King
Baabu
by Wole Soyinka
Methuen 2002
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka continues his outspoken criticism of the
misuse of power in his 17th play, King Baabu. It tells the
story of General Basha Bash (bearing a strong resemblance to Nigerian
dictator Sani Abacha), who takes power in a coup and decides to turn
his country into a kingdom and call himself
King Baabu.
Soyinka satirizes the rule of the brutal and corrupt Abacha, so it is
not surprising that the work was not staged in Nigeria until after Abacha’s
death in 1998. The play premiered in the Lagos’ National Arts
Theatre in 2001. “Baabu” is a pun on a Hausa word meaning
“nothing,” or metaphorically “finished.”
Soyinka was getting ready to stage his own The Beatification of
Area Boy in Lagos in 1994 when he learned that Abacha wanted him
arrested. He fled into self-imposed exile and continued to write and
produce plays critical of the brutality and corruption in his homeland.
Although Abacha is dead, other corrupt regimes remain in Africa and
around the world, giving King Baabu, like Macbeth,
which it loosely resembles, continued currency.
Of his use of theater to strike at corrupt, murderous politicians, Soyinka
has said, “If we can’t hang people from the nearest lamppost,
I can at least hang them symbolically on the stage. That’s the
instrument I have available to me.”
Soyinka’s previous works include The Burden of Memory, The
Muse of Forgiveness, which was published by Oxford University Press
in 2000. Based on Soyinka’s Stewart-McMillan lectures at the W.E.B.
DuBois Institute at Harvard, the collection of essays addresses African
politics and social justice. His most recent work is the poetry collection
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, which follows the
author’s journeys since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Soyinka's long poem “Samarkand” is also available in a fine-press
book from Rainmaker
Editions, the International Institute of Modern Letters’ collectors
series.
Stardumb
by Dave Hickey
Artspace Books, 1999
When you conjure up a vision of a “genius,” you likely think
of someone like Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,”
sitting, chin in hand, pondering weighty thoughts. But even a genius
has a funny bone. Picture instead the famous photo of Albert Einstein
sticking his tongue out for the photographer.
MacArthur Fellow Dave Hickey’s latest work is more tongue in cheek
than tongue in your face, and it is a far cry from his usual art criticism.
In Stardumb, a slender volume described on its back cover as
“The astrology book for the art world at the millennium,”
Hickey and psychedelic artist John DeFazio have indulged their lighter
sides in interpreting the signs of the zodiac.
For each astrological sign, there is a vignette written by Hickey and
an illustration by DeFazio that, among other things, invariably shows
a couple (or more) in a sexually compromising position amidst wild,
colorful characters. Hickey’s vignettes have art themes and frequently
involve drugs and sex.
One might think that because Hickey took the time to write about astrology
he takes it seriously, but the title, Stardumb, reveals his
basic view of the subject. “I know nothing about astrology and
care less,” Hickey says. “This is one of the characteristics
of Sagitariuses like myself.
“The astrology [theme] was my friend DeFazio’s idea,”
Hickey says. “I got an astrology-for-idiots book — a redundancy,
I know — and used its characterizations of the various sign-types
as occasions for little stories about the art world.
“I wrote them in order, one a day for 12 days, revised for two
more, and that was it,” he continues. “The stories are not
as shiny as I would like, but they are professional writing and they
get better as you go along.” (They also tend to get longer, offering
more space for development, which may have something to do with Hickey’s
greater satisfaction with the later pages.)
Stardumb is a bit of fluff on the body of perceptive art criticism
Hickey has built over the last decade. He prolifically writes essays
for exhibit catalogs and has contributed to Rolling Stone, Art in
America, and The New Yorker. In his older corpus of work,
some of the more intriguing titles include Air Guitar: Essays on
Art & Democracy (1997); Howl: The Artwork of Luis Jiménez
(1997); In the Dancehall of the Dead (1993); Last Chance
for Eden: Selected Art Criticism by Christopher Knight, 1979-1994
(1995); and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993).
Ahmed’s
Revenge
by Richard Wiley
Random House, 1998
It’s been more than four years since novelist Richard Wiley’s
Ahmed’s Revenge reached bookstores. In the intervening
years Wiley, who sets his fiction in foreign locales, has researched
in Japan and has finished Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show;
so in the not-too-distant future, readers can expect a novel where Japanese
people, culture, and places provide the synergy for the story.
Ahmed’s Revenge, however, is a long way from Japan. Instead
of fitting onto the small islands with their crowded cities on the western
edge of the Pacific Ocean, the characters in Ahmed’s Revenge
have the vast expanse of Africa with which to play out their tale of
mystery, moral conflict, and racial identity.
Wiley, who’s lived in Kenya, Nigeria, Japan, and Korea, brings
the colonial continent of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa
into the 1970s. When a coffee grower in Kenya is murdered, his widow,
Nora, decides to investigate. She discovers that not only was her husband
involved in the illegal ivory trade, but so was her father, once a minister
of wildlife in the Kenyan government.
The book has been described as an “ingeniously off-the-wall story”
and an “exceedingly clever novel” (Wall Street Journal)
as well as “nothing short of an exotic page-turner” (Booklist).
The New York Times Book Review wrote: “It’s a credit
to Wiley’s intelligence and narrative expertise that the answer
he suggests arrives subtly, without the wince of heavy-handed rhetoric.”
The title character was, by the way, a real elephant so large that his
tusks were more than three times longer than average. “I was intrigued
by the irony of the fact that to protect Ahmed from poachers, they took
away his freedom,” the author says about one of the themes of
his novel.
Wiley came to UNLV in 1989 to teach creative writing and is now also
director of publications for the International Institute of Modern Letters.
