Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge

##29-30: Ogun Abibiman by Wole Soyinka, Bill of Rights by Fred D'Aguiar

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:26:22 GMT

#29: Ogun Abibiman by Wole Soyinka
#30: Bill of Rights by Fred D'Aguiar

These are both long poems (though Ogun Abibiman is only 24 pages long to the 133 pages of Bill of Rights), and poetry being poetry, I don't feel very confident in reviewing them, but I'll try. Ogun Abibiman is about Ogun, the Yoruba smith-god, seen as a symbolic revolutionary figure that could unite Africa; it was written in 1976 after the president of Mozambique effectively declared war on the white rulers of Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe, and the fact that the end of white rule gave Zimbabwe a whole new set of problems that they're still struggling with casts a bit of a shadow over the poem. Because, in a way, the good guys won -- but what did they win?

I got the feeling that there were things I was missing -- if I knew more about Yoruba mythology or 20th century African history, I think I would have appreciated it more. Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate it. It took me a few pages to get into it, and there were quite a few pages where I wasn't sure what he was getting at, but I always felt that he was getting at something, and I could see glimmers of it through the haze of my own ignorance. Even when I wasn't sure of the meaning, the poem felt right, if you know what I mean; if I had read it aloud, it would have felt like music. I want to try some of Soyinka's other poetry and see if that context makes Ogun Abibiman more comprehensible to me.

Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is dense with references that I did get, which just goes to show that the more you read, the more you get from what you read. D'Aguiar references Shakespeare and Bob Dylan and Benjamin Zephaniah and W.H. Auden and the Bible and a bunch of others, as well as the patois native to Guyana, where D'Aguiar was born and where the story of the poem takes place. The poem is a sort of imaginative reconstruction of the last days of Jonestown, as seen by a black man from Brixton who joined the People's Temple and just barely managed to survive. It's moody and atmospheric, capturing the squalor of the settlement, the tyranny Jones exercised over his followers, and the sense of being trapped that remains for the nameless protagonist even after he's left Jonestown.

It's one of those books that I get absorbed in, and then when I put it down I have a little trouble picking it up again; the rhythm of the lines and the oppressive atmosphere pull me in when I'm actually reading, and then I need time to digest what I've read and recover from it a little bit. I'm still not sure that I've digested it, but that's just a sign that there was something there to digest.

Outside Beauty; Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:02:53 GMT

4. Cynthia Kadohata, Outside Beauty.

It looks like I may have stumbled across the single non-agony YA that Kadohata has written. (I don't know what her actual ratio is, but the books I see talked about most suggests that she's a master of the problem novel. Let's just say I'm scared to read the one about the dog.) Outside Beauty isn't uniformly kicky and upbeat -- there's a sad, lonely bit through the middle -- but it doesn't scream "Problem Novel" at me, either.

And just let me interject: oh, but Kadohata writes some beautiful prose.

So, in Helen Kimura's world, women exist to be beautiful and men exist to support them. Helen is raising her four daughters to that philosophy, and their lives are a whirlwind of boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, fathers (each of the girls has a different one), and staying one step ahead of whoever is pursuing them now. That comes to a crashing halt when Helen is in a Terrible Accident, and the four sisters are individually shopped out to their respective fathers while their mother recovers. (I know, it sounds like a Problem Novel...)

I love the portrayal of the four sisters. There's a deep and unselfconscious love and loyalty between them, and while they do view each other with envy -- Marilyn is stunning; Lakey has the best father -- they don't view each other with jealousy. That things are uneven is just the way things are. They're similarly non-judgemental about their mother, in a way that rings true to me. Everyone else judges their mother -- and our narrator, the one "plain" girl in the bunch, has her own private doubts about the "women exist to be beautiful" philosophy -- but she's their mother, and their loyalty lies with with her. Plus, it's a pretty good, if crazy, life.

Until the Terrible Accident, that is.

As to why I don't consider this a problem novel, *spoiler* the four girls decide to run away together the next time they meet up. Cue kick-ass (and successful!) road-trip. Awesome road-trip. And they don't have to drive off a cliff at the end to escape the police, either.

5. Benjamin Alire Saenz, Sammy & Juliana in Hollywod.

This novel, on the other hand, would be an excellent contender for rachelmanija's YA Agony Award.

The author kills off one of the title characters in the first paragraph -- total woman in the refrigerator -- and then proceeds to repeat a grinding cycle of introducing one of Sammy's BFFs in one chapter and killing off or otherwise disposing of the selfsame BFF in the next. (Always a tragic disposal, too: a near-fatal gay-bashing that requires moving to another city afterwards, or being drafted into the Vietnam war.) Sometimes it isn't a BFF; sometimes it's "just" the next-door-neighbor, who's been raising Sammy and his sister all these years since their mother died. After that's gone on for a while, the author starts going through the list of Tragic But Still Technically Alive BFFs again and starts killing them off for reals.

By this time, Sammy has become the Great Hope of his generation -- as each of his friends fall, they press on him the destiny of being the only one to make it out of Hollywood (not the Hollywood, but the name of their Las Cruces barrio). Every time someone reiterates that Sammy is Their Only Hope, I'm shaking my head: no WAY is this author is going to let Sammy go to Berkley.

And sure enough: Sammy's father has a Terrible Accident. Want to hear how Sammy breaks the sheer Terribleness of the Terrible Accident to his father, while Dad lies in his hospital bed? "Which is worse, Dad? Losing a leg, or losing a son?" After the father replies that losing a son is worse, Sammy responds, "Well, guess what? You still have a son!" Then Sammy continues, "Which is worse, Dad? Losing a kidney, or losing a daughter?"

So, Sammy doesn't get to go to Berkley, because now he's the sole breadwinner of the family and someone has to take care of his little sister while his father recovers. So Sammy gets his leatherbound copy of Great Expectations, inscribes it with a You're Our Only Hope message to one of his few remaining friends, and passes the Mantle of Hope on to her. And it is all very Tragic.

In the remaining few chapters, the author kills yet another character (but Sammy learns a Valuable Lesson along the way and paints his truck red to demonstrate so), and then in the final chapter, I swear to God, the author kills off something like five characters in a single paragraph. Pretty much anyone who ever had a name gets killed, at the rate of one character per sentence.

