social justice

The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

by

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”

Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”

Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.

I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the  mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.

Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.

The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.

She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

Do you have a room of your own?

The book review that helped me understand the haters

by

The lead article in the 4 January 2024 issue of the London Review of Books (Vol. 46 No. 1) began to sound eerily familiar. In “Say Anything, Do Anything,” James Meek reviews Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television, by Peter Biskind.

The premise of Pandora’s Box is that a series of daring, innovative shows on US cable channels, starting in the 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks.

Released from the censorship that delivered shows that were “lowest common denominator programming, comforting, predictable and morally neat,” cable channels began producing shows such as The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. These shows were not only explicit in language and violence but featured “[a]nti-heroes like Tony Soprano, the man who garottes a fink while taking his teenage daughter on a tour of prospective colleges.”

While the movement from traditional TV shows to cable was supported by new bandwidth availability and an exponentially higher number of shows to choose from, Meek also identifies the use of algorithms to determine what viewing audiences want.

Netflix was a data-mining operation long before it got into streaming and [Reed] Hastings believed his algorithm could be used to predict the films and TV shows subscribers would like, whether they’d been made or not; if not, he’d make them.

And what did audiences want? Sports, of course, but also more nudity and lots and lots of violence. Thus, dramas like Game of Thrones became big hits.

I’m not a prude, but I am grateful that I can fast-forward through the endless nude scenes in certain dramas. Trained as a writer, I can’t help mentally wielding my red pen against gratuitous scenes that don’t move the story forward. As a woman, I can’t help suspecting these scenes are due in part to the misogynistic writers’ rooms described in Biskind’s book.

Look, I’m not here to rail against television. I have enjoyed and appreciated the craft of shows like Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and The Wire. In fact, the scene Meek calls out—”the almost loving meeting between the Baltimore drug dealers and childhood friends Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in The Wire, where each knows the other is setting him up to be killed”—is in my opinion the single best scene in any TV drama ever.

But I don’t idolise Stringer Bell or Al Swearengen in Deadwood or Walter White in Breaking Bad. They do evil things. I appreciate that they are presented as complex characters, instead of purely evil monsters. They have their own moral codes, a line they won’t cross. Meek mentions the save-the-cat device (per Blake Snyder) of making audiences like them by having them rescue a woman or child.

What gave me chills, though, were the parts of the book about the “significant fraction” of a show’s fans that cheered the violence, demanding more, and glorifying the characters because of their evil deeds. Meek mentions the “little old ladies” who fawned over Joe Pantoliano, Ralphie in The Sopranos. Pantoliano said, “‘They were flirting with me, turned on that I was the guy who beat up this hooker. It was sick.’”

Perhaps a little disingenuously, [David] Chase said later that ‘he was troubled by how much the “less yakking, more whacking” contingent of his fan base loved his mobbed-up characters, no matter how badly they behaved. The show is “about evil”, he said. “I was surprised by how hard it was to get people to see that.”’

Evil that becomes commonplace. Evil that becomes entertainment. Evil that becomes something to cheer on. Until some people don’t even see it as evil. They applaud when a would-be dictator, already a convicted criminal, threatens to use the power of the government against his political opponents. and respond “Kill them!”

Of course, I’ve long thought about the moral damage to viewers from the bullying and cruelty of reality shows that depend on elimination, whether by firing, being voted off the island, or whatever. This part of Meek’s review hit home for me because many of these shows I’ve watched and liked. I especially appreciated the nuanced way a good man like Walter White gradually, and for reasons that seem good to him, embraces evil.

I remember the flap over films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that glorified criminals. It seemed silly to think that watching them would make me or anyone else go out and rob a bank. I’m older now, and appreciate the more subtle ways that such things work upon our psyches. Also, that exposure a two-hours film is quite different from binge-watching five or six seasons of a TV show.

Still, I’m not advocating censorship. I’m just saying that the bloodthirsty viewers, the ones who adore their violent anti-heroes, remind me of the crowds these days baying for the blood of journalists, political opponents, immigrants—anyone they’re told to hate. I’ve been surprised by how hard it’s been to get them to see the evil in these demands. I guess I shouldn’t be. After all, they’ve been practicing this behavior night after nights in their own homes.

What TV dramas do you watch? Why?

Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

by

If you’re going to read the history of women in England for the last 900 years, then you can’t be surprised that it is a huge book. Long? Yes. Also, fascinating and infuriating.

Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. Sound like a generalisation? Read this book, where each assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically.

Gregory’s extensive research yields statistic after statistic, example—by name—after example of women doing the work of society while having no power. She divides the book by eras and, within each presents a cogent description of areas such as the status of women’s health, marriage rights, widows, work (paid and unpaid), female soldiers, sexuality, slavery, rape, and prostitution.

Bottom line? Every time things start to look better for women, every time they are given a modicum of power, the immediate reaction by terrified men shoves them backwards. Think it’s all in the past? Look at how the percentage of rapes of women that are investigated by British police—already appalling low—have declined in recent years. If I remember correctly, the most recent figure in the book is from about ten years ago and is shockingly only two percent. Two percent!

