This is not another linguistic term, nor is it figurative. I literally mean the big cruise ship whose sinking continues to intrigue and entertain over a century later. I’ve been listening to the BBC Sounds podcast Ship of Dreams, which puts the tragic voyage under a microscope, examining everything from the workings and perils of the engine room to what was on the menu for the upper deck passengers. Following an introduction covering the sociocultural and economic background that led to the construction of such a ship and the weeks leading up to Titanic setting sail, the podcast re-enacts the disaster with the help of historians, nautical experts and survivors’ accounts.
Among the fascinating factoids to emerge is information about the languages spoken on the Titanic. After English, the most spoken language was Swedish. Of the 1,300 passengers on board, 123 were Swedish (with 327 British and 306 Americans). Of the 994 crew members, some 34 were Swedish nationals. While these crew members were mostly dining staff who worked the luxury liners with the full expectation of returning to Sweden, all the Swedish passengers were travelling third class and immigrating to America for a better life. The Italians and French, by the way, ran the kitchen.
In this potpourri of languages, Arabic could also be heard on the Titanic, though the exact number of speakers is hard to ascertain, especially given the bilinguals on board and the poor record keeping of the day. Among these Arabic speakers were some 150 Lebanese immigrants who came from rural villages and were fleeing poverty. Sadly, only 29 made it to America. When these survivors arrived in New York, they were given temporary lodgings, food and clothing by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. According to the podcast and other accounts (Encyclopedia Titanica), anyone from that part of the Middle East was categorised and treated as the same by Euro-Americans. It has also been noted that the Hebrew Aid Society was a non-discriminatory humanitarian organisation.
It’s hard not to think about these Swedish and Lebanese immigrants without reflecting on the plight and treatment of immigrants to America today, or the hostilities between Arab nations and Israel. The adage about history repeating misses the mark.
What I’ve been reading
Annie Ernaux may have won the Noble Prize for Literature, but I’m not convinced of the literary merit of her work. By literary I mean work that makes the reader aware of its language and style of presentation. I’ll admit that I grumbled when Bob Dylan – a lyricist, not a poet – won the prize, but now I have to say that his lyrics are far more literary than Ernaux’s prose. To be fair to the French writer, she has often said that she is an author of autofiction and not a novelist. I’ve just finished reading her ‘autofiction,’ Une Femme, about the life and death of her mother. While the story holds some interesting reflections on the lives of women and family dynamics in France from the early twentieth century to the 1980s, the writing was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t come away from it with any satisfaction of having read a work of literature.
The flipside of this was reading Bill Browder’s Red Notice, which doesn’t aim at fiction or literariness. Yet, it read like a thriller with feelings of frustration and pathos that gave it emotional force worthy of any literary writer. Browder, a US citizen, recounts his experience of setting up an investment company in Russia following the end of the Soviet Union when the country was a wild west for investors. His run-ins with corruption and dubious politicians reached its peak with the torture and murder in a Russian prison of Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s lawyer. Holding people responsible couldn’t happen within Russia, so Browder involved the US government, international human rights organisations and the media. And none of that was easy. Today, Browder is recognised as a human rights activist.
Finally, noting the death of writer Edmund White, I reread his brilliant essay published in Granta in 2008 about his view of Europeans when he was a child in America and his first experience of travelling in Europe years later. So much of what he said then resonated with me (an American who has immigrated to Europe) that I still remembered much of the essay 17 years later. I owe that not only to the content, but to the magic of his prose. RIP.
Paola Trimarco 