What is America?

 

When I was a student, I lived in a small room on a floor full of other students. One of them was a Chilean, and whenever I referred to the United States as "America," he would correct me by saying, "the United States of North America."

In the halftime show of the Super Bowl LX, the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny ended his performance by leading a group of dancers, each flying the flag of a country of the Americas. Bad Bunny shouted, "God bless America!" and then went on to enumerate all the countries of the Americas, ending with the United States and Canada. 

Some people from the U.S. who were in the audience may not have picked up what he was putting down, but the way I see it, this was a message both of defiance and of inclusivity. Put another way, the message was: we're not part of your country; your country is part of our continent. 

I think Bad Bunny expressed the same thing when he was recently quoted as saying, "English is not my first language, but that's OK... it's not America's first language either." I think he wasn't referring to the historical first language of what is now the U.S. (like Cherokee or Navajo), but of the main language of the Americas, Spanish.

The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. How is it that there's a North America, a Central America and a South America, and one of these contains a country that is called... America? How is it that "the American South" means something completely different than "South America"?

Maybe we should take Bad Bunny's example, and use "America" to refer exclusively to the left half of my picture. But there's one problem with this: what adjective do we use to refer to the right half of my picture? If it's not "American," what is it? USian? United Statesian?

Book review: "The Ornament of the World" by María Rosa Menocal

"The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain" is bookended by two events. The first event marks the beginning of the period, in the early 700s CE, when a stranger named Abd Al-Rahman arrives in southern Spain from across the Strait of Gibraltar. His story is like a dark fairy tale: he's a refugee who has travelled all the way from Syria, the lone survivor of the leaders of the Umayyad caliphate, who have been slaughtered by the rival Abbasids. His arrival and subsequent conquests are the inciting events that lead to a new culture on the Iberian peninsula, not a Muslim culture, but a rare blend of Muslims, Jews and Christians living together, governed from the city of Córdoba. This is more than mere coexistence or mutual tolerance: it's Arabian culture elevating all of the inhabitants of al-Andalus (as Andalusia is then called) to a level of civilization then unheard of anywhere in Europe.

The second event, in 1492, is the end of this multicultural society, when the last vestige of that culture is destroyed by "Los Reyes Católicos" (The Christian Monarchs), who force the last stronghold of Arab presence in Spain, the city of Granada, to capitulate. The capitulation agreement claims that Jews and Muslims can continue to live in Spain if they convert to Christianity. But within a few years, Spain kicks out or kills any "New Christians" (that is, Jews or Muslims who converted) on the flimsy claim that their conversion wasn't genuine.

In the 700 years between these two events, the region has many ups and downs. At its peak, it's a melting pot unlike any I've read about before. Christians and Muslims fight alongside each other in wars against other Christians or Muslims. Jews are viziers (both counselors and military leaders) under Muslim rule. Jews and Christians speak Arabic fluently and write poetry in that language. Christians hold mass in Arabic. The area is the scientific capital of Europe. And the city of Toledo becomes a hub of translators, who work in teams to oversee the translation of massive amounts of Greek and Arabian manuscripts into Latin, Hebrew and Castilian. 

It's hard to put into words how much more advanced and well-read al-Andalus is compared to the rest of Europe, but the story of Petrus Alfonsi helps to explain it. Alfonsi is a Spanish Jew who converts to Christianity and is baptized as an adult. He travels to London in the early 1100s. As Andalusian scholars go, he is not particularly well-educated or knowledgeable. But in London, in a turn of events not unlike the plot of the movie Idiocracy, he is hailed as a genius whose deep knowledge makes him a celebrity in the scientific community and the personal physician of King Henry I.

At the same time, this melting pot is under constant threat from all sides. Throughout the 700-year period, various groups of Muslims from Morocco, brought to the European continent to help out in a war, try to impose a stricter, less tolerant form of Islam, persecuting Jews and Christians, and often succeed. The once-unified region splits up into smaller taifas, small kingdoms or city-states constantly at odds with each other. Later, Christian forces arrive from southern France and force the Christian population to hold their mass in Latin, not Arabic, as was the practice. And eventually, the whole project comes crashing to the ground when an extreme form of Christianity washes over the entire peninsula and destroys the Jewish and Muslim presence, burning countless books and people in a brutal form of ethnic cleansing.

Despite all that, the takeaway of "The Ornament of the World" is not that we should lament the fall of al-Andalus, but rather celebrate its successes. For hundreds of years, it managed to establish a true multiculturalism, rare not only for its time, but also for our time. Who today can imagine any place in the world in which members of the three Abrahamic religions can do more than peacefully coexist, but actually cooperate, learn from each other and improve each other? This book proves that such a place can exist, and that the reality we see today is not set in stone.

Book review: "The Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius

 

"The Consolation of Philosophy" is a book written in 524 CE, when Europe was transitioning from the classical era to the early Middle Ages. The author, Boethius, has a dialogue with Philosophy, personified as a woman, covering big philosophical and theological issues such as, Why does God permit evil to exist? and If God is all-knowing, can there be free will? It's a short book, written in a very accessible style, which probably helps explain why it remained very popular for centuries to come. Until the Renaissance, it was the most important book linking Christianity back to ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Artistotle.