Century after century, women are excluded from profitable work, from unions and guilds, from being able even to train for better work. All this while they are the ones feeding the family, more often than not. Elite women cheerfully throw their lower class fellow females under the wheels of their chariots.

A lot of this I already knew, but the tsunami of detail, of individual stories, really brought the horror of this persistent imbalance of power home to me. One area I hadn’t realised is that women were the true force behind the great resistance movements in England, the ones that pushed back against enclosure of common lands, automation, and other power grabs by the wealthy that left everyone else to starve. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was sparked by two women from Kent, Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn protesting a poll tax, not Wat Tyler, as the history books would have it.

If you think that 500+ pages of this would be boring, think again. There are surprises everywhere. Did you know that boxing was primarily a women’s sport in the early 18th century? Gregory writes with a cool attention to story, grabbing the reader’s attention and not releasing it. You cannot even turn away from her ten pages listing names of women murdered in Britain in 2019, nearly all dying from domestic violence. She tells us of the broken ribs and deformed bodies of women laced into too-tight corsets, of women colliers dragging coal out of mines like pit ponies.

She reminds us of how men of every period attempted to define women—quoting their very words—in ways that demeaned them and reinforced male dominion. All these unscientific theories of women’s nature spoke of her weakness of body, mind, and morals.

We are introduced to so many extraordinary women in these pages, but the author reminds us to look around us. “The history of women is a struggle over identity and inclusion: we are all ‘normal’ women even when we have been described as exceptional or deviant or inadequate, even when our vanity prompts us to stand apart, or our ambition to compete with each other.”

Yes, it’s a long book. You may want to pace yourself, though I confess that I tore through it. This is the book that I’m recommending to everyone this year.

Have you read any part of this remarkable book? What did you think about it?

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

by

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her sole remaining child, her 17-year-old daughter Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. That same night a young, Black man was found dead in a Southie subway station, apparently hit by a train.

Mary Pat knows whom to talk to, who’s connected to whom. Her search takes her into the inner circle of Southie’s Irish mob, run by Marty Butler. They’ve known each other for years—everyone knows everyone in this tight enclave—and he advises her to let it go lest she bring the attention of the authorities down on his activities. One of his lieutenants explains that Jules has probably gone to Florida, which reminded me that the film Midnight Cowboy had come out only five years earlier, though it isn’t mentioned in the book.

This mostly Irish-American neighborhood may be Mary Pat’s world, the only one she’s known, but the outside world makes itself felt. There’s Vietnam and the heroin epidemic. There’s Nixon’s resignation and the recession caused by the oil embargo among other things. Most of all, there’s Judge Garrity’s order to desegregate Boston’s schools by busing children to schools outside their neighborhoods.

Boston exploded. I was living nearby and well aware of the uproar, though several members of my book club only read about it later. Lehane takes us inside one of its hotbeds: Southie, where residents—mostly the women—rose up in protest. The casual racism and racist epithets may seem incredible to those who were not around then, but they were common enough, not just in South Boston but most other places as well—certainly in the city where I grew up—though more often in private conversations than yelled on the streets.

By laying bare the web of connections between the characters, going back to childhood, and the insistent demands to conform to the neighborhood’s customs, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. You risk losing everything, even the little that you have. Once one of the leaders of the protests, Mary Pat is now only concerned about her daughter. The more she discovers the circumstances of Jules’s disappearance, the more she finds herself in conflict with the mob and her former friends.

What most fascinated me were the tiny, incremental changes in the characters. Not epiphanies or redemptive realisations, but rather the slightest doubt, the whisper of a question. Is what I’ve been taught and believed all my life actually true? Did I miss an important piece of information somewhere along the way? Questions all of us might find it useful to ask ourselves now and then.

It’s easy to look back, and in our self-righteousness call the crowds protesting integration ignorant, but Lehane enables us to see their point of view. I also loved the way Lehane, who grew up in neighboring Dorchester, slips in the little social codes of that time and place, such as that a man didn’t curse in front of a woman he doesn’t know, no matter what foul language she dishes out to him.

Some people in my book club thought Mary Pat was unrealistic. One called her “almost Wonder Woman.” But I’ve known women like Mary Pat who, hardened by life’s blows, have learned to fight back and win. They’ve learned timidity doesn’t work; you have to raise your voice and demand what you need.

This is a cracking good read, as you’d expect if you’ve read other Lehane novels. Like me, you’ll find it hard to tear yourself away. When you do, still thinking about Mary Pat and Jules and the other characters, you’ll find their story gives you a context for today’s news, a more accurate picture of the past instead of the fairy tale some people would like you to believe.

What’s your favorite Dennis Lehane novel?

