2019 Selections

The UN Women Book Club met on Monday, January 14, 2019 to discuss The Woman Who Read Too Much by Iranian author, Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. The titular woman is the poetess of Qazvin who lived in nineteenth-century Persia. “Everyone spoke of her beauty, and her dazzling intelligence. But most alarming to the Shah and the court was how the poetess could read. As her warnings and predictions became prophecies fulfilled, about the assassination of the Shah, the hanging of the Mayor, and murder of the Grand Vazir, many wondered whether she was not only reading history but writing it as well. Was she herself guilty of the crimes she was foretelling?” She taught women in secret to read and write, denounced polygamy, the veil and other restraints put upon women, and she dared to take off her veil in front of a group of men. For these crimes, she was executed, strangled with her own veil and thrown into a well. Welcoming her martyrdom, she uttered, “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.” Nakhjavani’s writing style is exquisite, though somewhat difficult to follow a chronological spiral, circling backwards and moving upwards to tell the same stories from the points of view of a mother, sister, daughter and wife.

The Afterword unexpectedly reveals the fact that the poetess is Tahirih, the most famous woman of the Bha’i religion, who wrote many poems that are highly regarded in Persian culture. We appreciated the presence of a new book club member who practices the Bha’i faith and explained many meanings of Tahirih’s story.

The question arose regarding the condition of women during the Tahirih’s time and today. We referred to a book we had read recently, Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi’s Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran, that gave us a true and tragic picture of the present status of women in Iran, as well as the persecution of Baha’i practitioners. While I did not find any report on UN Women activities in Iran, I did learn that “Iran’s deplorable record on women’s rights did not stop the Islamic Republic from winning a seat on UN Women, a United Nations body that was formed in 2010 to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality.” (2016)

Also, from Human Rights Watch: “It’s not just women who are repressed in Iran. Anyone who openly criticizes the government risks being thrown in jail. The government also discriminates against ethnic communities like the Kurds and Balochs, as well as people belonging to the Baha’i faith.”

Leita Kaldi Davis

The UN Women Book Club met on Monday, March 11, 2019 to discuss The Gospel of Trees by Apricot Irving. Irving’s missionary parents moved to Haiti when she was six years old; she left at fifteen. She returned to Haiti in 2010 to cover the earthquake for NPR’s This American Life. At the center of her memoir is her father, Jon Anderson, an agronomist who hiked alone into the hills with baskets of seeds to preach the gospel of trees in a deforested country. Irving’s mother and sisters, meanwhile, spent most of their days in the confines of the hospital Le Bon Samaritain compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Apricot; as a teenager, the same setting felt like a prison. As she emerges into womanhood, an already confusing process is made all the more complicated by Christianity’s demands. Irving struggles to understand her father’s choices. His unswerving commitment to his mission, and the anger and despair that followed failed enterprises, threatened to splinter his family. His wife and his three daughters did not want to go to Haiti, but he imposed his will and mission upon them. Their marriage became “a patched-together tent of whatever you have on hand to protect yourself from the wind and the sun.”

The conundrum that the Andersons faced in Haiti, trying to create harmony in a chaotic country that they do not fathom, describes the challenge that missionaries everywhere experience, coupled with the plight of the expatriate. As Irving states, “Here’s to home, wherever that is, and whatever it takes to find it.” “Haiti is a country that I have never understood and have always resented and have always wanted to belong to.”

Haiti is called the graveyard of development projects, with its thousands of private organizations whose erstwhile goals usually do not take into account the wishes, skills or culture of the Haitian people. Irving’s father learns this the hard way as he watches his tree seedlings wither and die, neglected by the rural people who do not heed his “gospel.” His Haitian counterpart, Zo, however, has notably more success working with his people to reforest their lands.
Irving’s memoir also recounts the story of the Southern Baptist missionary family of Dr. William Hodges who founded the hospital le Bon Samaritain near the northeastern coast of Haiti in 1954 and suffered the onslaughts of young revolutionnaires who regularly tried to take over the hospital for their own purposes.

I related to this memoir because of my own similar experiences as administrator of Hospital Albert Schweitzer, founded around the same time as le Bon Samaritain and subjected to similar political uprisings through the years. It’s unfortunate that readers tend to take away a negative view of Haiti, skipping over the information about the countless people that both hospitals and their outreach programs benefitted. In Irving’s memoir, and in my memoir, In the Valley of Atibon, (amazon.com), we also profile many Haitians who touched us deeply with their goodness, kindness, courage and dignity.

The UN Women Book Club met on Monday, April 8, 2019 to discuss Happiness by Aminatta Forna, a brilliant Scottish-Sierra Leonian writer who has also worked for the BBC, and is known for her Africa documentaries. Forna is also a judge for The Man Booker International Prize.

The story begins in London one night when a fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide—Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech on post-traumatic stress syndrome, and to contact Ama, the daughter of friends, who has gone missing. Attila learns that she was swept up in an immigration crackdown, and now her young son Tano is missing. When, by chance, Attila runs into Jean again, she mobilizes the network of rubbish men she uses as volunteer fox spotters. Security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens—mainly West African immigrants who work the myriad streets of London—come together to help. As the search for Tano continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds. Meanwhile a consulting case causes Attila to question established ideas on trauma, the values of the society he finds
himself in, and a grief of his own.

The title raises the question of defining happiness and whether, after all, it really exists. Love, trauma, migration and belonging, the conflict between nature and
civilization are some of the book’s themes. Forna’s writing style is sublime, e.g.: “Minutes past midnight the group left Pardis to be mugged by the wind, which came at them down the street like a gang of thieves.”

Our British participant was impressed by the accuracy of all Forna’s descriptions of the streets and landmarks of London, and her perception of attitudes towards urban foxes and other creatures that dwell among the buildings. “She got it all right,” our reader declared. Jean’s struggle to protect the city creatures against citizens who wish to annihilate them parallels differing points of view regarding immigrants. Readers were unanimous in applauding Happiness.