But the book takes on a whole new meaning when you consider who Boethius was and under which circumstances he wrote it. Born in Rome, he became a statesman in the Ostrogothic Kingdom, in which the eastern Goths, under King Theoderic the Great, ruled most of present-day Italy, Spain, Croatia and Bosnia from Ravenna in Italy. Boethius was Theoderic's personal advisor. But when he tried to expose corruption among the Ostrogoths, he was convicted, imprisoned and eventually put to death.

Boethius wrote "The Consolation of Philosophy" while imprisoned, and although it's not clear if he knew he would be executed when he wrote it, he must surely have considered it a possibility. With that in mind, the book becomes more than an intellectual exercise, and rather an attempt to find peace with the vagaries of fickle fate. Philosophy is more than a teacher; she brings peace of mind and equanimity to Boethius, in a word: consolation.

Book review: "The Shortest History of Italy" by Ross King

 

When you're about two-thirds into this book, you realize that Ross King could have cheated by documenting only the last 150-odd years of the history of Italy, because before that, Italy wasn't a country. Luckily for us, the author starts around 1200 BCE and takes us through 3000 years of history in less than 250 pages. 

Before reading this book, when I thought of Italy, three periods came to mind: Ancient Rome, especially those crazy emperors; the Renaissance; and Mussolini. As it turns out, the history of the country-that-mostly-isn't-a-country is a wild ride that goes off in all kinds of directions. Its cities constantly take turns dominating the area. First it's Rome, obviously, but then it's Ravenna, next Venice, then Florence, and later Milan. For most of its history, "Italy" is a hodgepodge of small city-states, many of them running something approximating democracy, and all of them constantly being invaded (by Huns, Goths, Lombards, Normans, Napoleon, and each other), overtaken, decimated by disease, or otherwise in a state of flux. Even something as basic as the Italian language isn't properly fixed in place until the 1800s. After the country unifies in the 1860s, things don't exactly calm down. Whatever else you might say about Italy, boring it's not.

The book is very enjoyable to read: never oversimplifying, fast-paced and full of fun little anecdotes. The writer obviously knows his stuff and uses foreshadowing and back-referencing to stitch together the fragments of Italian history into something resembling a coherent narrative. As a quick introduction to the country and its history, this book is hard to beat.

Book review: "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" by Giorgio Bassani

 

Many attempts have been made to express the loss that the Holocaust caused, the huge gaping hole left across Europe by the millions of lives it claimed. This classic Italian novel is a melancholy, poetic portrayal of the Jewish community, leading up to its extinction, in the city of Ferrara. It's all the more heart-rending because it barely touches on the impending doom, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.

My edition of the book included an introduction that compared the book to Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," and like that novel, here, too, an unassuming narrator from a humble background finds himself mesmerized by an elite family, especially one of its members. And that's a fair comparison. But in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the inevitable, omitted final chapter looms over the book like a sword of Damocles. 

In the novel, the unnamed narrator, who presumably lives in the Jewish ghetto in the south of the city, befriends the Finzi-Continis, a well-to-do, intellectual family living in the richer, greener north. When Mussolini's oppressive antisemitic laws forbid Jews from playing at the local tennis club, the Finzi-Continis instead host tennis matches in their large garden. There isn't all that much of a plot here, but there doesn't need to be. The narrator's hopeless infatuation with the daughter of the family, Micol, feels like a metaphor for the hopeless situation the characters find themselves in --without realizing it.

It's rare to come across good writing, but this is it.

Book Review: "Ravenna - Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe" by Judith Herrin

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s, I always felt that there was a gap in the history of my country. What was going on after the Romans left and before the Middle Ages properly began? From roughly 400 to 1100, nothing much seemed to be going on in my country, nor indeed anywhere else in Western Europe. Charlemagne seemed to be the only noteworthy character from those days. And the Roman Empire? Well, it was gone after the barbarians destroyed Rome around the year 500. There was something called the East Roman Empire, which went on for about 1000 years longer, but my history teachers didn't really dwell on that.

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin explains the history of the two Roman empires, the one based in Rome and the one based in Constantinople, through the perspective of one Northern Italian city, Ravenna, that linked them together, but today doesn't even make it into the top 20 places to visit in Italy.

My history books was right in saying that, after the sacking of Rome (or rather sackings --there were several), its population was decimated --in the original sense of the word, from some 600,000 people to barely 60,000. Its political power was equally diminished: "Rome" no longer controlled present-day France, Italy, England or Germany. 

But the Roman Empire was far from gone. It continued to flourish, now as a Christian society with its headquarters in Constantinople (later Byzantium and eventually Istanbul). From there, the emperor called the shots and controlled a huge area, covering almost all land around the Mediterranean, from Andalusia to Syria. And Ravenna was the capital of the western half of the empire.

