Emigrés - French words that turned English

by Richard Scholar

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

Becoming

by Michele Obama

Perhaps, like me, you remember the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as US President. As I recall it, in America and all over the world, joy and hope erupted on that day.

In spite of the intense cold, millions of people, as far as the eye could see, attended his inauguration in Washington, a scene redolent of the great civil rights marches of the 1960s in more ways than one. Millions more watched the historic event on television. It seemed like a new chapter in American history.

A beaming Michele Obama held the Bible that her husband used to take his oath, the same Bible that Lincoln used for his first inauguration.

Michele Obama went on to become a popular First Lady and in her book Becoming she finally tells us her own story, and we get a glimpse of her role in this unique period of American history.

She was already a well-known lawyer, community organiser and administrator before ‘the skinny guy with a funny name’ came to work in the same law firm. Shortly afterwards she left that firm to do work that chimed more with her values, and had greater effect in her immediate community. She set up programmes for young people to work in government, where they could instigate social change from within, and to provide vital services that were sorely missing for the black community in Chicago.

There was, and still is, no job description for the role, but when Michele Obama became FLOTUS she continued to work on areas that she thought would improve people’s lives. She drew attention to the situation of service men and women and their families; she campaigned to improve awareness of the importance of proper nutrition and exercise, creating a vegetable garden at the White House where she invited children to plant and harvest vegetables; she advocated for girls’ education, and lent a powerful voice to the Bring Back our Girls campaign when girls were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria.

Particular attention was paid to Michele’s outfits, and she used this opportunity to wear the clothes of young designers who as a result were catapulted to success overnight.

How did she promote these projects? Both of the Obamas made a canny use of social media and popular culture and Michele was not above dancing, singing or doing exercise on some of the most popular television shows to get her message across.

Life in the White house was not as easy at is might seem from the outside, and she admits it was often like a prison due to security concerns. But the greatest challenge was ensuring that her family had a normal family life, or at least as normal as possible.

In spite of the gloss of public relations and literary agents who have no doubt had a hand in this book, reading between the lines of the memoir makes us realise how far both Michele and Barack Obama have come: we get an inside view of the many obstacles and prejudices they had to overcome, how they were able by sheer willpower, passion and ability, to create and seize opportunities. Sadly, from the stories Michele tells of family members or acquaintances,   we also understand that there are many more remarkable people with similar backgrounds who never get those chances and never realise their potential in spite of their real talent.

The Black Lives Matter movement and the events that led to its rise are a reminder that these issues of racial injustice and inequality that we read about in Becoming remain, and that America has not quite turned the page on them yet.

Burning the Books - A History of Knowledge Under Attack

by Richard Ovenden

I ordered this book after hearing a talk about it by its author Richard Ovenden, who is the librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This is a fascinating book about the importance of libraries and archives in preserving a record of our past for the future. It examines in depth a number of instances of the deliberate destruction of books and archives throughout history and in different cultures, which as the author points out, is almost always a political act related to identity. It starts with the well known example of the Library of Alexandria, and ends with the Internet, going through other instances such as the library in Sarajevo, which burned for three days and was never reported in western news. It also chronicles writers who have decided to destroy their own archives as a way to write their own histories and determine their own reputations for posterity. It ends with important questions about the influence of the Internet and who now decides what gets recorded, how, and at what price? Paradoxically, with so much information available, much of it may be lost to us and future generations. The book is a thought-provoking read for everyone interested in the preservation and transmission of our artefacts. I couldn’t help but draw the parallels with the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage that we have witnessed in recent years .