The Babushkas of Chernobyl - Film Review

On April 26, 1986, one of the reactors in the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded and caught fire. At the time, it was the world's worst nuclear accident (though in March of 2011 it was superceded by the earthquake and tsunami damage to the Fukushima reactor, a slow-motion catastrophe still in the making).  The area around the reactor was evacuated and closed, declared an Exclusion Zone. Within a 10 km radius, radiation levels are extremely high. Within the 30 km zone, levels are still toxic, but that zone is not depopulated.

The documentary The Babushkas of Chernobyl, directed by Anne Bogart and Holly Morris and released in 2015, explores that world.

Three groups of people spend time in the Exclusion Zone:
1. Scientists tracking radiation hot-spots and effects (new hot-spots keep showing up, since the radiation doesn't stay in one place), sampling soil, water, plants and animals. They are rotated out of the zone every 15 days to forestall toxic buildup of radiation in their tissues.
2. A group of enthusiasts of a post-apocalyptic video game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R., whose mecca is the 10 km zone. They seek the abandoned city Pripyat, quite near the reactor, to get there climbing barbed-wire fences and sneaking through the forest, their dream being to tramp through the deserted buildings of a once-thriving city - essentially playing high-risk hide-and-seek. On camera we watch young men fill bottles from the river and drink it, though the water doesn't look potable even if it weren't radioactive. They don't stay long. Police patrols arrest and remove them - when they can catch them.
3. The babushkas. In Russian, the word (pronounced BOB-ush-kuh; the pronunciation buh-BOOSH-kuh refers to a style of colorful kerchief worn by these women) babushka means grandmother, but more than that, it refers to the tough peasant women of a generation not much longer for this world, survivors of what they call the "famine of Stalin" and World War II.  In the aftermath of the explosion they were evacuated, but they longed to return to their motherland, the villages where they spent their lives. And because they were old (ages range from 70s to 90s and even older), there seemed no harm in letting them come back - the ailments of age would likely kill them before radiation did.

They live mostly alone, with chickens and pigs, planting, harvesting, distilling their own moonshine, and foraging for sustenance. In the Exclusion Zone there are no stores (no nightclubs, as one babushka laughs), only the labs. They're on their own. But the forest is beautiful, wild and lush, abundant with game and plant-life.  There are about 130 of these old women. They cheerfully share their raspberry jam, their potatoes and mushroom soup with visitors - it would be rude not to partake. Our young tour guide says she eats as little as possible then gets out of there. We watch one babushka lovingly add new soil to the planter box over the grave of her grandson, then plant flowers in it. Who will tend her grave?

When conditions are dry and the wind picks up, radioactive dust blows around - this is the most dangerous time to be in the zone. After rains, when the air is humid, it's a little safer. Groups of scientists visit the babushki, taking samples of their garden soil, their water, the buckets of mushrooms they've harvested for soup, eggs from their chickens, berries and tomatoes. The Geiger counters are clicking away, the levels far above anything considered safe. The babushki are, however, thriving: cheerful, independent, hard-working. They laugh about the crows that will maraud for eggs if they leave the coop open, or the wild boars that root in the garden eating potatoes. An almost toothless babushka demonstrates how banging on a pail eventually scares the wild boar away - after he's eaten his fill. But clearly she doesn't mind sharing her harvest. Another remarks that if she had stayed in Kiev, where she was evacuated, she'd be dead by now, what with the polluted air and the traffic and noise. The forest is her home. She impales mushroom caps on a tree at different levels: near the ground for the hedgehogs, at thigh level for the wild boars, and at eye level for the moose. She uses the diminutive form for each of these animals - they might as well be her children, the way she looks after them.

Our tour guide brings us near the damaged reactor, pointing out the porosity of the concrete sarcophagus originally built to entomb it. She shows us the new cover under construction, a giant arch of concrete which will be rolled into place, to seal in the radiation - for a hundred years. She seems very pleased with this new structure. It's worth remembering that the half-life of uranium-238 is something like 4,468,300,000 years (source: Wikipedia: Isotopes of Uranium).  We can't even imagine how long that is.

Those who tout nuclear power as "clean energy" conveniently ignore not only this timeline but the accidents which have already occurred.  It's time to admit humans have not even begun to grasp the task of coping with toxins so long-lasting, and that we have no way of either cleaning up, storing, nor containing such material until geologic-scale time finally renders it harmless.