The various groups of barbarians who were fighting all over Europe in the 400s through 600s, the Huns, the Goths, the Lombards, may seem at first glance as the logical mortal enemies of this empire. But the Constantinopolitan emperors were not the decadent, Rome-burning fiddlers many of us are familiar with, and the barbarians were less barbaric than you might imagine. Sharing the Christian faith, the two  groups actually found common ground, and the symbol of this new convergence was King Theoderic (thee-OH-de-rick), whose long and wise rule over Ravenna and its territories cemented the city's importance for centuries to come. Theoderic is decidedly civilized, focused on good governance rather than on splitting skulls, and surprisingly tolerant --for example, he treats his Jewish subjects with much more respect than the rest of Europe does.

The book also makes clear how the early Middle Ages were defined by endless quibbles over what even present-day Christians might consider minor doctrinal details. The exact nature of the Holy Trinity, for example, was a topic of heated debate, and led to schisms between the Arian Christians (that's Arian, not Aryan) in the east and the Catholic Christians in the west. The city of Rome was pretty much an afterthought, and not at all the heart of Christianity that it would later become. Also, some eight or nine centuries before Calvinists in the north would destroy depictions of Jesus, Byzantium had its own iconoclasm, possibly under the influence of the Muslims, who were keeping the eastern part of the empire busy with their attacks, and opposed depictions of the Prophet pretty much from day one.

The happy side effect of these Muslim conquests was that the eastern emperor took his eye off the ball in the west, allowing Ravenna to keep its "graven images," allowing many of them to survive until today (although the mosaic of Theoderic would eventually be covered up). This is what makes Ravenna so special: it's one of the few places where early Christian art survives.

"Ravenna" is much more than a history of the city; it's a portrait of Europe and the Middle East in that fairly unknown period from roughly 300 to 700. The book is also well-written and especially well-structured: it's divided into parts, then chapters, then sections, the last of which never cover more than about 4-5 pages, making the information much more bite-sized than your average history books. Multiple inserts show the beautiful mosaics and buildings in Ravenna that managed to survive till the present day.

Book Review: "The Travels of Ibn Battutah" (abridged)

Here's a game: using your place of birth as the center, how far west, east, north and south have you traveled on this planet? For me, the westernmost point is San Francisco, northernmost is Luleå (Sweden), easternmost is Moscow, and southernmost is Marrakesh.

Now think of people living in the 1330s. Who, in those days, was the most well-traveled person in history? The vast majority were born, lived and died within spitting distance of their birthplace. Who didn't? Marco Polo? Alexander the Great? Maybe a Chinese merchant traveling the Silk Road?

All signs indicate that the person was Ibn Battutah, a qadi (judge) who left his home town of Tangier, Morocco in 1325 and didn't stop traveling until 1354. What begins as a pilgrimage to Mecca by way of the Horn of Africa soon becomes a true globe-trotting journey, taking in the pyramids in Gizeh, Constantinople, the Arabian peninsula, and Central Asia, and then on to India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and further still, to Bangladesh, the islands of Sumatra and Java in Indonesia, and finally the east coast of China (then ruled by a descendant of Genghis Khan). But that's not all: after returning home, he goes on to visit Andalusia in Spain and travels all the way down to Timbuktu in Mali, where he meets Mansa Sulaiman, the brother of Mansa Musa, arguably the richest man who ever lived. (Of course, most of these places have different names in Ibn Battutah's day.)

Virtually everywhere he goes, there is a Muslim presence of some kind, and vast swaths of the ground he covers are ruled by Muslims. He generally gets a warm welcome by the local rulers, who are keen to hear his stories about distant lands, and receives enough horses, camels and slaves to make it to his next destination. And, miraculously, he survives everything, being none the worse for wear, escaping even the Black Death that is ravaging Europe when he's there.

Once home, he sits down and turns his experience into a manuscript that's 1000 pages long. The entire thing was translated in English in the 1950s, and a scan of all four volumes is online for free at the Internet Archive. (I've read only a 300-page abridged version.)

The story sounds almost too good to be true, and you'd have good reason to be skeptical: in Europe, one Sir John Mandeville, around the same time, wrote a travelogue filled with fantastical monsters, men with dog heads and cotton plants that grow sheep, and the Europeans eagerly ate up the baloney. 

But this is in sharp contrast with Ibn Battutah, who not only describes his itinerary so meticulously that there is a Google Map of his voyages, there's also a mere handful of cases where his claims cannot be corroborated by 21st-century scholars. He write cautiously, and his caution is understandable: his claims are scrutinized and criticized by scholars when he returns, even when he tells things that are verifiably true, say, that rulers in India throw handfuls of dirhams on the ground for their subjects to scramble over. He explains what hippos are, what a coconut is and how pepper is grown and dried.

Equally surprising, compared to the highly dramatic style of European books of the time, is his non-judgmental, objective and detached style: only very rarely does he express any kind of emotional reaction to people and customs that to him must have seemed perfectly alien. He reports his experiences with a neutrality that could make a present-day cultural anthropologist jealous.

In other words, the book is a contemporary portrait of the world in the Middle Ages (except for the Americas, of course) that is without equal. Maybe I'll eventually sink my teeth into the full, 1000-page version, but for now, I'll cherish the abridged and heavily annotated version.