Various - "In The Yule Log Glow Book 3"

Grace S. Richmond - "On Christmas Day in the Morning"

Agnes C. Laut - "Canada: the Empire of the North"

Lewis C. Lockwood - "Mary S. Peake"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Tancred

B >> Benjamin Disraeli >> Tancred




Though proud of his ancient house, and not unequal, when necessary, to
the due representation of his position, unlike the Orientals in general,
he disliked pomp, and shrank from the ceremony which awaited him. His
restless, intriguing, and imaginative spirit revelled in the incognito.
He was perpetually in masquerade; a merchant, a Mamlouk, a soldier of
fortune, a Tartar messenger, sometimes a pilgrim, sometimes a dervish,
always in pursuit of some improbable but ingenious object, or lost in
the mazes of some fantastic plot. He enjoyed moving alone without a
single attendant; and seldom in his mountains, he was perpetually in
Egypt, Bagdad, Cyprus, Smyrna, and the Syrian cities. He sauntered away
a good deal of his time indeed in the ports and towns of the coast,
looking after his creditors; but this was not the annoyance to him which
it would be to most men.

Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only
real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.
The usurers of Syria are as adroit and callous as those of all other
countries, and possess no doubt all those repulsive qualities which are
the consequence of an habitual control over every generous emotion.
But, instead of viewing them with feelings of vengeance or abhorrence,
Fakredeen studied them unceasingly with a fine and profound
investigation, and found in their society a deep psychological interest.
His own rapacious soul delighted to struggle with their rapine, and it
charmed him to baffle with his artifice their fraudulent dexterity. He
loved to enter their houses with his glittering eye and face radiant
with innocence, and, when things were at the very worst and they
remorseless, to succeed in circumventing them. In a certain sense, and
to a certain degree, they were all his victims. True, they had gorged
upon his rents and menaced his domains; but they had also advanced large
sums, and he had so involved one with another in their eager appetite to
prey upon his youth, and had so complicated the financial relations of
the Syrian coast in his own respect, that sometimes they tremblingly
calculated that the crash of Fakredeen must inevitably be the signal of
a general catastrophe.

Even usurers have their weak side; some are vain, some envious;
Fakredeen knew how to titillate their self-love, or when to give them
the opportunity of immolating a rival. Then it was, when he had baffled
and deluded them, or, with that fatal frankness of which he sometimes
blushingly boasted, had betrayed some sacred confidence that shook
the credit of the whole coast from Scanderoon to Gaza, and embroiled
individuals whose existence depended on their mutual goodwill, that,
laughing like one of the blue-eyed hyenas of his forests, he galloped
away to Canobia, and, calling for his nargileh, mused in chuckling
calculation over the prodigious sums he owed to them, formed whimsical
and airy projects for his quittance, or delighted himself by brooding
over the memory of some happy expedient or some daring feat of finance.

'What should I be without my debts?' he would sometimes exclaim; 'dear
companions of my life that never desert me! All my knowledge of human
nature is owing to them: it is in managing my affairs that I have
sounded the depths of the human heart, recognised all the combinations
of human character, developed my own powers, and mastered the resources
of others. What expedient in negotiation is unknown to me? What degree
of endurance have I not calculated? What play of the countenance have
I not observed? Yes, among my creditors, I have disciplined that
diplomatic ability that shall some day confound and control cabinets.
O, my debts, I feel your presence like that of guardian angels! If I be
lazy, you prick me to action; if elate, you subdue me to reflection;
and thus it is that you alone can secure that continuous yet controlled
energy which conquers mankind.'

Notwithstanding all this, Fakredeen had grown sometimes a little wearied
even of the choice excitement of pecuniary embarrassment. It was
too often the same story, the adventures monotonous, the characters
identical. He had been plundered by every usurer in the Levant, and in
turn had taken them in. He sometimes delighted his imagination by the
idea of making them disgorge; that is to say, when he had established
that supremacy which he had resolved sooner or later to attain. Although
he never kept an account, his memory was so faithful that he knew
exactly the amount of which he had been defrauded by every individual
with whom he had had transactions. He longed to mulct them, to
the service of the State, in the exact amount if their unhallowed
appropriations. He was too good a statesman ever to confiscate; he
confined himself to taxation. Confiscation is a blunder that destroys
public credit: taxation, on the contrary, improves it, and both come to
the same thing.

