Fensch Man Who Changed His Skin

The Life and Work of John Howard Griffin
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9907181-1-6
Verlag: New Century Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

This is the first full-length biography of John Howard Griffin, who became blind during World War Two. 10 years later his sight suddenly came back--no one knows why. And then he dyed his skin black and wrote the American classic, 'Black Like Me.' An engaging biography of a fascinating life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fensch, Thomas

Leseproben

Two | The South Pacific Nuni World War Two The Solomon Islands and Morotai GRIFFIN FLED THE Gestapo, fled France, to England to Ireland and then to the United States. In 1941, he enlisted in the Army Air Force, at the time when the Army and the Air Force were not yet separate. After basic training, he was sent to the South Pacific as an intelligence officer/language expert. Griffin spent 1943 living in a native village on a remote island in the Solomon chain, assigned to study the indigenous culture, translate the dialect of the inhabitants, and gather strategic information on Japanese positions from the native allies. At first he viewed them as “primitives”—as Other. But after he was unable to navigate jungle trails without a five-year old boy to guide him, it became obvious “that within the context of that culture, I was clearly the inferior—as an adult man who could not have survived without the guidance of a child,” he admitted, Robert Bonazzi wrote in the Introduction to Scattered Shadows. Griffin was able to chart the language of this tribe phonetically. The analysis of this dialect would place him in the Florida or Nggela islands, just north of Guadalcanal. His chart still exists: the following was marked in pen –ORIGINAL– in the top right corner of the first page. This is part of his translations of the oral dialect: VIA NAMBETI QUEENO (VIA NAM-BETI QUEE-NO) I WANT A DRINK. ELEONGUNA (’LÈON-GU-NA NAEEN) I WANT A DRINK. ALOGO BETI VIM (‘LOGO BETI VI?M) DO YOU HAVE WATER IN THE HOUSE? MAI QUEENU (MY QOO-EE-NOO) GIVE ME WATER.       INAU VITE (EENA-OO VITAY) I AM HUNGRY. I NAU VANGATI (VA-NGA-TI) I AM EATING. IGANI CORNI (I-GAN-I COR-NI) I EAT CORNI (CORN). I EAT CORNI (CORN). I SHOULD LIKE SOME CORN. While living with Pacific islanders, Griffin developed a friendship with John Vutha, Grand Chief of the Solomons, who was a staunch alley of the Americans in battling against Japan’s occupation. Vutha provided crucial information by tracking enemy movements and, when he had been captured and tortured by the Japanese, he refused to divulge allied positions. After 22 bayonet wounds, they left him for dead, hanging from a tree as an example. “There is little doubt that if he had given in and spoken,” Griffin writes, “the American victory at Guadalcanal would have been much slower in coming. Countless lives would certainly have been lost that were saved by his silence.” For his heroism, Vutha received the highest awards accorded by the British and American governments. … Griffin biographer Robert Bonazzi later wrote. Grand Chief Vutha united all the Solomon Islands tribes before the Japanese invasion. Griffin not only knew Vutha, but also “married” a native South Pacific island tribal woman, in a ceremony traditional to the Solomon Islands. When Griffin began studying to become a convert to Catholicism, he told his spiritual advisor, Father Langenhorst, who decided that the marriage would not be considered “binding” in the Catholic church. Griffin did not mention this Solomon Island ceremony in any of his writings; Bonazzi only heard about it years later, from Griffin’s wife Elizabeth. His experiences on the island led to his second novel, Nuni, eventually published in 1956. Griffin translates Nuni as World. He had a “next work” clause in his contract with Smiths, Inc., obligating him to offer that publishing firm his next project after The Devil Rides Outside. But on the strength of his Book of the Month Club success with The Devil Rides Outside, he was able to move to the mainstream publisher Houghton Mifflin. Smiths had become inactive as a publisher by the time Nuni was ready. The main title page reads: “Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, in association with Smiths Inc., Dallas, Texas.” The Devil Rides Outside and Nuni share three characteristics: both are first-person narratives. The narrator is never given a name in The Devil Rides Outside; in Nuni his