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

by

It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

by

Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Best Books I Read in 2022

by

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston

by

barrac

After reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the leader of the 1831 slave uprising, I wanted to read a first person account from someone who had been a slave. This slim book, subtitled The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” fits the bill.

I was already familiar with Hurston from her novels, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, and knew she had studied with the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Here, she combines her anthropologist and storyteller skills to give us the story of Cudjo Lewis in his own words.

Born in the town of Banté in West Africa, Kossola, as he was known then, was captured by the Dahomey when they destroyed his town, taking the teenager and others to sell as slaves. At the time Hurston interviewed him in 1927, he was thought to be the only person still alive who had made the gruesome Middle Passage from Africa to the United States. His was the last group of slaves to make that journey.

A storyteller in the griot tradition, Kossola describes what life was like in his town, including marriage customs, how murderers are punished, and his own training to be a man. He tells of the Dahomey raid—“ ‘I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run ‘way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey head’”—and the long march to Dahomey where they are kept in the barracoon, or barracks, until the White slave traders come.

Hurston captures his voice by representing his dialect. Although I usually tire easily when trying to read dialect, I had no trouble here, easily falling into Kossola’s voice. The dialect adds authenticity to his story.

Dey takee de chain off us and placee us in de boats . . . When we ready to leave de Kroo boat and go in de ship, de Many-costs [a derisive term for the Kroos, an African tribe that works for the white men, called that because many of them can be hired for the cost of a good worker] snatch our country cloth off us. We try save our clothes, we ain’ used to be without no clothes on. But dey snatch all off us. Dey say, ‘You get plenty clothes where you goin’.’ Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ‘Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savages. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ‘way from us.

He goes on to describe his life as a slave, which lasted a little over five years, and after abolition, when he and the other slaves who had been brought on the Clotilda, those who hadn’t been sold elsewhere, built a town for themselves that they called African Town, today a community known as Africatown or Plateau, Alabama.

Religion is important to him and he is active in his church. He doesn’t see a disconnect between the faith of his childhood and the Christianity he learned in Alabama. He says that they worshiped the same god back in Africa, though they called him Alahua. Because they couldn’t read the Bible, they didn’t know he had a son.

This is not a traditional slave narrative, the story of an enslaved person escaping, trying to survive in the wilderness as they struggle to reach a place where they will be free. Instead, it starts with a free man, captured at 19 by fellow Africans and sold to White slavers—a fact that startled Hurston who had not realised that Black people were as responsible for the slave trade as White.

Hurston gives us a man who, despite the trauma and tragedies of his past, is someone much like us: retired, working in his garden, enjoying a good peach. We feel his love for his wife and their grief over the loss of two of their three children. His words touch us, especially his heartsick knowledge that he will now never see Africa again. He hopes that someday someone will carry his words back to that town in Africa where people will recognise his name and welcome him home.

This is a remarkable primary source for a time before any of us were born. Hurston completed the book in 1931, but it was rejected by publishers, partly because of the dialect. It was not published until 2018.

Do you ever pair two books that you’re reading, so that one complements the other?

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown

by

9781556594861

I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal.

Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words.

He uses enjambment more fiercely than I would have thought could work, and by doing so, introduces ambiguity. The end of each unfinished line introduces a gap that invites the reader to leap across it, as Robert Bly described in Leaping Poetry. The reader’s mind begins to fill in what comes next, only to get to the next line and find it something else entirely. Here are the first lines of “Second Language:”

You come with a little
Black string tied
Around your tongue,
Knotted to remind
Where you came from
And where you left
Behind photographs
Of people whose
Names now buck
Pronouncing . . .

Constantly being pulled up like this as we form sentences in our head reinforces the ideas in the poem. It also introduces what Donald Maass terms micro-tension, irresistibly drawing the reader forward. Plus the original thought lingers, a soft echo sounding through the poem.

Brown creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity. Some poems are in invented stanza forms, invented indentations, all of which carry meaning. The most outstanding are in the form Brown created: the Duplex. It combines sonnet and ghazal forms: fourteen lines in couplets, where the first line of the couplet is the last line–more or less–of the previous couplet, and the last line of the last couplet is the first line of the poem. Couplets two, four, and six are indented.

Such a form should be impossibly repetitive, but in Brown’s hands each Duplex is an experience like no other: the subtle changes between repetitions, the force of the ideas, and the return at the end, the words the same but the meaning irrevocably changed.

I’m struck by the physicality of these poems. Brown gets at emotion through our bodies, reminding me of Resmaa Menakem’s nonfiction book My Grandmother’s Hands where he locates what Wendell Berry called this country’s Hidden Wound in White and Black bodies, in the trauma held there. See for example these first lines from “Correspondence:”

I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
I had to go back this far in order
To present myself as a whole being
You’d heed and believe in . . .

These poems are all infused with love, even when they are exploring heartache or calling out injustice. Capturing the currents that have been roiling out society in the last few years, and before, the poems may rock you, as they did me, but you will still feel cradled by the love.

What poems astonish you?

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

by

fire

This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?