Timbuktu's Buried Treasure

by Marcela ValdesBook Notes. The Washington Post Book World. October 8, 2006.

Anyone who cares about rare books would have been horrified by the damage. Page after page of the 16th- to 18th-century Malian manuscripts that Abdel Kader Haidara brought to the Library of Congress this past April was shot through with watermarks and insect holes. One sheet of a scientific manuscript titled "Knowledge of the Movement of the Stars and What it Portends in Every Year" was almost entirely washed out -- only a few words remained legible.

Then again, it was something of a miracle that the nine manuscripts still existed at all. After carefully preserving them for centuries, Haidara's family had hidden them underground for more than 60 years.

As Haidara explained through e-mail, the manuscripts were buried by his grandparents and great-grandparents during the French colonial rule of Mali. During that time, he says, "all African intellectuals hid their manuscripts." The reason was simple: Colonialists were deporting thousands of the precious volumes to Europe. "The ancient manuscripts of the El Hadj Oumar Tall Library are still in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris," Haidara writes. "They are still there. And there are others in various European capitals."

To prevent such theft, 19th-century Malians stashed their treasures away. Some sent their collections into the Sahara. Others built false fronts over the entrances to their libraries. And some, like the Haidara family, dug deep pits and buried their manuscripts in metal trunks.

And there they stayed until 1960, when Mali won back its independence.

"The original assumption [among Western scholars] had been that Africa did not have a written tradition," says Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern division of the Library of Congress. "When in fact it did."

Manuscripts have now emerged not only in Mali, but also in Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana. Most of them are written by hand in Arabic because, in Africa, written traditions usually spread along with Islam. As a result, literacy was more common in Mali in the 14th-century than it was in Europe. And books appeared on every conceivable topic, including theology, astronomy, travel, law, economics and medicine.

Haidara's own family has been producing scholars, and acquiring manuscripts, for more than 400 years. Their private library, Mamma Haidara, which is named after Abdel Kader's father, is one of the largest libraries in Timbuktu. It contains more than 9,000 items. The oldest among them is a 10th-century manuscript on Islamic law written on parchment -- Haidara keeps it at home, and it has yet to be officially catalogued.

More than 80 percent of Mali's hidden manuscripts have now been unearthed, but the process of recovery has been slow, and thousands of manuscripts still have yet to be indexed or catalogued. Having lost so many of their volumes to Europe, for a long time after the country gained independence in 1960, Malian collectors felt wary of accepting foreign aid for manuscript recovery and conservation efforts. "Abdel Kader Haidara is in a way leading this movement of saying, 'Look, we shouldn't fear people. We should work with others. They can help us,' " Deeb says.

In fact, Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré has designated Haidara as the world spokesperson for Mali's manuscript treasures. And with help from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, UNESCO and other aid organizations, Haidara is working to renovate Mali's libraries, to catalog their holdings and to train their owners in up-to-date conservation techniques. "Our project is to save all these manuscripts," Haidara writes. Foreign aid for that project is crucial because Mali is one of the 10 poorest nations in the world.

When Haidara allowed the Library of Congress to digitize the 22 manuscripts he brought to Washington in 2003 and to post them on its World Digital Library (at www.loc.gov/exhibits/mali), and when he lent them nine more manuscripts for scanning in April, he worked toward another important goal: making the world aware of Mali's precious holdings.

"He's enormously generous," Deeb says. "Many librarians and institutions that hold rare manuscripts are wary of the new technology: of scanning, digitizing and putting their materials on the web. They're afraid they will lose control of them." But Haidara has understood that by having the manuscripts of Timbuktu digitized, they will be publicly linked to their rightful owners -- which may help prevent them from ever being stolen again.

Instant Bestseller, American Style

by Marcela ValdesBook Notes. The Washington Post Book World. August 20, 2006

Once known as "vanity publishing," self-publishing is still widely sneered at by book industry professionals. No wonder, since most self-published books begin their lives on the reject piles of New York publishing houses. Many bookstores still refuse to carry them, but the Web has given little-known authors an unprecedented boost.

Recently I dialed into a phone seminar that teaches self-published authors how to take advantage of some of these new methods. It was called "How to Make Your Book an Amazon.com Bestseller and Sell Tons of Copies -- Even If You're a Marketing Novice," and listening to it felt like watching an infomercial. Everything was pre-recorded. Periodically, the speakers erupted into tinny laughter.

