Samantha Harvey

 

Our next meeting, on Friday 13 May, takes the form of an interview with the author Samantha Harvey by Jonty Driver, with participation by other members encouraged. To get some background, here are some useful links about our guest and her books: 

Samantha Harvey website

Review in The New Yorker

Interview in The Scotsman 


 Samantha Harvey is the author of three novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song and most recently Dear Thief, which was published in September 2014.  She been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.  She was named by The Culture Show as one of the 12 Best New British novelists.  This year Dear Thief was longlisted for the Baileys Prize and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

A chance to hear our very own poet in action

On Sunday 10th July at 4-00 p.m., in the church of Sr Mary, St Mary in the Marsh, as part of the John Armitage Memorial (JAM) Festival in the Romney Marshes, C.J. (“Jonty”) Driver will be reading his sequence of poems called BEFORE:  22 poems about his African childhood and young manhood, including the five weeks he was held by the security police in solitary confinement in South Africa in 1964.  In between some of the poems in the sequence, Peter Fields will be playing on the violin a variety of pieces - some classical, some folk, some popular.

This recital is a continuation of the very successful recital of 2015, also in St Mary in the Marsh, when Jonty read the sequence of poems called REQUIEM and Peter played a transposition of Bach’s Cello Suite No 2. BEFORE has been published so far only in a South African literary magazine in 2013, though a printed version of the sequence will be available at the recital for those who like to read as well as listen

Here is an example of what Jonty will be reading: 

 Number IV of XXII.

Odd that anyone should love a landscape

Most where he has never lived for long:

The greys and blueish greens, the flecks of white

Which pass as blossom on the bush, the twist 

Of twig and threat of thorn, the succulent 

Spread out to catch the slightest drop of dew,

The red-brown earth and slate-grey shale, the haze

Which makes the colours smear themselves like paint.

I note the detail first, and then the whole

Expanse of plain and upland to the edge

Of what a human eye can see. And though

Horizon is the limit of our sense

Beyond that feeble distance still there lies      

Horizon yet again, which stretches on

And on as if we couldn’t ever rest,

As if the distance called us farther still,

Beyond the edge, then to the edge again.

I raise my eyes, and wish that I could climb

This hill, and then the next, and so beyond,

Or walk that river-bed, or track that line

Of green and golden shrubs. If spirits walk,

It’s here that I shall hope to find myself,

A lanky ghost in old khaki, my shirt

Untucked to catch the breeze, my boots well-laced

And stout enough to deal with thorns, a stick

In case there are still snakes in paradise.

I’ll walk beyond the dam, beyond the sound

Of windmill clanking round and round, the splash

Of water on the upward stroke, the lap

Of ripples on the edge, to where korhaan

Crank-crank alarm as I get near their nest

And then towards the koppies far away.

I’ll pause to count the springbuck on the slopes,

To mark the way erosion shapes the hills,

And note the level heights where spirits dance

When all the sounding stones reverberate -

And then I’ll walk, and walk, to what I hope
May after all still turn to endless light.

Poetry and "Literary" Magazines.

There's an article by Gary Dexter in this week's Spectator (2 April, p 18) about his unusual way of making a living, earning about £12 an hour, by offering  to recite by heart to passers-by a piece of poetry selected by them. He has a repertoire of about 150  poems. He decided which to memorise by asking people what their favourite poem was. Any poem mentioned three times would get on to his list. The Spectator has a good book review section, and also runs a weekly literary competition. This all set me thinking how we could each extend our reading by circulating magazines we have fnished with. If anyone else has any interest in this idea, please send me an e-mail* saying which magazines you can contribute for circulation, and which you would be interested in reading. To kick off, I subscribe to the Spectator and The Oldie, which also has good reviews and a literary competition, (in which our very own Gillian Southgate has had some success). I used to see Jonty Driver's old New York Review of Books copies, that often had very interesting articles of general interest in the area of politics, international relations, history, economics and science, as well as the arts, usually in the form of long reviews of a book or group of books. I now get the NYRB on line, to read on my iPad, so don't have a paper copy to contribute. I'd be interested in seeing The London Review of Books, The New Statesman, and other publications of this sort. Get in touch if you are interested. The Winchelsea Gardeners already ciculate  a Gardening magazine.

* lyoulten@aol.com

Meeting on 18 March "A Terrible Beauty Is Born." Dublin 1916, Talk by William Doherty

  

This was William Butler Yeats's conclusion in his poem "Easter 1916" on the insurrection in Dublin and its aftermath. Writing within a few months of the rebellion he reveals an ambivalence towards it rather than the laudatory account that might have been expected from an unofficial national bard with early cultural roots in Gaelic revivalism.   

The importance of the Rising in Irish history is still disputed although it was undeniably a step on a path leading to dramatic shifts in political power, guerrilla warfare, a bloody civil war, separation and the emergence of an Irish Free State which was a disappointment to many of the actors in the drama.   