name is mentioned only twice—John Harper, literature professor. Both have musical motifs as foundation: Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 131 in The Devil Rides Outside; the antiphonal structure form of the Gregorian Chant in Nuni and both have anecdotes showing Griffin’s passion with medicine. Robert Bonazzi writes that “while the first novel builds a bridge towards a religious conversion, the second maps paths of physical pain, emotional loss and spiritual crisis—Harper’s and Griffin’s.” Nuni is a modern Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel of a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela. Griffin’s John Harper is the sole survivor of an airliner disaster; he washes up on the shore of an un-named island and barely survives his ordeal. Eventually he meets a native tribe, begins to communicate by drawing symbols with a stick in the sand and eventually learns their language. “John Harper is symbolic of modernity-as-useless to one stripped of civilized trappings,” Bonazzi writes. Harper eventually meet a prepubescent native girl: “Do you want a name?” I tease, feeling authority and liberation return to my stunted bloods. Her eyes open in blank surprise and her head starts forward in a movement of expectancy. “Since you are no bigger than a finger, I name you Ririkinger.” Her hand flies up to my chest. I sense its faint weight through the thick mat of my beard. “’Kinger?” she whispers. “You,” I say solemnly, “are not N’gari kikiki daoka. You are Ririkinger.” “’Kinger! ’Kinger! ’Kinger,” she laughs. The ger syllable in Ririkinger seems oddly jarring as it is not even remotely close to the rest of the native dialogue in Nuni. The native world of John Harper’s tropical island is full of hearing, smelling, tasting and touching sensations. Eventually Harper discovers that Ririkinger must undergo a coming-of-age face-marking ritual, so horrific it might kill her. He steals her away and inadvertently kills an ancient crone, the village matriarch, in the progress. Harper and Ririkinger escape. Griffin’s Gregorian chant motif appears toward the end of the novel, as a series of stream-of-conscience passages, variations on a single theme: Standing alone at the edge of the compound, looking at these sodden huts, a phrase haunts my brain in repeated chantings: driven along paths not of their own choosing What are they?—these beings that surround me with their sleeping. How is it they seem so dead and yet so move my affections, bound up as they are in the paraphernalia of snoring and flesh and hungers and salivas and hairs? driven along paths not of their own choosing Affection excites my heat with answers that cannot be formulated by the brain, truths from some far memory of the soul; intimate truths forever strangers to the intellect, truths stemming from: driven along paths not of their own choosing Griffin uses that phrase 19 times in 12 pages. Readers might anticipate a resolution toward the end of the novel; a glint of metal in the sky, a seaplane gliding to a stop, a lone figure striding onto shore, like MacArthur returning to the Philippines or a lone figure crashing through the jungle with machete in hand and a hearty—“We finally found you …” There is no such denouement; no such resolution. John Harper has saved Ririkinger from the face-marking ritual; but he has also lost much of his memory of civilization and of time. He no longer knows whether a specific day is Thursday or Sunday, although he writes those words in the sand. There is virtually no hint that he might ever return to civilization. After Griffin’s success with The Devil Rides Outside, Nuni was also judged exceptional, and he was compared (by more than one critic) to William Faulkner. In 1956, an evaluation of Griffin’s career by Lon Tinkle, appeared in The Dallas Morning News. Tinkle had a very lengthy career as critic. His essay/review is worth reprinting in full: ‘Nuni’: Faith Beneath the Form The keyboard of John Howard Griffin’s talents and soul has a range and depth not common in Texas writing. More than a lyric cry or a nostalgic recall or a tribal legend, his work has the rich texture and diversity of a symphony. His first novel, “The Devil Rides Outside,” was a shattering experience. Internationally acclaimed for its originally and vitality, the novel presented powerfully Griffin’s own spiritual evolution, from a simple delight in the flesh to a religious respect for man’s infinite complexity. His novel dramatized the conflict between...