Blake Morrison published a volume of poetry.

(meta data) TITLE: Blake Morrison: under the witches' spell | Books | The Guardian

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# Blake Morrison: under the witches' spell

Four hundred years ago 10 women were hanged in Lancashire for witchcraft.

Now Jeanette Winterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, all inspired by the notorious Pendle trials, join a long line of writers in thrall to witches

First published on Fri 20 Jul 2012 17.55 EDT

Fear and frenzy: Arthur Miller's The Crucible drew parallels between the Salem witch trials and McCarthyite paranoia about communism.

On a road near Colne, in Lancashire, a woman called Alizon Device met a pedlar called John Law and asked if he would give her some pins.

Perhaps she was offering to buy them; more likely, being poor, she was begging.

Whichever, the pedlar refused to undo his pack for her and she cursed him.

The two parted company and continued on their way.

Immediately afterwards, though, just a few hundred yards down the road, the pedlar collapsed with a stroke that paralysed him down the left side and left him unable to speak.

He was taken to an ale house, from where a letter was dispatched to his son.

By the time the son arrived, the pedlar's speech had recovered sufficiently for him to describe how he'd been bewitched.

The son tracked Alizon down and brought her to his father, from whom she begged forgiveness.

Unappeased, the son reported her to a local magistrate, Roger Nowell, "a very religious honest gentleman", who set about interrogating her.

At this point the story became stranger.

Alizon not only admitted having bewitched the pedlar with the help of a black dog (which had offered to lame him), she also recalled how her grandmother – known as Demdike – had initiated her in the malefic art.

As Nowell pressed, increasingly lurid tales came out: of how the black dog had first appeared to Alizon and "did with his mouth suck at her breast, a little below the paps, which did remain blue half a year"; of milk turned sour and cows falling sick and children bewitched to death; of the enmity between Demdike and her deformed daughter Elizabeth and a neighbour called Anne Whittle (Chattox) and her daughter, all of whom were witches living in Pendle Forest.

After further interviews, Nowell sent four of these women to await trial in Lancaster, leaving Elizabeth behind at her home, Malkin Tower.

Malkin Tower seems not to have been a tower, just a simple cottage.

But there, on Good Friday, emboldened by drink and a feast of roast lamb (the sheep having been stolen from a local farmer), Elizabeth and her friends and neighbours conceived a plan of travelling the 40-odd miles to Lancaster, blowing up the jail, and freeing the Pendle Four.

It's improbable they'd ever have acted on the plan, but Nowell – hearing word of it – was taking no chances, and 15 more men and women were charged and sent for trial

The trials took place over two days, Tuesday 18 August and Wednesday 19 August 1612, with the jury asked to consider a variety of offences, including murder and cannibalism.

Crucial to the proceedings was the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device, whose mother Elizabeth, "outrageously cursing … against the child in such a fearefull manner", had to be taken away before the evidence could be heard.

Standing on a table in front of the court, Jennet testified against her mother, brother and grandmother, along with others who had gathered at Malkin Tower.

Whereas the judge discounted the evidence of an older child witness against three other alleged witches, Jennet's modesty and innocence were taken to guarantee her reliability.

As a result, 10 of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death; they were hanged next day on the moor above Lancaster.

Demdike had already died during her four months in prison.

"Although it pleased God out of his Mercie to spare you at this time," Justice Bromley told those acquitted, "yet without question there are those amongst you that are as deep in this Action as any of them that are condemned to die."

Many similar witch trials took place throughout Europe and America both before and after 1612, including a second case in Pendle in 1634, when the adult Jennet Device was herself accused of being a witch on the say-so of a child.

(She and her companions were eventually acquitted.)

Many more witches were put to death before the law against witchcraft in England was finally repealed in 1736.

The Lancaster case remains the most notorious, however, in part because of the number of those involved (it was rare for so many witches to be tried at once), and partly because the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, published a detailed account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, which gives a fascinating insight into the legal processes and socio-religious attitudes of the day.

The Pendle witches don't conform to modern stereotypes.

Spells are cast, clay images pricked with pins, and supernumerary nipples or warts (the mark of the devil) diligently searched for.

But there are no broomsticks, no steaming cauldrons, no pointed hats, no witches' sabbaths, no black masses.

Satan has a role to play but he appears in the guise of a dog or hare, not as a devil with horns.

And there's nothing especially spine-chilling about the motives for witchcraft.

It happens when someone behaves meanly or intemperately and has a curse put on them in return.

Grudges, superstition, a belief in charms and otherworldly spirits: all this seems perfectly familiar.

The witches may look ugly but they're also homely – the dysfunctional neighbours across the way.

The events of 1612 are now an established part of English folklore, and a large tourist industry flourishes around them.

When I was growing up on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, with Pendle Hill visible in the distance, talk of witches was commonplace; every local village seemed to have one – or rather, every village had an old woman whose behaviour and appearance struck fear into the hearts of children.

Even the methods of punishment seemed close in time.

Our village still had a wooden stocks, and it was easy to imagine witches being placed in them.

Sorcery and spookiness weren't reserved for Halloween.

Potts's account of the Pendle witches may have been the first book on the subject, but other less legalistic treatments soon followed, including plays, novels and revisionist histories.

The Late Lancashire Witches, by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was performed in 1634 (at the time of the second Pendle witch-craze), and later adapted by Thomas Shadwell.

William Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches was a huge success in its day (1848) and prompted comparisons with Dickens and Walter Scott.

Robert Neill's Mist Over Pendle (1951) is the best known of the author's many historical novels.

Now the 400th anniversary has brought a spate of new work about the Pendle witches.

Simon Armitage got in first, with a television documentary that included animation as well as scholarly interviews.

And in both Pendle and Lancaster there's a year-long festival, with art installations, exhibitions, lectures, guided walks, two plays – Sabbat by Richard Shannon and Devilish Practices by Richard MacSween – a sculpture trail, a folklore camp and a specially commissioned poem by Carol Ann Duffy carved into stones by the textual artist Stephen Raw and placed along the 48-mile route from Pendle to Lancaster.

There's even a witch-themed flower show.

There are also two new novellas on the subject, by Jeanette Winterson and Livi Michael.

Winterson's, The Daylight Gate, takes its title from the dialect term for dusk: it's when night-time horror begins, and that's appropriate given Winterson's publishers, Hammer, which in partnership with Arrow Books is tapping the genre made famous by its film studio.

Livi Michael's Malkin Child, narrated by nine-year-old Jennet Device, is aimed at younger readers looking for a witch story that isn't Harry Potter fantasy but grounded in fact.

Her Jennet is slangy, unsensational and determined, above all, to set the record straight.

"Everyone's got a story, and if they don't tell it, then other people'll tell it for them," she says.

Stories about witches have been told since the beginning of time.

In classical literature, they're either wily seductresses (such as Circe in the Odyssey) or malicious hags (such as Dipsas, who deprives Ovid of his lover in the Amores).

On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage – with John Lyly's Endymion, Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens, Thomas Middleton's The Witch, and Dekker, Ford and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton – they became more bloodthirsty ("I had a dagger; what did I with that? / Killed an infant to have his fat").

The three weird sisters in Macbeth are Shakespeare's most celebrated contribution to the genre ("What are these / So withered and so wild in their attire / That look not like the inhabitants of earth / And yet are on't?"), but with her "mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible", Sycorax in The Tempest runs them close (though dead, her spirit lives on in the "hag-seed" Caliban).

Othello is also charged with witchcraft: how else could a black man have successfully wooed Desdemona?

Dr Johnson defended Shakespeare's use of the supernatural from the charge of implausibility on the grounds that, "The reality of witchcraft … has in all ages and countries been credited by the common people, and in most by the learned."

In the age of Enlightenment, superstition was waning, though Joseph Addison confessed himself divided on the subject: "I believe, in general, that there is such a thing as witchcraft, but can give no credit to any particular instance of it."

Romanticism and the Gothic allowed a resurgence of witches, along with elves, fairies, goblins and ghosts.

Stories about them might defy reason but, said Scott, made better reading when left mysterious: "The professed explanation of a tale, where appearances or incidents of a supernatural character are referred to natural causes, has often, in the winding up of a story, a degree of improbability almost equal to an absolute goblin narrative."

Witches might have been expected to die out in a secular, scientific age.

But ever since Dorothy took on the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, they've multiplied.

From Roald Dahl and Mary Norton to Celia Rees, children's books abound in them – and exult in their destruction ("And through the town the joyous news went running / The joyous news that the wicked old witch was finally done in").

In films and television series, from the 1960s sitcom Bewitched to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the aim is laughter rather than shivers down the spine.

In the Harry Potter books and the Vampire Diaries series, the supernatural is the norm.

Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1987 film of John Updike's

Two major 20th-century authors found the witch-craze in Salem in 1692 – which had parallels with that in Pendle 80 years earlier – indispensable when making sense of America in the 1950s and 60s.

To Arthur Miller, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Salem witch trials served the same ritualistic purpose, requiring "that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows".

When The Crucible opened in 1952, during the heyday of McCarthyism, the response of the New York audience was predictably hostile: there never were witches but there are communists, was the common objection.

Two years on, with paranoia abating, the play was better received.

From 60s anti-war protesters to the Manson murders, recent history was also on John Updike's mind when he wrote The Witches of Eastwick.

His coven of divorcees – Alexandra, Sukie and Jane – wreak havoc in the local community, making feathers, dead wasps and bits of eggshell appear from the mouths of victims, and (thanks to the spells they cast and the pins they stick in Alexandra's dolls or "bubbies") subjecting their worst enemies to grisly ends.

"Wickedness was like food," they found, "once you got started it was hard to stop."

The main power the trio revel in is sexual, and Updike has his usual fun with that.

But he put in some serious research for the book, drawing on works of history (Michelet, Norman Cohn, Margaret Murray) and novels including Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes.

