Day 4

During this first week I observed that the women brought in to teach us taught differently than the men.

Bushra Rehman was the first to ask students to read things from the board. She was the first to create an activity that was a true workshop where we worked with each other and created our own poetry-in-translation. Her class was the one that had us all literally buzzing with excitement about what we had created - that's the feeling I want to create in my own classes!

Dr Pritchett

Today, Dr. Frances Pritchett followed in this model by also asking us to read the poetry projected on the board, rather than reading it herself, as all the men teachers have. She also turns the traditional teacher's advantage on its head by maintaining a remarkable website about Persian poetry.
At the beginning of her talk she said "My lecture is not going to be like the others you've been experiencing, because unlike the other lecturers I'm not trying to get you to understand every possible important thing about an area of study that I've spent decades in. That's not my goal."

She went on to explain how in her retirement, her goal has been to create resources for all the material she knows about and taught, on her website dedicated to Urdu Poetry. It is a remarkable feat. There is everything anyone would ever want to know about Persian Poetry on this site, and she maintains and updates it all herself.

Today's study of the ghazal genre also touched on the idea that romantic passion is divine in nature. It is also, interestingly, transgressive. The poet, or rather the speaker, is always transgressing in some way. So, for example, the lover in the poetry is not the poet's wife (!) or the person he is destined to marry. It is a woman or a boy who is not available.

Transgression has been so stamped out of religion - it is about conforming rather than challenging. I suppose some Christians, Quakers included, see their role as challenging power, but so little of that challenge happens at the Meeting level, or the congregational level. We are by and large very well behaved. I say this as a criticism of myself. I think I could certainly be more transgressive with my political voice. Jesus certainly was.

Another thing Dr. Pritchett pointed out about the ghazals that I liked was that because they were so formally constraining, they really allowed a poet to show his or her stuff. When there are no rules, it's hard to say that something is not good. But when there are so many constraints, you really have to know your vocabulary and your poetic tone to succeed.

I also like that in the poetry gatherings, people held their friends accountable - they might say something like "You're not using that idiom right" or "Your rhyme is not as tight there as in the rest of the poem." This kind of criticism is unusual in most writerly circles I know because we are all too friendly. We have to pay an editor big bucks to be mean! I like the idea that friends would value their friends' abilities well enough to push them. I want to do this with students- to warmly demand their best work by pointing out where they have fallen short of what they can produce.

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Did you know that Langston Hughes went to Turkestan?

Hughes with a writer's group in Central Asia

Zohra Saed, our presenter this afternoon, had put together a slideshow of images from Hughes travels in the USSR in 1932-33. It was pretty remarkable. Apparently Harlem was a point where Soviets recruited communist sympathizers to come to the USSR and see how life could be. Hughes went on one of these trips, but he didn't stay on the mainline tour, which of course skimmed over the difficult truths of communism and looked only at a handful of propped up scenes of happy and productive Soviets.

Hughes literally jumped off a train as it went south and visited the southern bloc countries where he photographed working conditions on the cotton farms (which bore striking resemblance, of course, to cotton plantations of the American south). 

Day 3

A quick post! Last night was a late night so I didn't write anything, but mash Allah my mind is exploding with how amazing class was yesterday. 

Poetry. Specifically, Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez. 

I have been exposed to Rumi's poetry and that of other sufis many times, but never has it really stuck. I don't really get the mysticism, I am not compelled by the imagery of love and wine. It all feels rather pithy and overblown, like so many of the romantic poets I read last year at Bread Loaf. 

The form of sufi poetry we looked at was the GHAZAL (pronounced ga-ZAHL).  It is the most prolific form of Persian poetry, and predates Islam, dating to the 6th century. 
One issue that came up for me right away was the question facing faithful seekers and humanists across the ages and cultures: how much do I remain "of the world" and how much do I attempt to be removed from it, being only physically "in the world"? Most sufis seek self-annihilation, so they desire to be not even "in the world" physically. One early Sufi poet, a woman named Rabi'a, said that LOVE was key to an understanding of God, so experiencing love and giving love (activities arguably "of this world") were key to spiritual experience. I like that. 

So I was surprised to know that Sufism was the mainstream form of Islam until the 19th century. Yes! What happened? Why is the Islam we know politicized today? Because of Colonization. When lands where Muslims lived became overrun by colonizers, leaders of these lands decided that Sufism was not the tool they needed to fight the invaders with. It was too escapist, too soft, and made people too dependent on one another, rather than independent and ready to work hard, as the new modern world required them to. These leaders recognized that if Muslim-led countries would be able to compete with colonizers and colonized countries, they would need a style of governance more appropriate for capitalist battles. So Suffism was swatted down, and politicized Islam arose in its place. 

The wine imagery: Why is there so much drinking in poems by Muslims, who are instructed not to drink? 

Simplest answer: The wine is symbolic of otherworldly intoxication that one experiences when one approaches the divine. 

Interestingly, the cub-bearer figure, present in many ghazals, is often a young boy, and is portrayed both as a master, and the provider of the intoxicating experience. Homoeroticism is a strong strain in these portrayals. Why do we think that homosexual relations are a new thing?

Ghazals were written to be performed. This is where my lesson-planning funny bone started to twitch. Last year we had Poetry Out Loud in which students memorize poems by outside authors (whom we haven't studied, and they don't necessarily know what the poems are saying). The kids were not into it, and many failed to memorize their poems, even though I know them to be fans of poetry and great poets themselves. I'm wondering how to redo poetry this year (Poetry Out Loud is a school wide, required thing, not my choice) to make it more personal and engaging for them. I think we're going to write ghazals. 

Just this morning I read about the venue in which poems are shared, the mushairah. Check out this description of the event: 

A real Mushairah in India

Most mushairahs were based on a well-known ‘pattern’ line (or verse) announced in advance, so that everybody’s ghazals composed in this pattern were formally identical (sharing meter, rhyme, and refrain). This formal identity made them extremely comparable, so that individual achievement stood out strikingly. Recitation-- or chanting in a popular style called tarannum (an example: Jigar Moradabadi, 1957)-- of the first line of a verse was followed by a longish pause full of obligatory praise and exclamatory comment from the audience, after which the poet repeated the first line and only then followed it with the second line. Mushairahs were thus lively and participatory.

OK, I'll have to come back to this post, or do a poetry part II post, because there is so much more to say. 

Day 2

It rained hard this afternoon, and I arrived home quite wet. My Composition notebook is several stages closer to Decomposition, but I have less to recount than I did yesterday, because a) a chunk of today I didn't really understand or feel engaged by and b) in the afternoon session we did calligraphy for about an hour, so I have no notes, but a painting.

Me and two other scholars before our visit to the Mosque yesterday

This morning Muhsin al Musawi of Columbia University spoke to us of Sufi poetry. There were several interesting ideas. Principally in relation to love. If one reads sufi poetry, it is easy to think that the Sufis were obsessed with drinking and romantic love. But the drink is really only alluding to the intoxication that Sufis seek by communing with god. Their wine, as Musawi said, is not our wine. 

I think this image gets at the subsumption
 into the divine.

The goal of Sufism is to be in fact subsumed into the divine, to become one with it. This involves the entire annihilation of the self. Like a moth that is drawn to flame and finally dies when it comes in contact with the heat, a sufi seeks to be burned by her proximity to the divine. The goal is to lose oneself in the mystical experience that is divinity.

The erotic love between the poets and the young women they often write about is also divine in nature: the beauty that the sufi poets are attracted to in these women is really God, manifesting in them. I suppose this could be construed as something similar to the Quaker light of the divine within, though thankfully the Quakers don't have any conceptions of physical beauty as an indication of inner divinity! 

But I must confess that whatever puritan streak remains in my upbringing makes me raise my eye brows at the alleged reverence motivating these poets. It seems like an easy way to justify lustful feelings while still considering oneself holy. (Here's an article from the NY that I read a few years ago about St. Augustine's brain child, original sin.)

But then, what is wrong with lust? It is only because of that Puritan streak, indeed, that I have the idea that erotic love is bad, or impure. What if our culture glorified even romantic love as one of the highest attainments, something natural, or more radically, divine in nature? I don't think Las Vegas would exist in that culture. We would not have the deep ambivalence and shame that results in such an outburst of incoherent and violent energy.

All the yearning that is done in sufi poetry is really yearning for God, because God is what we are attracted to in another person, or a place or thing. This was argued (either initially or most powerfully, I'm not sure) by Ibn Arabi, a poet born 1165.

I had forgotten about this Bible (and surely Qur'an) story, which al Musawi told to illustrate the Sufi desire to be annihilated in communion with God: 

Moses is aware that his people don't believe, and he desires to offer them reassurance. He says to God, "Please, show yourself to me, so I can report to my people that I've seen you." God says, "If I show myself to you, you'll die. I'll show myself to that mountain, and you stay where you are and watch." God shows himself to the mountain and the mountain trembles and then breaks apart and disintegrates. Moses faints.

Isn't that great? Gotta love the Old Testament.

What about modern poets? Well, they don't have the courage to wish for self annihilation through communion with God (my words, not his). (By the way, I don't have the courage either). Modern poets believe in the visionary quality of poetic work, but are not about to self-abnegate through it; in fact they don't think it's possible to achieve that. 

They should talk to the guy who was martyred by being gradually dismembered, laughing the whole way, because he had no consciousness of his body as physical. He was entirely one with the divine. 

eL Seed Calligraffiti

This afternoon we had a calligraphy workshop. We saw several of the scripts used in advanced calligraphy. Many were very hard to decipher, even for a reader of Arabic or Farsi or Urdu. It seemed that the emphasis was so clearly on the visual quality of the art, not just the meaning of the words conveyed. Imagine an English poetry volume in which the words can't be made out! Simply the depiction on the page carries enough significance of the beauty of the words.

A1one aka Tanha

The presenter also showed us calligrafitti images from A1one aka Tanha and eL Seed, images that are unreadable but use letters as basic units.

I missed Utah a lot today, so my image depicts the mountains:

Reverence for Words Day 1

It's 8:00 pm in New York, and I'm in a Starbucks on Union Square (I say "a" because there are multiple on the park.)

I am now one day into the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) workshop called "A Reverence for Words: Muslim Cultures through the Arts".

Today I spoke with a few other scholars about the need to take some kind of productive action to preserve what I take in during the day. Indeed there is so much intake, I need a way to process it, even if at a basic level, to solidify some of it in my mind. Since I don't have a dog to tell these things to out loud (that must be why people have dogs - to rehash their learning outcomes from the day) I will quickly treat them here.

This morning Dr. Shawkat Toorawa of Yale University spoke to us of the Qur'an's influence on literature.

First he spoke to us about the key terms for understanding the religion.
Islam (don't pronounce the s like a z) is the religion.
Islamic is a problematic word which we should basically never use. It's an adjective, but it's unclear whether it describes something/one of the religion, or of a country which is majority muslim, or under Muslim leaders...

He drew a parallel between the absurdity of the idea of a monolithic Christian world and a monolithic Islamic world. The "Christian world," he pointed out, would have to include Nigeria and South Korea, because each has made significant contributions to Christianity. But they are, of course, not part of the same world in the cultural, linguistic, historical, or ethnic sense. The same is true for Muslims the world over.

An Islamist is a muslim extremist. An islamicist is a scholar who studies Islam.

This was so cool: The Qur'an is not a book! The Qur'an is the revelation of God's word, and as such cannot be destroyed or damaged. It is also not truly possessed in the book (the book itself is actually called the mus-haf, or a copy of the revelation) but in the mind, where one is supposed to have it committed to memory.

This made me think of the notorious George Fox song, and how he refuses to swear on the Bible, "For the truth is more holy than the book to me!" Indeed, the Qur'an is the truth of what God said, and is contained in the heart.

Another cool thing about the Qur'an: It is not the story, or narrative, of a people, like the Hebrew Bible is for the people of Israel. It is a book of admonition, which basically tells stories to illustrate what happens to people who do not do as Allah says.

The Hadith, on the other hand, tell us all about how to live our daily lives.

The Qur'an was revealed over 23 years (each revelation was through the Angel Gabriel), and during that time Mohammad received little bits and pieces of it. And that is how it existed in the minds of believers, as little memorized bytes, each relating to an idea or telling a story. These bits are suras.

The professor spoke quite a bit on the misguided idea that many have now that the Qur'an was an inviolate text which no one could use for inspiration or appropriate parts of for their own artistic purposes. In fact, this is what people have been doing for ever, and it has been seen by the most devout as a way to lift up the Qur'an by showing its place of pre-eminence in daily life and thought. I love this idea. When I teach Shakespeare, which is also rhyming and poetic, bits of it get stuck in my mind and I appropriate them for my own purposes. For example, this fall when I teach Othello and someone calls my name across the room, I might just make use of the phrase "I shall be with thee betimes" because it's relevant and I like the way it sounds.

Just such borrowing has been integral to Muslim daily thought life, says Dr. Toorawa. There were indeed Muslim wits who would use bits of the Qur'an to make people laugh. Copies of the revelation (Mus-haf) were also heavily annotated with notes to self and exclamations etc. I plan to show students some of the pages of annotated Qur'an to show them what annotation looks like, and how it's used in different kinds of reading.

                   A note on the Arabic language: its grammar and lexicography developed very quickly, because once Islam started to spread, people really wanted to know what the Qur'an meant. They needed to do their own figuring out, and so the language developed to help them decipher the holy text.

See - no vowel marks (the dashes and lines under and
over arabic script that are absent here)

ALSO COOL: Written verses of the Qur'an were almost impossible to decipher to readers unfamiliar with the text. The words, printed without vowels, were strictly a nemonic device: it was assumed that anyone would already know the words from having memorized it, so this page was just there to jog one's memory.

Last note on Toorawa's lecture: Islam defined itself to an extent against Christianity and Judaism as a religion which did away with the hierarchy necessary to communicate with God. Someone could recite the Qur'an (as our afternoon lecture said, in order to ingest divinity, rather in the same manner of the eucharist) and know God through God's word. No intermediary was necessary - people were meant to commune with Allah themselves.

This makes sense given the emphasis on prayer to Allah. We visited the second largest mosque in NY, at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, where we were reminded that men and women pray separately. The Imam told us in admirably frank terms that this is to prevent distraction, especially for the men, from Allah, who should have their own focus. This is fine, although I think this repeated separation, especially when men are positioned in front of women, simply makes the men accustomed to being ahead of the women and in a better position than them, in the name of "reducing distractions".

Someone asked a great question at the end of Toorawa's talk: what role does Jesus play in the Qur'an and in the faith?

Here is a partial comment on what he said: Jesus is the prophet before Mohammad. In the Qur'an he does all the miracles attributed to him in the Bible. He is born of a virgin, he raises the dead, walks on water. He is even resurrected (though not crucified). It is as if the point is: this prophet was so so so amazing and still people disbelieved! Even his ministry didn't work on this world! So Mohammad came all those years later, and basically said "Here's a summary of everything the other prophets have told you, plus this: This is your last chance." Shape up. Account for your lives before someone else accounts for your lives on Judgment Day.

Toorawa added that prophets also become increasingly fatherless. At first the link is clear: Adam is like God's son. The sons of Adam are humankind. Then things get harder with Abraham, who is asked to repudiate his father, and repudiates his son Isaac. This is hard to do - it's the hardest thing to repudiate one's father for the sake of something greater: God. Jesus doesn't have the same problem with this, because he doesn't have a father, and he doesn't have sons. So that's another way Jesus is more magical, or miraculous, or God-like than the others - this lack of father hang-up.

That's basically the end of today, except that in the afternoon we had a lecture on how Allah Is Beautiful and Loves Beauty. The lecturer was Zain Abdullah of Temple University. The point he made that I liked, even though it's very simple, is that most Muslims don't speak Arabic (only 15% are arab) so it's not the meaning of the Qur'an which keeps them coming back. It's the beauty. There is something about the religion which appeals to our delight in beauty, and that is the glue that keeps one in the faith.

I think this is true for me of Quakerism too. I find the silence beautiful. The model of community beautiful. The simplicity beautiful. Even when considered with the difficult and frustrating parts of Quaker practice, there is an overarching to the ideals and practice of the religion which bind me to it.

A word on Pride

Today the idea of Pride was mentioned several times as being the root of all sin. Abdullah elucidated that Pride of appearance is not the issue, in itself. It's not bad to want to look nice and have polished shoes and pressed shirts. It's bad to do two things:
1. look down on others2. knowingly ignore the truth

Therefore in order to be humble, we must see ourselves as equal with others, joined in the chorus of singers, shoulder to shoulder, and we must look the truth in the face and act according to what Allah demands of us once we are aware of the truth. That's all!

Quaker Meeting today, and Una, the Star-Gazer

Today I returned to the Murray Quaker Meeting. I walked into a far more crowded Meeting room than I had ever seen. "How time has wrought change here!" I thought, and wondered how many were visitors. 

The Meeting for worship was good. I had been nervous to go. I journaled about the nervousness. 
1. Part of it stemmed from the fact that I hadn't seen these Friends for months, and hadn't communicated about why I hadn't been at Meeting. I felt embarrassed. But this hangup seemed only part of the issue, since I knew in my heart of hearts that everyone would simply say "Good to see you!", which they did. 

2. I kept writing, and wrote this sentence: "I am afraid to go to Quaker Meeting because I can't pretend to be perfect there." It's true that in most church services, it's pretty easy for me to come off as doing perfectly fine. I can sing, I can read along with a prayer, I can listen to an intelligent sermon and understand it. I can make enjoyable conversation with friends and new acquaintances at coffee hour. 

At Quaker Meeting, two things threaten this mirage. The first is the silence. I cannot pretend for an hour of silence in communion with others that I am doing enough to align my life with God's will for me. That idea is untenable after just a few minutes of silence, and certainly dissolves after the first instance of vocal ministry. 

Today's ministry brought up such discomfiting subjects as "the seeds of hate" and "power and control - who do I want to control? How can I stand up for those who are being controlled by abusers?" These questions probe deep, and unlike sermons, don't portend to offer solutions or conclusions. These questions linger in the mind and heart all week if not longer. The silence threatens my own perception of my perfection. 

The second thing that threatens the mirage is the form of community in Quaker Meetings. It's on us. There is no paid staff to make new people welcome, or to talk to people about what's going on in their lives. We embark on the joyous and unpredictable errand of living in community at the end of the silence. We figure out, together, how to live with those among us that maybe we don't like, or who don't live the way we live. 

Once I had enumerated both of these aspects of Quaker Meeting as being the seat of my discomfort, I closed my journal, jumped into the car, and drove with alacrity toward the Meeting house. These very things were the hallmarks of the kind of religious community I wanted to be a part of. Suddenly I was eager to lean into the discomfort they engendered. 

I was not the only one led to the Meetinghouse this morning. During the introductions round three groups of people said it was their first time to Quaker worship and that they were navigating "faith transitions" and looking for genuine faith communities where they could feel as though they had something to offer. 

It was also a joy to fall back into conversation with (F)riends who I discovered this morning were more dear than I'd realized when I left in January. I heard wonderful accounts of Intermountain Yearly Meetings annual sessions in Ghost Ranch, NM, and am already eager to claim my own place there next year. 

Ahab's Wife continues to minister to my spirit with each chapter. Una's spiritual journey includes many turns which my mind's eye has contemplated, even if my mind's feet have not trod it. She seems to me the best kind of Quaker, untethered by the thinking of her time, and ready to let her own experience inform her understanding of the divine and of the world. 

Here she takes on both "that of God in everyone" (the inner life) and the silliness of our concept of marriage. 

"And suppose the universe itself is but some greater globe where it is possible to travel through rather than on its curving surface. Or suppose that - that we are only on the surface of a dark expanding globe - then where is the journey to the place that is limitless? I find it within. Last night I found it within me - independent and single. No, I do not unmarry Ahab. But I marry myself. I take my fate as within."

She, a woman who is not afraid of love, and who gives her own love without fear of hurt or rejection, finds that her spiritual journey is independent. No matter how a woman is wed to a man, and she and Ahab are wed in what seems indeed a divinely ordained sense, she is still her own being as far as her spiritual journey is concerned. 

One aspect of Una I found impressive was her resilience and adaptability. I was surprised, late in the novel, to hear that she considered this a potential fault in herself. Her opinion becomes clear in a conversation that starts with her characteristic deviations into childishly grand statements, which I found endearing and the sign of a confident woman, not afraid to say what was on her mind.

"When we were all dry and changed and the boys had gone outside to play, Mary and I sat beside the hearth and chatted. I felt wonderfully fresh and happy. 'Sconset, I told Mary, was far better in its simple isolation than town with its bustle. I had never lived in a town before Nantucket, and, I claimed, if I had more people about me th an could compose the crew of a ship (about thirty on a whaler), then I grew restless. 

View from Siasconset ('Sconset)

'No, Una,' she said, 'you are a person who can adjust to anything. If you prefer 'Sconset, it is only that you choose it.'

Always, I have felt uncomfortable with such a remark - it implies I have no true core, no essence - but I knew Mary did not mean to imply that I was lacking She must have seen the shadow pass over my face, for she reached out and took my hand.
'I meant only that you are always your own true self. Every time I see you I am but more impressed by that.'"

To have friends like Mary! Who can speak so simply and well about a friend's character. I agree with her - Una's strength is that she is herself in every setting. That self is not consistent through the book - do we not all change as we journey? - but it is always genuine. 

Nothing could be a proper coda to the splendor of this book. So I'm going to reread Pride and Prejudice next. 

Kindred minds and spirits

I love the experience of reading something or hearing something that expresses an idea the fragments of which have floated around in my own head without achieving the coherence or simplicity that someone else has taken the time to render. 

This happens frequently when I read Quaker writings.

Indeed, when I read fragments of George Fox and his contemporaries (mostly in his journal, and in the New England Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice) I was astonished to find many of the ideas of 17th century Friends to resonate with my millennial mentality.

On Sunday I attended a forum about the Salt Lake Sanctuary Network at the local Unitarian Church. The discussion attempted to place the Network's work in the context of the national Sanctuary network. The presenter drew heavily on ideas espoused by the American Friends Service Committee, in particular the idea of Sanctuary Everywhere. 

From the AFSC Website: 

"Sanctuary Everywhere is the simple idea that everyday people can work together to keep each other safe. Sanctuary can mean taking someone into a congregation to protect them from deportation, but more broadly, it's about the community coming together to protect targeted communities from state violence—including immigrants, people of color, Muslims and other targeted religious groups, or LGBTQ people. 

Join us to create safe, inclusive spaces; dismantle the school-to-prison-pipeline; and become more effective allies."

Essentially, SE is about showing up as a neighbor. I cannot very well provide sanctuary to those I don't know or know of. Knowing my community and its needs is an essential first step to being the Quakerly neighbor I need to be in order to realize God's kingdom on earth. And that's what this movement, and all of Quakerism, it seems to me, is about. How am I participating in this earthly kingdom so that it becomes the true kingdom of God? 

Another place I am finding a kindred mind and spirit is in Una, the protagonist of Ahab's Wife. We are quite different - her appetite for adventure and risk is far greater than mine - but I appreciate certain truths that she holds to be self-evident. 

At this point her husband (pre-Ahab) is sick in the mind, and knocks himself out. As she bathes his brow, she asks, 

"Would it be better if Kit were dead? How bitter the idea broke in my heart, like a bad, foul egg, the shell of that idea shattered and drained out gall. What world was this to let Kit's pain drive him to nonbeing? And yet there was peace, quiet, rest, in his countenance - as though he had got through to something better. 

I would not believe that. This world was our arena. This place was where we had to look for any happiness."

I agree with her. This is our arena, and this is where we are charged with generating joy, love, justice, in our lives. Una's father spoke of eternal life. Una doesn't feel in her core the need for it, and neither do I. 

In order to be a good neighbor in this earthly kingdom, it seems important to me to create strong relationships within community. The past few weeks I've been wondering about how to spend my community service hours in a way that puts relationships first, even before the service rendered. 

I currently spend every other Saturday afternoon in a non-denominational Bible study at the Utah State Prison, and while the activity and interaction with the inmates is I'm sure welcome on their end, the frequency and nature of the visits doesn't encourage true relationship building. I hardly know the guys who are there. 

I wonder how I might dedicate those hours to a more relationship-based form of community building. One thought that has surfaced many times is to chaperone a hiking group for students at Utah International Charter School, where I work. In the interest of strengthening current community bonds, rather than spreading myself out across more but flimsier connections, I like the idea of leaning into the UICS community in a way that would help me get to know the school's students in a non-academic context. 

And, it's far to easy to live next to the mountains here and never get into them; without the right shoes, car, skin color, and know-how, it can feel very uncomfortable to venture into the mountains on one's own. I remember living in Lourdes, France, and being so surprised that our elementary school students had never been into the Pyrenees. But the same phenomenon exists here, to be sure. 

I'll keep praying about this service possibility.

Moby Dick, compared to Ahab's Wife

At the beginning of this month I read Moby Dick for the first time, and was underwhelmed. The book had such a promising beginning, and Ishmael's voice was so earnest and engaging, but the action of the book went almost no where, I found. Nothing was happening, and too much of Ishmael's precious energy was wasted on uninteresting descriptions and odes. 

Now, a third of the way through Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter-Naslund, I am starting to understand the author's motivation. She is taking the premise and the rich characters of MD and turning them into a page turner! I am enthralled in Una's world, as much because of the way she tells the story as its events. Whereas by the 50% mark I was skimming MD, skipping passages of descriptions and jumping to the dialogue, someone would have to pay me to skip pages in this book, where I can hardly tear my eyes away from the page to attend to the (precious few, blessedly) other things I need to be doing this week. 
How much of the increased interest lies in the fact that Una is a woman, and tells the story from a female perspective, contrasting with Ishmael's young man? Some, I suppose. But I think this book would be just as good if it were Ahab's Brother.