More from Orwell

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in essays

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Today, I am lazy, and have outsourced most of my blog-writing duties to George Orwell. We continue our readings from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier, with Orwell talking about the social conditions in the working-class areas of the industrial north:

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his family–to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to ‘get on’. The fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle class don’t is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow’s job….

In a working-class home–I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes–you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages–an ‘if’ which gets bigger and bigger–has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working- class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat–it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question–whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is ‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been sup- pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way….

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem engineering, nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors–especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still prosperous– that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.

One reads with horror Orwell’s description of the "Utopia" awaiting far in his future. A century from Orwell’s time is only twenty years from now. And while some of his vision has come to pass (invisible heaters, furniture of rubber, glass, and steel), horses are still with us, and so are dogs.

But now contrast Orwell’s discussion of the working-class family with this discussion of the British riots. Some things have gone better than expected. Some things have gone worse.

The Road to Dongguan Pier

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in essays

≈ 1 Comment

George Orwell, it turns out, wrote things other than Animal Farm and 1982. For some reason (I can’t actually remember, now), I started reading Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier a few weeks ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing. Orwell’s voice drew me in immediately, depicting with clear, compelling prose prose the miserable conditions in a working-class boarding house:

I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained, but strange to say there was a bathroom, dating from before the Brookers’ time. Downstairs there was the usual kitchen living-room with its huge open range burning night and day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on one side of it was the shop and on the other the larder, which opened into some dark subterranean place where the tripe was stored. Partly blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs. Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face. No one knew for certain what was the matter with her; I suspect that her only real trouble was over-eating. In front of the fire there was almost always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this table completely uncovered, but I saw its various wrappings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer of old newspaper stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white oil-cloth; above that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth, never changed and seldom taken off. Generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.

The shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the outside of the window a few white letters, relics of ancient chocolate advertisements, were scattered like stars. Inside there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as ‘black tripe’, and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was the ordinary ‘tripe and pea’ shop, and not much else was stocked except bread, cigarettes, and tinned stuff. ‘Teas’ were advertised in the window, but if a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off with excuses. Mr. Brooker, though out of work for two years, was a miner by trade, but he and his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a side-line all their lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they had lost their licence for allowing gambling on the premises. I doubt whether any of their businesses had ever paid; they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in order to have something to grumble about. Mr. Brooker was a dark, small- boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and astonishingly dirty. I don’t think I ever once saw his hands clean. As Mrs. Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most of the food, and like all people with permanently dirty hands he had a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner of handling things. If he gave you a slice of bread-and-butter there was always a black thumb-print on it. Even in the early morning when he descended into the mysterious den behind Mrs. Brooker’s sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were already black. I heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place where the tripe was kept. Blackbeetles were said to swarm there. I do not know how often fresh consignments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long intervals, for Mrs. Brooker used to date events by it. ‘Let me see now, I’ve had in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened,’ etc. We lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the time I imagined that this was because tripe was too expensive; I have since thought that it was merely because we knew too much about it. The Brookers never ate tripe themselves, I noticed.

[...] It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses in the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain. The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired, sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been in the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his first glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys. In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in the double bed, of course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow- Southerner. ‘The filthy bloody bastards!’ he said feelingly. After that he packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with great strength of mind, told the Brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately. The Brookers could never understand why. They were astonished and hurt. The ingratitude of it! Leaving them like that for no reason after a single night! Afterwards they discussed it over and over again, in all its bearings. It was added to their store of grievances.

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me.

This isn’t a book of advocacy, exactly. As far as I’ve read, Orwell concerns himself with journalistic, nearly novelistic depiction of the work and lives of the British working class, and he does not spend time arguing for any particular policy or politics. He doesn’t need to. His book accomplishes its purpose merely by presenting the lives of the proletariat in vibrant, grim detail, creating the potent mix of sympathy and revulsion evinced by the quoted paragraphs above. Political action is left as an exercise to the reader.

I came across this book fortuitously, as I had also just started reading Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang, an account of the lives of the working class in the new industrial China, specifically the city of Dongguan. The similarities are numerous. Like the miners in Orwell’s account, the girls in the factories that Chang visits work long hours, live in crowded, uncomfortable dwellings, work for astonishingly low wages, and are subject to a variety of abuses and indignities at the hands of management. Such conditions are universal in the annals of the global proletariat.

