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Salman Rushdie is often best known for his novel The Satanic Verses: A Novel.
Akbar the Great, whose realm stretches from Kabul to Bengal, is as mad and melancholy as Hamlet; despite his many wives, he lusts after a queen he dreamed up ”in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends.” Then a Florentine magic man calling himself Niccolò Vespucci arrives in Akbar’s court with a yarn about a common relative: a sorceress descended from Genghis Khan, a good witch at the center of a great fable. Qara Koz, a beautiful mysterious princess who bridges both Asian and European worlds with her powers of enchantment and sorcery becomes war booty.
Read more about Salman Rushdies book The Enchantress of Florence here.
There are an estimated 370 million indigenous peoples living in more than 70 countries worldwide. They represent a rich diversity of cultures, religions, traditions, languages and histories; yet continue to be among the world’s most marginalized population groups. The health status of indigenous peoples varies significantly from that of non-indigenous population groups in countries all over the world.
An official definition of “indigenous” has not been adopted by the UN system due to the diversity of the world’s indigenous peoples. Instead, a modern and inclusive understanding of “indigenous” has been developed and includes peoples who:
- Identify themselves and are recognized and accepted by their community as indigenous.
- Demonstrate historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies.
- Have strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources.
- Have distinct social, economic or political systems.
- Maintain distinct languages, cultures and beliefs.
- Form non-dominant groups of society.
- Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.
In some regions, there may be a preference to use other terms such as tribes, first peoples/nations, aboriginals, ethnic groups, adivasi and janajati. All such terms fall within this modern understanding of “indigenous”.1
Read more about indigenous people’s health and the World Health Organization here.
Recently I had to move. Packing up boxes and boxes of books is not my favorite thing, but unpacking boxes of books is quite enjoyable. You get to see old books that you read summers ago, reminiscing on what you thought of the story, the characters, what you were doing when you read the book, etc. In the process of unpacking my books, I stumbled upon one that I had read earlier this summer but had never gotten around to reviewing. Looking over The Power of the Dark Goddess and Other Stories,
Continuing to flip through the book some more, I ran across the original letter author George J. Bryjak had sent with the book. In it he referenced the story “Sunday Morning” and how it might be of particular interest to me.
Well, the story Sunday Morning happened to be one of the pages I had dog-eared. I began re-reading the story as it was short, only five pages with a nice black and white line drawing included. Telling the story of an indigenous religious man who has an awakening of sorts, the story struck me for its clarity of prose and ability to incite the imagination. My mind continued to wonder after the story was well over: did the rains come once the traditional gods were worshiped again; what happened to the small dusty Church where Father Ibarra had his realization; is this story not a metaphor for some of my own awakenings as I am continually drawn towards traditional beliefs and practices of my ancestors?
Read more about the Power of the Dark Goddess and magical realism here.