I'm pretty sure there was a clearly stated Moral to all this, but I got distracted by the carnage. Also, I, um, kinda forgot that this was a Serious Problem Novel and started regarding it as a Spectacle, and thus was too busy laughing at the predictability of the onslaught to pay attention to the Moral when it went by.

...it got really good reviews, though?

(Hm. Although I do see at least one reviewer likened it unto the Book of Job.)

But seriously, there was a lot of good stuff there. I liked the portrayal of the neighborhood, of the era, of the kids. I liked the way the characters played together, and I gained an abiding affection for Sammy. It's just, wow. If only the author had been a little less predictable, or if he hadn't tried to crowbar twenty Problem Novel plots into a single volume and had restrained himself to a respectably modest five Problem Novel plots. Or something. Just... wow.

Hemant Mehta, I Sold My Soul On eBay

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:34:40 GMT

3. Hemant Mehta, I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith Through an Atheist's Eyes.

This one was a bit odd, mostly because it was not the book I was expecting it to be. I was expecting an atheist's critique of religion, directed toward an audience at least potentially sympathetic to atheism, plus maybe some rollicking stories of foolhardiness-on-the-internet. However, this volume is low on the rollicking, directed at convinced Christians, and is intended to assist those who are attempting to convert the non-religious. Which, wha-?

So the backstory: Mehta was raised in the Jain faith in Chicago, deconverted at fourteen, became active in the Secular Student Alliance in college (founding a group on his own campus), and then realized that in becoming an atheist he had made a jump: he had rejected all religion because of dissatisfaction with one religion. Consequently, he started trying to explore Christianity, using the most prominent Christian preachers he could find, Robertson and Falwell. When Christian friends protested that those preachers were not good representatives of Christianity, Mehta decided to attend a local church instead, but that he'd sell the right to pick which church, as well as how many hours he should attend, on eBay.

The auction was won by Jim Henderson of Off The Map, a Christian group that's trying to "help Christians discover how they are perceived by non-Christians" as a step toward "reinventing evangelism." Mehta basically became a one-man focus group for Off the Map. Henderson picked out a few dozen mainstream churches and Mehta went to multiple services a day for a few months (fifty hours of church-time), and wrote this-is-what-the-service-looked-like-to-an-openminded-atheist critiques for each of them. Mehta's critiques are polite and non-inflammatory, reading like annual performance reviews ("here's what you're doing well; here's what you should work on"). The churches he visited all seem like very moderate and respectable places: no demon-possessed German shepherds or the like.

So. This is not a romp of someone doing crazy things on eBay and what happened thereafter. Nor is it the psychological drama of a single buyer/church trying to save one atheist's soul. Nor anything else that I might have been expecting. But still, the premise -- an open conversation between Christians and an atheist about how Christianity might best approach atheists for possible conversion -- was an interesting one to me.

Unfortunately, I'm not the target audience for this book, which means it fell somewhat flat: most of the material here is pretty familiar to me. Many of the things that Mehta thought while sitting in church pews are the same things I've thought. Several chapters are a primer on "What Atheists Believe" (dude, it's not like there's an atheist orthodoxy!) for people who have been getting their "knowledge" about atheists through the Christian gossip mill.

The three sections that made the book worth reading for me were the story behind the book's existence, Mehta's own religious history and deconversion from Jainism, and the publisher-written "study guide" at the end (which gives one some hints about what a Christian perspective on Mehta's views might be). In many ways, it seems that the archives at The eBay Atheist would be a more satisfying read for me, because they contain both sides of the conversation between Mehta and the community at Off The Map.

Altogether, I would recommend the book to evangelical Christians who are willing to examine their approach to non-religious people, but I feel that atheists would likely find the book of only moderate interest, and would be better-served by the archived conversations at The eBay Atheist.

Mehta also runs the group blog, Friendly Atheist.

#28: You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down by Alice Walker

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:43:30 GMT

#28: You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down by Alice Walker

My feelings for Walker are becoming increasingly ambivalent, in ways that I have trouble talking about. Anyway: this is a collection of short stories, some of them better than others, all of them good. Some highlights:

"Such a fine idea, our ball: Come as the feminist you most admire! But I did not know you most admired Scarlett O'Hara, and so I was, for a moment, taken aback." (from "A Letter of the Times")

"The mayor was much in their lives because of the difficulties being the first black mayor of a small town assured... Mayor Carswell would never look at her directly when she made a comment or posed a question, even sitting at her own dinner table, and would instead talk to Clarence as if she were not there. He assumed that as a woman she would not be interested in, or even understand, politics.... But Imani understood every shade and variation of politics: she understood, for example, why she fed the mouth that did not speak to her; because for the present she must believe in Mayor Carswell, even as he could not believe in her." (from "The Abortion")

"When white people reached a certain level of poverty (assuming they were not members of the Klan, or worse, which they very often were), they ceased to be 'white' to her. Like many of her quasi-political beliefs, however, she had not thought this through. She was afraid to, and this was one of the major failings in her character." (from "Source")

Andrea Smith, Conquest

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:25:52 GMT

2. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide.

This book is awesome. I've been seeing rave reviews for it (oyceter's review; coffeeandink's review), and it absolutely lives up to its press.

First of all, I'm just desperately grateful to Smith for her language -- words, ideas, connections, concepts, frameworks. To be able to say why new-age religious appropriative crap is so harmful, or to put into words what feels so desperately cure-nearly-as-bad-as-the-ill about the domestic violence shelter model, or her neat expression of my frustration with the professionalization of everything I feel grassroots passion about... There is such exhilaration in finally having conceptual language for these things.^[1] (Next task: learn to use that language.)

Plus the clear-voicedness that Smith puts into this book! (Which is much of what I loved about A Broken Flute, too.) I sometimes feel so frickin' immersed in the mainstream POV about the genocide of American Indians (Very Long Time Ago and Pretty Much Inevitable and anyway Everyone Meant Well And Did Their Very Best), that it's always such a relief to see someone writing about it without all the stupid minimizing lies.^[2]

(And would I be too much of an academic geek to be thrilled that there are copious endnotes? Every couple sentences, another superscript? Because I am full of joy about that. This book is a reference, an ongoing tool against the skeptics, not "merely" a set of thrilling conceptual frameworks. Ee!)