But the differences are even more indicative. First, the cleanliness. Orwell evokes the omnipresent filth of the British slums, but the dormitories that Chang visits are tidy and always smell faintly of bleach. The girls are so pressed for time that they bathe only occasionally, but neither do they spend hours doing hard labor at the coal face. They may not be adequately protected from industrial chemicals, but they do not inhale air that’s black with coal dust.

Chang’s girls live in what seems like an enormous, unisex high school. Most of them are in their teens or early twenties, and they live in an environment where they only see each other, living in an isolated social bubble, almost entirely cut off from the rest of the city. They only contact their families occasionally, though most of them send money home. They may have boyfriends and friendships, but the conditions in Dongguan are so chaotic and fluid that few of these relationships last long. Impermanence is the rule of the new China.

Orwell’s mining families, on the other hand, have at least the advantage of being families. They have permanent residences, small and miserable as they are, and they have neighbors and relatively stable social arrangements. In this sense, they seem to have it better than the factory children of China. The girls in Chang’s book seem so lonely. Orwell’s slums have many vices, but loneliness does not seem to enter them.

In yet another serendipitous coincidence, last week This American Life ran a story about the factories where iPhones are made, with excerpts from a hilarious, moving story about a man who went to China to see them for himself. The second half of their podcast included a defense of sweatshops from Paul Krugman, who offers the familiar apologetic: the miserable factories one currently finds in China and elsewhere are an important stepping stone towards First World prosperity, and as bad as they are, they are still an improvement over the poverty of subsistence agriculture.

I don’t know exactly what to say to this defense, but I find it deeply dissatisfying. I want to push back; I want to ask whether it is really an improvement to move from plowing behind an ox for twelve hours a day to laboring in a factory for sixteen. I want to know whether the social chaos, gross inequality, and rank exploitation of industrial China are really describable as progress. It seems to me that a peasant farmer may be poorer in monetary measures than a factory worker, but he has a dignity that the wage slave does not. I could be wrong about all of these things. But I wonder.

Most of all, I cannot shake the stench of complicity off of myself. I own a bevy of Chinese-manufactured devices. Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to live in the world today without profiting from sweatshop labor?

I turn again to Orwell:

The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker’s self-pitying talk–always the same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine of ‘It does seem ‘ard, don’t it now?’–revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led –to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

Review: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in essays

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

, , , ,

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

World History, says Tamim Ansary in his introduction, is always the story about how we got to be where we are. It therefore always includes an implicit notion of who "we" are, and what our current place in the history of the world is.

Most people with a basic college education feel that they know how history works. First there was the ancient world, from whose murky depths emerged the cultural brilliance of the Greeks and the political might of the Romans. Then the Roman Empire fell, plunging the world into an age of superstition and darkness, from which we finally emerged during the Renaissance. Shortly thereafter we discovered science, democracy, and industrialization. Now the First World has reached the pinnacle of human development, and all that remains is for the rest of the world to finally bring itself up to our level.

This history is false.

Or at least incomplete and parochial. This is the historical narrative of a particular civilization in a particular time, and it clashes and competes with alternate historical narratives told by people from outside our cultural milieu. But by conflating our history with the history of the whole world, we not only marginalize and insult those whose historical narratives are different, but we make ourselves incapable of understanding the interactions that we have with the other worlds around us.

And so we come to Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary’s attempt to write an Islamic history of the world accessible to Western readers. According to the very brief autobiography in the book’s introduction, Ansary was raised in a traditional Islamic household, but all of his formal schooling was in Western-style schools, giving him a bifurcated view of the world which he struggled to integrate. His book is part of that resolution.

Destiny Disrupted is a world history, but it’s a world history as understood by the Islamic world. As such, it features a very different set of actors and key events than the more familiar world history given above. The Roman Empire is a footnote in this story; the universal state which defined the classical age is the early united Khalifate. The central geographical regions are Arabia and Persia, with the latter being the cultural and intellectual center of the world for most of its history. The frontiers of civilization were the Sahara Desert in the south, the Central Asian steppes in the north, barbarian Europe in the west, and the Indus river in the east. Within this area the drama and tragedies of civilization played out, only occasionally interrupted by incursions from the outside, such as the catastrophic invasions of the Mongols or the nuisance of the Franji (Franks, i.e. Christian Crusaders).

