You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East. My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards. You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people.
- Khalil Gibran, from You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
- John Keats, from The Eve of St Agnes

There is none like her, none.
Nor will be when our summers have deceased.
O, art thou sighing for Lebanon
In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,
Sighing for Lebanon,
Dark cedar, tho’ thy limbs have here increased,
Upon a pastoral slope as fair,
And looking to the South, and fed
With honey’d rain and delicate air,
And haunted by the starry head
Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate,
And made my life a perfumed altar-flame;
And over whom thy darkness must have spread
With such delight as theirs of old, thy great
Forefathers of the thornless garden, there
Shadowing the snow-limb’d Eve from whom she came.
- Alfred Tennyson, from Maud

He was following orders.
And the children already lying in puddles of filth,
their mouths gaping,
at peace.
No one will harm them.
You can’t kill a baby twice.

And the moon grew fuller and fuller
till it became a round loaf of gold.

Our sweet soldiers
wanted nothing for themselves.
All they ever asked
was to come home
safe.
- Dalia Ravikovitch, from You can’t kill a baby twice

“Without a sword, I govern the people with good words.”
- from the Ruhnama of Turkmenbashi

What is it in the dictatorial make-up that makes you go: “Monday, work on bunker; Tuesday, invade neighbour; Wednesday, make ill-advised statements about nuclear ambition; Thursday, write novel”? Some recent examples have been Saddam Husseins’s last publication, Be Gone Demons!, sales of which suffered due to bomb damage, despite the author’s previous million-selling form; and Radovan Karadžić’s The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night, written while on the run from the UN’s War Crimes trials yet still nominated for Serbia’s highest literary prize, the Golden Sunflower. Neither, unfortunately, are available from Amazon.

Saddam’s last effort continued much in the vein of his previous books: a refiguring of the history of Iraq as a struggle between the noble Iraqi tribes and their arch-nemesis, the odious yet immortal Jew Ezekiel. Ezekiel delights in meddling with the affairs of Arab states and inciting war between them - although not without the connivance of the lazy and avaricious Arabic élite. When Ezekiel seizes power in Iraq following the disastrous Iran-Iraq war, it falls to Selim, “a pure, virtuous Arab… tall and handsome with a straight nose,” to take up arms in the name of the resistance. Selim routs Ezekiel with the words “Be gone, Demons!”, but his enemy soon returns with US backing in the form of the vogueishly-portrayed Roman Empire. Once again, the enemies of Iraq are put to the sword and Ezekiel and the Roman king retreat, to find that the Arabs have set the twin towers of the Roman capital on fire.

While Saddam clearly saw himself as the war-like yet righteous ruler of his tribe, Karadžić is more of a quiet man. Reports of The Miraculous Chronicle of the Night are mixed: one source claims it details a love affair set in a thinly-disguised Sarajevo, while another has it set in a prison in the run-up to the Bosnian war. The novel apparently reached the publisher through ’secret channels’ (those incensed by the fact that an accused war criminal is free to write at all should check the Finding Karadžić blog), and all 1,000 copies sold out at the Belgrade book fair in 2004.

Karadžić has previous published a number of books of poetry, which have garnered much politically-motivated praise, and have latterly been cited as evidence by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal of his genocidal intentions. In his fascinating paper, Is Poetry a War Crime?, Jay Surdokowski draws an equivalence between Karadžić’s poetry and his ultra-national radio broadcasts, public addresses and manifestos to suggest that poetry is a legally valid means of adjudicating a man’s mind. Included among the evidence acquired by the ICT is a video of a unique poetry reading: Karadžić and Eduard Limonov, Russian nationalist and eXile columnist, exhanging stanzas atop Mount Trebevic while loosing shells from a field gun into the besieged city of Sarajevo below. It’s not exactly Bookslam.

Karadžić’s poetry is described as inhabiting “a psychic landscape of eerie and illogical violence” and embodying a “paramilitary surrealism.” In particular, a fatal lack of irony is discerned in the poet’s longings for the military life - notably in the poem Goodbye, Assassins: “The gentlefolks’ aortas will gush without me./The last chance to get stained with blood/I let go by.” - enough, at least, to make the ‘warrior-poet’s work admissable in the International Court.