The penultimate chapter, "Anticolonial Responses to Gender Violence," is absolutely essential reading for everyone in the women's anti-violence movement (and is likely pretty darn useful in the anti-prison movement, and other anti-violence movements -- I only called out women's anti-violence by name because that's where my activist roots are, and thus I can see how neatly this chapter deals with the broken places). Smith meticulously documents the failures of both mainstream and alternative anti-violence models, and instead of viewing those failures as those unfortunate edge cases that you'll always have, she moves them to the center of her analysis: if your anti-violence model doesn't work for women of color, for poor women, for LGBTQI women, for disabled women, for mothers of disabled children, for undocumented immigrants, she asserts, then your model breaks in important -- not marginal! -- ways. Additionally, models that work well for the women who Smith centralizes, tend to simply work well. That is, even women who can afford to walk away from their communities benefit from not having to. And so forth. It's a sweet bit of work, that chapter. Seriously, go read it. Even if you don't want to deal with the itemization of ongoing genocide in the earlier chapters -- and I can see why you might not want to -- do read chapter 7.

---

[1] I am developing such a crush on Smith: when I read her "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy" in The Color of Violence, it was the same thrill, except condensed into a single-glug espresso shot of eight pages. OMG-framework! I turned right back to the beginning and re-read the essay, then re-read it again. And then didn't go to bed that night because I was too! Excited! To sleep!

[2] Which, um, YMMV on that. Lots of terribly upsetting not-pretty things in this book. Just so's you know.

Joe Sacco, Palestine

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:19:42 GMT

1. Joe Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition.

In 1991, aghast at what his U.S. tax dollars were financing and how poorly the U.S. media was covering it, journalist and comic artist Joe Sacco went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to research material for a comic book (Sacco eschews the term "graphic novel") about the Israeli occupation. Palestine is a forthright documentation of that trip: a mix of stories of the Occupation, plus his own roller-coaster of emotions as a privileged outsider, alternately perceiving himself as champion and vampire. Many times he is challenged by the people who tell him stories: they have told these stories many times before; what is the point of telling them again, to him? Will his retelling be listened to any better than anyone who came before him? And more importantly, will anyone ever support them in anything more than words?

Sacco does not try to tell "both sides" in Palestine: as he points out in the introduction, he can safely assume that U.S. audiences are familiar with Israel's side. Instead, Sacco gives a short overview of the socio-political history of Palestine, 1917-1948, itemizes life under military occupation, and details the Catch-22 legal web of economic colonization. Sacco is correct: these are stories that are not often told by the U.S. mainstream media. But even though Sacco doesn't aim to tell both sides, both sides are there, but viewed against the context of the Occupation. As the pages went by, I began to hear the oft-repeated phrase from Israeli interviewees, "We just want peace," as not a desire for peace but a desire for the Palestinians to stop fighting back. At the end of Sacco's trip, two Tel Aviv women insist on telling Sacco the Israeli side of the story -- but my eye is distracted by the coiffures, the clean lines of their suits, the wealth of the Tel Aviv streetscape behind them.

Personally, I found this a very difficult book to read: the language of Zionism is the language of Manifest Destiny, right down to the rhetorical notion that Palestine was empty ("a land without a people"), just waiting for industrious "Pioneers" and "settlers" to make it blossom. (I would list more parallels -- they never seemed to end -- but gah.) Usually, I blow through a graphic novel in a few days. This one took months, just because it took that long to process the rage many of the details triggered. It's not like I didn't know that American contritition about Manifest Destiny was false; believe me, I knew. But that it's all playing out again, and with U.S. backing, as if not a damned thing had been learned... I wish someone else was writing this review, because I cannot find a center to write it from.

There's good stuff here. The introductory materials for the Special Edition are also strong, with Sacco discussing the pitfalls of what he tried to do in the comic, and some of the poor choices he made. (Early on, for example, Sacco drew in the Bigfoot style, with the effect of making everyone into highly racialized caricatures.) That introspection appears in the comic, too, as Sacco narrates his reactions to the stories he was hearing. Sometimes the in-comic meta seems tiresome; other times absolutely necessary. If nothing else, it keeps bringing the reader back to the questions: Why did you choose to listen to these stories? And now that you are hearing them, what do you intend to do?

The ending is heartbreaking and brilliant. The final spread:

The bus taking me away left Israel and entered the Gaza Strip on its way to the Rafah border crossing... We carefully skirted Palestinian population centers, but it soon became apparent and word spread -- the driver was lost... He stopped at a Jewish settlement for directions... But a few minutes later we were heading for what looked like a Palestinian refugee camp or town... You could see the kids in the distance taking cover on each side of the road... If we continued that way, we were going to get stoned... The driver backed the bus up and turned it around... He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...

And with that final ellipsis, the comic ends. He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...

#27: Why Are We So Blest? by Ayi Kweh Armah

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:01:42 GMT

#27: Why Are We So Blest? by Ayi Kwei Armah

Armah is a Ghanaian novelist and this novel dates from 1972; my edition is from the Heineman African Writers series, which looks incredibly impressive, to judge from the list on the inside front cover. (But then, Chinua Achebe was the founding editor. Which reminds me that I've never read any Chinua Achebe, and he needs to go on the list...) I picked this up in a secondhand bookshop on the strength of the powerfully beautiful writing on the first page; Armah sustains that power and that beauty throughout.

Why Are We So Blest? is an extended series of meditations on the effects of colonialism on Africa, as seen through the experiences of an African student with revolutionary aspirations, his white American girlfriend, and the disillusioned ex-revolutionary who gives them lodging when they travel to a country where a revolution is taking place. It's frank and thoughtful and painful to read, especially in its focus on how sexual relationships between European women and African men are shot through with power issues. For all that it's bleak and pessimistic and conveniently vague about details, I found it deeply compelling.

Does my head look big in this?

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 08:05:09 GMT

2: Does my head look big in this? by Randa Abdel-Fattah

There's already quite a few good reviews of this book on this community, so I'll just link to a rather rambling post I wrote about it on my lj.

