Do the movies 'Into the Wild' and 'The Godfather' have anything in common?

At a glance it would seem that there is little connection between The Godfather movies and Into the Wild, Sean Penn’s movie based on the story of Christopher McCandless two-year (1990 -1992) wilderness trek that sadly ended in McCandless death in Alaska.

Upon closer look, however, one can draw some similarities in how happiness eludes both Michael Corleone in the end of The Godfather III and Christopher McCandless as he breathes his last on an abandoned school bus in the Alaskan wilderness.

Michael Corleone dies a forlorn figure, disillusioned and pained by the futility of it all. The murders, the schemes, the connivances and for it all to turn so meaningless in the end, so symbolically embodied in the poignant moment at the stair case of the opera house where Michael desperately hangs on to the body of his dying daughter. The sheer anguish on Michael’s face eloquently communes how unworthy the struggle has been.

Likewise, although Christopher McCandless world is not blood-soaked and murky like that of Michael Corleone, he too cuts an all the more forlorn figure, as he lies dying on that hearse of a bus.

The main difference between Into the Wild and The Godfather is encapsulated in that ethereal realization and revelation by McCandless that “happiness only real when shared”.

Though he had achieved his goal of living life on the bare minimum, free of material obsession, and that ideal of all freedoms: the freedom from being pigeonholed into a career and limited by societal expectations dictated by austere needs of a capitalist economy.

The irony of Christopher unfortunately having to pay the ultimate price for his adventurous spirit is not lost on the reader or viewer, as one contemplates the stark contradiction between his initial reaction: “You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from human relationships.  God’s placed it all around us, it’s in everything, in anything we can experience.  People just need to change the way they look at those things” and at the end, the stoical reflection: “Happiness only real when shared.”

One may, without contradiction, conclude that while Christopher McCandless adventurous spirit is unquestionable, noble, and indeed admirable; it is hard not to exclaim: ‘what a waste of a life’. That said, his moment of redemption, in fact his gift to the world, is the unequivocally high premium he places on the value of human relations with the prudent words: “Happiness only real when shared”.

If it is hard to imagine the value of the little moments in life if we did not have someone to share our ups and downs with, then it is easy to see the value of relating with those whom we regard as close and dear to our lives.

After all, a lot of the things we often say we are purely doing for ourselves are only worth doing when we know that somebody somewhere will appreciate our effort.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o’s new memoir illuminates his sympathy for the oppressed

Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, illuminates the source of the sympathy for the weak and vulnerable that has come to characterise his literary work and political views.

The Dickensian penury described in the opening in which sixteen-year-old Ngugi has to run six miles to school after only having a bowl of porridge for breakfast and later have nothing to eat for lunch, sets the scene.

A childhood scarred by torturous colonial times, fear and frailties characterises Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s upbringing in central Kenya.

In the first installment of, Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir, the poverty, love of books, the art of storytelling, politics and violence that light up his early life mark the sparks that ignite his sympathy for the oppressed.

The events and individuals he presents in the memoir echo characters from his early books, notably, Weep Not, Child, The River Between, and A Grain of Wheat.

Born in 1938 in the shadow of the Second World War and growing up in 1950s colonial Kenya, the repression caused by the state of Emergency and being forced to live in what Ngugi calls ‘concentration villages’, provides extremely difficult times. Mistrust threatens the cohesion of Ngugi’s family as brothers align themselves on the opposing sides of the struggle.

The childhood portrayed in the memoir is not all gloom and doom. There are fond memories of those who made huge sacrifices (especially his mother) so that Ngugi would live to tell his story and happy ones too of fireside stories in his father’s house that brought out the storyteller in Ngugi.

In the video below, Ngugi, at an interview with Granta, discusses the memoir and its illuminations on the author.

So, how significant do you think a painful childhood is in shaping a writer’s literary work?

The scariest villains in literature ever

The literary world is awash with scary fictional characters, but there has to be one whom you consider to be the most terrifying ever.

We are not just talking of Count Dracula’s I-will-suck –your blood type of scary. We are talking of the character that makes you shiver with the incomprehensible nature of human evil.

