“Once upon a time, the marabouts of Chinguetti began to collect books,” we are told in the opening essay of Anna Badkhen’s most recent collection, Bright Unbearable Reality. Marabouts are Muslim holy men, and Chinguetti is a city in Saharan Mauritania that is home to some of the world’s oldest libraries. Scholar-wanderers traveled abroad and returned with manuscripts; visiting scholars and other pilgrims performing the hajj brought their books to town which became home to twelve libraries holding thousands of volumes, many copied and illustrated by hand. Badkhen speaks with the librarian of the Bibliotheque al Habott, a man five generations removed from the founding librarian, who tells her that the library abides by two rules: “that it be maintained by one of the marabout’s male descendants, lest it shift patrimony; and that the books in its collection never leave Chinguetti, lest knowledge seep from the town.”
This information, delivered with this fairy tale opening, touched the tenderest part of my librarian’s heart, but then I read on. In Badkhen’s work, you always read on, and the news is never good:
“But the manuscripts are disappearing in place” due to mice, termites, mold, and simple disintegration. “The cartilage of history is precious and perishable: tens of millions of family chronicles of tens of millions of people lost in transit or in the slave trade, lost in translation or untranslatable, abridged out of fear or neglect or unsuitability, so that we are displaced not merely in place but also in time, our ancestral narratives mislaid or missing or hiding from our sight.”
A year later, Badkhen returns, this time in Ethiopia on a mission to study the the origins of humanity, the movement of human population, the ancient Eden. “Imagine,” she writes, “all of humankind, past and present and future – Shakespeare, my child, the baker on the corner, Nelson Mandela, our parents, Hitler – comes from this frassy boneyard.” Producing a meditation on this erstwhile Eden may have been the plan when she was arranging the trip. A war journalist since the 1990s, Badkhen has covered plenty of conflict, peril, and horror. She has received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Joel R. Seldin Award for Excellence in Peace and Justice Journalism, and a Guggenheim. She was born in the Soviet Union to an extended family of foreign language professors (which explains but does not diminish her astonishing fluency in the texts of so many cultures) and currently lives in Philadelphia. She is the author of six prior books, three about Afghanistan, all about community.
So if she wanted to spend some time pondering the bone fragments of our most famous known human ancestor, the 3.2 million year-old fossil dubbed “Lucy” by the white American who headed the dig that found and named her after a Beatles song, but known locally as Dinknesh, which means “you are marvelous” in Amharic, who would begrudge her that? Not one person, but the pandemic, did. The very day Badkhen landed in Ethiopia, the country confirmed its first case of Covid-19. Stripped of this meticulously planned adventure to the past, Badkhen is brought up short by “our whole future, suddenly so unscripted and fearful.”
In addition to the scourge of the pandemic, the essays explore the great displacement caused by climate change and its subsequent famine, so that by the summer of 2020, nearly three million migrants were stranded at implacable borders, or in concentration camps, or hoping to reach the shelter of one.
In the title, and most brilliant essay, “Bright Unbearable Reality,” Badkhen explores the concept of mass migration, viewed from above by aerial photography, by going back to “the first Westerner known to portray human suffering from above,” the Flemish Renaissance painter Patinir, followed closely by Brueghel, who depicted the Holy Family as a small trio in a throng of other refugees in his painting Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. Brueghel, Badkhen points out, was a migrant himself, as was Patinir, as is the author herself. She tells us that the word “migrants” was originally a term used to describe animals changing location, and in captions provided with the aerial photography of migrant movement, of masses leaving Guatemala for Mexico, or hundreds crowded onto a boat attempting to cross the Mediterranean, the people photographed are often described as “herds” (and that a certain former president felt free to call them “animals.”)
“I begin to think,” she writes, “that an aerial photograph exposes the human condition twice: first by depicting the scope of the tragedy we have at best allowed and at worst caused – and then by confronting us with the distance from which we have chosen to view it.”
Badkhen confronts nothing from a distance; she digs to the root of everything, the etymology of the word “map,” the gradations of hunger indicated in the five-phase scale relief agencies use to rank food emergencies into categories, like hurricanes (1 is “minimal,” 5 is “famine”), and the specificities of colonial greed that have produced these dire results. In the essay “Forgiving the Unforgivable,” she traces the many displacements, arrests, and ill-fated wives of the warrior chief Geronimo, whose grave she visits in a prisoner of war cemetery at an Oklahoma army base. There, she doesn’t dig down to bones, but she does allow herself to gather soil from the grave into a plastic bag which she then delivers to his Apache descendants in Mexico who are holding a Ceremony of Forgiveness.
“What does it mean to look past the mirror, to choose to see something truly other than what has become comfortable?” she asks in another essay. “To make a deliberate effort to see the world in a grain of sand, to summon the level of curiosity required to supersede the confines of our prejudice and fear?”
Each one of these eleven essays is an example of her deliberate effort. Look at this community, these people. Here is their poetry, their history, their art, their myths, which persist, despite their decaying libraries. The literary references in this book would fill their own library. For all its harsh truth, its bright unbearable reality, the voice here is calm, kind, deeply informed and even, sometimes, forgiving.
[Published by New York Review Books on October 18, 2022, 187 pages, $17.95 paperback]