Also, if you liked this book you might like Looking for Alibrandi, a YA book about a young italian-australian girl finding herself etc, it's more serious and meaty but still entertaining. It's very well known here, I remember it being pretty good, and it has a passable film adaptation. It's not about or by POC, but still explores some of the same ideas of identity and "the migrant experience" etc.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:20:08 GMT

I finally finished this last night, and while I did have some problems with it, overall I enjoyed it. Amazon has some good, non-spoilery summaries of the plot, so I'll just move on to my own impressions here.

It reminded me somewhat of Middlesex, in that in addition to the main character's story, it also tells the story of the parents and grandparents. Oscar Wao is only a bit over 300 pages, and yet I never felt like it was rushed, even with a story spanning three generations (and giving time to Oscar's sister Lola as well, and later in the book even the narrator becomes a character in the story, though he is still focusing on Oscar and Lola rather than himself). Diaz has a nice, tight style that I really like. Very conversational, but not padded. It felt a little slow at first, and it was easy to put down and walk away from for days at a time, but about a third of the way in, I started finding it really hard to put down.

It almost feels like it's written in three languages. English, of course, with a ton of Spanish words and phrases (which are easy enough to figure out via context if you don't know Spanish (or like me, have forgotten most of what you learned)), but there are also so many geek references thrown in that it feels like that's a third language as well. I really enjoyed the style of it.

There are a lot of footnotes, which I both liked and disliked. I liked them, because I did end up learning a lot about the history of the Dominican Republic, which I sadly knew nothing about before (the most I can say is that the name Trujillo rang a bell, though I would not have been able to tell you what country he had ruled). But I do dislike getting interrupted in the middle of reading to have to go read a footnote.

I found the sexism and fat-hate really hard to take. There's a lot of casual misogyny and fat-hate going on throughout the story, from pretty much everyone, even those who are supposed to be sympathetic.

Oscar himself is a gross stalker. He's not gross because he's fat or because he's a nerd (the reasons the narrative gives), but because of his entitlement and his inability to see women as actual people worth his time if they're not going to fall in love/have sex with him. (Oh, and I almost forgot the part where Oscar, despite being overweight and having no social skills, refuses to look twice at anyone he deems "too ugly" for him, even if they get along really well and are good friends.) The narrator reinforces this view, when he talks about Oscar having a friend who has a boyfriend, and wondering what it is that guys get out of such friendships since they know they can't sleep with the girls. God forbid a guy actually befriend a girl because they have stuff in common and the friendship itself is interesting. If he's not banging her, it's a worthless effort! And it's not a one or two time thing. Degrading language about women can be found on pretty much every single page, often from the narrator himself. The fat-hate is pretty much integral to the story: Oscar is a loser because he's fat and a nerd. (And the way he was written about was the way a thin person typically thinks of fat people. His weight was given as 300 pounds, but you'd think, from the way he's described, that he was double that. And yet when he loses twenty pounds at one point, he's suddenly visibly thinner and looking better.)

I wanted to really love this book, and I do like it. The story was excellent, as was the writing, but I really didn't like all the rest of the crap that was floating around. I liked Lola a lot, but none of the guys were remotely sympathetic. I'm not sure why Oscar's life was wondrous at all.

Query for the Comm

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:49:32 GMT

Can someone help me out of this hole I'm digging for myself, please? Does Joe Sacco (Palestine) qualify for this comm?

Sacco is Maltese. Malta is a Mediterranean island with a mixed European and Arabic history (f'rinstance, Maltese is an Arabic-family language written in Romanic script); I'm seeing a lot of debate as to whether the Arabic or European influence is stronger, and some assertions that at least some of the debate is British propaganda from when Malta was a British colony. From my roaming around chatrooms trying to figure this out, at least some ethnic Maltese self-identify as people of color.

...but I can't tell if Sacco himself does. The first photo I saw of him, I thought "person of color," but most of the press about him seems to assume he's white (the "his race/background isn't worth mentioning" treatment that white people get). But then, this comm has been generally considering people of the Middle East to be people of color even though many in the mainstream consider them white, so I'm not sure that Sacco's treatment by the press is exactly relevant here.

So... um?

(And if the mods want, I'll delete this post after.)

Statement of Intent

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:58:25 GMT

Hello! I heard about this community last year but wasn't really in a reading books frame of mind at the time. I was reminded by being linked to sanguinity's post and right now I am in a reading-lots-of-books state of mind, especially challenging ones, so here I go. Normally I'd lurk for a while in a new comm before posting, but this way I feel like I've committed myself and am more likely to stick with it :)

And as it happens, I read a book by a POC today! Just because it looked interesting! *gives self a cookie*

1: Buddha: Book One by Osamu Tezuka
I read book three a while ago when I came accross it in my local library and quite enjoyed it, but this is, unsurprisingly, a better place to start.

It's a somewhat fictionalised account of the life and death of Gautama Buddha. If you're familiar with Astro Boy (Or "Kimba the white lion" etc) you'll know Osama Tezuka's style of writing and art, but as well here there is that rare mix of sincere reverence and entertaining story-telling that makes for the best religious stories (at least to this atheist reader :))

I don't know that much about buddhism or Buddha beyond what I've picked up from the non-fiction buddhist texts my buddhist-leaning family members have lent me and the tv show "Monkey". So I can't say how faithful it is to the original stories and religion, but I can say it's definitely more along the lines of the latter than the former :) (And it's worth noting that both were made by japanese buddhists about non-japanese buddhist figures and then translated into english with possibly more emphasis on entertainment than accuracy)

Anyway, I really enjoyed it, overall. Like "Astro Boy" it has a very simple almost childish style and a lot of silly humour (including a cameo by the author) but underneath that are strong characterisation, engaging stories and surprising emotional complexity. It made me cry twice! There's a lot of un-selfconscious nudity (male and female), which didn't feel too gratuitous to me but was a bit disconcerting.

Hope I've done the tags right!