That the proud soul of Tancred of Montacute, with its sublime
aspirations, its inexorable purpose, its empyrean ambition, should find
a votary in one apparently so whimsical, so worldly, and so worthless,
may at the first glance seem improbable; yet a nearer and finer
examination may induce us to recognise its likelihood. Fakredeen had
a brilliant imagination and a passionate sensibility; his heart was
controlled by his taste, and, when that was pleased and satisfied, he
was capable of profound feeling and of earnest conduct. Moral worth
had no abstract charms for him, and he could sympathise with a dazzling
reprobate; but virtue in an heroic form, lofty principle, and sovereign
duty invested with all the attributes calculated to captivate his rapid
and refined perception, exercised over him a resistless and transcendent
spell. The deep and disciplined intelligence of Tancred, trained in all
the philosophy and cultured with all the knowledge of the West, acted
with magnetic power upon a consciousness the bright vivacity of which
was only equalled by its virgin ignorance of all that books can teach,
and of those great conclusions which the studious hour can alone
elaborate. Fakredeen hung upon his accents like a bee, while Tancred
poured forth, without an effort, the treasures of his stored memory and
long musing mind. He went on, quite unconscious that his companion was
devoid of that previous knowledge, which, with all other persons, would
have been a preliminary qualification for a profitable comprehension of
what he said. Fakredeen gave him no hint of this: the young Emir trusted
to his quick perception to sustain him, although his literary training
was confined to an Arabic grammar, some sentences of wise men, some
volumes of poetry, and mainly and most profitably to the clever Courier
de Smyrne, and occasionally a packet of French journals which he
obtained from a Levantine consul.

It was therefore with a feeling not less than enthusiastic that
Fakredeen responded to the suggestive influence of Tancred. The want
that he had long suffered from was supplied, and the character he had
long mused over had appeared. Here was a vast theory to be reduced to
practice, and a commanding mind to give the leading impulse. However
imperfect may have been his general conception of the ideas of Tancred,
he clearly comprehended that their fulfilment involved his two great
objects, change and action. Compared with these attainments on a great
scale, his present acquisition and position sank into nothingness. A
futurity consisting of a Syrian Emirate and a mountain castle figured as
intolerable, and Fakredeen, hoping all things and prepared for anything,
flung to the winds all consideration for his existing ties, whether in
the shape of domains or of debts.

The imperturbable repose, the grave and thoughtful daring, with which
Tancred developed his revolutionary projects, completed the power with
which he could now dispose of the fate of the young Emir. Sometimes,
in fluttering moments of disordered reverie, Fakredeen had indulged in
dreams of what, with his present companion, it appeared was to be the
ordinary business of their lives, and which he discussed with a calm
precision which alone half convinced Fakredeen of their feasibility.
It was not for an impassioned votary to intimate a difficulty; but if
Fakredeen, to elicit an opinion, sometimes hinted an adverse suggestion,
the objection was swept away in an instant by an individual whose
inflexible will was sustained by the conviction of divine favour.




CHAPTER XLV.

_The People of Ansarey_

DO YOU know anything of a people in the north of this country, called
the Ansarey?' inquired Tancred of Baroni.

'No, my lord; and no one else. They hold the mountainous country about
Antioch, and will let no one enter it; a very warlike race; they beat
back the Egyptians; but Ibrahim Pasha loaded his artillery with piastres
the second time he attacked them, and they worked very well with the
Pasha after that.' 'Are they Moslemin?'

'It is very easy to say what they are not, and that is about the extent
of any knowledge that we have of them; they are not Moslemin, they
are not Christians, they are not Druses, and they are not Jews, and
certainly they are not Guebres, for I have spoken of them to the Indians
at Djedda, who are fire-worshippers, and they do not in any degree
acknowledge them.'

'And what is their race? Are they Arabs?' 'I should say not, my lord;
for the only one I ever saw was more like a Greek or an Armenian than a
son of the desert.'

'You have seen one of them?'

'It was at Damascus: there was a city brawl, and M. de Sidonia saved the
life of a man, who turned out to be an Ansarey, though disguised. They
have secret agents at most of the Syrian cities. They speak Arabic; but
I have heard M. de Sidonia say they have also a language of their own.'

'I wonder he did not visit them.'

'The plague raged at Aleppo when we were there, and the Ansarey were
doubly rigid in their exclusion of all strangers from their country.'

'And this Ansarey at Damascus, have you ever seen anything of him
since?'

'Yes; I have been at Damascus several times since I travelled with M. de
Sidonia, and I have sometimes smoked a nargileh with this man: his name
is Dar-kush, and he deals in drugs.'

