Selected Nonfiction
On Place, Culture, Travel, Nature & History
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 98/2) - pdf
From the Victoria & Albert Museum, London: on Jacques Schuhmacher’s efforts to trace the origins of the Gilbert Collection’s decorative objects, to find out if any of them were looted from Jews persecuted by the Nazis.
A recommendation—to restitute, compensate, or publicly acknowledge—is made to museums by a UK governmental panel, which only deliberates when a victim’s descendants make a claim on an object in a public collection
“That gives me a lot of freedom because I don’t have to think about what it all means for the collection,” Schuhmacher says. He can focus on his research and help the V&A communicate it to the public. Whereas provenance was once seen as an administrative detail, it’s now something museums can tell visitors about, through publications and exhibitions, before the full picture is clear.
For him, the gaps are the story.
Lonely Hearts Club
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 97/1) - pdf
From around the world: Personal stories from the #loveisnottourism movement amid the coronavirus pandemic.
To witness them proclaim their love so publicly is to be heartened in a time of increasing ethnocentrism and nationalism. They also test our assumptions about what love looks like in a globalized age, as several countries, having made the “sweetheart” exception, impose various requirements for reunion. What if you’ve only been together for six months? What if you’ve never lived together? How do you quantify the strength of love?
Fossil Combing
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 96/1) - pdf
From Lyme Regis, England: On fossil hunting and unearthing the life of nineteenth-century palaeontologist Mary Anning along the dramatic Jurassic Coast.
It’s on this stretch of beach in 1812 that Mary Anning, a young girl and pioneering local fossil hunter—who would likely be better-known today had she been born a man—unearthed the remains of a whole ichthyosaur. It was like no other creature, with eyes that seemed to bulge, a body like a dolphin’s, and a mouth like a crocodile’s. Almost two hundred years later, on this same stretch of beach, Howe found his ichthyosaur. It now hangs in the local museum.
“That’s not an everyday find, and I can’t promise you one of those today. But it’s well within the range of possibilities.”
This Land Is Our Land
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 95/2) - pdf
From Kelantan, Malaysia: In the forests of Gua Musang, indigenous Temiars are fighting against state authorities, loggers, and a durian plantation for the recognition of their ancestral land.
Soon, their inner rhythm takes hold. A man drops to the ground. He shudders and writhes, upending the bamboo floorboards, scattering his leaf whisk so violently it turns into confetti. Other men embrace him as if to absorb his energy, or perhaps to steady him; they anoint him with their bouquets. Then, he stops still; the exposed soles of his feet, turned up, look strangely vulnerable.
The Temiar trace their origins back some five thousand years. “Sewang selombang is a tradition we inherited from our ancestors,” Dendi says. “When we dance, the spirits come, and they speak in their own way through each of us. We ask to be forgiven for all the harm we have done to this world.”
If the forest were to be razed, all this, and much more, would be lost.
The Remained
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 95/1) - pdf
From Kolkata, India: On cultural survival, contentious histories, and what makes a Chinatown in this modern age in light of the drastically dwindled numbers of Chinese in the city. (Supported by the Out of Eden Walk project and the National Geographic Society.) / Newsletter outtake here.
“Growing up, we could make up two cricket teams with the young guys around here. Not anymore.”
Trevor Chen sits with his brother Stephen inside Sei Vui Club in Tiretti Bazaar, Kolkata’s old Chinatown. They’re waiting for the rest of their group to show up. They used to play gully cricket outside, Trevor says, when they had more friends. But now they’re down to just the handful of them, in their thirties and forties. “Almost all bachelors,” one of their friends would say later.
So it’s boys’ night some evenings after work, and tonight, in a hall upstairs decorated with portraits of Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen, they’ll be playing ping-pong. That, they have enough manpower for.
Memory Wars
(Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 94/3) - pdf
From Belfast, Northern Ireland: On conflicts that never die, the territorialisation of memory, and the politics of identity. / Newsletter outtake here.
Since the Troubles ended, loyalist and republican paramilitaries once at war with one another have sat in the same room to share their experiences. They’ve met with victims in the name of truth and reconciliation. They’ve given talks to students and led wide-eyed tourists on Troubles-themed tours—something of a cottage industry here—as ambassadors of peace of a kind, so that what happened will not happen again.
But all the talking, Donnelly says, hasn’t always been productive. “Sometimes, people are revisiting old anger, and you think, Do we keep having the same conversation over and over?”
The Wild Wild West, in Spain
(Roads & Kingdoms)
From the Tabernas desert, Almeria: A European paean to an American idea, passed from generation to generation, lives on in Spain half a century after the filming of a classic spaghetti western trilogy.
Perhaps it's as 27-year-old Cristian Navarro, the youngest of Oasys’ showmen, said, “Me siento mas realizado aqui"—I feel more realized here. He would rather be playing a romantic hero at Oasys than work as a ranch hand or compete in equestrian competitions, even if (in a departure from how things usually end) the sheriffs always win and he's always shot dead.
A New Hope
(Roads & Kingdoms + Slate)
From Kelantan, Malaysia: How a Hindu epic inspired a Malaysian art form that survived attacks by Islamists and learned to love Star Wars. / Medium outtakes here and here.
There was no hurried pow-wow before they opened the show, no talk of what story would be performed, no ironing out of logistics. Instead, we lounged on the verandah of Abang Man's house eating keropok while discussing the virtues and foibles of the characters in the Ramayanic universe. The troupe members knew their repertoire so well they were ready to perform at a moment’s notice. The genius of a master puppeteer is his ability to improvise, to pick a story based on the audience and the mood of the troupe. No two performances—even of the same story—are ever the same.