The latter – her first novel, published in 1926 – is also a novel for its time.

Written in the wake of the suffragette movement and the enfranchisement of women, it reinterprets witches as proto-feminists whose only cult is a benign one, that of self-discovery.

Suffocated by middle-class life in London, the spinster heroine takes off to the countryside and there, in a village called Great Mop, finds herself becoming a witch – not, as she explains to Satan (who appears as a gamekeeper and gardener), in order to plague people or do harm, but "to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others …

That's why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure."

The last witch-hanging in England was in 1685 but witchcraft goes on living, it seems.

Certainly the issues surrounding the trial of the Pendle witches resonate to this day.

The use of child witnesses is as contentious now as it was then.

Rushed proceedings resulting in harsh sentences were a feature of last August's riots as well as of August 1612.

And confessions continue to be extracted from innocent parties.

"Loath they are to confess without torture, which witnessed their guiltiness," wrote King James in Daemonologie, and many security forces around the world today operate by the same principle.

Once witches were ducked in ponds and rivers; now there's waterboarding.

The Pendle witch story also appeals to writers because it lends itself to different readings.

Livi Michael shows her being conned into betraying those she loves.

"Wouldn't you like to save your family?" Nowell asks her, and she submits to his coaxing and coaching, not realising what he's up to until it's too late.

By contrast, the nine-year-old in The Daylight Gate – Winterson's Jennet – fully understands the consequences of her actions:

She named them one by one and condemned them one by one.

Much of Winterson's book focuses on a protagonist even more intriguing than Jennet: Alice Nutter, one of those hanged.

"She was a rich woman; had a great estate, and children of good hope," Potts's account of the trial records, making a distinction between witches who live "in great miserie and povertie" and those like Alice who, "though rich, yet burne in a desperate desire of Revenge".

Why would a woman of means associate with beggars?

Winterson's story builds a new life for Alice that involves an earlier career in London, friendship with the famous magician John Dee and a passionate love affair with Elizabeth Southern, aka (in later life) Demdike.

There's even a walk-on part for Shakespeare, who sits with Alice watching a performance of The Tempest at Hoghton Tower, near Preston.

Winterson tackles the issue of Catholicism, too, as anyone telling this story must.

Anti-Catholicism was rife at the time, all the more so after the gunpowder plot of 1605, and Lancashire was regarded as a hotbed of the "old" religion.

To those of a Calvinist persuasion there was little to choose between Catholic prayers and magic spells or incantations.

What is the difference?" as Winterson's novel has it.

Catholics = witches = deviants = enemies of the state.

The wild talk of blowing up Lancaster jail sealed the fate of those on trial in 1612.

A group of impoverished labourers and elderly widows were presented as dangerous conspirators in the tradition of Guy Fawkes.

The previous year had seen the publication of the King James Bible, in which the religious justification for executing witches was clearly stated: "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft" (I Samuel 15:23) and "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).

James himself had helped induce anti-witch hysteria while king of Scotland: convinced that a group of witches in North Berwick had plotted to murder him and his new queen, he ordered an investigation and mass arrests.

His ideas were set out in his book Daemonologie, and enshrined in the 1604 Witchcraft Act, one of the first pieces of legislation passed under his reign in England.

Later James became more sceptical about the prevalence of witches but his thinking influenced magistrates.

Severe sentences had the king's blessing.

They also did right by God: "The giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible," John Wesley said.

The persecution of witches also offers insights into misogyny, as Caryl Churchill showed in her 1970s play Vinegar Tom.

"More women in a far different proportion prove witches than men, by a hundred to one," ran a treatise of 1616, and explained why:

First, women are by nature credulous, wanting experience, and therefore more easily deceived.

Secondly, they harbour in their breast a curious and inquisitive desire to know such things as be not fitting and convenient …

Thirdly, their complexion is softer, and from hence more easily receive the impressions offered by the Devil

Fourthly, in them is a greater facility to fall, and therefore the Devil at the first took that advantage, and set upon Eve in Adam's absence …

Fifthly, this sex, when it conceiveth wrath or hatred against any, is unplacable, possessed with insatiable desire of revenge, and transported with appetite to right (as they think) the wrongs offered unto them...

Sixthly, they are of a slippery tongue, and full of words: and therefore if they know any such wicked practices, are not able to hold them, but communicate the same with their husbands, children, consorts, and inward acquaintance.

Some women writers have retaliated against such prejudice by laying claim to sorcery as a form of empowerment – witches and proud of it.

"I have gone out, a possessed witch / haunting the black air," Anne Sexton wrote, and Sylvia Plath imagined herself as a witch exulting when burnt at the stake: "My ankles brighten.

/ I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light."

This kind of hag-ography exists not only in Wicca circles but in academe (Mary Daly: "Our foresisters were the Great Hags whom the institutionally powerful but privately impotent patriarchs found too threatening for coexistence"), with the female body seen as a site of atrocity and with witch-burnings equated to the Holocaust.

The complication is that men were also hanged for witchcraft (two of the 1612 victims were male), and that many of the accusations against women were made by members of their own sex.

One popular new age myth is that witches were beneficent healers and midwives persecuted by the establishment – white witches not black.

It's certainly tempting to recruit witches as symbols of paganism, nature worship, herbal remedies, earth-wisdom and ecological right-mindedness, if only to confound those who see them as purveyors of madness or Satanic child abuse.

There have even been petitions for those convicted under anti-witchcraft legislation to be retrospectively pardoned.

But no evidence exists to suggest that the Pendle witches were healers and midwives.

On the contrary, they convinced themselves that they possessed malign powers.

Demdike described how she and her followers used clay images to afflict their enemies:

When they would have them to be ill in any one place more than another, then take a thorn or pin and prick it in that part of the picture you would so have to be ill; and when you would have any part of the body to consume away, then take that part of the picture, and burn it.

And when they would have the whole body to consume away, then take the remnant of the said picture and burn it: and so thereupon by that means, the body shall die.

It's sad and desperate stuff: that a marginalised group could delude itself it possessed such powers is a sign, more than anything, of powerlessness.

But even the best minds of the age were unforgiving.

"Witches think sometimes that they kill when they do not," wrote John Donne in his sermons, "and are therefore as culpable as if they did."

Hobbes said the same: "I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief."

In many parts of the world, people still believe in witchcraft and its mischief.

Evangelical churches in Africa offer exorcisms: "Are you in bondage, affliction, oppressed or tormented by witches?

The cure comes at a price, of course, but anyone who has experienced "strange dreams, delay in marriage, miscarriage and barrenness, stagnancy in business, financial struggles, premature death in the family, sickness resisting medication and strange occurrences" is said to be in need of deliverance – ie most of us.

Even more insidious is the belief in child witches.

In 2010 a 15-year-old French Congolese boy, Kristy Bamu, was tortured and murdered in London by his elder sister and her fiancé because they believed him to be a witch.

The Lancaster-based charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, which campaigns on behalf of children in the Niger delta, recently had a case on its own doorstep of a child being accused of witchcraft.

Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" sums up the events of 1612, which began as a feud between two families but escalated into a panic about maleficium.

When misfortunes occur, it always helps to have someone to blame.

It's only the names of the scapegoats that change.

A few years ago, when the British National Party was making gains in the Pendle area, I interviewed one of their candidates.

His grudge was against immigrants and their "otherness".

But I couldn't help noticing he had books about witchcraft on his shelves.

• This article was corrected on 30 July 2012 because the original named the author William Harrison Ainsworth as William Ainsworth Harrison.

Literary adaptations and other media.:2012 anniversary.

Events to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials in 2012 included an exhibition, "A Wonderful Discoverie: Lancashire Witches 1612–2012", at Gawthorpe Hall staged by Lancashire County Council. "The Fate of Chattox", a piece by David Lloyd-Mostyn for clarinet and piano, taking its theme from the events leading to Chattox's demise, was performed by Aquilon at the Chorlton Arts Festival.
 A life-size statue of Alice Nutter, by sculptor David Palmer, was unveiled in her home village, Roughlee. In August, a world record for the largest group dressed as witches was set by 482 people who walked up Pendle Hill, on which the date "1612" had been installed in 400-foot-tall numbers by artist Philippe Handford using horticultural fleece. The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Rev John Goddard, expressed concern about marking the anniversary on the side of the hill. Publications in 2012 inspired by the trials include two novellas, "The Daylight Gate" by Jeanette Winterson and "Malkin Child" by Livi Michael.


The title of the volume of poetry is "A Discoverie of Witches".

(meta data) TITLE: Blake Morrison: under the witches' spell | Books | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/blakemorrison

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2012-07-20T17:55:00-0400

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Blake Morrison: under the witches' spell

Four hundred years ago 10 women were hanged in Lancashire for witchcraft.

Now Jeanette Winterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, all inspired by the notorious Pendle trials, join a long line of writers in thrall to witches

First published on Fri 20 Jul 2012 17.55 EDT

Fear and frenzy: Arthur Miller's The Crucible drew parallels between the Salem witch trials and McCarthyite paranoia about communism.

On a road near Colne, in Lancashire, a woman called Alizon Device met a pedlar called John Law and asked if he would give her some pins.

Perhaps she was offering to buy them; more likely, being poor, she was begging.

Whichever, the pedlar refused to undo his pack for her and she cursed him.

The two parted company and continued on their way.

Immediately afterwards, though, just a few hundred yards down the road, the pedlar collapsed with a stroke that paralysed him down the left side and left him unable to speak.

He was taken to an ale house, from where a letter was dispatched to his son.

By the time the son arrived, the pedlar's speech had recovered sufficiently for him to describe how he'd been bewitched.

The son tracked Alizon down and brought her to his father, from whom she begged forgiveness.

Unappeased, the son reported her to a local magistrate, Roger Nowell, "a very religious honest gentleman", who set about interrogating her.