And now it’s the turn of another famous fugitive to make his mark on the written word - although, this time, it is unlikely that the pursuing authorities will need to subpoena the muse in order to make a case. Martyrdom Press (Islamabad, Kabul, London) has issued The Islamic Millennium (ISBN: 0954006356), claiming to be one of the early literary efforts of Osama bin Laden. Unlike the violent struggles of his fellow-travellers in the Axis of Evil book club, bin Laden’s bucolic future fable is more akin to JG Ballard’s Hello America, in which a band of sailors visit an abandoned, desertified USA. A thousand years into the future, the good ship Zluthulb hoves to off the coast of an unknown island. In a wide bay, a gigantic statue stands many times higher than the ship’s masts, and behind it rises a forest of ruins, great iron structures and temples with pointed roofs. Only the wise narrator can explain to his companions that they have chanced upon the once-great city of Nhu-Yok, capital of the ancient Mehrikans, who left so little to posterity that their very existence has almost been forgotten:

“There was nothing to leave. The Mehrikans possessed neither literature, art, nor music of their own. Everything was borrowed. The very clothes they wore were copied with ludicrous precision from the models of other nations. They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell. Even women, both of high and low degree, spent much of their time at bargains, crowding and jostling each other in vast marts of trade, for their attire was complicated, and demanded most of their time.”

The narrator admits that much, if not all, of the scientific and technological knowledge which made the Mehrikans great - “The very elements seems to have been their slaves” - was lost along with them, but maintains that their successors have been spared the indignities which were their price: restless activity, ceaseless noise and industry, social conformism, ill-fitting clothes, and educated and unblushing women.

After a number of semi-comedic adventures clearly intended as satire on the strange and hilarious customs of the West, wherein the crew of the Zluthulb are seduced into drinking alcohol by a ghostly party and have an unpleasant encounter with an animal resembling a skunk, the brave sailors defeat the last survivor of the Mehrikan race in close combat, and set sail for home, intending to present the latter’s skull to the museum at Teheran. What the narrative does suggest is a far more optimistic and inevitable approach to the future than either Saddam or Karadžić: the enemies of bin Laden’s people will not run rampant through his lands but will instead be consigned to history by their own arrogance and greed. Of course, such a work may be dismissed as juvenilia, but given others’ literary form while under duress, we may expect more despatches from the Tora-Bora press yet.

There’s one final post we have to make about the Book Fair, which was all a long time ago now, and that’s to mention the amazing Laugh it Off from South Africa. Justin Nurse from Laugh it Off dropped by our stand (after hearing about us from Michelle of Oshun) to tell us all about himself.

Justin makes stunningly good, Adbusters-style anti-ads, detourning the presentations of South African and international companies to great effect - the above example uses Avis car hire to satirise SA’s continued reliance on underpaid black labour to support white affluence, while others poke fun and a little more in the direction of both big business (Johnny Walker takes a tumble in the ‘Keep Drinking’ ads) and youth apathy (Mtv and ‘eMpty’s Stoner of the Year’ award). He also publishes a regular zine with mini-campaigns, such as the anti-fashion ‘Fascionism! For Successful Cloning’ based on the Diesel campaigns, and a selection of poetry and other books.

In 2002, he fought a hard fight with SAB Miller, the massive South African conglomerate which owns Castle Lager and brews a host of international beers in SA, over a T-Shirt Laugh it Off produced based on the Carling Black Label logo. “White Guilt: Black Labour” didn’t go down too well with the suits, and it went all the way to the High Court before Justin won the right to satirise (read the full story in press clippings [pdf]). Naomi Klein, of No Logo fame, commented that the SAB case was the most important yet regarding the rights of corporation ownership versus the right to individual freedom of expression.

Laugh it Off is, in Justin’s estimation, pretty much the only outfit of its kind in SA (and, therefore, by extension, Africa). That is, in a media culture still relatively unquestioning when it comes to brand consumption, the only outfit opposing globalisation with the tactics that have arguably made the most impact elsewhere: good ideas and headline-grabbing stunts, well executed. As one of the commentators on the SAB feud noted, when the G8 came to Durban a few years back, an event that, on other occasions, prompted thousands and thousands to take to the streets in Seattle and elsewhere, a mere 200 turned out to protest - yet Africa is the place most affected and most likely to be affected, one way or the other, by the G8’s global policies. If Laugh it Off can do something to stir up some action, it’ll have a huge effect on a still-young nation.

Justin was at the Book Fair in search of European distribution for his work, most of it international and just as recognisable over here as south of the Equator - and European sales would, we’re sure, provide a huge boost to the business, which Justin descibes as “a social organisation run on business lines”. Serpent’s Tail, among others, turned him down, but if there’s anyone else out there who’d be interested in putting out some excellent quality political satire that’s damn funny with it, let him know.