Get It In Writing

Huevos Rancheros seem to be the weekend breakfast to beat around here these day.  Yesterday was black beans.  Today was pintos.  Lay them out on a tortilla with cheese add a fried egg and salsa.  With all the culinary might of China they grew up with and the predominance of American style breakfasts, I must note that this insistence is some pretty remarkable Mexican soft power to consider.   How is it that beans, eggs and tortilla are the thing to order, if someone is taking your order, in the morning time?  Yesterday, for lunch, they asked to get burritos.  That’s a lot of beans and salsa. 

Sunday morning, I allow myself time to read.  Otherwise this only seems to happen on planes or in truncated two page bursts in the bathroom. I had about one hundred and fifty pages to go with Ms. Sayyida, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman (a.k.a. Emily Ruete).  She had a keen eye for observation and an appropriately understated tone of a royal.  One continually considered just how rare it was to have an Arab princess account of this time gone by, so that she chose to focus on weddings and crafts and cooking which might have gone unobserved by visiting Europeans or indeed male Arabs who chose to write about it. 

How brave she was to up and leave her island and all the family intrigue to relocate to Germany.  What else but love could fuel such a radical departure.  No difficulty feeling waves of empathy when her husband slips from a tram in Hamburg and is struck dead, leaving her with three small children in a strange land.  And it was to these children that she initially set out to  write this book, to explain to them what they could otherwise never imagine about her own life as a child.

There is a bit of highly plausible treachery which casts the British government in a poor light.  I don’t know if posterity has left us any more positive renderings of Sir Bartle Frere, but Ms. Ruete has managed to effectively characterize him as mendacious knave, when he lies to her and reneges on the deal he had promised her.  The tone of the proposition seems too authentic to have been fabricated:  He asked her: “What did I consider of greater value to me – a reconciliation with my relations, or the securing of my children’s future prospects?”

He later informs her, after she has delivered on her side of the agreement and foregone seeing her visiting brother, that because she is a German subject, something he absolutely knew from the outset, her Majesty’s government would not be able to provide for her family as otherwise promised.  One wishes we could revisit the meeting and insist she get it in writing. 

And, infidel though she had become, when she finally did return, blood proved thicker than the mud, and her brother and extended family did not treat her as an outcast and one might imagine a royal Muslim family might with a sister who’d converted to Christianity.  Perhaps it is our modern era in which attitudes have hardened.  Perhaps the real lesson is that family’s generally do come before faith, in any era. 

Sunday 06/11/17