Ansary does an excellent job of presenting the narrative of this world history so that it’s accessible and interesting to a reader who knows almost nothing about it. His history is not overly detailed—he occasionally skips over entire centuries with a few paragraphs—but it suffices to make one understand who the actors are and how they see the world. More importantly, he gives his narrative a sense of flow, so that every subsequent development makes sense in light of earlier ones, and one can gain the feeling that history is going somewhere and means something.

And that, of course, is why it’s heartbreaking when the whole story turns sideways.

The period that we think of as the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and colonialism comes across in this book as a series of bitter catastrophes. It isn’t simply the case that the European powers overwhelmed the Islamic world militarily—military setbacks and invasions had happened before, and anyway the Europeans didn’t actually conquer the Islamic world except in a few places at the outskirts. Rather, the problem is that the Islamic powers were suddenly changed into pawns, and they found themselves being played around by foreigners who didn’t have any role at all in world history up to that point. Ansary does a masterful job of getting you into the perspective of the Islamic world on this point, so that the sudden domination of Europe feels like a shock, and the crisis it precipitates is profound.

There are weaknesses in this presentation, and if you have a deeper familiarity with the historical epochs Ansary visits you may find much to criticize in his approach. When he discusses the Christian middle ages, the description is so brief that it severely distorts several things, and his presentation of the Reformation is a caricature. But in some ways these distortions are part of the logic of the story. After all, the doctrinal nuances which agitated the Protestant Reformers are of no interest at all to the Islamic world, and so who actually cares if he gets them right? What is more important—and what Ansary does very well—is presenting the internal logic of the Islamic world.

Ansary ends his story on a cliffhanger, with the events of 9/11 and the assurance that, contra Fukuyama, history is not over. Events since then are too recent to recount as history. Nonetheless, this book changed my perspective on one event more recent even than the publication of this book: the "Arab Spring" of 2011. Here in America, coverage of the uprisings presented them as a liberal phenomenon, a recapitulation of the revolutions in the West in which a democracy-seeking populace overthrow the old monarchs and aristocrats. But Ansary’s book makes it clear that this misunderstands the history of the region. The dictators which were overthrown were not in any way the ancien regime of the Islamic world, but were what Ansary calls "secular modernists." They were committed to a secular state (run by them), modernization (by force if necessary), growing a modern, capitalistic economy (at least for the elites), and imitation of Western forms and customs. The revolt against these powers was democratic exactly insofar as it reflected the popular ethos of the Islamic heartland, for which the centrality and ubiquity of Islam is non-negotiable and the West is a corrosive foreign invader rather than a model for emulation.

Events in Egypt since the revolution have largely played out along these lines, with one more secular party (the army) trying to hold on to power against a coalition of popular "Islamist" groups. (The term "Islamist" conflates a number of different streams with wildly different ideals and aspirations together, a fact which Ansary also discusses.) The error that the popular media of West made with regards to the Arab Spring is very similar to the error that we’ve been making all along: we assume that the Islamic world is replaying a scene from our own past, rather than enacting a drama of their own.

We repeat this mistake to our peril.

View all my reviews

Year in review: 2011

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in writing

≈ 1 Comment

So it’s that time of year again, when we look back on what we’ve accomplished in shame and embarrassment, then set ourselves unrealistic and unachievable goals for the next year! I’m perhaps a little late, but, hey, I have a once-a-week posting schedule and I’m sticking to it.

Here’s the highlights of 2011 in my writerly life:

  • In January, my story The Last Free Bear was published at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
  • Also in January, Last Words was published at Eschatology Journal.
  • In November, The Judge’s Right Hand was published at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
  • Aside from the sales mentioned above, I submitted seven other stories a total of 31 times to various markets.
  • I completed the first draft of my third novel, The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • I completed the first drafts of two other short stories.
  • I wrote 55 blog posts. In December 2011 I had four times as many visitors as in January 2011!
  • I moved across the country, bought a house, and changed jobs. (This was not, strictly speaking, a writing accomplishment, but it has to count for something.)

All in all, not a terrible year. So what am I hoping to do in 2012?