At this point the story became stranger.

Alizon not only admitted having bewitched the pedlar with the help of a black dog (which had offered to lame him), she also recalled how her grandmother – known as Demdike – had initiated her in the malefic art.

As Nowell pressed, increasingly lurid tales came out: of how the black dog had first appeared to Alizon and "did with his mouth suck at her breast, a little below the paps, which did remain blue half a year"; of milk turned sour and cows falling sick and children bewitched to death; of the enmity between Demdike and her deformed daughter Elizabeth and a neighbour called Anne Whittle (Chattox) and her daughter, all of whom were witches living in Pendle Forest.

After further interviews, Nowell sent four of these women to await trial in Lancaster, leaving Elizabeth behind at her home, Malkin Tower.

Malkin Tower seems not to have been a tower, just a simple cottage.

But there, on Good Friday, emboldened by drink and a feast of roast lamb (the sheep having been stolen from a local farmer), Elizabeth and her friends and neighbours conceived a plan of travelling the 40-odd miles to Lancaster, blowing up the jail, and freeing the Pendle Four.

It's improbable they'd ever have acted on the plan, but Nowell – hearing word of it – was taking no chances, and 15 more men and women were charged and sent for trial

The trials took place over two days, Tuesday 18 August and Wednesday 19 August 1612, with the jury asked to consider a variety of offences, including murder and cannibalism.

Crucial to the proceedings was the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device, whose mother Elizabeth, "outrageously cursing … against the child in such a fearefull manner", had to be taken away before the evidence could be heard.

Standing on a table in front of the court, Jennet testified against her mother, brother and grandmother, along with others who had gathered at Malkin Tower.

Whereas the judge discounted the evidence of an older child witness against three other alleged witches, Jennet's modesty and innocence were taken to guarantee her reliability.

As a result, 10 of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death; they were hanged next day on the moor above Lancaster.

Demdike had already died during her four months in prison.

"Although it pleased God out of his Mercie to spare you at this time," Justice Bromley told those acquitted, "yet without question there are those amongst you that are as deep in this Action as any of them that are condemned to die."

Many similar witch trials took place throughout Europe and America both before and after 1612, including a second case in Pendle in 1634, when the adult Jennet Device was herself accused of being a witch on the say-so of a child.

(She and her companions were eventually acquitted.)

Many more witches were put to death before the law against witchcraft in England was finally repealed in 1736.

The Lancaster case remains the most notorious, however, in part because of the number of those involved (it was rare for so many witches to be tried at once), and partly because the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, published a detailed account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, which gives a fascinating insight into the legal processes and socio-religious attitudes of the day.

The Pendle witches don't conform to modern stereotypes.

Spells are cast, clay images pricked with pins, and supernumerary nipples or warts (the mark of the devil) diligently searched for.

But there are no broomsticks, no steaming cauldrons, no pointed hats, no witches' sabbaths, no black masses.

Satan has a role to play but he appears in the guise of a dog or hare, not as a devil with horns.

And there's nothing especially spine-chilling about the motives for witchcraft.

It happens when someone behaves meanly or intemperately and has a curse put on them in return.

Grudges, superstition, a belief in charms and otherworldly spirits: all this seems perfectly familiar.

The witches may look ugly but they're also homely – the dysfunctional neighbours across the way.

The events of 1612 are now an established part of English folklore, and a large tourist industry flourishes around them.

When I was growing up on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, with Pendle Hill visible in the distance, talk of witches was commonplace; every local village seemed to have one – or rather, every village had an old woman whose behaviour and appearance struck fear into the hearts of children.

Even the methods of punishment seemed close in time.

Our village still had a wooden stocks, and it was easy to imagine witches being placed in them.

Sorcery and spookiness weren't reserved for Halloween.

Potts's account of the Pendle witches may have been the first book on the subject, but other less legalistic treatments soon followed, including plays, novels and revisionist histories.

The Late Lancashire Witches, by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was performed in 1634 (at the time of the second Pendle witch-craze), and later adapted by Thomas Shadwell.

William Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches was a huge success in its day (1848) and prompted comparisons with Dickens and Walter Scott.

Robert Neill's Mist Over Pendle (1951) is the best known of the author's many historical novels.

Now the 400th anniversary has brought a spate of new work about the Pendle witches.

Simon Armitage got in first, with a television documentary that included animation as well as scholarly interviews.

And in both Pendle and Lancaster there's a year-long festival, with art installations, exhibitions, lectures, guided walks, two plays – Sabbat by Richard Shannon and Devilish Practices by Richard MacSween – a sculpture trail, a folklore camp and a specially commissioned poem by Carol Ann Duffy carved into stones by the textual artist Stephen Raw and placed along the 48-mile route from Pendle to Lancaster.

There's even a witch-themed flower show.

There are also two new novellas on the subject, by Jeanette Winterson and Livi Michael.

Winterson's, The Daylight Gate, takes its title from the dialect term for dusk: it's when night-time horror begins, and that's appropriate given Winterson's publishers, Hammer, which in partnership with Arrow Books is tapping the genre made famous by its film studio.

Livi Michael's Malkin Child, narrated by nine-year-old Jennet Device, is aimed at younger readers looking for a witch story that isn't Harry Potter fantasy but grounded in fact.

Her Jennet is slangy, unsensational and determined, above all, to set the record straight.

"Everyone's got a story, and if they don't tell it, then other people'll tell it for them," she says.

Stories about witches have been told since the beginning of time.

In classical literature, they're either wily seductresses (such as Circe in the Odyssey) or malicious hags (such as Dipsas, who deprives Ovid of his lover in the Amores).

On the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage – with John Lyly's Endymion, Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens, Thomas Middleton's The Witch, and Dekker, Ford and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton – they became more bloodthirsty ("I had a dagger; what did I with that? / Killed an infant to have his fat").

The three weird sisters in Macbeth are Shakespeare's most celebrated contribution to the genre ("What are these / So withered and so wild in their attire / That look not like the inhabitants of earth / And yet are on't?"), but with her "mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible", Sycorax in The Tempest runs them close (though dead, her spirit lives on in the "hag-seed" Caliban).

Othello is also charged with witchcraft: how else could a black man have successfully wooed Desdemona?

Dr Johnson defended Shakespeare's use of the supernatural from the charge of implausibility on the grounds that, "The reality of witchcraft … has in all ages and countries been credited by the common people, and in most by the learned."

In the age of Enlightenment, superstition was waning, though Joseph Addison confessed himself divided on the subject: "I believe, in general, that there is such a thing as witchcraft, but can give no credit to any particular instance of it."

Romanticism and the Gothic allowed a resurgence of witches, along with elves, fairies, goblins and ghosts.

Stories about them might defy reason but, said Scott, made better reading when left mysterious: "The professed explanation of a tale, where appearances or incidents of a supernatural character are referred to natural causes, has often, in the winding up of a story, a degree of improbability almost equal to an absolute goblin narrative."

Witches might have been expected to die out in a secular, scientific age.

But ever since Dorothy took on the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, they've multiplied.

From Roald Dahl and Mary Norton to Celia Rees, children's books abound in them – and exult in their destruction ("And through the town the joyous news went running / The joyous news that the wicked old witch was finally done in").

In films and television series, from the 1960s sitcom Bewitched to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the aim is laughter rather than shivers down the spine.

In the Harry Potter books and the Vampire Diaries series, the supernatural is the norm.

Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1987 film of John Updike's

Two major 20th-century authors found the witch-craze in Salem in 1692 – which had parallels with that in Pendle 80 years earlier – indispensable when making sense of America in the 1950s and 60s.

To Arthur Miller, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Salem witch trials served the same ritualistic purpose, requiring "that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows".

When The Crucible opened in 1952, during the heyday of McCarthyism, the response of the New York audience was predictably hostile: there never were witches but there are communists, was the common objection.

Two years on, with paranoia abating, the play was better received.

From 60s anti-war protesters to the Manson murders, recent history was also on John Updike's mind when he wrote The Witches of Eastwick.

His coven of divorcees – Alexandra, Sukie and Jane – wreak havoc in the local community, making feathers, dead wasps and bits of eggshell appear from the mouths of victims, and (thanks to the spells they cast and the pins they stick in Alexandra's dolls or "bubbies") subjecting their worst enemies to grisly ends.

"Wickedness was like food," they found, "once you got started it was hard to stop."

The main power the trio revel in is sexual, and Updike has his usual fun with that.

But he put in some serious research for the book, drawing on works of history (Michelet, Norman Cohn, Margaret Murray) and novels including Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes.

The latter – her first novel, published in 1926 – is also a novel for its time.

Written in the wake of the suffragette movement and the enfranchisement of women, it reinterprets witches as proto-feminists whose only cult is a benign one, that of self-discovery.

Suffocated by middle-class life in London, the spinster heroine takes off to the countryside and there, in a village called Great Mop, finds herself becoming a witch – not, as she explains to Satan (who appears as a gamekeeper and gardener), in order to plague people or do harm, but "to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others …

That's why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure."

The last witch-hanging in England was in 1685 but witchcraft goes on living, it seems.

Certainly the issues surrounding the trial of the Pendle witches resonate to this day.

The use of child witnesses is as contentious now as it was then.

Rushed proceedings resulting in harsh sentences were a feature of last August's riots as well as of August 1612.

And confessions continue to be extracted from innocent parties.

"Loath they are to confess without torture, which witnessed their guiltiness," wrote King James in Daemonologie, and many security forces around the world today operate by the same principle.

Once witches were ducked in ponds and rivers; now there's waterboarding.

The Pendle witch story also appeals to writers because it lends itself to different readings.

Livi Michael shows her being conned into betraying those she loves.

"Wouldn't you like to save your family?" Nowell asks her, and she submits to his coaxing and coaching, not realising what he's up to until it's too late.