#26: Unbowed, by Wangari Maathai

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:20:23 GMT

#26: Unbowed: One Woman's Story by Wangari Maathai

This is the autobiography of Kenyan woman Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, politician, activist, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. It's a compelling read, and I don't normally read biographies; Maathai's life has been so extraordinary that she's worth making an exception for. She has a disarming modesty that belies the enormous courage and wisdom that shines through her actions; at one point she says:

"Many people assumed I must have been inordinately brave to face down the thugs and police during the campaign for Karura Forest. The truth is that I simply did not understand why anyone would want to violate the rights of others or to ruin the environment... What people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don't see danger... If you don't foresee the danger and see only the solution, then you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless."

It's an inspiring read.

#46-52

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:42:07 GMT

Tyson, Neil de Grasse - Universe Down to Earth
The book is like Tyson-the-lecturer distilled, although it cannot quite get across just how charismatic, funny, and, above all, clear he is. Sadly, I've clearly forgotten all my basics of physics, but the book has a brief refresher. Though Tyson's field is astronomy and the book has chapters specific to astronomy, other parts are just good background. (more)

Butler, Octavia E. - Clay's Ark
It's the near-distant future, and society has deteriorated so that there are walled cities and gangs running amuck outside. Blake and his two daughters, Rane and Keira, end up being kidnapped, but not by the normal suspects. Instead, they've been kidnapped by a group of people infected with a strange organism from outer space. (more)

Winston, Sherri - The Kayla Chronicles
This is a very small book, and I had to be in the right mood to feel up to Kayla's voice, which is snappy and slangy and very fun. I was a little irritated that the main plot is mostly "Oh, I can be feminist and wear heels too!" as I felt the nuances of social expectations and gender roles and etc. weren't fully explored, and that the book took the easy way out with Rosalie's hardcore, "you're not a feminist unless you're like me" line. (more)

Tyson, Neil de Grasse - Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries
This is a collection of essays Tyson wrote for Natural History, and it ranges from grumping at astronomical movie gaffes to light spectrum analysis to how exactly a black hole would kill you. (more)

Smith, Andrea - Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
I am not even covering half of what I found exciting about the book, but the core of it is how Smith reads what is normally read as racial or cultural violence as sexual violence. Just... *flails* READ THIS. (more)

Min, Anchee - Empress Orchid
Overall, I think this could have been a fascinating reimagining of a powerful woman who worked her way up despite the system, as well as a sharp critique of that system, but instead, the emphasis on Orchid's love life and the decision to stay firmly in her first-person POV undermines the retelling. (more)

Sunee, Kim - Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home

I always find it hard to critique memoirs when I find myself disliking the character of the author. Sunee writes very well, but it's a literary fiction first-person-POV present-tense style that I tend to dislike, and that coupled with existential angst really threw me off. Despite some angst about her unknown Korean heritage and her distant adoptive family, most of the book is actually about Sunee's successive unsuccessful love affairs and her search to find a family for herself. (more)

Whoo! I hit 50! And there are three books from this year by POC that I haven't written up yet!

Chicken With Plums; Please Save My Earth

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:34:02 GMT

(BTW, these are going to be my last two books on the 2007-2008 count. I was doing it from IBARW to IBARW, and I'm committing to another fifty for 2008-2009.)

58. Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums

For the first three-quarters of the book I was pleading with the main character to please, please, get some treatment for depression. (Not that I know what year this was set, nor what treatments were available.) It's beautifully told, but jeez.

And then I hit the end. Oh. And then, after a delay while my brain backtracked and realized everything that had been going on: Ohhhhh...!

And so it has gone over the past week. Every once in a while, I realize again: Ohhh.

59. Saki Hiwatari, Please Save My Earth, Vol. 1

Thank you so much for the manga recommendations!

I liked this lots. Volume 1 is an excellent teaser for what looks like it will shape up to be a multi-layered story with interesting characters and some deliciously transgressive elements. Ee!

Ai Yazawa, Nana 8 through 10

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:01:58 GMT

55. Ai Yazawa, Nana Volume 8.
56. Ai Yazawa, Nana Volume 9.
57. Ai Yazawa, Nana Volume 10.

I've been such a lightweight lately.

So, Nana is pretty much the only manga I've ever read (excepting the first volume of Wallflower, which creeped me badly). I love Nana to death, largely because I'm all swoony over the one Nana and all empathetic-protective over the other (I so want to go all big sister on her about Takumi!), and the package satisfies my chicklit cravings in a way that chicklit-the-genre-as-it-currently-exists pretty much doesn't anymore. A new volume of Nana is a wonderful treat, an excuse to turn off the rest of the world for a few hours while I indulge my inner teenager.

Which is the long version of: what other manga should I be reading?

Past tense, future perfect: White Teeth

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:50:42 GMT

I am eventually going to try and sum up my reaction to the book as far as my personal enjoyment of the story, but I'd heard so much hype beforehand, and have read so many reviews in the hopes of clarifying my own stance in relation to the rest of the world that I'm probably going to have a difficult time doing that.

White Teeth follows two families - The Bangladeshi Iqbals, and the Jamaican/English Bowdens/Joneses - through London of the 1970's, 80's and 90's, picking up the Jewish/Catholic (and liberal, middle-class) Chalfens in the early nineties. The Chalfen's suffer slightly¹ from under-going the same slightly uncomfortable (to read) unfavourable scrutiny, but not having as many moments of sympathy/being as well-rounded characters as the Iqbals and the Joneses. Part of this may be the greater sense of history given and time spent on these families, but most of the minor characters (I almost typed 'caricatures', but quite a few are saved from this) are given moments of (occasionally heart-breaking) humanity.

While the bulk of the story is set in a timeline running from 1975 until 1992(/1999?) there are digressions² to trace the roots of the main characters/families from the matrilineal descent of Irie Jones through her Jamaican great-grandmother and English great-grandfather and Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones' time serving together in the last year of the second world war, to Samad's revolutionary great-grandfather Mangal Pande³ during India's first war of independence/the Indian mutiny in 1857. This novel is fairly epic, in the time and history covered, if not in the scope of the majority of the narrative - which tends towards the depiction of day-to-day life in North-West London in the latter years of the last century. Major events of the era(s) form the backdrop of the character's lives but most don't inform their individual journeys. One of the Iqbal children is involved in the furore surrounding the publication of 'The Satanic Verses', Irie Jones' Jamaican grandmother was born during the 1907 Kingston earthquake, the Iqbals and the Joneses shelter together during the 'hurricane' of 1987, but a lot of major developments pass with little or no effect. I'm going to bring in my subjective thoughts (more) and say that I liked the use of history and how it binds people to each other and affects the way they live, and the ambiguity as to whether these roots are necessary, or necessarily should be so present in people's lives⁴.

