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Freedom:
Short Stories Celebrating the Universal declaration of Human Rights
Edited
by Amnesty International
Mainstream
Publishing 2009, Paperback
Read
an interview on the blog
with Nicky Parker, Amnesty UK's Publisher, about why she chose short stories and win a copy!
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Authors: A.L. Kennedy, James Meek, Marina Lewycka,
Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Gabriella Ambrosio, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter
Mosley, David Mitchell, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Petina
Gappah, Milton Hatoum, Ali Smith,
David Constantine, Jon Fosse, Kate Atkinson, Banana Yoshimoto, Alexis
Wright, Helen Dunmore, Héctor Aguilar Camín, Paulo Coelho, Mahmoud
Saeed, Richard Griffiths, Juan Goytisolo, Yann Martel, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, Nadine Gordimer, Xiaolu Guo, Alice Pung, Ishmael Beah, Alan
Garner, Liana Badr, Rohinton Mistry, Olja Knezevic, Henning Mankell
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"Madeleine
and Mr Kramer faced each other in silence across the table. The nurse
had closed her magazine and was watching them. Mr Kramer was thinking
that from many points of view the project was a bad one. Madeleine had
wanted to write about being Madeleine. Fine, he said, but displace it.
I have, she said. My image is a war zone. My story is about a child in
a war zone, a boy half my age, who wants to get out to somewhere safe.
Asylum, said Mr Kramer. He seeks asylum."
Reviewed by Tania Hershman
What inspired the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was most definitely not fiction. The 30
articles outlining the rights - freedom from torture, right to free
movement, to a fair trial etc.. - had to be written down, it seems,
because it is not in our nature to behave this way. We need reminding.
When Amnesty International commissioned writers to celebrate the
anniversary of the UDHR, they might have compiled a collection of
articles, of reportage, of case studies. But choosing the short story
form was, in my opinion, a brilliant idea. The greatest short stories
don't just tell
you something, they slip you beneath someone
else's skin. And to really feel what the UDHR represents, what
atrocities it is attempting to prevent, that is where we need to be.
Freedom,
whose royalties go to
Amnesty International, contains 36 short stories, most of which are
inspired by one of the articles of the UDHR. There is some overlap, and
there are also some stories not specially written for the book, but
that doesn't matter. Taken as a whole, this is a powerful and moving
book. You could buy a copy because it is a worthy cause - or, more
simply, because it contains some of the best writing I have read in a
long time.
I would recommend that when reading the
stories you try not to let the particular UDHR Article it was inspired
by influence how you read the story. It's difficult, of course. When
you see the Article referring to "the right to asylum" above the story
title, it sets up certain expectations.
My personal preference is for stories that do
not tackle an
issue head on. For example, A L Kennedy's The Effects of Good Government on the City,
on the surface about a couple's walk through Blackpool, but
something terrifying lurks
underneath the words. Kennedy has no need to spell anything
out, the way she uses language to describe the everyday conveys
sufficient menace:
"He's looking at you - easy to tell
without having to
check, because
his attention is tangibly leaking, scampering, running down the side of
your face. Fair enough, your boyfriend is supposed to pay attention,
but his payment feels like a trickle of something bad, feels like he's
pissing on you."
Already a fan of Kennedy, this anthology introduced me to several
writers whose work I had never read, such as Italian writer Gabriella
Ambrosio. Sticko, her take on the article
relating to freedom from
torture, left me
stunned, shaken. It begins:
"I am a Stick, I am the most advanced
stage in the
evolution of humankind. I remain motionless, still, exactly the same as
everything else, spread somewhere in some way. I am here, but no-one
sees. I sit in front of the television in my flower-patterned cretonne
armchair. I too am flower-patterned cretonne."
Wherever you imagine this story might go, it doesn't. Whereas An Internet Baby, by Xiaolu Guo, another author
new to me, does go where you fear
it will, but this does not detract from the shock of the story of a
young couple who decide to sell their baby on the Internet:
"After putting the ad online, Yuli feeds her son a bitof milk and
changes his wet nappy. What she's worried about is that if the baby
doesn't go soon, sh'll miss her end-of-term exam, then she won't get
her diploma."
Joyce Carol Oates' Tetanus,
one of those not written especially for Freedom, has not left me alone
since I read it either. Every time you think you know what is about to
happen in this story of a police detective interviewing a young boy,
the story twists and spirals away. A masterpiece.
Inspired by the article on the right to a free trial, Aniruddha: The Latest Instalment,
was my introduction to Amit Chaudhuri, a writer I will certainly be
seeking more from. This is the quirky, moving story of "a typical -
even completely conventional - Bengali intercultural marriage" between
two men, Chris and Aniruddha, in London, around the time of the London
Underground bombings. I could not help but be wooed
by a story whose first sentence begins: "Then there's Aniruddha", as if
we have been chatting for some time already. Once again, as great
stories are wont to do, this does not go in the direction you might
predict.
There are several stories concering the actions of one's neighbours
(James Meek's The Kind of Neighbour
You Used to Have and Walter Mosley's The Trial), because history has
proved time and again that it is those closest to us that have the
power, to either betray and condemn or to rescue.
Yann Martel's The Moon Above His Head
apparently concerns a man who fell into a septic tank, but is in fact
about paying attention to those around us and seeing the different ways
in which they express their suffering.
Of those stories that do look the issue right in the eye, Helen
Dunmore's Where I Keep My Faith
is an exquisitely original telling of a woman's exploration of where
her
faith resides inside herself in order to imagine how she might renounce
it. David Mitchell's Character
Development carries you along with its protagonist's strong
voice, and is less about torture than about one soldier's personal
dilemma. Ali Smith's The Go-Between
uses humour to illustrate the absurdity of borders, slamming its point
home with an ending that wipes the smile of your face.
David Constantine's Asylum, from which the quote at
the top of the page is taken, is a complex and multi-layered story
exploring the term "asylum" through the relationship between Madeleine,
a patient in a psychiatric instituation (one use of "asylum") and Mr
Kramer, her visitor, who's daughter has just found the Ukrainian shtetl
where his family was wiped out. And Banana Yoshimoto's A Special Boy simply and
devastatingly demonstrates the effect on the children of an abusive
family through the eyes of one small boy who would never want the to be
the kind of "special" that the title assigns to him.
There are more that I would mention if I had the space. And, as with
all multi-author collections, there were those that
left me unmoved, some because
they seemed less a short story than the sort of lengthy mini-novel,
others because they looked too directly at the issue in hand or took a
rather cliched approach (Kate Atkinson's The War on Women, about sharia law
being declared in Scotland, for example).
Freedom
left me with many thoughts, about what we take for granted, what we let
slide because our daily lives distract us from caring. These
"fictions",
more than any newspaper article I may read or television news program,
took me inside what the UDHR strives for, leaving an lasting
impression.
Read
Ali Smith's story
from this collection in The Times
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