By contrast, the nine-year-old in The Daylight Gate – Winterson's Jennet – fully understands the consequences of her actions:

She named them one by one and condemned them one by one.

Much of Winterson's book focuses on a protagonist even more intriguing than Jennet: Alice Nutter, one of those hanged.

"She was a rich woman; had a great estate, and children of good hope," Potts's account of the trial records, making a distinction between witches who live "in great miserie and povertie" and those like Alice who, "though rich, yet burne in a desperate desire of Revenge".

Why would a woman of means associate with beggars?

Winterson's story builds a new life for Alice that involves an earlier career in London, friendship with the famous magician John Dee and a passionate love affair with Elizabeth Southern, aka (in later life) Demdike.

There's even a walk-on part for Shakespeare, who sits with Alice watching a performance of The Tempest at Hoghton Tower, near Preston.

Winterson tackles the issue of Catholicism, too, as anyone telling this story must.

Anti-Catholicism was rife at the time, all the more so after the gunpowder plot of 1605, and Lancashire was regarded as a hotbed of the "old" religion.

To those of a Calvinist persuasion there was little to choose between Catholic prayers and magic spells or incantations.

What is the difference?" as Winterson's novel has it.

Catholics = witches = deviants = enemies of the state.

The wild talk of blowing up Lancaster jail sealed the fate of those on trial in 1612.

A group of impoverished labourers and elderly widows were presented as dangerous conspirators in the tradition of Guy Fawkes.

The previous year had seen the publication of the King James Bible, in which the religious justification for executing witches was clearly stated: "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft" (I Samuel 15:23) and "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).

James himself had helped induce anti-witch hysteria while king of Scotland: convinced that a group of witches in North Berwick had plotted to murder him and his new queen, he ordered an investigation and mass arrests.

His ideas were set out in his book Daemonologie, and enshrined in the 1604 Witchcraft Act, one of the first pieces of legislation passed under his reign in England.

Later James became more sceptical about the prevalence of witches but his thinking influenced magistrates.

Severe sentences had the king's blessing.

They also did right by God: "The giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible," John Wesley said.

The persecution of witches also offers insights into misogyny, as Caryl Churchill showed in her 1970s play Vinegar Tom.

"More women in a far different proportion prove witches than men, by a hundred to one," ran a treatise of 1616, and explained why:

First, women are by nature credulous, wanting experience, and therefore more easily deceived.

Secondly, they harbour in their breast a curious and inquisitive desire to know such things as be not fitting and convenient …

Thirdly, their complexion is softer, and from hence more easily receive the impressions offered by the Devil

Fourthly, in them is a greater facility to fall, and therefore the Devil at the first took that advantage, and set upon Eve in Adam's absence …

Fifthly, this sex, when it conceiveth wrath or hatred against any, is unplacable, possessed with insatiable desire of revenge, and transported with appetite to right (as they think) the wrongs offered unto them...

Sixthly, they are of a slippery tongue, and full of words: and therefore if they know any such wicked practices, are not able to hold them, but communicate the same with their husbands, children, consorts, and inward acquaintance.

Some women writers have retaliated against such prejudice by laying claim to sorcery as a form of empowerment – witches and proud of it.

"I have gone out, a possessed witch / haunting the black air," Anne Sexton wrote, and Sylvia Plath imagined herself as a witch exulting when burnt at the stake: "My ankles brighten.

/ I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light."

This kind of hag-ography exists not only in Wicca circles but in academe (Mary Daly: "Our foresisters were the Great Hags whom the institutionally powerful but privately impotent patriarchs found too threatening for coexistence"), with the female body seen as a site of atrocity and with witch-burnings equated to the Holocaust.

The complication is that men were also hanged for witchcraft (two of the 1612 victims were male), and that many of the accusations against women were made by members of their own sex.

One popular new age myth is that witches were beneficent healers and midwives persecuted by the establishment – white witches not black.

It's certainly tempting to recruit witches as symbols of paganism, nature worship, herbal remedies, earth-wisdom and ecological right-mindedness, if only to confound those who see them as purveyors of madness or Satanic child abuse.

There have even been petitions for those convicted under anti-witchcraft legislation to be retrospectively pardoned.

But no evidence exists to suggest that the Pendle witches were healers and midwives.

On the contrary, they convinced themselves that they possessed malign powers.

Demdike described how she and her followers used clay images to afflict their enemies:

When they would have them to be ill in any one place more than another, then take a thorn or pin and prick it in that part of the picture you would so have to be ill; and when you would have any part of the body to consume away, then take that part of the picture, and burn it.

And when they would have the whole body to consume away, then take the remnant of the said picture and burn it: and so thereupon by that means, the body shall die.

It's sad and desperate stuff: that a marginalised group could delude itself it possessed such powers is a sign, more than anything, of powerlessness.

But even the best minds of the age were unforgiving.

"Witches think sometimes that they kill when they do not," wrote John Donne in his sermons, "and are therefore as culpable as if they did."

Hobbes said the same: "I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief."

In many parts of the world, people still believe in witchcraft and its mischief.

Evangelical churches in Africa offer exorcisms: "Are you in bondage, affliction, oppressed or tormented by witches?

The cure comes at a price, of course, but anyone who has experienced "strange dreams, delay in marriage, miscarriage and barrenness, stagnancy in business, financial struggles, premature death in the family, sickness resisting medication and strange occurrences" is said to be in need of deliverance – ie most of us.

Even more insidious is the belief in child witches.

In 2010 a 15-year-old French Congolese boy, Kristy Bamu, was tortured and murdered in London by his elder sister and her fiancé because they believed him to be a witch.

The Lancaster-based charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, which campaigns on behalf of children in the Niger delta, recently had a case on its own doorstep of a child being accused of witchcraft.

Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" sums up the events of 1612, which began as a feud between two families but escalated into a panic about maleficium.

When misfortunes occur, it always helps to have someone to blame.

It's only the names of the scapegoats that change.

A few years ago, when the British National Party was making gains in the Pendle area, I interviewed one of their candidates.

His grudge was against immigrants and their "otherness".

But I couldn't help noticing he had books about witchcraft on his shelves.

• This article was corrected on 30 July 2012 because the original named the author William Harrison Ainsworth as William Ainsworth Harrison.

Events to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials in 2012 included an exhibition, "A Wonderful Discoverie: Lancashire Witches 1612–2012", at Gawthorpe Hall staged by Lancashire County Council. "The Fate of Chattox", a piece by David Lloyd-Mostyn for clarinet and piano, taking its theme from the events leading to Chattox's demise, was performed by Aquilon at the Chorlton Arts Festival.
 A life-size statue of Alice Nutter, by sculptor David Palmer, was unveiled in her home village, Roughlee. In August, a world record for the largest group dressed as witches was set by 482 people who walked up Pendle Hill, on which the date "1612" had been installed in 400-foot-tall numbers by artist Philippe Handford using horticultural fleece. The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Rev John Goddard, expressed concern about marking the anniversary on the side of the hill. Publications in 2012 inspired by the trials include two novellas, "The Daylight Gate" by Jeanette Winterson and "Malkin Child" by Livi Michael. Blake Morrison published a volume of poetry.


In June 2018, RetailMeNot sued competitor Honey Science Corporation.

(meta data) TITLE: RetailMeNot sues rival Honey over patent infringement – TechCrunch

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/techcrunch

# RetailMeNot sues rival Honey over patent infringement

RetailMeNot is suing rival Honey over patent infringement, the company announced this week.

Honey is the maker of a deal-finding browser extension that helps consumers shopping online get the best price by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout.

It also helps with finding the best price on Amazon purchases, doles out digital coupons, offers cash back, helps you track price drops and more.

According to RetailMeNot's suit, Honey infringes on U.S. Patents 9,626,688; 9,639,853; 9,953,335; and 9,965,769, which detail technologies related to things like facilitating access to promotional offers, merchant offers and coupon codes.

"These valuable patents protect RetailMeNot's pioneering developments in computer-related technologies, and Honey's unauthorized use of them enables key features of Honey's website and browser extensions," RetailMeNot stated in a press release about the lawsuit, which is how Honey first heard the news.

The suit comes at a time when Honey is growing in popularity among online shoppers, while RetailMeNot is getting a bit long in the tooth.

The latter has been around since 2006, while L.A.-based Honey was founded in 2012, and is backed by more than $40 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

It had a reported 5 million monthly active users as of last fall, and said users were saving an average of $32 per month with its help.

Honey has also dabbled with expanding its deal-finding efforts to other verticals, including as of last year, travel.

Meanwhile, RetailMeNot, a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings, claims $4.8 billion in retailer sales were attributable to consumer transactions from paid digital offers in its marketplace last year, with more than $560 million which were attributable to its in-store solution.

(The company operates a number of websites, including RetailMeNot.com in the U.S. and .ca in Canada, plus VoucherCodes.co.uk in the United Kingdom; ma-reduc.com and Poulpeo.com in France; and GiftCardZen.com and Deals2Buy.com in North America.)

Reached for comment, Honey called the lawsuit "baseless."

"We were disappointed to learn of this lawsuit from a press release and are in the process of reviewing the documents with our legal counsel," said Honey spokesperson, Kelly Parisi, VP, Communications.

"The lawsuit is baseless and the claims are irrelevant to how consumers use and experience our services.

It's unfortunate that they've taken this tactic to try to thwart innovation that helps consumers save time and money when shopping online."

Mary Kay Cosmetics sued affiliate site RetailMeNot in federal court for displaying coupons on their site despite the fact they have been asked to take them down. Mary Kay's position is that the display of Mary Kay coupons misleads consumers and harms the brand and its relationship with its sales reps (independent consultants) in several ways. The lawsuit was resolved after several months by way of confidential settlement.


The lawsuit was over patent infringement in computer-related technologies.

