Moazzam Reviews Clifford Garstang's The Shaman of Turtle Valley for Heavy Feather Review

"What to Aiken’s mind has always been a matter of betrayal from Kelly when she left town and eventually married after Aiken joined the army, Kelly’s perspective shatters his sense of self. Their last love-making moment, she considers rape."

There’s been a lot of talk, at least since Trump’s victory, about the poor Whites left to rust and rot due to our neoliberal economic policies pursued by the two political parties. We often get stuck with an image of illiterate redneck pockets unable to cope with the evolving nature of modernity and corporate greed. There’s a risk of dehumanizing which must be avoided despite political differences. Clifford Garstang has done a decent enough job to explore the good, the bad, and in-between by focusing his lens on a family whose presence in a small idle place called Turtle Valley, Virginia, goes back generations. For now, Garstang goes after the current  generation with Aiken at the heart of the story.

    According to one view, America keeps a certain part of its population illiterate and poor, Whites and non-Whites, on purpose to be used as cannon fodder for its imperial wars around the globe. Without any regard for their well-being afterwards if they’re lucky enough to return in one piece. It is not rocket science to see the connection between the Korean War and onward to a rising number of veterans ending up homeless on American streets, begging or going insane. So it is only natural that Aiken, the younger son of Henry and Ruth, joins the army to be deployed to Kuwait and Iraq around Desert Storm. Luckily his deployment is short, though he has his share of war trauma but it has spared him more or less. Before he can quit the army, however, his second deployment takes him to South Korea, where he befriends an underage young woman interested in practicing her English with American soldiers and gets her pregnant towards the end of his tenure.                                      

  The novel opens with Aiken loading his truck with few of his belongings in order to move in with his parents while contemplating how best to stay in touch with his four year old son, Henry named after his father, a Navy veteran, and how to make sense of the distance which has opened up regarding his Korean wife.

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My Re-evaluation of noted writer Altaf Fatima's Urdu Novel Chalta Mussafir

When novelists take on historical events or embed their characters into watershed moments of history, they complicate narratives peddled by the state, and even historians, whose primary concern revolves around countering a popular narrative set in motion by state actors via textbooks, patriotic songs, popular media and compromised journalists. 

  A historian’s focus is on facts extracted from primary or secondary sources offering a counter-narrative. For example, in the US ‘the no taxation without representation’ narrative persists. Some historians have however argued that the fear of losing slaves caused the revolution. There were slave rebellions. Then King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding white settlers from usurping more land from the natives.  
                                                                                                                      Historian Gerald Horne argues that the revolution was, in fact, a counter-revolution spelling disaster for African Americans and Native Americans. When novelists enter the fray, they draw a narrative arc with ordinary humans at the centre. Altaf Fatima’s novel Chalta Mussafir was written about a decade after Pakistan army’s unconditional surrender in Dhaka. 

  Except for the weak ending, I loved her book Daskat Na Do (The One Who Did Not Knock, translated finely by Rukhsana Ahmed) for its diction and for situating two outsiders at the heart of the story. One would think that a decade was a long enough time to gain perspective about an emotionally charged moment in history, and weigh official and unofficial narrative and counter-narratives to offer an undidactic lens. An equal number of Hindus and Muslims don't have to die and en equal number of perpetrators of violence should not should not also be lined up. Since no one has a complete grip on the truth, the author must look far and wide.
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