(Archival image of a watchtower of the Home Guard, a militia recruited among Kikuyu who were willing to oppose the Mau Mau movement.)

The Pulitzer for non-fiction goes to Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins. Elkins teaches history at Harvard. An excerpt from a review of her book:

‘’Imperial Reckoning'’ is an important and excruciating record; it will shock even those who think they have assumed the worst about Europe’s era of control in Africa. Nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million was, by Elkins’s calculation, herded by the British into various gulags. Elkins, who assembled her indictment through archives, letters and interviews with survivors and colonists, tells of a settler who would burn the skin off Mau Mau suspects or force them to eat their own testicles as methods of interrogation. She quotes a survivor recalling a torment evocative of Abu Ghraib: lines of Kikuyu detainees ordered to strip naked and embrace each other randomly, and a woman committing suicide after being forced into the arms of her son-in-law. She quotes an anonymous settler telling her, ‘’Never knew a Kuke had so many brains until we cracked open a few heads.'’ Her method is relentless; page after page, chapter after chapter, the horrors accumulate.

The review from which I have quoted above faults Imperial Reckoning for what it describes as an absence of “complexity and careful analysis.” (Example: “Not only are the colonists barbaric in their treatment of the Kikuyu, but, as she has it, they are basically barbarous in private as well, maintaining ‘an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance.’) The reviewer also feels that Elkins’s “prosecutorial zeal in a sense precludes a true ‘imperial reckoning’” because “British rule brought crucial benefits that persist — among them modern education and a degree of infrastructure — as well as violent oppression to its subjects.” I disagree. A balancing act of this sort seems to me to be akin to a hollow sort of accounting. For Elkins’s book to be superior to what it is what needs to be abandoned is a sense of moral purity–abandoned in favor of a something closer to self-implication and entanglement. This is one of the reasons why I like the self-consciousness that gives texture to the rage in Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

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A poem entitled “In Antigua” by Kerri Webster, inspired by a travel ad in a magazine:

“In Antigua I am famous. I am bathed in jasmine
and pressed with warm stones.”
—Carnival Cruise ad in The New Yorker

In Albuquerque, on the other hand, I am infamous; children
throw stones and the elderly whisper behind their hands.
In Juneau, I am glacial, a cool blue where anyone can bathe
for a price. In Rio I am neither exalted nor defamed; I walk
the streets and nothing makes sense, voices garbled, something
about electricity, something about peonies and cheap wool.

In Prague I am as fabulous as Napoleon and everyone
knows it. They give me a horse and I tell them this horse
will be buried with me, I tell them I will call the horse either
Andromeda or Murphy and all applaud wildly….

Read the rest at the NPR website. The poem is a part of the collection We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone. April is the National Poetry Month.

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