(meta data) TITLE: RetailMeNot sues rival Honey over patent infringement – TechCrunch

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/techcrunch

# RetailMeNot sues rival Honey over patent infringement

RetailMeNot is suing rival Honey over patent infringement, the company announced this week.

Honey is the maker of a deal-finding browser extension that helps consumers shopping online get the best price by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout.

It also helps with finding the best price on Amazon purchases, doles out digital coupons, offers cash back, helps you track price drops and more.

According to RetailMeNot's suit, Honey infringes on U.S. Patents 9,626,688; 9,639,853; 9,953,335; and 9,965,769, which detail technologies related to things like facilitating access to promotional offers, merchant offers and coupon codes.

"These valuable patents protect RetailMeNot's pioneering developments in computer-related technologies, and Honey's unauthorized use of them enables key features of Honey's website and browser extensions," RetailMeNot stated in a press release about the lawsuit, which is how Honey first heard the news.

The suit comes at a time when Honey is growing in popularity among online shoppers, while RetailMeNot is getting a bit long in the tooth.

The latter has been around since 2006, while L.A.-based Honey was founded in 2012, and is backed by more than $40 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

It had a reported 5 million monthly active users as of last fall, and said users were saving an average of $32 per month with its help.

Honey has also dabbled with expanding its deal-finding efforts to other verticals, including as of last year, travel.

Meanwhile, RetailMeNot, a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings, claims $4.8 billion in retailer sales were attributable to consumer transactions from paid digital offers in its marketplace last year, with more than $560 million which were attributable to its in-store solution.

(The company operates a number of websites, including RetailMeNot.com in the U.S. and .ca in Canada, plus VoucherCodes.co.uk in the United Kingdom; ma-reduc.com and Poulpeo.com in France; and GiftCardZen.com and Deals2Buy.com in North America.)

Reached for comment, Honey called the lawsuit "baseless."

"We were disappointed to learn of this lawsuit from a press release and are in the process of reviewing the documents with our legal counsel," said Honey spokesperson, Kelly Parisi, VP, Communications.

"The lawsuit is baseless and the claims are irrelevant to how consumers use and experience our services.

It's unfortunate that they've taken this tactic to try to thwart innovation that helps consumers save time and money when shopping online."

Mary Kay Cosmetics sued affiliate site RetailMeNot in federal court for displaying coupons on their site despite the fact they have been asked to take them down. Mary Kay's position is that the display of Mary Kay coupons misleads consumers and harms the brand and its relationship with its sales reps (independent consultants) in several ways. The lawsuit was resolved after several months by way of confidential settlement. In June 2018, RetailMeNot sued competitor Honey Science Corporation.


Leonard-Morgan went to Los Angeles, California.

(meta data) TITLE: News | Paul Leonard-Morgan

Errol Morris' Wormwood premiered at the Telluride Film Festival yesterday to a sold-out Werner Herzog Theatre.

Running in its entirety, the write-ups have been phenomenal, with Variety commenting on Paul's "beautiful score" and the Hollywood Reporter calling it Errol's best work ever.

It shows next at Venice Film Festival, before its release mid-December.

Recordings for the score of Drifter's Gunheart are taking place, with electric cello in New York, and harmonica and guitar in Glasgow.

The soundtrack will be mixed next week by Rupert Coulson in London's Air Studios.

The game's slated for release in 2 weeks for Oculus Rift.

Errol Morris' B Side, which Paul scored earlier this year, goes on general release this week, distributed by Neon.

From The Academy Award-winning director comes his new feature - a beautiful documentary portrait of Elsa Drofman, a photographer of such visionaries as Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, who does mainly portraits on a unique huge polaroid camera, and whose photography is inseparable from the details of her daily life.

Due to the thousands of requests for Paul's score to Warhammer: Dawn Of War 3, we're delighted to announce that it's being released by Nile Rodgers' record label, Sumthing Else Music.

Paul scored over 180 music tracks with a duration of over 2 and a half hours.

A selection will be available on all digital platforms soon.

The album includes the award-winning track from the launch trailer, "Where There Is Darkness".

Paul's started work on his first VR game soundtrack being made for the Oculus platform.

"Gunheart" comes form a new studio, Drifter, made up of top developers.

(Ray Davis (Gears of War, Robo Recall), Kenneth Scott (Oculus) and Brian Murphy (Microsoft)).

It's designed as a full-length game for 3 players, with cool weapons, fast-moving combat and co-operation.

After Paul spent the last 16 months scoring the soundtrack, Sega / Relic today launch the game.

It's being released in the Steam store and is available for download now.

The factions you can play as initially are the Space Marines, Eldars And Orks.

Paul Leonard-Morgan composed the film score for "Walking with Dinosaurs". He joined the production in July 2013. The German Film Orchestra Babelsberg performed the score at the Babelsberg Studio in Potsdam, Germany, where it was recorded. Engineer Rupert Coulson then mixed the score at AIR Studios in London, England.


Leonard-Morgan went to dub the music for the film.

(meta data) TITLE: News | Paul Leonard-Morgan

Errol Morris' Wormwood premiered at the Telluride Film Festival yesterday to a sold-out Werner Herzog Theatre.

Running in its entirety, the write-ups have been phenomenal, with Variety commenting on Paul's "beautiful score" and the Hollywood Reporter calling it Errol's best work ever.

It shows next at Venice Film Festival, before its release mid-December.

Recordings for the score of Drifter's Gunheart are taking place, with electric cello in New York, and harmonica and guitar in Glasgow.

The soundtrack will be mixed next week by Rupert Coulson in London's Air Studios.

The game's slated for release in 2 weeks for Oculus Rift.

Errol Morris' B Side, which Paul scored earlier this year, goes on general release this week, distributed by Neon.

From The Academy Award-winning director comes his new feature - a beautiful documentary portrait of Elsa Drofman, a photographer of such visionaries as Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, who does mainly portraits on a unique huge polaroid camera, and whose photography is inseparable from the details of her daily life.

Due to the thousands of requests for Paul's score to Warhammer: Dawn Of War 3, we're delighted to announce that it's being released by Nile Rodgers' record label, Sumthing Else Music.

Paul scored over 180 music tracks with a duration of over 2 and a half hours.

A selection will be available on all digital platforms soon.

The album includes the award-winning track from the launch trailer, "Where There Is Darkness".

Paul's started work on his first VR game soundtrack being made for the Oculus platform.

"Gunheart" comes form a new studio, Drifter, made up of top developers.

(Ray Davis (Gears of War, Robo Recall), Kenneth Scott (Oculus) and Brian Murphy (Microsoft)).

It's designed as a full-length game for 3 players, with cool weapons, fast-moving combat and co-operation.

After Paul spent the last 16 months scoring the soundtrack, Sega / Relic today launch the game.

It's being released in the Steam store and is available for download now.

The factions you can play as initially are the Space Marines, Eldars And Orks.

Paul Leonard-Morgan composed the film score for "Walking with Dinosaurs". He joined the production in July 2013. The German Film Orchestra Babelsberg performed the score at the Babelsberg Studio in Potsdam, Germany, where it was recorded. Engineer Rupert Coulson then mixed the score at AIR Studios in London, England. Leonard-Morgan went to Los Angeles, California.


He did not receive any formal secular education as a child.

(meta data) TITLE: Mizrahi rebel: Bidding farewell to an Israeli Black Panther | +972 Magazine

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# Mizrahi rebel: Bidding farewell to an Israeli Black Panther

Kochavi Shemesh, one of the legendary leaders of the Israeli Black Panthers, believed that the liberation of Mizrahim was bound up with the freedom of Palestinians, black South Africans, and other oppressed people.

He passed away last week at the age of 75.

An Israeli Black Panthers protest at Tel Aviv University.

Shemesh is fourth from right, January 1972.

Kochavi Shemesh, who was born in Iraq during World War II and grew up in the dilapidated and war-ravished slums of Jewish Jerusalem in the 1950s, never received formal schooling.

More than 100 files from the 1800s are still classified in Israel's archives

At Tel Aviv rally, a Mizrahi-asylum seeker alliance is born

Echoes of a Black Panther's murder in killing of Palestinian activist

Israel's Black Panthers remind us what their struggle was about

The lack of education didn't stop him from founding and editing a community newspaper as an adult in the late 1960s.

What did stop him was a visit from the police soon after putting out the seventh weekly issue.

Operating a newspaper without a permit, a legal requirement that was in place in Israel until 2017.

Shemesh had thought of applying for one but he didn't qualify because he'd never earned a high school diploma.

"The paper came out every Saturday evening," Shemesh later recalled in a 1971 interview with Maariv.

"It contained sports news and Sephardi human interest stories.

A judge gave Shemesh a choice of paying a small fine or serving a three-week prison sentence.

Autodidactic and strong-minded, Shemesh, who died last week at age 75, hitched his talents to the cause of social justice.

Chiefly, he championed the rights of Mizrahi Jews, but his solidarity extended far beyond that — to Palestinians, Vietnamese, black South Africans, and others.

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In early 1971, a group of Israeli youth stunned and scandalized society when they rose up as the Black Panthers of Israel, summoning the specter of civil turmoil from across the globe.

A friend introduced Shemesh to the firebrands and he immediately joined the group.

His affiliation with the Panthers solidified on May 18, 1971, a date that would forever be known in Jerusalemite lore as the Night of the Panthers.

The events started unfolding peaceably enough with a rally of several hundred Panthers at the city's Davidka Square.

The Panthers moved through the crowd passing out leaflets with their demands and ideology written out in bullet points.

One protester held up a sign that declared:

As the rhetoric escalated, the crowd began to swell into the thousands.

They had warned the authorities from the beginning: continue to sideline us and we will eventually explode in your faces.

A mass of people started to march down Jaffa Street, Jerusalem's main thoroughfare, their bodies blocking traffic, their voices filling the air with the discordant sound of protest chants: "Ku-la-nu Pan-te-rim!"