Randy Gilbert, who spent 22 years in the Coast Guard before retiring because he "really wanted to help the industry become proactive," told me (and uncountable others) how his self-published book Success Bound: Breaking Free of Mediocrity rose from Amazon.com Sales Rank #65,000 all the way to #5.

On Sept. 18, 2002, Gilbert had about 12 people e-mail an "endorsed announcement" of his book to approximately 150,000 potential buyers. The announcement included incentives to get people to buy the book within 24 hours.

Gilbert's technique worked because most online bestseller lists measure the rate of sale, not the total number of books sold. Thus, a concentrated sales bump can land a book on the lists for a few hours or a couple of days, especially if buyers purchase books during the dead of the night.

"It used to be very predictable which books would rise into our Top 100 or break into the Top 10," Amazon.com's PR Manager Sean Sundwall says. "They were the books backed by big publishers with big publicity budgets. While those still make up the majority of our Top 100 titles, we are seeing more grassroots marketing efforts that result in much higher rankings than one might expect."

According to Gilbert's partner, Peggy McColl, the e-mail campaign for E. Dee Merriken's self-published novel Dream Season caused so much consternation at BarnesandNoble.com that the president of the company called the author to ask what was causing the unknown book's rise to #15.

The great enemy of Internet marketeers is spam filters. And for $3,095, Gilbert and McColl will gladly teach you how to use "fr.ee" instead of "free" and other such filter-dodging tricks. For another small fee, they'll probably send out an "endorsed announcement" of your book, too.

"We can only work with a small fraction of the authors that are on this call," Peggy's pre-recorded voice said. But so far, I've received six follow-up e-mails telling me there's still room for another desperate author.

Successful Web campaigns all depend on either amassing a huge number of valid e-mail addresses or driving a huge number of visitors to a site. In this ability to network, big publishers and booksellers may still have the advantage over self-published authors.

Powells.com, for example, sends out its biweekly newsletter to 320,000 people. After it goes out, the retailer sees "a spike," says Promotions Coordinator Georgie Lewis, "particularly with books we have a signed first edition of." That sounds like a strategic bonus to me, and with an audience that size it's no surprise that almost all the books on Powells.com's top 10 list are connected to its promotions.

The site's bestseller list is also unusual because it figures in sales from the previous 144 hours, not just the last 24, though sales from the last 12 hours are weighted most heavily.

"If something does have a surge during the day, we want to reflect that," Darin Sennett, Director of Powells.com's Web Stuff, says. "But at the same time we want to show what has staying power."

Staying power may be the one thing Randy Gilbert can't guarantee. He'll have the words "bestselling author" on his bio for the rest of his life, but, as I write, the current Amazon.com Sales Rank of Success Bound is #1,372,974.

Too Hood or All Good?

by Marcela ValdesThe Washington Post Book World. June 18, 2006.

The African American Book Industry Professionals Conference took place on a Thursday this year, while most of the Washington Convention Center still hummed with preparations for Book Expo America. For many attendees, the real excitement began when Nick Chiles convened a panel called "Too Hood or All Good?: The Impact of Urban Fiction on African American Literature" in a large, windowless room.

There was the expectation of a fight.

Urban fiction -- also known as hip-hop fiction, ghetto fiction, and street lit -- is a big deal in African American bookstores these days, with good reason. It's helping many of them survive. Bernard Henderson of Alexander Books in San Francisco estimates that 50 percent of his store's sales came from street lit last year. That's about $600,000.

"At one point it was all about romance: the Terry McMillan, the Eric Jerome Dickey, the E. Lynn Harris stories," Henderson explains. Now the big sellers are Vickie Stringer, Nikki Turner, and Noire. Their books are love stories, too, but gritty, violent ones that often involve dealers, junkies and ho's.

Chiles isn't pleased by the change. In January, the author threw down his glove, declaring in a New York Times op-ed piece that urban fiction's "lurid book jackets" turn African American literature sections into "a pornography shop," and that "the sexualization and degradation of black fiction" left him "thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted." Industry professionals should stem the rise of these books, Chiles argued, before they crowd out literary volumes by authors such as Benilde Little and Edward P. Jones.

