The Overloaded Ark - Cameroon's Birds and Beasts

Gerald Durrell is a childhood favourite. I've enjoyed many of his books on animals and you will too. When trapped indoors for ages, what can be better than going on a six-month journey to Cameroon to get some animals for a zoo? Begin with Durrell's first book, The Overloaded Ark. 

By Source, Fair use 

The Overloaded Ark is rich with descriptions of the country's landscapes and people. The book may be hard to find but if you take the trouble you will not regret your embarkation:

The ship nosed its way through the morning mist, across a sea as smooth as milk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist- looking nimbus of light seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays penetrated and loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea. Slowly it was drawn up towards the sky in long lethargically coiling columns, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.

Wonderful illustrations enrich the book. So do try to find and read it. Also, it has a lot of humour - something that is good for us now more than ever. One of the most memorable characters in the book is a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee. 

I know that I visualized an ape about three years old, standing about three feet high. I got a rude shock when Chumley moved in.

He arrived in the back of a small van, seated in a huge crate. When the doors of his crate were opened and Chumley stepped out with all the ease and self-confidence of a film star, I was considerably shaken. Standing on his bowlegs in a normal slouching chimp position, he came up to my waist.He stood on the ground and surveyed his surroundings with a shrewd glance, and then he turned to me and held out one of his soft, pink-palmed hands to be shaken, with exactly that bored expression that one sees on the faces of professional hand shakers.

He seated himself in a chair, dropped his chain on the floor, and then looked hopefully at me. It was quite obvious that he expected some sort of refreshment after his tiring journey. I roared out to the kitchen for someone to make a cup of tea, for I had been warned that Chumley had a great liking for the cup that cheers.

As I poured the tea and milk into Chumeley’s mug and added three tablespoons of sugar, he watched me with a glittering eye and made soft “ ooing” noises to himself. I handed him the mug and he took it carefully in both hands. He tested the tea carefully with one lip stuck out, to see if it was too hot. As it was, he sat there and blew on it until it was the right temperature and then he drank it down.

Chumley’s crate was placed about fifty yards from the hut (next to a great gnarled tree stump to which I attached his chain) From there he could get a good view of everything that went on in and around the hut, and as we were working he would shout comments to me and I would reply.That night, when I carried Chumley’s food and drink of tea out to him, he greeted me with loud “ hoo hoos” of delight, and jogged up and down, beating his knuckles on the ground. Before he touched his dinner, however, he seized one of my hands in his and carried it to his mouth.

With some trepidation I waited as he carefully put one of my fingers between his great teeth and very gently bit it. Then I understood: in the chimpanzee world, to place your finger between another ape’s teeth is a greeting and a sign of trust. To place a finger in such a vulnerable position shows your confidence in the other’s friendliness.

His manners were perfect. He would never grab his food and start guzzling, as the other monkeys did, without first giving you a greeting, and thanking you with a series of his most expressive “ hoo hoos.” Then he would eat delicately and slowly, pushing those pieces he did not want to the side of his plate with his fingers. His only breach of table manners came at the end of a meal, for then he would seize his empty mug and plate and hurl them as far as possible.

Mo's Monkey King - Timothy's Take Tickles

At a time when some find relief in making China a scapegoat, Timothy Mo's The Monkey King might hit the right spot. Timothy treads the traditional trajectory of seeing the Chinese through the lens of the colonising Europeans. 

From Somerset Maugham and his literary like, we 'learned' that the Chinese are filthy in their personal habits, are liars and quite crooked in their dealings. And Maugham can rest easy in his grave as such caricatures continue to infuse our view of the other. 

Half-white Mo's novel, like a cartoon show, is filled with rude and ready humour. Timothy was only in his twenties when he wrote the book and the tone of the tale is probably due to chips on his shoulder.

The very first chapter of The Monkey King plunges you into a dizzying spiral of insane characters and situations. Very quickly you're stuck in a large old house - almost a vertical fortress. And up and down its entrails you go, meeting all sorts of spurious specimens. 

By Source, Fair use 

Before I read Mo's novel, the Monkey King, for me, was the impish simian disciple of a mythical Buddhist monk. Says Wikipedia:

... he is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices. After rebelling against heaven and being imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, he later accompanies the monk Tang Sanzang on a journey to retrieve Buddhist sutras from the West (India) where Buddha and his followers reside.

