Rescue

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake strikes Port-au-Prince in January 2010, a place already so desperately poor, prompting survivors to scramble to rescue loved ones and strangers and “to save photographs and whatever trinkets they held dear that meant nothing at all to anyone else on earth.” In the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and later in the refugee camps, people become the same, “were always the same,” and as one market vendor observes, this was “something we had always known from our low-to-the-ground perches…”

In What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy, ten narrators, connected by blood and, in some cases, friendship share the story of the earthquake and its aftermath. the stories are poignant and brutally honest. Often, small and seemingly inconsequential objects and memories link the characters and the relationships they cherish. Even before the earthquake, all held “dreams about where they’d rather be.” Individual methods may have varied, including wealth, marriage, or crime, but the common hope is to escape hardship and grinding poverty.

Haiti ranks among the poorest countries in the world with a GDP per capita of less than $3000. Such poverty blurs individuality, and vendor Ma Lou, mother and grandmother of two narrators, describes the marketplace as a place of “colliding senses, … much of it decay, especially at the end of the day, when the best of what’s available is gone and all that remain are castoffs, the leftovers.” She describes the market workers as blending into the dust, becoming “one with the elements…, the nothing that we are.” She adds, “striving toward perfection is beyond our reach.”

Haitians who managed to flee prior to the earthquake learn the news by way of international broadcasts. Haunted and torn, they do not feel as they belong in their new homes: “Sometime, being an immigrant is like being illiterate,” explains one of the narrators. He feels the weight of the tragedy, knowing that up to 300,000 died and survivors endure unthinkable hardship – hunger, sexual assault, cholera, injuries while no medical treatment. Yet he also understands there is little he can do to help by returning home. “The weight of not being able to do enough,” Didier notes. “If I was honest with myself, that was why I’d left.”

The book lightly criticizes charity and donors who set agendas for tackling crises, drawn into assisting others while seeking credit. Organizations and donors judge needs while victims can only wait and accept whatever is given. Of course, after the earthquake, Haitians required safe shelter, clean water and nutrition, yet what should be so easy, supplying basics, becomes overwhelming. And of course, individuals have needs and priorities less obvious to others – a photograph of a loved one, bones of a deceased husband, the fading memories of a child’s pattering footsteps, giggles and final kiss.

One of the most vulnerable narrators, a woman who loses three children refers to NGOs as Not God’s Own. The tent where she lives after the quake includes a label, “A gift from the American people … in association with the Republic of Ireland” and she finds herself regretting dreams and plans made with a husband who abandoned her after the tragedy. “She wished they had other things in mind, escape routes and exit strategies. They’d set their eyes on nothing but a future in which everything would go according to a fabricated plan that they believed in more than in reality itself – or that amplified it.”

Globalization of news, the instant knowledge about a distant crisis, might catch attentions briefly and that invites comparisons. Not long after the tragedy, one of the narrators, an architect, receives an email about an earthquake in the Italy and the loss of 200,000 rounds of pecorino. Activists quickly organize a global campaign to cook Italian recipes and donate proceeds to the region. “It was a kind objective, a goodwill gesture, but reading about it only made me sigh wearily,” notes Anne. “For every round of cheese, a person had died in the Haiti earthquake, and now I was expected to respond to this regional calamity while still burying our dead as if I, and others, might be ‘over’ what had happened to us….”

Still, the architect flounders in helping her hometown and leaves for Africa, later putting her energy to entering an international competition for rebuilding a Haitian cathedral near her neighborhood. She cares deeply about the project, describing the luxury of researching the history, exploring and imagining new beauty, while deciding whether her goal in creating a replacement is to commemorate the dead or recognize what remains. Her section concludes: “I did it for the satisfaction of doing something, of imagining a better, less hostile future, where a God might still exist to watch over us.”

As pointed out in Allure of Deceit, no amount of rules and regulations can prevent the ambition, greed, judgment, control, or inequality that can accompany organized charitable giving. 

The publication of What Storm, What Thunder, a work of fiction, was timely as another earthquake, magnitude 7.2, struck Haiti in August 2021, about 70 miles away from the capital, destroying more than 60,000 homes and killing more than 2,000 and injuring 12,000. 

Privacy

A caveat: In the midst of busy preparations for the release of Allure of Deceit, I have not seen the film American Sniper. Such war films have little to do with my books set in Afghanistan, even though a primary character of Fear of Beauty was an Army Ranger.

Chris Kyle, his story in American Sniper, stood apart among veterans for many reasons - a special skill, intense feelings, an ability to relay his story.

My stories address the workings of modern globalization by examining personal relations on the ground, eye to eye, along with village and family routines, the everyday and ordinary relations that are complicated enough without extra layers of social controls or conflict. Few of the American and Afghan characters in my stories seek out attention, and instead most strive to blend with their communities. They keep their motivations a secret and they grieve, plan, love, manipulate, dream in privacy - and that lends them a special strength.