His novels include Fools’ Gold, Festival for Three
Thousand Maidens, and Indigo. He won the PEN/Faulkner
award for best American fiction in 1987 for Soldiers in Hiding,
his first novel. In addition to Commodore Perry, Wiley fans
can expect a novel set in the United States to come out in the future.
Voices
from Silence
by Douglas Unger
St. Martin’s Press, 1995
Douglas Unger’s Voices from Silence has, perhaps, special
relevance in an era of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It deals with state-supported
terror and its impact on families and individuals.
In the novel, a former exchange student, now a journalist, takes his
wife to Argentina to introduce her to his former host family, the Benevenutos.
He becomes deeply involved with the family’s tragic circumstances
after military dictatorship takes over their country. Two of the family’s
three sons “disappeared” while the third went into exile.
The journalist narrates the story, which is based on Unger’s own
experience as an exchange student who became close to a family in Argentina.
“I call it a novel of witness,” Unger told the New York
Times when the book was first published in 1995. “I promised
my Argentine family I would tell their story.”
Voices from Silence has been called “an uncomfortable but
effective book” (Booklist) and an “emotionally
complicated story (that) is a grisly sequel to El Yanqui” (Washington
Post).
Unger is the director of the creative writing program at UNLV and the
grants and acquisitions officer for the institute, but he has not neglected
his writing since Voices from Silence was published. “I’ve
been steadily at work on two manuscripts, one a collection of literary
short stories and one a comic short novel currently in submission in
New York,” Unger says.
Focusing his attention on short stories has garnered considerable success.
“Leslie and Sam,” published in the Southwest Review,
was chosen for the short list of the O. Henry Award for 2002 and named
a distinguished story by the Best Short Stories of 2002 anthology editors.
“The Perfect Wife (After Maupassant)” was published in the
Colorado Review, and “The Writer’s Widow”
in the Ontario Review. These and other stories, such as the
novella-length Looking for War (to be published by TriQuarterly),
will be collected into a single volume tentatively titled Cuban
Nights.
Concrete
Countertops
by Fu-Tung Cheng with Eric Olsen
Taunton Press, 2002
Most members of the International Institute for Modern Letters deal
with abstract ideas and ideals. As befits the person responsible for
the day-to-day smoothing of the path for the idealists, Executive Director
Eric Olsen writes about concrete. Literally. Olsen is the author, with
designer Fu Tung Cheng of Concrete Countertops, a how-to for
those who want an alternative to granite, Corian, Formica, or other
traditional surfaces in their kitchens or baths.
Cheng, a designer of contemporary homes based in Berkeley, Calif., has
won awards for his creativity. He wanted to produce a book full of photos
of his work and teamed up with Olsen, who did the writing. Tips for
handling the product, for combining ingredients for design purposes,
and just for the reader’s general education about concrete enliven
the design of the book.
Genesis for the book was a remodeling project in Olsen’s home.
His kitchen is shown on page 49 before concrete; the finished countertop
is on page 173; and all of the how-to sections feature the Olsen project.
Except that its binding does not allow it to lie impressively open,
this is a coffee table-quality book, full of lush photos of finished
countertops and the process that goes into making them. The authors
show the way imagination and creativity can be brought to bear on a
material most of us relegate to sidewalks and building slabs. The book
quotes Frank Lloyd Wright: “Concrete is (a) passive or negative
material, depending for aesthetic life almost wholly upon the impress
of human imagination.”
Olsen has also written several other non-fiction books, including Lifefit:
An Effective Exercise Program for Optimal Health and a Longer Life.
The
Execution of a Serial Killer:
One Man's Experience Witnessing the Death Penalty
Joseph Diaz, ’97 MA and ’99 Ph.D. Sociology
Poncha Press, 2002
The Execution of a Serial Killer explores the life and death
of a serial killer as well as the impact his execution had on the author,
a UNLV graduate who is now a sociology professor in Minnesota.
Joseph Diaz’s journey into the death chamber began with a news
report about prison officials having trouble finding people to serve
as witnesses during the execution of prisoners. Hoping that the experience
would help his research, Diaz sent letters to Florida and Texas officials
volunteering to witness upcoming executions. To his surprise, Florida
granted his request, and in December 2000, he held a seat just three
feet from serial killer Edward Castro as the man was executed by lethal
injection.
Six
months after witnessing Castro’s execution, the death penalty
came to the forefront of the media as Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh’s
execution neared. In the two days leading up to McVeigh’s execution,
Diaz was interviewed by 20 news organizations. The Execution of a Serial
Killer, he writes in the book’s introduction, grew out of a question
he was asked repeatedly, “How did it make you feel?”
As a social scientist, Diaz expected to find the experience “informative
and profoundly fascinating,” he writes. He previously had never
taken a strong stance for or against the death penalty, though he tended
to put more value in the studies that show capital punishment does not
deter crime.
He was also swayed by incidences of DNA evidence proving the innocence
of men on death row as well as the statistics that show poor minorities
are much more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted
of murder.
Yet, he also had supported the death penalty at times. In part of the
book, he discusses Zane Floyd, who killed four people in a Las Vegas
grocery store in June 1999. At the time, Diaz was finishing his doctoral
dissertation at UNLV and working part-time in a nearby store. “While
the studies (that the death penalty does not deter crime) were scientific
and well-researched, they were strictly theoretical and unemotional,”
Diaz writes. “Whenever people like Zane Floyd decided they were
ready to show their inhumane desires to the world, my gut, my emotions,
shifted back again to supporting the death penalty.”
As Castro’s execution unfolds in the book, Diaz finds himself
unprepared for his own emotions. The following excerpt is from Chapter
24:
