Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Which I thought was really cool -- it's hard to come up with a scenario where a guy could have no name and no nationality.
With millions in refugee camps these days? There are still a fair number of elderly U.S citizens without birth certificates. A rural refugee from the Congo, or Sudan could easily end up without any documentation - no birth cerificates, no passport. You would be issued some sort of documentation soon enough (probably a ration card) but it might well be with a made up name and nationality unknown.
In non spam news (unless you count me), does anyone know anything about this book? [link]
Looks kind of intriguing.
A rural refugee from the Congo, or Sudan could easily end up without any documentation - no birth cerificates, no passport.
Right, but -- refugees from Sudan are pretty much mostly from Sudan, you know? The coolth of the DP camps was that you might be a German or a Polr or a Czech or a Bulgarian originally, and nobody would be really sure if you could hide your accent. You can totally reinvent yourself, so much so that the novel implied that No-name had
no passport at all
and could cross borders anyway.
I know there are still a bunch of people out there who were born in DP camps, and thus have no native citizenship. There was a guy a couple of years ago, who'd been naturalized as an American, and then got stripped of his citizenship for some felony or other, and the problem was, they couldn't deport him to his native country, because, he kind of didn't have one.
Right, but -- refugees from Sudan are pretty much mostly from Sudan, you know? The coolth of the DP camps was that you might be a German or a Polr or a Czech or a Bulgarian originally, and nobody would be really sure if you could hide your accent. You can totally reinvent yourself, so much so that the novel implied that No-name had no passport at all and could cross borders anyway.
But that can happen too. I knew someone once with a Yugoslavia passport no longer good , after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Since he was from a Serbian Mother and Croatian Father he refused citizenship in either succesor nation - therefor literally a man without a country. And in Africa a lot these wars are cross country. A lot of the refugees from the Sudanese war are Chadians, cause there are a lot of lighting raids into Chad to commit massacres across the border. The war in the Congo has involved at least five nations bordering it at various times. So a refugee in a camp in the Congo could be from any of a number of nations.
Incidentally being a "man(or woman) without a country" was not a superpower in Flemings time nor is it today. It gives you no special ability to enter a country. No nation has to let you in if you don't hold no passport from it. (Well on human rights grounds they are supposed to if you face death or unjustified imprisonment elsewhere - but you have to prove that, and anyway it is not always honored. And until well after WWII it was not even a legal obligation most places.) You have no special rights as a stateless person, but have no consul, no nation to stand up for you. It can mean a life sentence in refugee camp; Eric Ambler often used stateless people as characters; because their extreme vulnerability let him get them into terrifying situations without needing to have them do anything especially stupid. (Dr. Frigo for example). One of the under-rated great novels of our time The Death Ship by B. Traven had a stateless person as the primary character. It explained why he accepted a berth on the ship, and why he stayed with it - nowhere else to go.
But we have plenty of stateless persons today. And we have a lot of multi-state refugee camps where a person could well be from a number of states.
(Replacing the last line with this - cause while meant as general snark it does not read that way.)
In addition to stateless persons, 9/11 and Katrina set up perfect circumstances for your old persona to die and you become a new person.
Wide Sargasso Sea is excellent.
The BBC adapted that recently with one of my favourite young, British actors, Rafe Spall, as Edward. I think he's going to be in an adaptation of Dracula next.
I saw where David asked me the other day at how my book is coming, and I didn't answer because it's been slow and sloggy lately, I've been behind on my schedule, and the topic has been depressing to consider.
Anyway, with mounting frustration at how dry my book has been thus far (and, hell, I don't even want to read it at this point), I decided to start rewriting it today with a faux-pompous tongue-in-cheek approach that I hope other people (such as, say, my editor, publisher, comrades, and player-haters) might also find fun. Continuum has been pretty lenient with the other writers, and I hope to enjoy some of that leniency. At the very least, I hope they don't sue me for smart-assery. What's your take, David?
Yeah, I've seen that one. It's fun.
Did I post Bob Bob's take on that here some years ago? He adds "people person" to the sentence (a "buffalo buffalo buffalo").