On the march to Zion Square, a distance of just over a third of a mile, the Panthers passed through the city's shopping and dining district.

Vendors folding up their wares at the end of the day paused to behold the spectacle.

Shoppers poured out of the narrow storefronts clutched their bags and watched the parade of protestors.

Some, magnetized and galvanized, joined in.

The square emerged in view and still, it seemed, the guards were absent and the palace was up for grabs.

A young man with a thick mane of black hair split from the crowd.

He sprinted ahead shouted over the general din: "We are going to change the name of Zion Square to the Square of Mizrahi Jewry."

As the demonstrators filled the center of the square, a clot of police dressed in full riot gear suddenly appeared out of a nearby alleyway.

An officer raised a bullhorn to his face.

"This demonstration has been declared an unlawful assembly," he said, "I give you two minutes to disperse!"

At the top of their lungs, the leading Panthers ordered everyone "Don't budge!"

People stayed put even as the menace of cudgels, shields, and steel helmets drew in closer and closer.

For a moment nothing happened; the chasm of asphalt between opposing battle lines remained empty.

But the commander sicced his police on the protestors and a rain of billy clubs came down.

They paused only to snatch those unfortunate few who failed to retreat in time.

Mounted officers appeared in the square followed by an armored tactical vehicle adorned with water cannons.

Within minutes the square was mostly cleared and traffic restored.

The demonstrators were pushed to the margins of the square and some disappeared into the alleys but they did not disperse.

In fact, their numbers only seemed to grow.

Thousands of ordinary Israelis joined in against the cops.

The Panthers themselves split into small groups, darting out to hurl taunts, abuses, and glass bottles at the cops and then withdrawing.

The fury of the riot control squads was fully unleashed at this stage and they made no apparent effort to distinguish between protestors and onlookers.

The water cannons were even less discerning as they squirted high-pressure jets of liquid, dyed green, in every which direction.

The flailing torrents even hit some police and eventually also a baby carriage, whose tiny occupant had to be evacuated to the hospital.

The aggressive conduct by police inflamed the crowds, who yelled at them, "you're Nazis!"

It was one of the most significant civil disturbances of its kind in the country's history.

Seventy-four people were arrested and dozens were hospitalized with serious injuries.

His hospital registration card noted that he suffered from polio, causing him to limp, and reported that Shemesh "had sustained blows to his legs" in the course of the night (thanks to cops who had sussed out his vulnerability).

Elected chairman of the Panthers for a period, Shemesh tried always to move the group left.

When the World Zionist Congress assembled in Jerusalem in 1972, he led a demonstration against it arguing that it "does not speak for the all the Jews in the world."

The following year, in the summer of 1973, Shemesh joined a delegation of communists and flew to East Berlin for the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Two of the figures headlining the event were Yasser Arafat and Angela Davis.

He learned from her to never again refer to degrading work as "black labor."

Shemesh ran for Knesset in the election that immediately followed the 1973 war.

Soon after that, a correspondent for the New York Times featured him in a series of portraits of Israelis, famous and ordinary.

"Our strongest bond is with the poor and oppressed in the Middle East," Shemesh was quoted as saying.

"The Zionist movement was formed to keep a European culture in Israel."

Israeli Black Panthers seen protesting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973.

"Our interests lie in seeking an alliance with the Arabs and forming an economic bloc to counter the influences of both U.S. and the U.S.S.R.," he continued.

"I fully support the Palestinians' desire to found a separate state on Israeli soil.

The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs is one of the highest crimes of the Zionist state."

In the decades that followed, not many people found his ideological positions compelling or even tenable.

Yet, as his oratory skill developed, none dismissed Shemesh as foolish or unserious.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, he advocated, again unpopularly, for stemming the mass arrival of Soviet Jewry until Israel's own destitute were cared for.

Shemesh himself provided for the needy — for example, as a co-founder of Zoharim village in the early 1990s, Israel's first drug addiction recovery center.

That experience convinced him that Israel's criminal justice system was inherently unfair, punishing precisely the people who needed help the most.

He teamed up with other Panthers and mounted a campaign to demand general amnesty for the country's inmates—in other words, he became a prison abolitionist.

In 2003, the elementary school dropout earned his law degree and became full-fledged attorney, soon joining the board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Shemesh is survived by his wife Rachel Ashur Shemesh, three children, numerous grandchildren, and a entire generation of Mizrahi activists.

Asaf Shalev is a journalist based in California.

He is completing a book about the Israeli Black Panthers with UC Press.

A lot of work goes into creating articles like the one you just read.

And while we don't do this for the money, even our model of non-profit, independent journalism has bills to pay.

+972 Magazine is owned by our bloggers and journalists, who are driven by passion and dedication to the causes we cover.

But we still need to pay for editing, photography, translation, web design and servers, legal services, and more.

As an independent journalism outlet we aren't beholden to any outside interests.

In order to safeguard that independence voice, we are proud to count you, our readers, as our most important supporters.

If each of our readers becomes a supporter of our work, +972 Magazine will remain a strong, independent, and sustainable force helping drive the discourse on Israel/Palestine in the right direction.

Support independent journalism in Israel/Palestine

1973 War, Israeli Black Panthers, Kochavi Shemes, Mizarhim, sephardic jews

At Tel Aviv rally, a Mizrahi-asylum seeker alliance is born

Israel's Black Panthers remind us what their struggle was about

Israel's education minister wants to reduce Jewish history to pogroms

Another Leftist Progressive-activist Nobody exists the stage.

This loser will go down in history as the nutter who opposed the influx of 1 Million ex-Soviet Jews into Israel.

His pathetic argument beung that their settlement would "steal" jobs from Mizrachim like himself.

Actually, the reverse happened and the big aliyah created more enterprizes and jobs than ever before.

I suspect some future PhD candidate will write a thesis about this deviant and his flawed thinking.

Welcome to the +972 Magazine general channel, where we post breaking news, live blogs, videos, staff reports, photos, and contributions from guest writers.

To submit articles, pictures or video for publication, please view our guest post policy in the "About" section of the site, and write to: oped@972mag.com.

For any other inquiry, contact: info@972mag.com.

Op-eds reflect the positions of their authors alone, and not those of +972 Magazine, its bloggers, or its editors.

Philippine police are executing people with Israeli weapons

What occupation looks like for Rashida Tlaib's village in the West Bank

My Palestinian sitty embodies the humanity Israel tries to deny us

Israel's 'humanitarian' offer to Tlaib made me cringe.

What's happening in Kashmir looks a lot like Israel's rule over Palestine

Thousands of Jews protest ICE raids across U.S., 44 arrested in NYC

Distorting the definition of antisemitism to shield Israel from all criticism

When Zionism imagined Jewish nationalism without supremacy

IAEA chief's death could spell the end of the Iran nuclear deal

Unlike South Africa, the world is giving Israel a pass on apartheid

How the once-fringe Jewish Temple Movement is going mainstream

Will Israel's treatment of Omar and Tlaib finally wake Democrats up?

How I learned to stop worrying and acknowledge the Nakba

From heat waves to 'eco-apartheid': Climate change in Israel-Palestine

Palestinians are holding weddings, baptisms, burials in villages destroyed by Israel

###### My Palestinian sitty embodies the humanity Israel tries to deny us

###### Come work with us: +972 Magazine is hiring an associate editor

###### Philippine police are executing people with Israeli weapons

###### What occupation looks like for Rashida Tlaib's village in the West Bank

Published August 18, 2019 Tweets from https://twitter.com/972mag/lists/972-on-twitter

Shemesh was born in Baghdad, Iraq in the Rabbi Meir Bal HaNess Jewish Hospital in January 1944. His family moved to Israel in July 1950, and he grew up in Musrara, Jerusalem, a neighborhood predominantly populated by recent Mizrahi and Sephardi immigrants.


He dropped out before he even completed first grade.

(meta data) TITLE: Mizrahi rebel: Bidding farewell to an Israeli Black Panther | +972 Magazine

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# Mizrahi rebel: Bidding farewell to an Israeli Black Panther

Kochavi Shemesh, one of the legendary leaders of the Israeli Black Panthers, believed that the liberation of Mizrahim was bound up with the freedom of Palestinians, black South Africans, and other oppressed people.

He passed away last week at the age of 75.

An Israeli Black Panthers protest at Tel Aviv University.

Shemesh is fourth from right, January 1972.

Kochavi Shemesh, who was born in Iraq during World War II and grew up in the dilapidated and war-ravished slums of Jewish Jerusalem in the 1950s, never received formal schooling.

More than 100 files from the 1800s are still classified in Israel's archives

At Tel Aviv rally, a Mizrahi-asylum seeker alliance is born

Echoes of a Black Panther's murder in killing of Palestinian activist

Israel's Black Panthers remind us what their struggle was about

The lack of education didn't stop him from founding and editing a community newspaper as an adult in the late 1960s.

What did stop him was a visit from the police soon after putting out the seventh weekly issue.

Operating a newspaper without a permit, a legal requirement that was in place in Israel until 2017.

Shemesh had thought of applying for one but he didn't qualify because he'd never earned a high school diploma.

"The paper came out every Saturday evening," Shemesh later recalled in a 1971 interview with Maariv.

"It contained sports news and Sephardi human interest stories.

A judge gave Shemesh a choice of paying a small fine or serving a three-week prison sentence.

Autodidactic and strong-minded, Shemesh, who died last week at age 75, hitched his talents to the cause of social justice.

Chiefly, he championed the rights of Mizrahi Jews, but his solidarity extended far beyond that — to Palestinians, Vietnamese, black South Africans, and others.

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In early 1971, a group of Israeli youth stunned and scandalized society when they rose up as the Black Panthers of Israel, summoning the specter of civil turmoil from across the globe.