I feel bad about analysing the representation of race, ethnicity and religion, just because the author has included people from BME/international/non-Christian religious backgrounds - and not just as window dressing! - because that's a step ahead of the majority of British fiction already⁵. But at the same time, I'd like to tink that my standards aren't so low that I'd be happy just because there is some sort of representation and not care about how good or bad it may be.

I have quite a few problems with the depiction of the Muslim characters, but I expect that, at this point. It's done wrong so often (I'm looking at you Britz, White Girl, and anything on Panorama or Dispatches⁶) that I am somewhat immune and more than ready to watch that upcoming programme about The Quran. But, despite one of the Iqbal boys becoming, in Samad's own words a 'green tie wearing fundamentalist terrorist', there really isn't a lot about religion, or being religious that isn't completely over-shadowed by doubt/the influence of Western culture/religion as a reaction against the influence of Western culture. It might just be that the author doesn't think that there is anything beyond this to religion - the Jehovah's witnesses don't get much better treatment - but that's not my experience, or even my experience of the majority of other people's faith. While there isn't really enough exploration of the African/Afro-Caribbean diaspora in London within the novel for me to even discuss it, there is a lot of interesting examination of hybrid identity and the liminal state occupied by immigrants (particularly the second generation) and people of mixed ethnic background⁷.

One of the great strengths of White Teeth is that it completely captures a setting, a place and time which have just disappeared. Novels that are set just a few years/decades beyond the time contemporary to being written/published are quite popular in the British literary tradition (going back to Hardy, the Brontes, Dickens, etc)⁸ and while I'm about ten years younger than Irie Jones, Magid and Millat Iqbal, and Josh Chalfen, the late-eighties/early-nineties London in this book is strikingly familiar. At least the Iqbal/Jones portion of it, I'm just assuming that white middle class people are being depicted accurately, or at least being accurately depicted from Irie and Millat's outsider perspectives. And aside from that, even the eras/places I'm not at all familiar with are brought to vivid life.

Similarly to my reaction to Persepolis, I still find it problematic that because this book is so overwhelmingly popular that it Zadie Smith is one of the only voices in mainstream British Literature that is representing BME and immigrant communities, but that's not her fault. While White Teeth is flawed⁹ and over-hyped (to the point of putting me off for years) I enjoyed it overall and will definitely try Zadie Smith out again. Probably On Beauty, because I've heard bad things about The Autograph Man.

Possibly Next on my 50books_poc challenge: Brick Lane, Persepolis 2, A Far Horizon.

^{¹ To be fair, they also suffer from being annoyingly superior and unthinkingly imperialistic in their relationships with the Iqbals and Joneses, which I have a hard time forgiving.
² Called 'Root Canals' in one example of the use of of tooth-related imagery within the novel.
² He's played by Aamir Khan in the apparently ahistorical film version of his life. But Rani Mukherji > historical accuracy, Y/N? Definitely if it's Rani + Aamir + Tobey Stephens, you cannot argue with my maths.
⁴"In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not too far from now, when roots won't matter anymore because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too torturous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it."

I say 'ambiguous' because while I can't find the quote, Samad (first generation) sees this world, this lack of roots as being dystopic, while Irie (second generation) sees it as freeing. But this may just be the author's portrayal of inter-generational conflict. Who can say?
⁵ Come on, people! 29% of London's population are of a BME background. In the borough I live in (part-time), that rises to over 40%.
⁶ I'm fairly sure that channels not the BBC and Channel Four do these kinds of programmes, but a) Channel 5 was a complete disaster area for years, and b) I can't think of any at the moment. And yes, I watch all of these programmes - not solely in order to mock, but that is usually the result. Hint: If you want to look like you've done a bit of research, find an actor who can pronounce the names of the Prophets in a way not entirely ridiculous to anyone who has ever heard Arabic spoken. And no, we don't say 'Peace be upon Him' after God's name, it's not like some catch-all term that can be applied to anything to do with Islam.
⁷ During his 'root canals' Samad says: "what am I going to do? Go back to Bengal? Or to Delhi? Who would have such an Englishman there? To England? Who would have such an Indian?" which kind of cuts to the heart of the issue. You can't can't go back home, because 'home' isn't the same anymore and neither are you, and if not you, your children, because there's always some degree of assimilation and some degree of loss/change (mother tongue, culture, religion).
⁸ It's like sci-fi being set twenty minutes into the future
⁹ And I haven't even gotten into all of the flaws. The ending is a glaring one in my opinion, and it is overly long, and I even had issues with the style in which it was written, but.}

#25: In Search of a Distant Voice, by Taichi Yamada

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:41:14 GMT

25: In Search of a Distant Voice, by Taichi Yamada

I picked up In Search of a Distant Voice on the strength of Yamada's previous novel Strangers (which I greatly enjoyed), and I wasn't disappointed. It's got the same edge-of-reality feel, with events happening that look like they might be supernatural or might just be psychological; in this case the story's less traditional, which in a way makes it more interesting. It's about an immigration officer who finds himself being spoken to in his mind by a mysterious disembodied voice. He doesn't know what to make of it, although he's convinced that the voice is real. Due to events in his past, he's desperate for a normal life, but this clinging to normality has left his own life drained of emotion and meaning, and the voice seems to offer a way out -- which is both terrifying and enticing. Short and well-structured, In Search of a Distant Voice is a good follow-up to Strangers and makes me eager to read more by Yamada.

Reginald Hudlin, Black Panther

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:22:23 GMT

52. Reginald Hudlin, Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther.
53. Reginald Hudlin, Black Panther: Bad Mutha.
54. Reginald Hudlin, Black Panther: The Bride.

Respectively: eh, meh, and ugh.

Big Two superhero comics have a way of getting up my nose -- I would itemize, but why bother? -- and these aren't an exception.

