DANCING IN THE STREETS: A History of Collective Joy

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company. $26.

Reviewed by C.  Bertelsen

“Dancing in the Streets” is, frankly, a brilliant book. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of “Nickel and Dimed,” “Blood Rites,” and other journalistic commentaries on human society, is not an academic, although she documents everything as would an academic. Nevertheless, some readers might quibble over this omission or that in this highly readable and multilayered book. But the truth is that Ehrenreich probes a hollow place in contemporary society and comes up with some intriguing explanations about why we are who we are today. By synthesizing a large number of seemingly disparate ideas and sources, she speaks with authority about the increasing absence of collective joy in Western society, tracing the loss of what appears to be a basic human need.

Using a chronological framework, Ehrenreich moves through western history, beginning with the prehistoric roots of archaic ecstasy, passing through the Middle Ages, the Age of Reason, Puritanism and its associated military reform, colonialism, fascism, the rock rebellion of the 1960s, and ending with the modern-day frenzy surrounding sports. Along the way, she touches on the oppression of women and ancient female-generated dance and worship.

Ehrenreich starts by examining the ecstatic ritual surrounding the worship of the Greek god, Dionysius, and the impact of that ritual on the everyday lives of the ancient Greeks. Hinting that early Christian rites bore no resemblance to today’s staid “sit-down” Christian worship services and that dancing played a role in those rituals, similar to Greek and Jewish practice, she proposes a number of credible reasons for the gradual decline of communal joy and festivities in the West and in areas colonized by Westerners.

One of the paramount reasons for this decline lies with the early Roman Catholic Church cracking down on sacred dance, which likely took place within the worship space. Dancing and festivals thus moved from the worship space to the streets. In the beginning, both noble elites and their vassals and peasants all celebrated feasts days and other events communally. But as time went on, the elite and the powerful found the raucous behavior associated with the festivals, particularly in the Lord of Misrule traditions and the antagonistic jokes made by the peasants about the nobility, to be disturbing enough to begin withdrawing from the public celebrations. More and more, the nobility and powerful Church authorities attempted to control these festivals that occurred with regularity through the year—one out of every four days during the Middle Ages was an official religious feast day or holiday of some sort. Carnival became a primary target for such control.

In another fascinating discussion, Ehrenreich shows how Puritanism helped to squelch the Carnivalesque behavior of the common soldier. Prior to the introduction of Calvinism, soldiers spent a lot of time sitting around, drinking and carousing. The seventeenth-century English soldier and politician, Oliver Cromwell, changed all that by demanding constant drilling and other tasks that left soldiers little time for anything untoward and undisciplined. The military of today reflects those changes.

Calvinism affected society in other ways as well. The number of suicides in the Swiss canton of Zurich increased sharply in the sixteenth century, just as Calvinism took hold. Prior to the sixteenth century, few remarks about depression turned up in historical records. Claiming that suicide is a sure marker for depression, the author documents these conclusions well and suggests that communal ecstatic ritual and festivities may well have acted as a cure for depression over the ages.

The signs of yearning for collective joy appear everywhere in our modern, individualistic society, but manifest themselves most vividly with the extreme preoccupation with sports. College football fans in particular represent a concrete example of Ehrenreich’s basic theory. With body painting, chants and songs, outlandish costumes and masks, and even just T-shirts in school colors, any American college town in autumn revels in a spectacle that could very well have transpired during Carnival week in the Middle Ages. And that’s the thing—society today is a “society of the spectacle,” of passive observance of organized activity.

If the book sports any defect, it lies with sporadic ponderous wordspeak and occasional convoluted sentence structure.

“Dancing in the Streets” is brilliant, profound, disturbing, exhilarating, and revolutionary. If nothing else, it will cause you to look differently at the sports fans in your life.

© 2008, originalyl published in The Roanoke Times.

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CLEOPATRA: Last Queen of Egypt

By Joyce Tyldesley
Basic Books. 304 pages. $27.50.
Reviewed by C. Bertelsen

Shakespeare immortalized the notorious Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII, in his play (circa 1607), “Antony & Cleopatra.” Through the centuries, other writers and artists took up similar themes in numerous works of literature and art, including film director Joseph L. Mankiewicz who directed the 1963 film, “Cleopatra.” People today might be forgiven if Elizabeth Taylor comes to mind when they think of Cleopatra. Long considered the immoral and blood-thirsty Egyptian paramour of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, the legendary Cleopatra gets a new public relations agent, as it were, in British Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley’s “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.”

