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Title: Emma's War
ISBN: 0375703772
Author:
Deborah Scroggins
Publicate Date: 2004-02-10
Publish: 2004-02-10
List Price: $15.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.28
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1: a look at the West's myriad and whimsical motives for interventions in Africa
Scroggins uses the life of aid worker cum rebel-wife Emma McCune to characterize the Sudanese north-south civil war. The author folds a series of stories into one volume: the life of McCune (from aristocratic British child with pony and all to adventurer to aid worker to wife of a Sudanese rebel leader), the experience of the Scroggins herself (who spent many years as a journalist in Africa), and the history of Sudan (from colonial times to the present).
[If you're going to read one readable (i.e., not terribly dense) book about Sudan, I recommend Dave Eggers' What Is the What, the fictionalized account of a Sudanese refugee boy in which Eggers discusses both the north-south civil war and the mass killings in Darfur.]
This book's greatest value - and Scroggins recognizes this - is not so much in its insight into Sudan but rather in its insight into the West. We see Emma leaping into aid work as an escape from boredom, we see some aid workers water skiing back and forth in front of refugee camps while others work around the clock in feeding centers, and we see how Emma's marriage to a Sudanese rebel affects the politics of local aid provision.** Scroggins also gives a larger history of Western intervention in Sudan. Her exploration of the manifold and whimsical motivations of Western involvement is insightful and worthwhile.
That said, I found the pre-Sudan life history of McCune (a chunk of the beginning of the book) tiresome, and occasionally Scroggins' judgment jumps the gun on her analysis.* But in general she seeks to apply an even hand. Scroggins' own observations from her time as a journalist provide a compelling illustration of the situation in southern Sudan (25 years ago, anyway). I also learned where anthropologists can get jobs (the UN, apparently).
I wouldn't rush out to buy this book, but I'm not sorry I read it.
I listened to the unabridged audiobook read by Kate Reading (an appropriate name for a narrator), published by Blackstone Audio. It comes in a bit long at 12 CDs, but Reading gives a fine...well, Reading.
* For example, she comments that "the New World Order [i.e., peace in Africa] was desirable only if it could be achieved without cost to American lives" (326). Of course, this presumes that the West is capable of achieving this at some higher cost, which presumption is not obviously true.
** When I read of Emma going as an aid worker and marrying a local person, I was reminded of the wildly different story of Kenneth Goode, the anthropologist who married a Yanamamo woman.
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2: Fiction couldn't be more exciting or more discouraging
Nearly a score of years after the events so intimately revealed in this book, the war in the Sudan continues. (It's all about oil stupid.) The author brings Emma alive as the very best fiction would (in the 20's, she would have lived among the fast crowd in Paris, in the reality of the '80's she went from Oxfram to wife of a Sudanese warlord) and brings the sad history of Sudan in the 1980's alive at the same time.
A fictional account of the same period, What is the What, would make an excellent companion to this book.
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3: Ambivalence
"Sudan's 26 million people were 2 thirds Muslim, but only a little over 1 third Arab. Muslim or not, most Sudanese were dark skinned Africans. Yet the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the descendants of a handful of Arabs (...) Meanwhile, this Arab elite kept the black African majority divided and fighting among themselves." The background in a nutshell.
It's the brief comments out of the blue like this one that make the book well worth reading. In the first half of the book we have the settings, and a summary of Emma's life up to her final journey to Africa. The author's gift for synthesizing a lot of history regarding Emma and Sudan is truly laudable. But in the second part of the book, when it comes to the more day by day activities of the different tribes warfare and of Emma herself, it becomes boring, entangled and messy.
The most interesting and revealing passages come unexpectedly. The conversations with Arab characters candidly reveal their racism towards blacks, and their intolerance towards other religions other than Muslim (see p.103 for a clear example).
The issue of the European aid workers is always a intriguing psychological mystery: "It was against the unspoken rule of aid to admit that all one really wanted was to get away from home" (p.70) regarding Emma. You can make your own ideas about Emma and other aid workers, although intriguing, my own interest remained on the cultural issues at hand.
There are more stories that are not dealt with here. We see African aristocracy, tribal high-class studying in nice English universities, going back to Africa to use their education to make war and impose their law on the rest of the people. This is a class worth taking a look at. The aid workers are also a class in itself, their motivations for being there, their personal stories, are all very interesting. All these peoples are interesting. The book should have continued to be like in the first part, more analyses, more summarizing, and less he-said-she-said and soap-opera.
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4: Excellent introduction to Sudan's North/South conflict (NOT Darfur, though)
Having lived in Sudan for almost two years I can say that the book was a perfect introduction to the issues and the life in Sudan with an eye on the North/South conflict. Riek Macchar, one of the characters in the book, is still an important figure in the country. Of course, John Garang has died in a helicopter accident.
The book reads like a novel and pulls you along on the strength of the "plot" which is the life of Emma and her work in Sudan's South. Additional information about Sudan and its history is supplied liberally. Scoggins is a reporter with an eye for detail and a penchant for making the story interesting.
Anyone who asks me for something to read about Sudan gets told, "Emma's War." Even if you are interested in learning about the Darfur conflict, this is a good place to start, since a) there is a lot of background material about this part of the world, and b) there are North/South elements in the Darfur situation which will probably continue to grow, even though the origins of the Darfur disaster are not based on North/South conflict.
This is very readable and filled with interesting characters, most of whom are still important to this area.
By the way, Philip Caputo's novel "Acts of Faith" deals with the same issues as Emma's war, but in an extremely fictionalized way.
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5: Important subplot, forgettable protagonist, poor writing
The best thing "Emma's War" by Deborah Scroggins accomplishes is to highlight the often overlooked tragedy and strife that grips Sudan in particular and Africa in general. That's it though, and is the only reason this book deserves more than one star.
Emma herself, based on Scroggins' testimony, is an otherwise forgettable, if not pitiable, person. She had a lot of sex, did a lot of drugs, and reveled in the attention that her exploits attracted. She and her "safari companions" competed to outdo one another with their wild pursuits, and you get the sense that marrying a warlord was simply her ultimate one-upping of her friends. "Top that!" you can almost hear her say. As one prominent tribal chief put it, "If she were in a European setting, she would never even have been noticed." Nevertheless, there is a good story in Emma's adventure, captured in the book's compelling subtitle: "An aid worker, a warlord, radical Islam, and the politics of oil - a true story of love and death in Sudan." How could such a story not be a hit?
The real problem with "Emma's War" is Scroggins' unbelievably poor writing. From what should have been a page-turning adventure, she rendered a laborious manuscript rife with typos, suffering from dreadful research and incoherent structure, and displaying a general misunderstanding of the English language. For example, she puts the date of Charles Gordon's death at both January 25th and January 26th in consecutive paragraphs (even if the details are murky, such inconsistency is inexcusable). She will use an opening parenthesis but have no corresponding closing parenthesis. She routinely jumbles several disconnected topics into a single, long paragraph. Meanwhile she jumps forward and backward in the story with no warning or explanation. And she repeatedly refers to the list of passengers on an airplane flight as the "airplane's manifesto." Overall, "Emma's War" reads like a long, disjointed, carelessly written e-mail.
Fortunately, there are alternatives to this book. For instance, there is the upcoming movie starring (possibly) Nicole Kidman as Emma. More seriously, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder is an excellent story of true humanitarian activism.
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