Too Far Afield, by Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass's 1995 novel Too Far Afield is set in East Berlin during the time leading up to, during, and immediately following the breaching of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.  His primary character, Theo Wuttke, known as Fonty, is an aging scholar/ file courier in the Reich Aviation Ministries building, whose labors under the East German government have earned him a permanent shadow, a man named Hoftaller.  Unlike the spies familiar to us from stories and movies, Fonty and Hoftaller have many conversations, spend a lot of time together, and work together - except when Hoftaller plays his government-agent card to prevent Fonty from going "too far afield" - speaking bluntly about political affairs, pursuing his friendship with a Jewish professor, leaving Germany, and so on.

Fonty's life study is of the writer Theodor Fontane, a man born exactly a century before him, and whose life events he parallels, consciously and unconsciously, throughout his own.  Fontane, referred to as The Immortal, becomes, through Fonty's scholarship and life-mimicry, indeed a timeless figure.  Working under censorship constraints, Fonty uses lectures about The Immortal to cast light on current events, a secret language well understood by his audience.

The novel has two central metaphors. First is the paternoster, a continually moving loop elevator whose open-front compartments one simply steps into to board, and out of to leave, on any floor.  No doors, no buttons, no pausing to move cumbersome objects on or off.  And no record, visible from other floors or by any engine-room observer, of one's travels.  Thus, a person who has occasion to visit many parts of a building, such as file courier Fonty, can choose his compartment companion, or avoid one, and make his journeys, observing activity on every floor he passes, all unobtrusively.  He and Hoftaller take many long rides together, and when tasked with writing a history of the building, he describes the appearance, feet first or hat first, of various high-level officials as they ride the conveyance.  Having worked in the Ministries Building under first the Reich, then the Workers and Peasants State, and finally in its incarnation as the Handover Trust, Fonty is as much a piece of its history as the paternoster itself.  Grass uses the elevator's circularity as one more confirmation of the cyclical nature of life - especially Fonty's.

His other metaphor is the diving duck. Fonty loves to spend time in the Tiergarten, watching the ducks paddle along, vanish suddenly beneath the surface, then pop up - where?  He envies them, because he would disappear if he could - indeed, he tries.  But he is also a diving duck, veiling his own views in his talks and articles about The Immortal, as though the present time were some lake surface he can dive beneath, traveling in concealment till he emerges to make his point.  And thus, though the government distrusts him, he is able to express himself with comparative freedom.

The plot, modest as it is, does not distract from the central observations of unification's impact particularly on East Germans: having grown poorer than their Western counterparts, they are underdogs when the private property confiscated by the East German state comes up for sale, and is promptly snatched up by West Germans with money.  The richly ironic title of the Handover Trust perfectly encapsulates this imbalance - the handover is essentially a handout to West German businesspeople, and trust is nonexistent.

Grass beautifully weaves the centuries together, showing that experience is recurrence, and that knowing the past is not only instructive but essential to knowing who we are as individuals, as nations, as humans.

Triplets of Belleville

What a visual tour-de-force is The Triplets of Belleville! This animated film by Sylvain Chomet
about the triumph of the downtrodden is musical, thriller, and whimsy all in one. It was nominated for the 2003 Academy Award for Animated Feature, but since then I hadn't seen it around. Browsing on the library's video shelves - our preferred source for at-home movies - I spotted this, remembered, and checked it out.

The primary characters are a small old woman; her bicyclist son (grandson?) - leg-muscle-bound, but gaunt elsewhere on his frame; their dog Bruno, a large weary belly-dragging pooch; and the Triplets. We first see them as young women in the Twenties, playing theaters, singing and swaying to jazz-inflected melody. Next time we see them they're entertaining on a small-venue stage with a couple of short stools and a refrigerator for accompaniment. They sing around a small fire in the evening, joined by other penniless folk washed up on the tide. Still shaking their hips and tossing out harmonies - the spirit that makes them dance shows no ill-effects per their reduced circumstances. Finally they are crones, as Macbeth's Weird Sisters were triplets. And song is still their power.

This film is set in Steampunk times - the source of the electricity in this film is muscle-power. The bicyclist is kidnapped by the Mafia while on one of his long-distance races. The domino-shaped goons need someone to pedal their boss's operation - our hero and 2 other exhausted cyclists provide the legwork.

Mom and Bruno and the Triplets are off to the rescue. The Mafia have cars and weapons, our gang have ingenuity.

The animation uses some live-action footage, along with drawn and tinted cityscapes, frequently viewed from above. Much of the film looks like watercolors from another time. There are touches of Art Deco - the ocean-liner leaving port, impossibly tall, majestic and un-boardable, with neither need nor inclination to see what's at water-level. And in its wake, laboring along in a row-boat, is Mom. She's not fast, but she doesn't give up. She was the bicyclist's trainer, before he was snatched - when he pulled her on his training rides, the whistle was parked in her mouth, setting a cadence with every breath. At night she tuned his wheels, on a spindle that easily became a zoetrope.