I almost, almost, found these interesting in what they don't talk about -- power separated from privilege in super-mutants, for example, or the supposedly "pro-woman" text that's drowned by the misogynistic drawings. And do all single-page summaries of Marvel's "Civil War" storyline frame themselves as a restatement of nativist/immigration politics? (Meh, it might be worth reading the next one to see if the "Civil War" storyline develops that. But I think it's mostly just going to be fist-fighting and scantily clad Wakandan Secret Service.)

Seriously, while we're on the topic, the official uniform for the all-female Wakandan Secret Service? String bikini, mesh crop top, high-heeled combat boots, and a utility belt. Except for the days they wear thongs and go without the utility belts and crop-tops. (Yeah, and this is supposed to be empowering. "Look how kick-ass women are! Panther has an all-female personal security detail! And they kick ass!")

If you already enjoy Big Two superhero comics, these might be cool for their Africa-centrism -- most characters are African or African-American, and the African nation of Wakanda is centralized, while the U.S. and other western colonial powers are corrupt and doddering. (F'rinstance, Wakanda military and a slate of African/African-American/African-Caribbean superheroes override FEMA to rescue the New Orleans Katrina victims! Interestingly, this does not create an international incident. Also interestingly, Panther chews out one of the superheroines for actually transporting Katrina victims to safety, rather than doing the important work of, um, killing vampires. And then once all the vampires are dead -- one night's work -- our heroes drive off into the sunrise in a vintage El Dorado, leaving the work of actually rescuing the flood victims to the now-leaderless Wakanda military. Which, as I mentioned, is operating on foreign soil, without consent of the relevant governments -- great time for the Wakandan head of state to go on a road trip, eh?)

I was looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of Genius #1 (ee! this week!), but this mess is making me worry that I think too much of the industry, and that I'm going to be greatly disappointed...

#13 - Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:46:25 GMT

Lots of people have done reviews of this already, so I won't add another full one, but I liked this very much. It starts out from the POV of someone on the other side of the wormhole, and you really should have read Crystal Rain first before you read this one, although you don't see people from that story until the second half of the book. Lots of action!

I did have a bit of trouble following the many storylines here, so I think overall I liked Crystal Rain a bit better as far as readability. I give this a 4/5.

They really need to make movies out of these books! I can't wait to read Sly Mongoose (the third one, which comes out in August). :D

#24: Jupiter Williams by S. I. Martin

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:33:31 GMT

24: Jupiter Williams by S. I. Martin

Jupiter Williams is a YA novel set in London in 1800, following the mishaps and misfortunes of Jupiter Williams, the second son of a Sierra Leonean businessman and escaped slave. Jupiter himself was born free, as were his brothers, and he's a student at the African Academy in Clapham (which really did exist). But the slave trade is still active, and racism is not just respectable but the norm. The London of 1800 is a hostile place for a black teenager, especially one who refuses to bow his head.

I don't normally read non-fantasy YA novels, but I was intrigued by this one partly because of its subject matter (I know there were both slaves and free Africans in London during this period, but I know almost nothing about their living conditions or the attitudes white Londoners had towards them), and partly because it was obvious from the first page that Martin had made the brave choice of using Jupiter as an unlikeable and not wholly reliable narrator. Jupiter is arrogant, pompous, and rather narrow-minded, but the way Martin constructs his story allows us to see the significance of things Jupiter dismisses. Martin doesn't skim over the nastiness and filth of the period, either; the book fairly reeks of it, and becomes quite gory and violent at times. Although gory violence is not typically my thing, I found it entirely readable throughout.

I can't say that I loved it; it felt a bit insubstantial to me, for all its cleverness. Still, it was enjoyable and worth reading.

44-51

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:06:44 GMT

Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans - Leny Mendoza Strobel. This is the result of a project Strobel did, in which she put together a group of Filipino American volunteers who committed to a year of meeting, discussing, & journaling about decolonization. Unsurprisingly, a lot of what her participants, & Strobel herself, say is upsetting: how they were raised to think of being Filipino as something to overcome (to become more like white people), how immigrant parents deliberately chose not to teach their children Tagalog (or other Filipino languages) because they believed it would only hinder them in the US, & the many ways in which mainstream American society devalues Filipino culture & heritage. There are some good snippets in here defining exactly what decolonization means. I do feel like the book, in defining what "being Filipino" means, gets a bit essentialist (while the book also asserts that culture is fluid). I guess it has to by definition, really, but still a bit annoying.

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction - Edited by Nalo Hopkinson. I'm so bad at describing short story anthologies, but I mostly liked this one (hey, there are always a few pieces in anthologies that leave you cold). I liked how storytelling was prominent in a lot of the works, & I liked how the book takes a broader view of what is fantastic fiction; Hopkinson says in the introduction:

Northern science fiction and fantasy come out of a rational and skeptical approach to the world: That which cannot be explained must be proven to exist, either through scientific method or independent corroboration. But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview: The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by side each with the daily events of life.

Stories I particularly liked: Hopkinson's Bluebeard-esque "The Glass Bottle Trick," Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar's "Soma" (in which people become identified by some prominent body part: referred to as Feet, Hands, Ear, S/Orgs), and Opal Palmer Adisa's "Widows' Walk" (in which a woman battles the goddess Yemoja for the life of her fisherman husband).

Of Love and Other Monsters - Vandana Singh. Arun is 17 & newly rescued from a fire; his recollection about his life prior is nil. He discovers fairly quickly that he's able to reach out to other minds & influence them; he mostly does this w/good intentions, & it doesn't occur to him that his power could be used cruelly until he learns more about Rahul Moghe, perhaps the only other person on earth that has his powers, & one who uses them to dominate & destroy humans. I liked how Singh described Arun's joyful & curious awareness of other minds. The plot thickens, of course, as Arun tries to figure out what happened to him pre-fire & just what Rahul Moghe's deal is. Um, I'm blanking on other suitably pleased things to say, but I did enjoy this novella quite a bit.