Now this was the reason that induced Tancred to inquire of Baroni
respecting the Ansarey. The day before, which was the third day of
the great hunting party at Canobia, Fakredeen and Tancred had found
themselves alone with Hamood Abuneked, and the lord of Canobia had
thought it a good occasion to sound this powerful Sheikh of the Druses.
Hamood was rough, but frank and sincere. He was no enemy of the House
of Shehaab; but the Abunekeds had suffered during the wars and civil
conflicts which had of late years prevailed in Lebanon, and he was
evidently disinclined to mix in any movement which was not well matured
and highly promising of success. Fakredeen, of course, concealed his
ulterior purpose from the Druse, who associated with the idea of union
between the two nations merely the institution of a sole government
under one head, and that head a Shehaab, probably dwelling at Canobia.

'I have fought by the side of the Emir Bescheer,' said Hamood, 'and
would he were in his palace of Bteddeen at this moment! And the
Abunekeds rode with the Emir Yousef against Djezzar. It is not the House
of Abuneked that would say there should be two weak nations when there
might be one strong one. But what I say is sealed with the signet of
truth; it is known to the old, and it is remembered by the wise; the
Emir Bescheer has said it to me as many times as there are oranges on
that tree, and the Emir Yousef has said it to my father. The northern
passes are not guarded by Maronite or by Druse.'

'And as long as they are not guarded by us?' said Fakredeen,
inquiringly.

'We may have a sole prince and a single government,' continued Hamood,
'and the houses of the two nations may be brothers, but every now and
then the Osmanli will enter the mountain, and we shall eat sand.'

'And who holds the northern passes, noble Sheikh?' inquired Tancred.

'Truly, I believe,' replied Hamood, 'very sons of Eblis, for the whole
of that country is in the hands of Ansarey, and there never has been
evil in the mountain that they have not been against us.'

'They never would draw with the Shehaabs,' said Fakredeen; 'and I have
heard the Emir Bescheer say that, if the Ansarey had acted with him, he
would have baffled, in '40, both the Porte and the Pasha.'

'It was the same in the time of the Emir Yousef,' said Sheikh Hamood.
'They can bring twenty-five thousand picked men into the plain.'

'And I suppose, if it were necessary, would not be afraid to meet the
Osmanli in Anatoly?' said Fakredeen.

'If the Turkmans or the Kurds would join them,' said Sheikh Hamood,
'there is nothing to prevent their washing their horses' feet in the
Bosphorus.'

'It is strange,' said Fakredeen, 'but frequently as I have been at
Aleppo and Antioch, I have never been in their country. I have always
been warned against it, always kept from it, which indeed ought to have
prompted my earliest efforts, when I was my own master, to make them
a visit. But, I know not how it is, there are some prejudices that do
stick to one. I have a prejudice against the Ansarey, a sort of fear, a
kind of horror. 'Tis vastly absurd. I suppose my nurse instilled it into
me, and frightened me with them when I would not sleep. Besides, I had
an idea that they particularly hated the Shehaabs. I recollect so well
the Emir Bescheer, at Bteddeen, bestowing endless imprecations on them.'

'He made many efforts to win them, though,' said Sheikh Hamood, 'and so
did the Emir Yousef.'

'And you think without them, noble Sheikh,' said Tancred, 'that Syria is
not secure?'

'I think, with them and peace with the desert, that Syria might defy
Turk and Egyptian.'

'And carry the war into the enemy's quarters, if necessary?' said
Fakredeen.

'If they would let us alone, I am content to leave them,' said Hamood.

'Hem!' said the Emir Fakredeen. 'Do you see that gazelle, noble Sheikh?
How she bounds along! What if we follow her, and the pursuit should lead
us into the lands of the Ansarey?'

'It would be a long ride,' said Sheikh Hamood. 'Nor should I care much
to trust my head in a country governed by a woman.'

'A woman!' exclaimed Tancred and Fakredeen.

'They say as much,' said Sheikh Hamood; 'perhaps it is only a
coffee-house tale.'

'I never heard it before,' said Fakredeen. 'In the time of my uncle,
Elderidis was Sheikh. I have heard indeed that the Ansarey worship a
woman.'

'Then they would be Christians,' said Sheikh Hamood, 'and I never heard
that.'




CHAPTER XLVI.

_The Laurellas_

IT WAS destined that Napoleon should never enter Rome, and Mahomet never
enter Damascus. What was the reason of this? They were not uninterested
in those cities that interest all. The Emperor selected from the capital
of the Caesars the title of his son; the Prophet, when he beheld the
crown of Syria, exclaimed that it was too delightful, and that he must
reserve his paradise for another world. Buonaparte was an Italian, and
must have often yearned after the days of Rome triumphant. The son of
Abdallah was descended from the patriarchs, whose progenitor had been
moulded out of the red clay of the most ancient city in the world.
Absorbed by the passionate pursuit of the hour, the two heroes postponed
a gratification which they knew how to appreciate, but which, with all
their success, all their power, and all their fame, they were never
permitted to indulge. What moral is to be drawn from this circumstance?
That we should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even
than conquerors and prophets.