This film is tagged as a comedy, but while it does have funny moments, it is really more of an eccentric view of life. Though you may laugh at such characters, you may also feel just as they do, nudged around by fates and forces, but with the tools of joie de vivre well in hand.

As I've said since high school, "I'd rather live till I die than die till I'm dead!"

The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami fills in the historical record of Spanish conquest in Florida and Mexico with The Moor's Account, building her novel from a brief mention in Cabeza de Vaca's story of his explorations: "el cuarto [sobreviviente] se llama Estevanico, es negro olarabe, natural de Azamor" which translates: The fourth [survivor] is Estevanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor."

In Lalami's hands, Estevanico becomes our narrator during an eight-year struggle for survival among the tribes of the southeast portion of the North American continent. He begins the expedition as a slave, but his skills at learning languages, adapting to primitive conditions, and his storytelling ability help him not only to survive but eventually to thrive while the majority of the Spaniards perish from disease, starvation, accidents, or murder.

A Moor from Spain, he is Muslim, and his given name, Mustafa ibn Muhammad, is the first thing taken from him when he sells himself into bondage to provide money for his family's survival. From a slave's vantage as Estebanico, he sees the underbelly of the wealth and power of sixteenth century Castilia: the many nameless whose labor supports them.  The life of a slave turns on caprice: one day his master, whose fortunes are rising thanks in part to Mustafa's skills as a merchant, brings home a slave for his wife. Ramatullai becomes Mustafa's ally, friend, and love, but one day the master's gambling debts cannot be ignored, and Mustafa is sold to cancel them - to a nobleman enticed by rumors of the riches of New Spain across the ocean.

Through a combination of greed, ignorance, and fatal arrogance, the leaders of the expedition seeking the wealth of legendary Apalache squander their military advantage over the natives, make enemies of those who could assist them, and fall prey to the terrain, weather, and lack of food they had never imagined might be obstacles to success.  Their weapons and tools dwindle, their clothing is used to make sails for rafts, they must slaughter and eat their beloved horses, and in the end, it is every man for himself.

They engage with many tribes, first as conquerors, then one leader to another, and finally as supplicants so desperate for a meal and protection from the cold that they become slaves themselves, scorned and beaten by the Indians who despise their incompetence and mistrust them. When they come to villages previously marauded by Spaniards - slave-takers and spreaders of disease - they find themselves less objects of curiosity than harbingers of trouble.

Mustafa and his master, Dorantes, remain together, becoming equals as they survive the challenges - until they come across another Spanish expedition. Reunited with Dorantes' fellow Castilians, their relationship reverts to master and man - only in the jungle could they be peers. Dorantes is all too willing to leave his life as an Indian behind, including forsaking his native wife and daughter, but Mustafa makes the most of his opportunities, and when at last he finds love with a native woman, he enlarges his dreams of home to include her.

Joseph Anton, by Salman Rushdie

In his more-relevant-than-ever memoir of life under the Iranian fatwa announced on Valentine's Day 1989 and only lifted over a decade later, Salman Rushdie chronicles with unvarnished exactitude the life of a man constantly under death threat. He lived with police protectors ("prot"), doing battle with their higher-ups who would have been happier had he simply retreated to some unmarked hole in the ground never to re-emerge.  His team told him he was as vulnerable as any head of state - yet those people were allowed to set foot outside, and the world knew where they lived - he was hidden away, and it was only the flawless cooperation of his friends and family that prevented his home from being known to those bent on murdering him.

The point on which he continued to insist, unheeded, is that The Satanic Verses, far from being a satire on Islam, actually reflected the history of that religion, which he studied at Cambridge. He writes about Muhammad's revelation:

"But the Qur'an spoke of how all the prophets had been tested by temptation. "Never have We sent a single prophet or apostle before you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper," it said in Sura 22. And if the incident of the Satanic verses was the Temptation of Muhammed, it had to be said that he came out of it pretty well. He both confessed to having been tempted and also repudiated that temptation. Tabari quotes him thus: "I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken." After that the monotheism of Islam, having been tested in the cauldron, remained unwavering and strong, in spite of persecution, exile and war, and before long the Prophet had the victory over his enemies and the new faith spread like a conquering fire across the world.
"Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division."
The "true" verses, angelic or divine, were clear: It was the femaleness of the winged goddesses - the "exalted birds" - that rendered them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God, as the angels were. Sometimes the birth of a great idea revealed things about its future; the way in which newness enters the world prophesied how it would behave when it grew old. At the birth of this particular idea, femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation."