With the goal of putting “Cleopatra back into her own, predominantly Egyptian context,” Tyldesley traces Cleopatra’s Ptolemy family tree and the convoluted relationships therein. She confirms Cleopatra’s romantic liaisons with Roman rulers and conquerors, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, who appear in the book in detail. In Egyptian culture of the time, Cleopatra may well have thought she was married to these two men, a lawful wife. Archaeological and documentary evidence portray an entirely different Cleopatra from the one vilified in propaganda spewed by her contemporary Octavian and other powerful Romans. “The Romans, who looked long and hard at Cleopatra, never saw a wife. They saw an unnatural, immodest woman who preyed on other women’s husbands.” Unlike Greek and Roman women of the time, many Egyptian women lived free, intellectual lives. In this fact perhaps lay the seed of the rumors and back-stabbing behind Cleopatra’s legacy centuries after her suicide.

Tyldesley provides many scholarly tools for readers to use as she excavates Cleopatra’s life story from the many layers of Roman innuendo. Family trees, photographs of archaeological finds and statues, and maps help to make sense of the political intrigue characterizing Cleopatra’s times. Quotations from Plutarch round out details of Cleopatra’s palace life: “Philotas, the physician of Amphissa, used to tell my grandfather, Lamprias, that … having got well acquainted with one of the royal cooks, he was easily persuaded … to take a view of the extravagant preparations for a royal supper. … [He] saw … eight wild boars a-roasting,” for only twelve diners.

A solid piece of scholarship, Tyldesley’s revisionist “Cleopatra” examines the whole arc of Cleopatra’s life and her cultural milieu. The power struggles between Rome and Egypt predominate. And the city of Alexandria merits its own chapter, as it was an important center for the Ptolemies, their seat of intellectual and political power.

Tyldesley rebukes many academic accounts of Cleopatra’s life, a number of which “have been unable to cast aside Shakespeare’s vision and have been seduced into quoting Shakespeare as if he were a primary historical source.” Ironically, Arab historians, with access to Egypt’s oral history, preserved much of Cleopatra’s real story.

© 2008 C. Bertelsen. Published in The Roanoke Times, Sunday, November 2, 2008.

SEA OF POPPIES

By Amitav Ghosh

Farrar Strauss Giroux. 504 pages. $26.00.

Reviewed by C. Bertelsen

Opium, scourge of China, coin of the realm for Britain, financed the British Raj in India under the flag of The East India Company. Beginning in 1730, China imported 15 tons of opium, brought in on British ships. The Chinese government soon realized the devastation wrought by opium and banned its importation. But the British continued to inundate China with smuggled opium; by the mid 1820s, 900 tons of Indian opium entered China yearly.

Indian anthropologist and historian Amitav Ghosh earned a doctorate from Oxford and writes well-received novels like The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Shadow Lines. His latest, and most ambitious, novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first in a planned trilogy.  And it flays the British opium trade.

Ghosh initially became interested in the issue of Indian opium when he learned about Indian indentured servants who fled India because of inroads on their livelihoods made by the opium trade. Using a former slave ship called The Ibis as the central character, he tells their story, wrapping it around the British opium trade. Dozens and dozens of characters flit in and out of the narrative. Three of these serve as the pillars of the sordid tale of Britain’s role in flooding China with smuggled opium:  the poor indentured Indian woman Deeti, the American sailor Zachary Reid or Zikri, and the French woman Paulette Lambert. Loves, deaths, betrayals, swindles, double-crosses, power struggles, and obsessions ebb and flow throughout the pages.

To his credit, Ghosh writes of the sea and ship life in the manner of Melville and Conrad. The tone of his book sounds very Dickensian, with a hint of Patrick O’Brien’s sea sagas. But Ghosh’s compulsive fascination with linguistics spoils the impact of his solid research on the minutiae of life and language in 1830s British India. His telling of a basically interesting yarn suffers accordingly.

For Sea of Poppies either has you running to the dictionary every five minutes or frantically paging through the “glossary” at the end of the book, searching for the meanings of words like “sheeshmahal,” “silmagor,” and “doolally.” Called “The Ibis Chrestomathy,” this eccentric “glossary” encompasses thirty-one pages of double columns and contains most, but not all, of the odd words swimming out of the mouths of Ghosh’s characters and throughout the narrative itself. Take the ship’s pilot words to Zachary about the old Raja of Raskhali: ” ‘Wasn’t a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmahal blazing with shammer and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced smikn. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table.’ ”

No doubt about it, reading Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel comes close to a Babelic nightmare.

And yet, and yet, the story takes hold as the three major characters attempt to make their way through the currents of their karma.  Sea of Poppies, for the patient reader, renders up a fascinating look at a little-known time period, with a story line worthy of trilogization.

© 2008 C. Bertelsen. Originally published in The Roanoke Times, Sunday, October 19, 2008.