Famous for constantly rewriting his work even after publication, Yeats later ruminated on his possible contribution to the revolt       

                                         "That play of mind sent out  

                                          Certain men the English shot"      

and his own doubts about the nascent Free State  

                                                                         "That is not," I say,  

                                        "The dead Ireland of my youth,but an Ireland  

                                         The poets have imagined, terrible and gay."   

In this talk I propose to consider some of the formative literary and cultural influences on the Rising and the subsequent literature it shaped.     

Gillian Southgate: prize winner in The Oldie literary competition

Congratulations to Gillian whose entry for The Oldie's monthly literary competition is published in the April issue, now out. The brief was to write a poem called "First Time in the Country" Here is her prize-winning poem:

First Time in the Country

So this was Australia. There was so much light

I thought the sky had rinsed itself away.  There were cockatoos

In the eucalypts, yellow legged and crested. They might

Have known me; they watched with heads on side

As if they would impart a secret. And like a bride

The oleanders flowered white in tumbled tiers.

A Christmas beetle, iridescent green, banged his small hide

Against a window; the blue

Of sapphires clothed the vault of sky.

The red gums blossomed, sweet and redolent

Of an old land, from whence my people came.

The birds looked down. One of them spoke my name.

A message from Jonty Driver

I’d like to encourage members of the WLS to read at least one of Sam Harvey’s novels. There is a website: www.samanthaharvey.com   There is something about her in Wikipedia.  The novels are:  The Wilderness (2010), All is Song (2013), Dear Thief (2015). I see there is a novella called Bounty Hunter, 2015;  I don’t know about that

Introduction to our February talk, by our speaker, Barnaby Phillips

I'm a broadcaster and writer. I was born in the UK, raised in Kenya and Switzerland, and studied History at Oxford, with a Masters in African Politics and Geography from London.

I worked for the BBC from 1991-2006. During this time I was a producer at the BBC World Service, and freelance reporter ('stringer') in Mozambique (1993-4) and Angola (1997). Later I became a BBC Correspondent in Nigeria (1998-2001) and Southern Africa (2001-2006). During this time I travelled and reported from countries across Africa. I speak fluent French and Portuguese.

In 2006 I joined the new Al Jazeera English television station, where I'm now a Senior Correspondent. I was based in Athens from 2006-2011, and have been living back in London for the last four years.  With Al Jazeera I've reported from across the world; including Japan, India, Burma, Africa, the Middle East and the United States, although the main focus of my work has been in Europe, recently concentrating on the migration and Eurozone crises. 

My talk

My talk will be will be about a forgotten aspect of the Second World War; how Britain took 100,000 African soldiers to the jungles of Burma to fight against the Japanese. These were the so-called ‘Burma Boys’.  In particular, I will tell the story of Isaac Fadoyebo, who signed up as a 16 year old in rural Nigeria in 1942. He was shipped to India the following year. In March 1944, in Burma, Isaac was horribly injured in a jungle ambush deep behind Japanese lines. His British officers were killed and so were many African colleagues. Too sick to even crawl, Isaac was saved by a family of courageous Burmese rice farmers who hid and fed him for 9 months, before his eventual rescue by the British. Isaac returned to Nigeria in 1945, where he lived a life of respectable obscurity. Many decades later, in his final years, Isaac became my friend in Lagos;  at his urging I went to Burma, carrying a letter of thanks and photographs for the family who'd saved him and of whom he'd been thinking these past seven decades.

Through Isaac’s tale, I will look at the bigger picture. Were these African soldiers volunteers, or were they forced to fight for King and Empire? How were they treated by the British, and how did they fare afterwards? What impact did their experiences have on them and on Independence Struggles after the War? I hope to make your audience think about the Second World War in new and less Eurocentric ways; from the perspective of a Nigerian youth or a Burmese rice farmer it was more a struggle of dying Empires than a heroic stand against fascism.

My book 'Another Man's War: The Story of A Burma Boy in Britain's Forgotten African Army' tells this story. 

Some useful links

For those who are interested in background reading, here are some reviews/articles about the book.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/another-mans-war-by-barnaby-phillips-review/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11093145/Another-Mans-War-by-Barnaby-Phillips-review-profoundly-moving.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/16/from-nigeria-to-burma-jungle-courage-and-compassion-in-war-with-japan-vj-day

'Another Man's War' was published in late 2014, and was chosen by NPR in the US as 'One of The Best Books of 2014' and by the Daily Telegraph in the UK as 'One of the Best History Books of 2014' . It's now out in paperback and on kindle- Amazon link with reader's reviews is here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Another-Mans-War-Britains-Forgotten/dp/1780745222/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405695837&sr=1-2&keywords=another+man%27s+war

And for those with a bit more time on their hands- I made an award winning documentary about Isaac Fadoyebo and the Burma Boys in 2011 for Al Jazeera English (a couple of years before I wrote the book).  It's free online, 45 minutes long, and all are welcome to watch 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeracorrespondent/2011/08/2011828135228487172.html

A couple of other links if people are keen- 

my own website is 

http://barnabyphillips.com/

and if you want to hear an interview with me by Justin Webb on the BBC R4 Today Programme on this story it's here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29106435