For a while, mine has been Big Brother from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. What is there not to be scared about a character from whom you cannot hide? But then again, because nearly all of the state surveillance imagined in this classic novel has already come to pass, with time, Big Brother is slowly becoming part of our psyche. Talk of normalizing the abnormal.

And how about Victor Frankenstein whose attempt to ‘create life’ is disastrously unsettling? Is he scary?Yes, very!

But the scariest, most villainous character ever, has to be Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights. This sinister character’s desire for revenge, initially, makes him an almost romantic hero ready to go the length to win over Catherine, his love.

Heathcliff, however, becomes increasingly sadistic, especially in his abuse of Isabella. Any sympathy that the reader may have had for him as a child tormented by Hindley Earnshaw evaporates to the thin air when he returns to Wuthering Heights a wealthy man ever more hell-bent on a vengeful warpath.

Heathcliff’s indefensible, endless sadism and failure to reform, against all expectations, makes him both a memorable and probably the scariest character in literature ever.

The following is an extract from Telegraph’s list of 50 Greatest Villains in Literature:

1.     O’Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

2.     Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

3.     Mr. Hyde from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

4.     Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

5.     Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare

6.     Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton

7.     Voldermort from the Harry Potter series by J. K Rowling

8.     Captain Hook from Peter and Wendy, by JM Barrie

9.     Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle

10.  Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

So, who do you think is the scariest, most villainous character in literature, ever?

How significant is religious faith in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night?

"Unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps."

In the memoir, Night, as the young narrator, Eliezer, struggles for survival amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, the author, grapples with the question of how an oppressive environment can affect an individual’s faith and ethics. Mainly through the use of night as a motif and imagery of light and darkness, Wiesel captures the power of cruelty in corroding faith in mankind and general goodness of the world. As Eliezer’s initial unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps, the resultant disillusionment can be seen as negative bildungsroman.

Elie Wiesel the author and the book jacket

The anaphoric “Never shall I forget” not only establishes a sombre mood, but also serves to illuminate the use of night as a significant motif throughout the memoir. The harrowing, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night …” (45), encapsulates the symbolic darkness occasioned by the oppressiveness of the Holocaust. The silence of the night, one would hope, would bring with it the respite much needed by Eliezer and his fellow prisoners, but it instead causes unbound anguish as Eliezer takes it to be symbolic of a God negligent of his people in their hour of need. Through a series of rhetorical questions and diction that portrays rebellion, Eliezer’s shifting faith in God comes to the fore:

Ngugi wa Thiong'o Challenges Linguistic Feudalism

"Linguistic feudalism, he explains, is a hierarchical view of language that ascribes aristocratic status to some languages while relegating others to the confines of a tribal language."

Southbank Centre, London, UK, on an autumnal afternoon, and there I am, with hundreds of others, expectantly waiting for him.

It is the 25th birthday for Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, and as the clock ticks close to 2pm, we know that among the literary luminaries gathered here in London, the man of the hour, capo di tutti capi, will be here any minute.

And as we take our seats in Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Susheila Nasta, the Founding Editor of Wasafiri, invites the author-journalist Aminatta Forna to, in turn; invite the renowned novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic, and social activist we have all been waiting for.

The man is non-other than distinguished Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Prof. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and I,
Southbank Centre, London, UK (October 31, 2009)

He respectfully sits there listening as the well-deserved accolades are rolled out by Aminata Forna, formerly an award-winning BBC television journalist and author of The Devil that Danced on Water, who is now introducing him. At the mention of the moniker of social activist, a telling smile lights up Ngugi’s otherwise contemplative countenance.

He takes off his jacket to reveal his trademark African shirt and approaches the podium with an ease that belies familiarity with the stage. The expectation is now palpable. And he does not disappoint.

His somewhat husky-croaky voice fades a bit, but nothing that a sip of water would not sort out. Within no time he has our brains cracking over his assertion that ‘linguistic feudalism leads to linguistic Darwinism’.

Linguistic feudalism, he explains, is a hierarchical view of language that ascribes aristocratic status to some languages while relegating others to the confines of a tribal language.

To elaborate this point, he invites us to consider that in the United Nations, four out five languages of the Security Council are European languages, a situation that puts these languages at the top of the linguistic hierarchy.