  • Complete more short stories. I’m sort of embarrassed that I only finished two last year. For 2012, I’d like to get at least six first drafts put away.
  • Completely revise The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • Decide whether to self-publish this or any subsequent novel.
  • Keep up with my once-a-week blogging schedule.
  • Get all of my short stories published and optioned into movies starring Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. The plot will be changed beyond all recognition and it will only get 68% at Rotten Tomatoes, but hey, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Honkies revisited

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in essays, writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

After writing my review of Shogun, there was one aspect of the book and its larger context which I wanted to comment on, but which wouldn’t fit into a book review. That is the issue of race, and the general idea of a white POV character surrounded by people of color.

This story template is known in SFF circles as What These People Need Is A Honky (and do read the linked article there — it’s interesting and funny), and it crops up frequently. Shogun is frequently mentioned in discussions of this topic, because it’s an excellent example, falling pretty neatly into the fake outline given at the link above:

White guy flees from his own culture for personal reasons (to set him up as different from those with white privilege). White guy meets natives. Natives educate white guy. White guy learns the way of natives, possibly also converting a native person who was originally doubtful of him, thereby proving white guy’s worthiness. White guy fights for natives. White guy makes dramatic escape while the native guy dies, possibly trying to help the white guy. The movie then ends with a dramatic coda and captions that inform the audience that despite white guy’s triumph, the Situation Remains Dire.

Shogun departs from this template mostly in the ending: the final victory belongs to the daimyo Toranaga, not the English sailor Blackthorne, and the Situation does not Remain Dire. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see how an actual Japanese person might be irritated by the presentation of feudal Japan in the book. The Japanese characters, while extremely sympathetic and often more compelling than the European characters, are thoroughly exoticized. The standard of comparison is always Western, the intended audience is assumed to be Western, and the Japanese civilization is presented as an object of fascination and evaluation by Western eyes.

And not just any Western evaluator, but a modern Western evaluator. James Clavell clearly loves Japanese culture, and he sets of a variety of contrasts in which we are meant to side with the Japanese against the early-modern European visitors: the relative religious neutrality of their monarchs, the sexual license and experimentation, the relative equality of the samurai women, their cleanliness, and their diet. The intended audience of the book may be Western, but the reader is clearly meant to side with the Japanese.

This story trope nearly always works this way: the story is presented to an audience that is presumed to be white and Western, yet the audience is asked to engage their sympathies against the West and for the "natives". But this presents us with a paradox. Why should stories which implicitly normalize the Western POV also explicitly criticize Western culture? And why is it that stories of this sort are often simultaneously accused of Western racism and colonialism and anti-Western revisionism?

The answer, I think, is that this story trope has a place in an ongoing argument within the confines of Western culture about the relationship between technology, culture, and human flourishing. The essence of the honky narrative is to present a dichotomy between Western society, which is technologically advanced but artistically and spiritually deficient, and a non-Western society which is technologically backwards, but rich is culture and spirituality. In Shogun, Blackthorne brings Western guns, cannons, shipbuilding, and navigation techniques to the Japanese who lack them, while he acquires a Japanese aesthetic sense and spiritual peace. The same pattern repeats in Avatar, Dances With Wolves, and other notable stories in this type. In every case, the non-Western culture is used as a mirror for the West, casting into relief the tension between technological and spiritual excellence, and its sympathetic presentation of the "natives" is a way of arguing for the incompleteness of technological society.

This explains why the honky narrative is so often reviled for being anti-Western. The West has achieved its current position of global dominance with a combination of technological and scientific ingenuity, and the core tenet of the honky narrative is that technological prowess is ultimately less important than artistic and spiritual wholeness. Furthermore, the audience-members are themselves steeped in technological society (and in the case of Avatar, the presentation of the story itself is a technological masterwork), so the white protagonist’s struggle to understand and integrate himself in the native society reflects the audience’s reluctance to give up their own technological comforts. The argument of all of these stories is that we, the white, Western audience, are missing out on something.

None of which mitigates the complaint from the other side of the aisle about the shallow and insulting depiction of the natives, and the assumption that the audience is white and Western. Non-Westerners and non-whites do not necessarily appreciate being press-ganged into service as object lessons for the more privileged. Nor should they.

And this is why I find myself conflicted about the honky narrative. I understand the complaints lodged against it, but I’m still very sympathetic to the core argument of the trope. Technological and scientific triumphalism leave me cold. I cheer on the protagonist as he questions his certainties about what constitutes "progress". Plus, I’m kind of white myself, so it’s convenient and comfortable to learn about another culture from a POV similar to my own.