Mo's novel, however, has little to do with apes or Buddhism. Says Wikipedia:

The Monkey King follows the humorous exploits of protagonist Wallace Nolasco, who finds himself in financial straits after being denied his dowry in hectic post-war Hong Kong, and must by guile better both himself and the moribund reputation of the Chinese house he has married into. The plot of The Monkey King, which is a family saga, divided into three sections, is driven by the tensions between Wallace and his father-in-law, the patriarchal Mr Poon.

It is sometime in the 1950s. Wallace Nolasco is a Macanese, of Portuguese descent. He is in his mid-twenties and has returned to Macau from the mainland where he was studying engineering:

On the whole Wallace avoided intimate dealings with the Chinese. Despite a childhood spent cheek by jaundiced jowl with the Cantonese in Macau, he still found the race arrogant and devious. Worse, they revelled in the confusion of the foreigner: turning blank faces to the barbarian and sneering behind his back. Like his fellow Portuguese, Wallace made the best of the situation. In fanciful moments, he saw the Chinese and himself as prisoners together in a long chain gang, the descendants of the original convicts.

Wallace is not well-off and nor is his family. So he is advised to marry a girl from a Cantonese family - rumour has it that the Poons are rich. Alas, May Ling is but the child of a concubine! 

Our hero is mercilessly mistreated by one and all or almost at his in-laws'. But the joint family hell is not only why you should dive into the world of The Monkey King.

It's not likely that we'll be able to travel around much for, perhaps, months to come. Why not visit the Macau and Hong Kong of the fifties then? Mo's story is often like some Hong Kong slapstick comedy.  

    

The closing page leaves you with something that echoes many prejudices - a monkey brain as food scene. Exotic enough? Dip into the novel and relish the unusual!    

Spring Cleaning - Sundry Samples from Literature

For many the recent changes have spelt bouts of spring cleaning. In fact, given the nature of the thing, cleanliness is encouraged. It is in that spirit that I recently chose Spring Cleaning as theme for Writer Rites. These days deep cleaning your living spaces has almost reached a philosophy of life. People scramble to declutter and to adopt minimalist lifestyles. But what was it like in earlier times? 

Imagining the Bounds of History gives us a glimpse of Spring Cleaning in the 19th Century.

A manual for young housekeepers provided these instructions for spring cleaning in 1869.

Were you, reader, some day in spring, generally in the week before Easter, to take a walk through villages which we know, you might be ready to suppose that a general emigration was contemplated. You would see chairs and tables, kneading-toughs and cradles, bedsteads and bedding, all put out for an airing, while the busy cottagers are scrubbing and whitewashing, and perhaps painting and papering within doors. Neither is the practice confined to the poorer class only….

Things have indeed changed over time. Even in my own lifetime. From brooms to microfibre mops we've come a long way, baby! Of course, spring cleaning is never meant to be Bean's way:

 

But, jokes apart, spring cleaning has generated fiction. Here is a short story about what happens when a daughter and granddaughter try to give an older lady’s home a makeover while she’s in hospital. 

“Right,” says my mother, as we drive out of the hospital car park. “Now’s our chance to get to work on that bungalow.”

Even with both eyes fixed on the road, she must notice my alarm, because she takes her left hand off the wheel and places it on my knee and says, in that wheedling what-do-I-ever-ask-of-you tone, “Come on, Emma. If we do it together we’ll have that place bottomed in no time.”

Home from Uni for the Easter holidays, I’m supposed to be churning out an essay on the English civil war. I’m supposed to be searching for a McJob to tame my overdraft, or hanging out in the pub with friends I haven’t seen since Christmas. Unfortunately, what I’m supposed to be doing is of no consequence to my mother. Set against one of her projects, any plans of mine turn out to be as flimsy as cobwebs.

 Spring Cleaning

 

However dull it may seem to spend time brushing away cobwebs, spring cleaning can also be poetic. Marilyn Nelson's poem Dusting says 

Thank you for these tiny 

particles of ocean salt, 

pearl-necklace viruses,

winged protozoans: 

for the infinite, 

intricate shapes 

of submicroscopic 

living things.