The most ancient city of the world has no antiquity. This flourishing
abode is older than many ruins, yet it does not possess one single
memorial of the past. In vain has it conquered or been conquered. Not a
trophy, a column, or an arch, records its warlike fortunes. Temples have
been raised here to unknown gods and to revealed Divinity; all have been
swept away. Not the trace of a palace or a prison, a public bath, a hall
of justice, can be discovered in this wonderful city, where everything
has been destroyed, and where nothing has decayed.

Men moralise among ruins, or, in the throng and tumult of successful
cities, recall past visions of urban desolation for prophetic warning.
London is a modern Babylon; Paris has aped imperial Rome, and may share
its catastrophe. But what do the sages say to Damascus? It had municipal
rights in the days when God conversed with Abraham. Since then, the
kings of the great monarchies have swept over it; and the Greek and the
Roman, the Tartar, the Arab, and the Turk have passed through its walls;
yet it still exists and still flourishes; is full of life, wealth,
and enjoyment. Here is a city that has quaffed the magical elixir and
secured the philosopher's stone, that is always young and always rich.
As yet, the disciples of progress have not been able exactly to match
this instance of Damascus, but it is said that they have great faith in
the future of Birkenhead.

We moralise among ruins: it is always when the game is played that we
discover the cause of the result. It is a fashion intensely European,
the habit of an organisation that, having little imagination, takes
refuge in reason, and carefully locks the door when the steed is stolen.
A community has crumbled to pieces, and it is always accounted for by
its political forms, or its religious modes. There has been a deficiency
in what is called checks in the machinery of government; the definition
of the suffrage has not been correct; what is styled responsibility has,
by some means or other, not answered; or, on the other hand, people have
believed too much or too little in a future state, have been too much
engrossed by the present, or too much absorbed in that which was to
come. But there is not a form of government which Damascus has not
experienced, excepting the representative, and not a creed which it has
not acknowledged, excepting the Protestant. Yet, deprived of the only
rule and the only religion that are right, it is still justly described
by the Arabian poets as a pearl surrounded by emeralds.

Yes, the rivers of Damascus still run and revel within and without the
walls, of which the steward of Sheikh Abraham was a citizen. They have
encompassed them with gardens, and filled them with fountains. They
gleam amid their groves of fruit, wind through their vivid meads,
sparkle-among perpetual flowers, gush from the walls, bubble in the
courtyards, dance and carol in the streets: everywhere their joyous
voices, everywhere their glancing forms, filling the whole world around
with freshness, and brilliancy, and fragrance, and life. One might
fancy, as we track them in their dazzling course, or suddenly making
their appearance in every spot and in every scene, that they were
the guardian spirits of the city. You have explained them, says the
utilitarian, the age and flourishing fortunes of Damascus: they arise
from its advantageous situation; it is well supplied with water.

Is it better supplied than the ruins of contiguous regions? Did the Nile
save Thebes? Did the Tigris preserve Nineveh? Did the Euphrates secure
Babylon?

Our scene lies in a chamber vast and gorgeous. The reader must imagine a
hall, its form that of a rather long square, but perfectly proportioned.
Its coved roof, glowing with golden and scarlet tints, is highly carved
in the manner of the Saracens, such as we may observe in the palaces
of Moorish Spain and in the Necropolis of the Mamlouk Sultans at Cairo,
deep recesses of honeycomb work, with every now and then pendants of
daring grace hanging like stalactites from some sparry cavern. This roof
is supported by columns of white marble, fashioned in the shape of palm
trees, the work of Italian artists, and which forms arcades around the
chamber. Beneath these arcades runs a noble divan of green and silver
silk, and the silken panels of the arabesque walls have been covered
with subjects of human interest by the finest artists of Munich. The
marble floor, with its rich mosaics, was also the contribution of
Italian genius, though it was difficult at the present moment to trace
its varied, graceful, and brilliant designs, so many were the sumptuous
carpets, the couches, sofas, and cushions that were spread about it.
There were indeed throughout the chamber many indications of furniture,
which are far from usual even among the wealthiest and most refined
Orientals: Indian tables, vases of china, and baskets of agate and
porcelain filled with flowers. From one side, the large Saracenic
windows of this saloon, which were not glazed, but covered only when
required by curtains of green and silver silk, now drawn aside, looked
on a garden; vistas of quivering trees, broad parterres of flowers,
and everywhere the gleam of glittering fountains, which owned, however,
fealty to the superior stream that bubbled in the centre of the saloon,
where four negroes, carved in black marble, poured forth its refreshing
waters from huge shells of pearl, into the vast circle of a jasper
basin.

