This Empty Northern Hemisphere Review

[Marquez Feliciano]

Grandmas Briefs is for grandmothers and others. Bits on life's second act and the empty nest: the good, bad, humorous and heartwarming of being a baby boomer, grandparent, parent to adult children, wife and writer. Features include lifestyle articles, movie reviews, recipes, product reviews, auto test drives, grandma profiles, and more.

Grandma's Back Room features product reviews, children's book reviews, cookbook reviews, game and toy reviews, giveaways, sponsored posts and more. All of interest to grandmothers and others living the baby boomer or empty nest lifestyle.

When my daughters were young, my husband and I used to take them camping to a family spot far from the city, far from city lights. One of our favorite activities while out in the wilderness was to stare up at the night sky and look for constellations and shooting stars.

The Homestar Original Home Planetarium is the closest you can get to the real thing. For those who enjoy planetarium star-gazing experiences, this provides exactly that. The Homestar is a high-definition planetarium with an ultra-bright 3-watt LED light that projects the night sky just as it really is, in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere.

The accurate detail (that's a photo of my ceiling in the lower right above) comes courtesy disks created by Takayuki Ohira, who holds the world record for creating technology that shows more than 20 million stars (the Megastar Planetarium). He teamed with Sega Toys to create the same out-of-this-world display in a home-size version.

The Homestar Original Home Planetarium from Sega Toys has a suggested price of $174.99 and is available on The Grommet. Additional two-packs of disks run about $35 a set. For more information, check out this video from The Grommet:

Arthur C. Clarke has lived in Sri Lanka for 50 years. On the rooftop of his rambling Colombo house he has a large telescope. He claims that the island is one of the best places in the world from which to gaze at the northern sky. Perhaps it is something to do with being at the southern end of the northern hemisphere.

I JOURNEYED TO Jaffna by road in a united nations vehicle driven by Momo, a stocky ex-French-army explosives expert and now a team leader with one of the mine-clearing groups operating under the United Nations Mine Action program. The road north hugs the west coast and cuts through impoverished fishing villages before turning inland towards the ancient archaeological city of Anuradhapura, where an eternal flame of peace and enlightenment burns in the shadow of the vast Buddhist shrine. Not far from this popular tourist city, enormous tracts of land are cordoned off with razor wire. The Sri Lankan national flag flutters from strategically placed guard posts.

Leaving the Sri Lankan army-controlled territory and entering the region of Vavuniya, controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), just 100 kilometres from Jaffna on the northern tip, reminded me of the divide between east and west Berlin before the wall came down. There is no wall in this north-south divide in Sri Lanka. But there is a busy checkpoint where every vehicle is searched and where all trucks must be unloaded for inspection.

The narrow potholed road continues north through the flatlands of Kilinochchi district and across the Jaffna lagoon via Elephant Pass. Jaffna district is now in the hands of the Sri Lankan army, so just before Elephant Pass the theatre of truck unloading and reloading is repeated, not to collect taxes but to satisfy the army that no munitions or explosives are carried in.

Around Jaffna I walked with the deminers as they painstakingly combed the soil, one millimetre at a time. Their high-tech detectors emit a high-pitched squeal that sounds like the peacocks that roam the Sri Lankan forests. Once a mine has been defused, a coloured marker is inserted in its place. Tape linking the markers reveals the extent and the pattern of a particular minefield. In many areas the tape extends for hundreds of metres in several directions, across farmland, close to schools and through villages.

Griffith Review acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land, pays respect to the Elders, past, present and emerging, and extends that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I nod and wave to other masked walkers, joggers, and cyclists, none of whom I know. I did not raise my children in this neighborhood. Flowering dogwoods, lilac hedges, and star magnolias embellished the late New England spring. In summer I watched for new blooms, peonies and irises giving way to roses and lilies, in the several well-tended gardens along my route; most homeowners here content themselves with squares of lawn and a bit of shrubbery, an azalea or rhododendron.

Professor Mizuno bought me a ream of printer paper and a handful of pens at the campus store and, when we ended the tour at his cluttered office, where books in English and Japanese stood two-deep on the shelves lining the room, offered reassurance about the specter of nuclear war that had suddenly intruded on our lives. On the morning of August 29, as my Japan Airlines flight winged its way toward Tokyo, North Korea had lobbed a test ICBM in a 1700-mile arc passing over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Throughout Japan, citizens were ordered to shelter in place until the missile was observed to splash down in an empty stretch of the Pacific.

Buddhism was in the air Chōmei breathed. Even if few practiced as extremely as he or the other rustic ascetics of his time, Chōmei addressed knowing readers with the confidence he would be understood, his choice accepted, even lauded. He could cajole, enchant; he need not exhort. Without exciting curiosity or malicious jibes, he could make a remote cabin his home.

During a visit to the University of Lagos in the early 2000s, I visited the bookshop and the library and I was saddened by both the paucity and the range of books available on the shelves. I discovered similarly lonely bookshelves in bookshops across cities and in the homes I visited. I wondered what kind of civilisation and cultural confidence can be built when so many homes are emptied of books or when the current books available rarely speak to or reflect the world the readers inhabit. Many of the books were either in the Euro-American self-help genre, business/motivational books, airport fiction, or religious inspiration from Nigerian Christian men of God (they are always men). Where were the great African novels which many of us enjoyed when we were young? Even more startling, where were the African voices that were at the time emerging in the northern hemisphere?

I was struck deeply by this lack and decided to do something about it. I hoped that I could encourage and support someone more entrepreneurial then I to fill those empty and unloved bookshelves with contemporary African writing. With no serious takers, three years after moving to Nigeria to take up an academic position at one of the universities, I quit academia. With no entrepreneurial experience and little knowledge about publishing beyond being a voracious reader, I started Cassava Republic Press with Jeremy Weate with the mission to feed and nourish the African imagination with literature from the African world, starting on the continent and eventually including Africans in Europe and the Americas. Cassava Republic then joined publishers like Kachifo and Book Craft who were already trying to change the literary landscape.

Still, I could not have done it without the support of so many people, especially my sisters who all had demanding full-time jobs, yet worked as though Cassava Republic was their full-time job. We always joked that maybe the company should have been called Bibi and Sisters!

What is the significance of geography to Cassava Republic Press? Having started in Abuja, Nigeria and recently opening offices in London and perhaps the US soon, does location matter for the work you do?

Expanding into these new markets, as well as allowing us to conveniently distribute our titles to a wider market, are signs that there is a significant demand for African books, a testimony to how much the literary scene has grown over the years. At the same time, our presence in the U.K. is hopefully a challenge and a provocation to larger publishers to publish more books by African authors and ensure that we have a diverse representation of writers, reflective of the diversity of Britain these days. Place is extremely important for grounding human experience and identity formation.

By continuously publishing groundbreaking stories that break through the clutter and noise. Last year, we published When We Speak of Nothing by Olumide Popoola, a book that is linguistically innovative and a fresh representation of hidden voices in a way that we rarely see in literature. Perhaps for the first time, young, black, British, and trans readers can also see themselves in print in a story they can relate to.

Why do you think Nigeria has had such a rich literary history with authors like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie found on required reading lists in schools around the world?

Book piracy and lack of publishing opportunities are the biggest challenges faced by African writers (not just Nigerians). There are a lot of fantastic (and not so great) stories being written by African writers and it is often a challenge to get publishing companies to publish these stories. There are still not enough publishing companies on the continent, and still not enough diversity of titles available to inspire African readers that would stimulate the kind of variety we find in music. Perhaps it is because the music industry has grown organically without requiring symbolic legitimacy from the West and therefore has produced much more diversity.

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