Across the Muslim world he was vilified, officially and personally, by people who did not read The Satanic Verses nor bother to know anything more about them than that they referred to the Qur'an and used the word Satanic, which must mean the author was calling the Qur'an Satanic. Once the fatwa was in effect, the truth scarcely mattered - his novel was unavailable in those countries and so people had only the imams' and Ayatollahs' word for what he had written: blasphemy.

One cannot fault Rushdie, living so long in the crosshairs, for speaking out against the way the liberal tolerant cultures of Europe and the Americas defended what they thought of as Islam, up to and including citizens who made specific death threats against him. He makes the case for the right of artists to say what they think, to imagine what they dare, and to share those visions with the world without the censorship of offending those who can't even be bothered to know what they are condemning.
"Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know. A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia. To criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot... 
It was Islam that had changed, not people like himself, it was Islam that had become phobic of a very wide range of ideas, behaviors and things. ... There were Islamist attacks on socialists and unionists, cartoonists and journalists, prostitutes and homosexuals, women in skirts and beardless men, and also, surreally, on such evils as frozen chickens and samosas."

Once the fatwa was lifted he was eager to resume his disrupted creative life:
"It would be wise to withdraw from the world of commentary and polemic and rededicate himself to what he loved most, the art that had claimed his heart, mind and spirit ever since he was a young man, and to live again in the universe of once upon a time, of kan ma kan, it was so and it was not so, and to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe." [emphasis mine]

Thank you, Salman Rushdie, for your courage and for sharing your long drinks from the Sea of Stories.

When the Killing's Done, by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle, in his storytelling prime, weaves the inevitable and improbable into a tapestry, giving individual faces to social movements and global issues.  His 2011 novel When the Killing's Done sets up a clash between fanatical nature-lovers, raising questions that should make any thoughtful person uncomfortable:

Why should some species be allowed to flourish while others, considered invasive, merit eradication?
What makes any species "native" to an isolated place?
To what extent is it even possible for us to undo the mistakes of earlier generations?
Why do we still think, "We know what we're doing"?

The setting is a California archipelago opposite Santa Barbara, twenty to thirty miles offshore but a world apart: three small rocky Anacapa Islands, and the larger Santa Cruz Island.
The main characters, tenacious and intolerant in pursuit of causes on collision course, are:
Alma Takesue, Ph.D biologist working for the National Park Service, in charge of restoration of the islands - which means extermination of the rats on the Anacapas and the pigs on Santa Cruz; and
David LaJoy, successful businessman and leader of FPA, For the Protection of Animals, a local animal rights group resisting the slaughter of rats and pigs.

Takesue's circle is rounded out with biologists, Park rangers, her lover Tim who's both, the exterminators, the local representative of The Nature Conservancy - which owns a large portion of Santa Cruz Island; her grandmother whose husband and his brother died in a storm off the Anacapas while she, pregnant, survived; and her own father, a sea urchin diver until an accident off those islands ended his life.

LaJoy's compatriots are his musician girlfriend Anise, who spent her youth and adolescence on Santa Cruz Island where her mother Rita was cook and general factotum for a sheeping operation; his right-hand-man Wilson, skilled handling a boat, delighting in the mischief LaJoy dreams up to interfere with the Park Service's plans; journalist Tina who applies her muckraking skills on behalf of LaJoy's cause; a young woman who works in Takesue's office, sharing inside information with FPA; and a group of impassioned youth following their fearless leader.

The other significant characters are sea and land and sky:
Glassy still one moment, raging the next, the unpredictable Pacific.
The craggy inhospitable islands - rocky coastlines, the only fresh water what falls from the sky.
The sky, by turns blistering, torrential and fog-bound, as different from Santa Barbara as if the islands were a thousand miles away.

Along the way, we learn enough about the ecology of the islands and what they demand of those who would survive on them, to confront the big questions and come up empty-handed.  A rat is a living creature.  Rats have lived on the Anacapas for centuries, survivors of a shipwreck.  The island birds, having no experience with them, have made easy prey for nest-robbers.  The sheep, imported to the islands as a money-making concern in the 19th century, wreak environmental havoc as they overgraze, denuding the landscape which is then at the mercy of erosion and runoff from fierce storms.  But to the sheepherders, the worst enemy is the ravens that gather at lambing time, bewildering the ewes then picking off their newborns with appalling efficiency.

Boyle is unsparing about the devastation of invasives: brown snakes, stowaways on planes or ships during World War II, have eradicated nearly all bird life from Guam.  That ecosystem is changed - the Guam before the snakes showed up is irretrievable.  Foxes and skunks live on Santa Cruz Island - how and when did they arrive?  They've been there long enough to evolve into smaller versions of their mainland counterparts, but does that make them "native"?  More "native" than the rats?  By what measure?