Such characters often discover a special affinity with strangers.

Like my previous four novels, Allure of Deceit is story about parenting. Yet it's a story of several parenting styles, not just one. Parents make choices about how to raise their children and this influences entire communities. As such, the story is political and, like our world, the story is complicated and never one-sided.
Not to be missed: The essay "The United States of 'American Sniper'" by Kyle's teammate in The Wall Street Journal. Won't repeat and spoil his conclusion here, but will remind readers that many rights and privileges, challenges and conflicts, are tightly interconnected.

Photo of abandoned Afghan village, courtesy of Todd Huffman and Wikimedia Commons. The reason for the desertion is unknown, though Huffman speculates that occupants either fled to refugee camps in Pakistan or were killed during the war with the Soviet Union. Request a review copy. 

Vote

US voters head to the polls on Tuesday, and their decisions have influence over daily routines for Americans and sometimes for the rest of the world - from climate change to global security:

"As globalization’s forces buffet the world..., the internal politics of any state can permanently alter course for other nations."

On the ballots is every seat for the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. But turnout is low for the mid-terms when the presidency is not being decided: 37 percent of registered voters turned out for the 2010 congressional race compared with 54 percent for the 2012 presidential election, reports the Pew Research Center.

Compare that to Afghanistan turnout, despite threats of Taliban violence: 50 percent in the 2014 presidential race, 29 percent in the 2010 parliamentary race and 67 percent in the 2004 presidential race.

The percentage of women voting was 35 percent in the first round and 38 percent for the second.

Voting is not compulsory in either country.

Globalization

The story of Project Artemis is one that shows globalization's many intricate twists.

A man is in charge of training pilots, US and foreign, including those fighting under Chiang Kai-shek, during World War II and decides that Americans could use a school that emphasizes trade and global connections. He obtains an airbase in Glendale, Arizona from the US War Assets Administration with the condition that the property be used for a school "for instruction in foreign area studies, business administration and international relationships." The school's international enrollment drops after the 9/11 attacks on the US, planned within Afghanistan. A few later, the school starts a training program for Afghan entrepreneurs - and that helps boost international enrollment once again.

Connections, expected and unexpected, emerge from trade, education, war and other diverse forces of globalization.

Photo of Lt. General Barton Kyle Yount, Thunderbird founder, courtesy of the Arizona Memory Project.

Soaring

Some students in Michigan compare it to a spaceship. And that's appropriate, because the spirit soars for visitors to the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, inside and out. "We are capable" is the instinctual response. The museum is committed to "exploring international contemporary culture and ideas through art."
 
The museum's home is located suitably on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing and the architect is Zaha Hadid.  "A Baghdad-born, London-based architect might not be the most obvious candidate for a commission in the heart of Middle America," said Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times when the commission was announced five years ago.

"No name is more celebrated in architecture these days than the London-based Zaha Hadid" wrote Julie V. Iovine for the Wall Street Journal , under a headline "Sculptural Yet Sensible." She adds Hadid's "latest notable effort" is in the Midwest.

Hadid studied mathematics in Lebanon - which undoubtedly enhanced her ability to work and innovate with engineers - and architecture in London before founding her firm Zaha Hadid Architects, going on to become the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture.

Lines soaring upward, connecting like crossroads, are an appropriate design theme for a museum focusing on international contemporary art. The building stands as testament that globalization can enrich as much overwhelm contemporary art and also suggests as argued by Jonathan Harris that "Public museums and galleries around the world are themselves increasingly preoccupied with the size and character of their publics, as art becomes a subsidized vehicle for national government and regional powers' 'cultural policy' directed towards a variety of economic ends including 'regeneration,' 'reconciliation,' and 'social inclusion.'" The comment is in Harris' introduction to Globalization and Contemporary Art.

Photo by D Olsen

A simple request

Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, writes the first essay in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology:

"The type of world in which women flourish is one where women have political, social, and religious power to participate fully in decision-making processes; where women’s bodies are valued, respected, and protected from demeaning forms of exploitation, abuse, and violence; where women’s labor, particularly the care they provide to children, the elderly, and the sick, is shared by all and honored as economically and socially valuable work; where the natural environment is engaged with respect; where education is open to all; and where the basic material resources that it takes for communities to be healthy and thrive are ensured. This view of flourishing also includes celebrating forms of beauty that women cherish and spiritual practices that women treasure, both of which point to the fact that flourishing involves not just the absence of oppression and injustice but also the positive presence of things that make women happy and fulfilled."

Jones suggests that daily action rather than dogma is required: “changing society requires both changing laws and practices and challenging the categories and process we use to think about life and to make sense of our world." 

She points out that "the dynamics of globalization are creating a world culture in which we often share more than we might expect….”  

Photos of western and eastern hemispheres of earth are courtesy of NASA and Wikimedia Commons