A friend introduced Shemesh to the firebrands and he immediately joined the group.

His affiliation with the Panthers solidified on May 18, 1971, a date that would forever be known in Jerusalemite lore as the Night of the Panthers.

The events started unfolding peaceably enough with a rally of several hundred Panthers at the city's Davidka Square.

The Panthers moved through the crowd passing out leaflets with their demands and ideology written out in bullet points.

One protester held up a sign that declared:

As the rhetoric escalated, the crowd began to swell into the thousands.

They had warned the authorities from the beginning: continue to sideline us and we will eventually explode in your faces.

A mass of people started to march down Jaffa Street, Jerusalem's main thoroughfare, their bodies blocking traffic, their voices filling the air with the discordant sound of protest chants: "Ku-la-nu Pan-te-rim!"

On the march to Zion Square, a distance of just over a third of a mile, the Panthers passed through the city's shopping and dining district.

Vendors folding up their wares at the end of the day paused to behold the spectacle.

Shoppers poured out of the narrow storefronts clutched their bags and watched the parade of protestors.

Some, magnetized and galvanized, joined in.

The square emerged in view and still, it seemed, the guards were absent and the palace was up for grabs.

A young man with a thick mane of black hair split from the crowd.

He sprinted ahead shouted over the general din: "We are going to change the name of Zion Square to the Square of Mizrahi Jewry."

As the demonstrators filled the center of the square, a clot of police dressed in full riot gear suddenly appeared out of a nearby alleyway.

An officer raised a bullhorn to his face.

"This demonstration has been declared an unlawful assembly," he said, "I give you two minutes to disperse!"

At the top of their lungs, the leading Panthers ordered everyone "Don't budge!"

People stayed put even as the menace of cudgels, shields, and steel helmets drew in closer and closer.

For a moment nothing happened; the chasm of asphalt between opposing battle lines remained empty.

But the commander sicced his police on the protestors and a rain of billy clubs came down.

They paused only to snatch those unfortunate few who failed to retreat in time.

Mounted officers appeared in the square followed by an armored tactical vehicle adorned with water cannons.

Within minutes the square was mostly cleared and traffic restored.

The demonstrators were pushed to the margins of the square and some disappeared into the alleys but they did not disperse.

In fact, their numbers only seemed to grow.

Thousands of ordinary Israelis joined in against the cops.

The Panthers themselves split into small groups, darting out to hurl taunts, abuses, and glass bottles at the cops and then withdrawing.

The fury of the riot control squads was fully unleashed at this stage and they made no apparent effort to distinguish between protestors and onlookers.

The water cannons were even less discerning as they squirted high-pressure jets of liquid, dyed green, in every which direction.

The flailing torrents even hit some police and eventually also a baby carriage, whose tiny occupant had to be evacuated to the hospital.

The aggressive conduct by police inflamed the crowds, who yelled at them, "you're Nazis!"

It was one of the most significant civil disturbances of its kind in the country's history.

Seventy-four people were arrested and dozens were hospitalized with serious injuries.

His hospital registration card noted that he suffered from polio, causing him to limp, and reported that Shemesh "had sustained blows to his legs" in the course of the night (thanks to cops who had sussed out his vulnerability).

Elected chairman of the Panthers for a period, Shemesh tried always to move the group left.

When the World Zionist Congress assembled in Jerusalem in 1972, he led a demonstration against it arguing that it "does not speak for the all the Jews in the world."

The following year, in the summer of 1973, Shemesh joined a delegation of communists and flew to East Berlin for the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Two of the figures headlining the event were Yasser Arafat and Angela Davis.

He learned from her to never again refer to degrading work as "black labor."

Shemesh ran for Knesset in the election that immediately followed the 1973 war.

Soon after that, a correspondent for the New York Times featured him in a series of portraits of Israelis, famous and ordinary.

"Our strongest bond is with the poor and oppressed in the Middle East," Shemesh was quoted as saying.

"The Zionist movement was formed to keep a European culture in Israel."

Israeli Black Panthers seen protesting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973.

"Our interests lie in seeking an alliance with the Arabs and forming an economic bloc to counter the influences of both U.S. and the U.S.S.R.," he continued.

"I fully support the Palestinians' desire to found a separate state on Israeli soil.

The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs is one of the highest crimes of the Zionist state."

In the decades that followed, not many people found his ideological positions compelling or even tenable.

Yet, as his oratory skill developed, none dismissed Shemesh as foolish or unserious.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, he advocated, again unpopularly, for stemming the mass arrival of Soviet Jewry until Israel's own destitute were cared for.

Shemesh himself provided for the needy — for example, as a co-founder of Zoharim village in the early 1990s, Israel's first drug addiction recovery center.

That experience convinced him that Israel's criminal justice system was inherently unfair, punishing precisely the people who needed help the most.

He teamed up with other Panthers and mounted a campaign to demand general amnesty for the country's inmates—in other words, he became a prison abolitionist.

In 2003, the elementary school dropout earned his law degree and became full-fledged attorney, soon joining the board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Shemesh is survived by his wife Rachel Ashur Shemesh, three children, numerous grandchildren, and a entire generation of Mizrahi activists.

Asaf Shalev is a journalist based in California.

He is completing a book about the Israeli Black Panthers with UC Press.

A lot of work goes into creating articles like the one you just read.

And while we don't do this for the money, even our model of non-profit, independent journalism has bills to pay.

+972 Magazine is owned by our bloggers and journalists, who are driven by passion and dedication to the causes we cover.

But we still need to pay for editing, photography, translation, web design and servers, legal services, and more.

As an independent journalism outlet we aren't beholden to any outside interests.

In order to safeguard that independence voice, we are proud to count you, our readers, as our most important supporters.

If each of our readers becomes a supporter of our work, +972 Magazine will remain a strong, independent, and sustainable force helping drive the discourse on Israel/Palestine in the right direction.

Support independent journalism in Israel/Palestine

1973 War, Israeli Black Panthers, Kochavi Shemes, Mizarhim, sephardic jews

At Tel Aviv rally, a Mizrahi-asylum seeker alliance is born

Israel's Black Panthers remind us what their struggle was about

Israel's education minister wants to reduce Jewish history to pogroms

Another Leftist Progressive-activist Nobody exists the stage.

This loser will go down in history as the nutter who opposed the influx of 1 Million ex-Soviet Jews into Israel.

His pathetic argument beung that their settlement would "steal" jobs from Mizrachim like himself.

Actually, the reverse happened and the big aliyah created more enterprizes and jobs than ever before.

I suspect some future PhD candidate will write a thesis about this deviant and his flawed thinking.

Welcome to the +972 Magazine general channel, where we post breaking news, live blogs, videos, staff reports, photos, and contributions from guest writers.

To submit articles, pictures or video for publication, please view our guest post policy in the "About" section of the site, and write to: oped@972mag.com.

For any other inquiry, contact: info@972mag.com.

Op-eds reflect the positions of their authors alone, and not those of +972 Magazine, its bloggers, or its editors.

Philippine police are executing people with Israeli weapons

What occupation looks like for Rashida Tlaib's village in the West Bank

My Palestinian sitty embodies the humanity Israel tries to deny us

Israel's 'humanitarian' offer to Tlaib made me cringe.

What's happening in Kashmir looks a lot like Israel's rule over Palestine

Thousands of Jews protest ICE raids across U.S., 44 arrested in NYC

Distorting the definition of antisemitism to shield Israel from all criticism

When Zionism imagined Jewish nationalism without supremacy

IAEA chief's death could spell the end of the Iran nuclear deal

Unlike South Africa, the world is giving Israel a pass on apartheid

How the once-fringe Jewish Temple Movement is going mainstream

Will Israel's treatment of Omar and Tlaib finally wake Democrats up?

How I learned to stop worrying and acknowledge the Nakba

From heat waves to 'eco-apartheid': Climate change in Israel-Palestine

Palestinians are holding weddings, baptisms, burials in villages destroyed by Israel

###### My Palestinian sitty embodies the humanity Israel tries to deny us

###### Come work with us: +972 Magazine is hiring an associate editor

###### Philippine police are executing people with Israeli weapons

###### What occupation looks like for Rashida Tlaib's village in the West Bank

Published August 18, 2019 Tweets from https://twitter.com/972mag/lists/972-on-twitter

Shemesh was born in Baghdad, Iraq in the Rabbi Meir Bal HaNess Jewish Hospital in January 1944. His family moved to Israel in July 1950, and he grew up in Musrara, Jerusalem, a neighborhood predominantly populated by recent Mizrahi and Sephardi immigrants. He did not receive any formal secular education as a child.


Nothomb's first novel was "Hygiène de l'assassin".

(meta data) TITLE: How Amélie Nothomb Became Belgium's Most Outlandish Writer

# How Amélie Nothomb Became Belgium's Most Outlandish Writer

For a country as small as Belgium, having an international writer is by itself an achievement, let alone a best-seller like Amélie Nothomb.

Throughout the years, the mysterious writer has created a real-life character of her own; her image is spread all over the press and tales about her biography proliferate.

Japan, where the author lived an important part of her life I © Pixbay.com

In 1992, 25-year-old Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb published her first novel, which would become an instant success.

Hygiene And The Assassin is about an old, obese, dying Nobel Prize-winning writer, who is solicited by countless journalists when they hear that he only has two months left to live and are, therefore, expecting to get one last, big interview.

But, by the power of his mordacious speech, the mean old man tortures the journalists — all inexperienced, naïve and poorly prepared — one after the other.

It is only then that a woman, Nina, enters the scene.

She will be his nemesis and will challenge him into a duel where the word is a deadly weapon.

The fact that a woman should succeed where many men have failed — attention being brought to her gender and the implication that it is somehow related to her success — is a cliché.

But if we can get past that, after reading this novel, one thing can easily be concluded: Nothomb is a wonderful plotter.