Most of the audience wasn't having it. "I'm an abandoned child," bestselling author Treasure E. Blue proclaimed during the Q&A portion. "I've seen horrors through these eyes that I still can't get out of my head. Things that happened to me as well as my sister.

"Things they done to me as well as I done to them. But this is my story. You cannot fault a person for telling these stories."

"Some of these people who sell a hundred thousand copies allow me to publish the other, award-winning writers," said Atria book editor Malaika Adero. She also acknowledged that it's difficult to find placement for the full range of her titles in stores.

But the loudest applause came when singer-songwriter Kia Jeffries took the floor. "I'm middle class; I'm from Queens; both my parents are college educated," she announced. "But I got a Kwame in my family that's been locked up ten times. You're gonna have an Oprah in the family and you're gonna have a Kwame in that family, too."

"But do you want to read about Kwame?" Chiles asked her.

"Sure, I want to read about Kwame, because sometimes I'm like, 'Damn, Kwame, why you keep getting locked up?' "

"Instead of us trying to push Kwame to the back closet and not deal with Kwame," she said, "you have to deal with Kwame."

"Du Bois attacked ragtime and the cakewalk in the same way we now talk about rap and booty-shaking videos," Chiles observed early in the session. And as long as people care about culture, the argument isn't going away.

Yukio Mishima and the Dream of the Holy Explosion

by Marcela ValdesThe Believer. February 2004.

DISCUSSED: The Shield Society Incident, Japanese Soft Porn, Guido Reni, Essays in Idleness, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, The Japanese Bureau of Fisheries, Eleventh-Century Genji Romances, Draft Dodging, Literary War Criminals, The Japan Romantic School, Post-Iron-Pumping Parties, “Yoko’s Story,” The February Rebellion, Emperor Hirohito, The “Werther Effect,” The Arab “Culture of Death,” The “Martyr of the Month” Calendar

I.

Early in the afternoon of November 25, 1970, a forty-five-year-old writer named Yukio Mishima committed suicide in front of an audience of 800 members of the Japanese Army Self-Defense Force. That morning, Mishima had led four university students into the office of the Army’s commander, General Masuda, and these students had gagged the general, roped him to a chair, and barricaded all the entrances to his office. Using Masuda’s life as leverage, the group demanded that the entire Eastern Division of the Army, as well as all the members of their own militia (the Shield Society), be assembled in a plaza below the office’s balcony. When the SDF soldiers arrived, Mishima urged them to overthrow the current Japanese government, which, he said, had defiled Japan’s history by signing a postwar constitution that deprived the Emperor of a real fighting army. “Grinding our teeth we had to watch Japanese profaning Japan’s history and traditions,” he told them. “Rise with us and, for righteousness and honor, die with us. We will restore Japan to her true form, and in the restoration, die…”

When his speech ended, Mishima stepped back into the office, removed the jacket of his uniform, plunged a sword into the left side of his abdomen, cut open his stomach, and gave the signal for his followers to decapitate him. It took three blows to separate the head from the body. Once it was done, one of the students, Masakatsu Morita, sat down next to Mishima’s corpse and repeated his actions: again the belly-cutting, again the decapitation. Mishima had ordered the other three students to remain alive. They set the two severed heads on the floor, bowed to them, untied their hostage, and began to weep. “Cry it all out,” Masuda urged them, as if they were small children waking up, alone and frightened, from the darkness of a nightmare.

Dramatic, violent, public, the Shield Society Incident would have captured headlines no matter who its perpetrators were. In fact, Yukio Mishima (né Kimitake Hiraoka) was already known internationally not only as a novelist and playwright, but also as a provocateur, a homosexual, a narcissistic bodybuilder, a boastful masochist, and a friend of the West. His very presence, it has been said, “transmitted a palpable energy of brilliance and wit and even playfulness.” By the time he sliced open his stomach, he had completed forty novels, twenty volumes of short stories, eighteen plays, and hundreds of essays. Fifteen of his novels were made into movies. All of his plays were staged. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. Yet, in the suicide note he left behind for his family, Mishima instructed his father not to commemorate any of these accomplishments after his death. “I have thrown the pen away,” he wrote. “Since I die not as a literary man but entirely as a military man I would like the character for sword—bu—to be included in my [posthumous] Buddhist name. The character for pen—bun—need not appear.”

Find the rest of this essay at The Believer.