to fight?