This, accompanied by the fluidity of the prose, might just be the key ingredient that makes her a best-selling author.

The story, in this case, is fortified by the strength of the dialogue, which overtakes most of the action and is powerful enough to subsist almost independently without the narrative.

The latter, though, left to its subsidiary role, tends to resemble stage directions and is therefore a bit awkward.

He proves to be cruel and quite grotesque yet sympathetic at the same time.

He somehow represents the social outcast or the artist who lives independently from the world, who we all sometimes — even if secretly — would like to be.

This is generally what tends to happen in Nothomb's novels: the energy is almost all directed towards one strong main character, while she seems to forget to give the other characters any peculiarity, making them rather two-dimensional.

Amélie Nothomb with her distinguishable big hat and black clothes I © G. Garitan/WikiCommons

Hygiene and the Assassin is a good example of the hypothesis that Nothomb has the qualities and defects of a commercial author writing for a big audience: good plot, complete characters but also dangerously approaching the cliché with regularity, as some critics would say.

The simplistic style that makes it very easy to read can also make it literarily plain, lacking the details that constitute excellence.

To fully understand Nothomb's work, though, we have to look into her childhood.

Being the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, she spent the first years of her life in the beautiful outskirts of Kobe, Japan.

The experience is extensively described in The Life of Hunger, a semi-autobiographical narrative in which she portrays the life of a girl whose world was revolutionized every three years by moving to different countries and therefore, worlds.

The hardest to leave behind was Japan — a land of abundance where nature could be observed in its purest form and a land of tranquillity where everything was loving — especially when she found herself in the arms of her nanny, Nishio-san.

In contrast, she then moved, in 1972, to China.

'My world was inhabited by birds and monkeys — she says — by fish and squirrels, each one free in the fluidity of its space.

In Beijing, all the animals were prisoners: donkeys heavily loaded, horses firmly attached to enormous carriages, pigs that read their soon-to-come death in the eyes of a starving population to whom we weren't allowed to say a word.'

Later, she lived in New York, Bangladesh and Burma, but Japan was the one place that haunted her mind, to the point that she returned there as a young adult.

After finishing her studies in Brussels in 1990, she moved to Tokyo in order to work as a translator for a big company.

'I had gone there to reconnect with the paradise of my childhood,' she says in a documentary called Amélie Nothomb, A Life Between Two Waters, 'and what I found was the inferno of Tokyo's professional life.'

The experience wasn't what she expected, and using it as inspiration, she published the novel Fear and Trembling, a story of a young Amélie who sees herself being constantly tortured by her superiors who are representatives of a ruthless work society where the self is negated and who thrives on humiliating and degrading others.

French Copy of Hygiene and the Assassin I © Les Editions des Saints Pères/WikiCCommons

If Japanese men have it hard, as they are obligated to forget their dreams in pursuit of the ever-nonexistent ideal of perfection, then the only honorable way out for women seems to be suicide.

This book allowed Nothomb to achieve notoriety, by winning the Grand Prix du Roman de L'Académie Française, thus making her gain literary prestige on top of her already immense popularity.

It was also turned into a quite successful film.

Read by millions of people, she pays very close attention to her fans and spends hours every day answering their mail.

Her eccentric image — big hat, black hair, strong red lips — is almost like a brand and grabs the public eye to the point of controversy.

The latest extends to her name (she was born Fabienne), and to the information she presents as biographical but are, by many, denounced as pure fantasies and lies.

Many believe, for example, that she was not born in Japan as she claims but in Etterbeek, Brussels.

The opinion is divided: this can either be seen as an idea of genius, by which the writer becomes a real life character herself, or a fraud that violates the relationship of trust between the writer and the reader.

All controversies aside, one thing is certain: the woman is a long-lasting success.

Amélie Nothomb in "Livre sur la Place", Nancy, France I © fidfiber/Flickr.com

She is from an old noble Belgian political family and is the grandniece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980–1981), and great granddaughter of writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She has one brother and one sister, Juliette Nothomb.
 While in Japan, Nothomb attended a local school and learned Japanese. When she was five, the family moved to China. She remarked in "Fear and Trembling" that leaving Japan was "a wrenching separation for me". She studied philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Having finished her studies, Nothomb returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company in Tokyo. Her experience of this time, is expressed in "Fear and Trembling".


"Hygiène de l'assassin" was published in 1992.

(meta data) TITLE: How Amélie Nothomb Became Belgium's Most Outlandish Writer

# How Amélie Nothomb Became Belgium's Most Outlandish Writer

For a country as small as Belgium, having an international writer is by itself an achievement, let alone a best-seller like Amélie Nothomb.

Throughout the years, the mysterious writer has created a real-life character of her own; her image is spread all over the press and tales about her biography proliferate.

Japan, where the author lived an important part of her life I © Pixbay.com

In 1992, 25-year-old Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb published her first novel, which would become an instant success.

Hygiene And The Assassin is about an old, obese, dying Nobel Prize-winning writer, who is solicited by countless journalists when they hear that he only has two months left to live and are, therefore, expecting to get one last, big interview.

But, by the power of his mordacious speech, the mean old man tortures the journalists — all inexperienced, naïve and poorly prepared — one after the other.

It is only then that a woman, Nina, enters the scene.

She will be his nemesis and will challenge him into a duel where the word is a deadly weapon.

The fact that a woman should succeed where many men have failed — attention being brought to her gender and the implication that it is somehow related to her success — is a cliché.

But if we can get past that, after reading this novel, one thing can easily be concluded: Nothomb is a wonderful plotter.

This, accompanied by the fluidity of the prose, might just be the key ingredient that makes her a best-selling author.

The story, in this case, is fortified by the strength of the dialogue, which overtakes most of the action and is powerful enough to subsist almost independently without the narrative.

The latter, though, left to its subsidiary role, tends to resemble stage directions and is therefore a bit awkward.

He proves to be cruel and quite grotesque yet sympathetic at the same time.

He somehow represents the social outcast or the artist who lives independently from the world, who we all sometimes — even if secretly — would like to be.

This is generally what tends to happen in Nothomb's novels: the energy is almost all directed towards one strong main character, while she seems to forget to give the other characters any peculiarity, making them rather two-dimensional.

Amélie Nothomb with her distinguishable big hat and black clothes I © G. Garitan/WikiCommons

Hygiene and the Assassin is a good example of the hypothesis that Nothomb has the qualities and defects of a commercial author writing for a big audience: good plot, complete characters but also dangerously approaching the cliché with regularity, as some critics would say.

The simplistic style that makes it very easy to read can also make it literarily plain, lacking the details that constitute excellence.

To fully understand Nothomb's work, though, we have to look into her childhood.

Being the daughter of a Belgian diplomat, she spent the first years of her life in the beautiful outskirts of Kobe, Japan.

The experience is extensively described in The Life of Hunger, a semi-autobiographical narrative in which she portrays the life of a girl whose world was revolutionized every three years by moving to different countries and therefore, worlds.

The hardest to leave behind was Japan — a land of abundance where nature could be observed in its purest form and a land of tranquillity where everything was loving — especially when she found herself in the arms of her nanny, Nishio-san.

In contrast, she then moved, in 1972, to China.

'My world was inhabited by birds and monkeys — she says — by fish and squirrels, each one free in the fluidity of its space.

In Beijing, all the animals were prisoners: donkeys heavily loaded, horses firmly attached to enormous carriages, pigs that read their soon-to-come death in the eyes of a starving population to whom we weren't allowed to say a word.'

Later, she lived in New York, Bangladesh and Burma, but Japan was the one place that haunted her mind, to the point that she returned there as a young adult.

After finishing her studies in Brussels in 1990, she moved to Tokyo in order to work as a translator for a big company.

'I had gone there to reconnect with the paradise of my childhood,' she says in a documentary called Amélie Nothomb, A Life Between Two Waters, 'and what I found was the inferno of Tokyo's professional life.'

The experience wasn't what she expected, and using it as inspiration, she published the novel Fear and Trembling, a story of a young Amélie who sees herself being constantly tortured by her superiors who are representatives of a ruthless work society where the self is negated and who thrives on humiliating and degrading others.

French Copy of Hygiene and the Assassin I © Les Editions des Saints Pères/WikiCCommons

If Japanese men have it hard, as they are obligated to forget their dreams in pursuit of the ever-nonexistent ideal of perfection, then the only honorable way out for women seems to be suicide.

This book allowed Nothomb to achieve notoriety, by winning the Grand Prix du Roman de L'Académie Française, thus making her gain literary prestige on top of her already immense popularity.

It was also turned into a quite successful film.

Read by millions of people, she pays very close attention to her fans and spends hours every day answering their mail.

Her eccentric image — big hat, black hair, strong red lips — is almost like a brand and grabs the public eye to the point of controversy.

The latest extends to her name (she was born Fabienne), and to the information she presents as biographical but are, by many, denounced as pure fantasies and lies.

Many believe, for example, that she was not born in Japan as she claims but in Etterbeek, Brussels.

The opinion is divided: this can either be seen as an idea of genius, by which the writer becomes a real life character herself, or a fraud that violates the relationship of trust between the writer and the reader.

All controversies aside, one thing is certain: the woman is a long-lasting success.

Amélie Nothomb in "Livre sur la Place", Nancy, France I © fidfiber/Flickr.com

She is from an old noble Belgian political family and is the grandniece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980–1981), and great granddaughter of writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She has one brother and one sister, Juliette Nothomb.
 While in Japan, Nothomb attended a local school and learned Japanese. When she was five, the family moved to China. She remarked in "Fear and Trembling" that leaving Japan was "a wrenching separation for me". She studied philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Having finished her studies, Nothomb returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company in Tokyo. Her experience of this time, is expressed in "Fear and Trembling".
 Nothomb's first novel was "Hygiène de l'assassin".