It is probable best to simply judge every instance of this trope on its own merits. Shogun seems to me to avoid the worst excesses of the trope, as its Japanese characters are more interesting and have more agency than the white characters. (It’s also well-written and fantastically paced.) Avatar is worse on both counts, with a derivative storyline and more racially problematic overtones. Other books and movies run the gamut. Your mileage may vary.

25 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in writing

≈ 1 Comment

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

A minor victory

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

Tonight I just finished the first draft of a short story. Yeah!

Okay, that’s not such a big deal, since I’ve finished the first drafts of lots of stories, but this is the first one I’ve pulled off in a while. I spent most of the first part of this year writing a novel, then I took a brief break from writing, and the two stories I tried to finish after that just didn’t work out. But this one turned out well.

Granted, it’s a total mess right now, with terrible pacing, a nonsensical conclusion, and some heavyhanded speechifying in the middle. But: it’s a first draft. And it’s done.

Uncaged Blood released!

20 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in writing

≈ 3 Comments

So remember my novella whose rights reverted to me? The one that I promised would be re-released with a new cover and a new title?

Well I’m proud to present to you:

Uncaged Blood

Read an excerpt and find links to buy here.

The new cover is SO MUCH BETTER than the old cover. The design and layout must be credited to Nathan Gramesc of Deluxe Photography, a photographer, web designer, and Level 9 Photoshop Mage, who managed to wring the beauty shown above out of the pile of “interesting prison pics” that I threw at him.

And the title has been freed from its, shall we say, unfortunate polysemy.

I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out. It’s the first thing I’ve self-published and it probably will not be the last.

Draft: Romania’s Silent Killer

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by in romania

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Foreigners visiting Romania often worry about health hazards implicit in visiting what was until fairly recently a Communist dictatorship. I tell them not to worry about it, since in the cities the water and food are all perfectly clean by European and American standards. However, there is a serious health hazard that stalks Romania, one which foreigners rarely think of. If the reports are true, then this epidemic is responsible for numerous illnesses, hospitalizations, and even deaths. It is little publicized in official sources, but nearly any Romanian on the street will be able to tell you all about it.

I’m talking about curent.

Curent in this context means "draft", as in a drafty door, or opening a window to let in a draft. People from outside Romania may believe that a draft is a nuisance (if you’re cold) or a welcome relief (if you’re too warm), but the Romanians will set you straight. If you catch a draft, you are in mortal peril.

The early symptoms of catching a draft include a headache, toothache, soreness of the neck, stiff joints, stuffy nose, sore throat, coughing, or sneezing. If untreated, the draft will continue to worm its way into your system and metastasize into pneumonia, arthritis, polio, and dementia. People have died from catching drafts. Especially vulnerable are the elderly and small children, which is why members of both demographics are traditionally dressed in the warmest clothes that they can find all through the summer—the best defense against the draft is a set of wool stockings and a scarf, even if it’s 40 C outside.

I had been in Romania for a while and heard about curent a few times, but the true seriousness of curent only struck me when the summer began. At the school where I was teaching I wandered into the kitchen, where a group of six women were preparing a meal for some guests. It was hot outside, and several pots of boiling water were on the burners around the kitchen, turning the crowded little kitchen into a sweltering sauna. After a few minutes I went over and opened the window, only to be immediately shouted down by the women. I was letting in a draft.

But weren’t they hot? Indeed they were, and I could see the sweat and discomfort on several of their faces. But the health dangers of cool moving air were far too great to risk for mere comfort.

I observed similar things on several other occasions. On crowded public buses during the summer heat, any attempt to open a window would be countered by immediate protestations about the draft. Friends and neighbors would close the windows of my room for me if they noticed them open, to protect me from the draft’s depredations. I heard a young woman complaining of a persistent headache and nausea which was blamed on sleeping with her head too close to her computer’s exhaust fan. It was a small draft, but it was enough.

Curiously, a draft’s lethality seems to be greatly reduced outside of Romania, to the point where many foreigners don’t concern themselves with it at all, and even claim to enjoy having a window open on a warm day. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real, however. Indeed, it’s as real as Korean Fan Death, another silent killer whose victims lie largely in a single country.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.