At this moment the chamber was enlivened by the presence of many
individuals. Most of these were guests; one was the master of the
columns and the fountains; a man much above the middle height, though as
well proportioned as his sumptuous hall; admirably handsome, for beauty
and benevolence blended in the majestic countenance of Adam Besso.
To-day his Syrian robes were not unworthy of his palace; the cream-white
shawl that encircled his brow with its ample folds was so fine that the
merchant who brought it to him carried it over the ocean and the desert
in the hollow shell of a pomegranate. In his girdle rested a handjar,
the sheath of which was of a rare and vivid enamel, and the hilt
entirely of brilliants.

A slender man of middle size, who, as he stood by Besso, had a
diminutive appearance, was in earnest conversation with his host. This
personage was adorned with more than one order, and dressed in the Frank
uniform of one of the Great Powers, though his head was shaven, for
he wore a tarboush or red cap, although no turban. This gentleman was
Signor Elias de Laurella, a wealthy Hebrew merchant at Damascus, and
Austrian consul-general _ad honorem_; a great man, almost as celebrated
for his diplomatic as for his mercantile abilities; a gentleman who
understood the Eastern question; looked up to for that, but still more,
in that he was the father of the two prettiest girls in the Levant.

The Mesdemoiselles de Laurella, Therese and Sophonisbe, had just
completed their education, partly at Smyrna, the last year at
Marseilles. This had quite turned their heads; they had come back with a
contempt for Syria, the bitterness of which was only veiled by the high
style of European nonchalance, of which they had a supreme command, and
which is, perhaps, our only match for Eastern repose. The Mesdemoiselles
de Laurella were highly accomplished, could sing quite ravishingly,
paint fruits and flowers, and drop to each other, before surrounding
savages, mysterious allusions to feats in ballrooms, which, alas! no
longer could be achieved. They signified, and in some degree solaced,
their intense disgust at their present position by a haughty and
amusingly impassable demeanour, which meant to convey their superiority
to all surrounding circumstances. One of their favourite modes of
asserting this pre-eminence was wearing the Frank dress, which their
father only did officially, and which no female member of their family
had ever assumed, though Damascus swarmed with Laurellas. Nothing in the
dreams of Madame Carson, or Madame Camille, or Madame Devey, nothing in
the blazoned pages of the Almanachs des Dames and Belle Assemblee, ever
approached the Mdlles. Laurella, on a day of festival. It was the acme.
Nothing could be conceived beyond it; nobody could equal it. It was
taste exaggerated, if that be possible; fashion baffling pursuit, if
that be permitted. It was a union of the highest moral and material
qualities; the most sublime contempt and the stiffest cambric. Figure to
yourself, in such habiliments, two girls, of the same features, the
same form, the same size, but of different colour: a nose turned up, but
choicely moulded, large eyes, and richly fringed; fine hair, beautiful
lips and teeth, but the upper lip and the cheek bones rather too long
and high, and the general expression of the countenance, when not
affected, more sprightly than intelligent. Therese was a brunette,
but her eye wanted softness as much as the blue orb of the brilliant
Sophonisbe. Nature and Art had combined to produce their figures, and it
was only the united effort of two such first-rate powers that could have
created anything so admirable.

This was the first visit of the Mesdemoiselles Laurella to the family
of Besso, for they had only returned from Marseilles at the beginning
of the year, and their host had not resided at Damascus until the summer
was much advanced. Of course they were well acquainted by reputation
with the great Hebrew house of which the lord of the mansion was the
chief. They had been brought up to esteem it the main strength and
ornament of their race and religion. But the Mesdemoiselles Laurella
were ashamed of their race, and not fanatically devoted to their
religion, which might be true, but certainly was not fashionable.
Therese, who was of a less sanguineous temperament than her sister,
affected despair and unutterable humiliation, which permitted her to
say before her own people a thousand disagreeable things with an air of
artless frankness. The animated Sophonisbe, on the contrary, was always
combating prejudice, felt persuaded that the Jews would not be so much
disliked if they were better known; that all they had to do was to
imitate as closely as possible the habits and customs of the nation
among whom they chanced to live; and she really did believe that
eventually, such was the progressive spirit of the age, a difference
in religion would cease to be regarded, and that a respectable Hebrew,
particularly if well dressed and well mannered, might be able to
pass through society without being discovered, or at least noticed.
Consummation of the destiny of the favourite people of the Creator of
the universe!

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