We can't un-break the egg.  Here in the Anthropocene era, we rely on the twin indices of appeal and efficiency, in deciding which species are good and which must go.  Water managers across the American West have declared war on Russian olive and tamarisk, which crowd riverbanks, sucking up water and blocking access for native creatures - but the primary creatures that want that water, and that riverbank access, are humans.  Fish and elk have no voice, neither do Russian olive trees.  Rats and snakes are "pest" species, raiding the nests of other creatures - but they're just doing what nature has equipped them to, and perhaps it's their survival skill that makes us hate them.  A weed is a successful plant; a pest is a successful animal. Human interference is the beating heart of the problem.

A Separation - Film Review

The Iranian film (2011 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film) A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi, is a window onto the court-ruled lives of modern Iranians. The story opens with Simin, a woman in her thirties, seeking divorce from her husband, Nader. The sticking-point is that Simin wants to leave the country, and take their 11-year-old daughter Termeh with her. Nader is willing to allow divorce, but he wants Termeh to stay with him. His Alzheimer's-stricken father, who lives with them, cannot travel, and he won't leave him. Simin oversimplifies matters - Nader should come with her: his father doesn't know him anyway, she claims, so anyone could look after him - nothing would stand in her way. She sees his refusal as stubbornness and antipathy. But as the story unfolds, we see that Nader's father does in fact know his family, and needs them.

Simin walks out, so to care for his father while he's at work, Nader hires a caregiver. This woman, who comes with her 4-year-old daughter, is so pious that before helping, she consults an imam, asking if assisting a senile man who has soiled himself is a sin. But she is also pregnant, which her little girl knows but is a secret from Nader - and from Simin, who provided her name. According to the law, this woman must have her husband's permission to work for Nader. The men meet and Nader thinks the man will be coming to look after his father - instead, it's the woman who continues to come, though her long bus commute and trek up multiple flights of stairs to Nader's apartment exhaust her.

Spoiler Alert - read no further if you plan to see the film!

Nader comes home early and discovers his father alone, crumpled on the floor barely alive, one arm tied to his bed-frame. In his rage, Nader sees that the cash he had set aside to pay the woman is gone. When she and her daughter return from their errand, he confronts her, accusing her of theft. She argues, and he pushes her out of his apartment.

Next thing we know, Nader is informed that the woman fell on the stairs and miscarried, and therefore he is charged with murder of the 19-week-old fetus. He and Simin, concerned when they hear the woman is hospitalized, go to visit her, only to be confronted by her angry distraught husband who declares they have only come out of guilt. The men are soon at each other's throats.

The referee requires witnesses; clearly this arbiter of justice is exasperated trying to get to the bottom of who knew what, whether Nader pushed the woman, whether he knew she was pregnant, why the woman tied his father to his bed then left - the story becomes more convoluted. Costly bail is set which Simin's wealthy parents willingly pay, while we learn that the caregiver's husband was recently in debtor's prison and takes several medications to treat mental illness. More and more, Simin's plan to leave Iran looks like the choice of a person of means.

Simin continues to negotiate with the woman, forcing Nader into a position of having to say he knew the woman was pregnant when he pushed her, or else face prison time. He doesn't want a deal, he wants justice. The other man also wants justice, which to him appears to mean that others must suffer as he has. He stalks Termeh at her school, which throws Simin into panic, her own role in Termeh's anguish quickly forgotten.

At every turn, Termeh is forced to bear witness to her parents' behavior. She wants only for her mother and father to stay together, and she'll say whatever she thinks will enable that - but they withhold what they know, urging her to "tell the truth" though she knows that will not help. She's constantly weighing what they tell her - If I say this, will Mom stay with Dad? If I say that, will Mom leave for sure? It's heartbreaking.

This glimpse into a society as litigious as modern America is depressing: Sharia (Quranic law) solves nothing - piety is just one more weapon people use against each other. Class divisions spark resentment and jealousy, and justice is blind. When Nader is first charged with murder, he pleads with the judge: who will care for his father if he's in prison? But it's not the judge's problem.

At the end, Simin, Nader and Termeh are again meeting with a judge about the divorce, this time to determine custody. By now Nader has passed the burden to their daughter - whichever parent she chooses, he'll agree. The judge asks Termeh if she has decided, she says yes. But she won't utter the name. He presses, she continues to say yes, she's decided. Tears flood her face. He sends Simin and Nader out into the corridor, which is filled with petitioners, some bickering and others slumped in chairs in a scene out of Kafka. They wait as the credits roll.