Filipino Women in Detroit: 1945-1955: Oral Histories from the Filipino American Oral History Project of Michigan - Joseph A. Galura & Emily P. Lawsin. This slender book features the oral histories of 3 Filipinas who immigrated to the Detroit area from the Philippines during the 1940s & 1950s. I picked it up because I was lucky enough to see Emily Lawsin doing an oral history workshop last year at the Allied Media Conference (which, sadly, I won't be attending this year). I admit that I, too, was one of the people who never would've thought about Detroit as an area having a Filipino community, so this book was very enlightening, even if the women's stories contain a lot of themes common to immigrant narratives (that's not a criticism!). I appreciated very much that the interviewers (Galura, Lawsin, & a student of theirs), like any good oral historians, took pains to maintain the language that their interviewees used. Two poems that Lawsin wrote based on the interviews are included in the back; she performed one of them at her workshop & I was glad to encounter it again, even if it's not nearly as awesome without Lawsin performing it. I wish that they didn't organize the book topically, though (thus dividing up each interview into separate chapters).

Filter House - Nisi Shawl. Great collection of science fiction short stories, most dealing with topics like racism, colonization, & gender. If you've read some of the other well-known POC science fiction anthologies (ie. either volume of Dark Matter or So Long Been Dreaming), you'll have encountered some of these stories before, as I had, but I enjoyed reading them again, particularly "Deep End," in which prisoners whose minds have been uploaded & transported for years to a new colonizable planet are now being downloaded into new physical bodies. Stories new to me that became favorites were "Wallamelon," (young girl uses magic seeds from Yemaya to protect her neighborhood from racial violence) and "The Pragmatical Princess" (a twist on the twist-now-becoming-almost-a-cliche of a princess saving her own ass from a stereotypically helpless princess-y fate).

Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. From 1989, & feeling more dated than I would've expected, it took some effort to get through this one. Divided into sections loosely based on themes, fiction & poetry mingle with nonfiction narrative & academic pieces… only the latter two usually seemed to be so short as to be really unsatisfying. My favorite pieces were the ones that talked about Asian women labor & tenant leaders. Also, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow's "The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?" is still very timely in its analysis of why mainstream feminism fails, & alienates, women of color (specifically Asians in this case).

Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. This is a collection of newspaper articles Lacaba wrote during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was reporting on the anti-Marcos protests bubbling up in the Philippines during that time. While I've already read several other eyewitness accounts of these events, Lacaba didn't bore me; his writing is lively & I was impressed w/how tenaciously he participated in demonstrations. The occasional phrase or line in untranslated Tagalog usually threw me, unfortunately, but midway I noticed there were notes in the back that included translations.

Reading the articles, I was struck by how fierce the student protesters were, & how central they seemed to be for a while--they did make efforts (some seeming clumsier than others) to link up w/labor & the poor, but for some time it seemed that the students were the vanguard of anti-Marcos sentiment. I don't mean to fall into the trap of sentimentalizing any sort of "good ol' days" as far as protest--it just seemed quite different from what I'm used to hearing about.

Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. The subject matter made this a difficult & emotional read for me. Some of the essays explore war as something personally experienced. But overall the book seems more tilted towards those of us who maybe never lived through a war ourselves, but for whom war looms large in our personal & familial history regardless (as Dora Wang writes in her piece, "I have never seen war, but I have always known the taste of it."), & I think this is what I found most gut-wrenching & also validating about it.

The essays that most touched me were the ones by people who grew up with sporadic & confusing hints of what their families might have endured during war, & whose parents tried desperately to protect their children from ever realizing this pain existed. Like many of the contributors to this anthology, I'm still trying to figure out what war means to my family, piecing together narratives from half-remembered hints during my childhood (wartime anecdotes as way-inappropriate bedtime stories from my grandfather, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, for example) & trying to get the courage to solicit more of this history from my relatives. The task is made harder by the collective amnesia imposed by the American myth-makers--for example, the invisibility of the Philippine-American War, which Luis Francia explores here, saying, "I write not only about the memory of a war, but also about the war of and on memory, the struggle to replace a history I barely recognize with one I do..."

Also very interesting to me was Maya Lin talking about the process of designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, & also Christopher Lee discussing his uncle, who was the first Chinese officer in the Merchant Marine.

x-posted to my reading journal, furyofvissarion

#23: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:03:41 GMT

23: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

A harrowing account of life under slavery in the USA before the Civil War. Douglass was born a slave but managed to escape as an adult, eventually becoming an important activist for abolition. This memoir was part of his campaign, since many apologists for slavery claimed that slaves led happy, comfortable lives. That could not have been further from the truth. Douglass details the hideous treatment he and his fellow slaves received: inadequate food, backbreaking labour, beatings and whippings that drew blood and caused permanent scarring and injuries; in some cases, slaves were even killed for defying their masters, and their masters were not prosecuted, because the testimony of a slave could not be used in court. Douglass also describes the psychological effects: the paranoia when anything remotely negative the slaves said about their masters could be reported back to them and used as an excuse for punishment, the impossibility of stable family life when any slave could be sold away from spouse and children, the sheer grinding degradation of being treated as property. The Narrative does not make for easy reading, but it's an essential first-hand account of slave life in this period.

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:50:09 GMT

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf's fiction debut tells the story of Khadra Shamy, a Syrian Muslim girl who, at a young age, moves with her family to the United States during the 1970s, and grows up in Indiana. Khadra's parents struggle to raise their children in accordance with Islamic values, while awash in a mostly Caucasian, Christian, and very American environment. The reader follows Khadra's journey to understand herself as an American Muslim well into adulthood. She travels to Syria after her marriage breaks down, and while there, learns her mother's secrets and the meaning of prayer. She lives in Philadelphia, away from the confines of the Indiana community she was raised in, and discovers Jewish friends and a passion for photography. And finally, the reader follows Khadra when she is finally able to go home again. Read the rest here

Born in Damascus, Syria, Mohja Kahf came to the U.S. as a child. Kahf is an associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers. Her first book of literary scholarship is Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (University of Texas Press, 1999). She is also the author of a book of poetry, E-mails from Sheherazad (University Press of Florida 2003). Kahf is a member of the national group RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers).
(Source: Public Affairs Books

New Member, Past Reviews

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:38:12 GMT

Hello! I just joined, and am really glad to see there's a community for this type of reading. I use my LJ account as my book blog, and I thought I'd post a few links to past reviews of relevant works. (see below) I look forward to reading your reviews and getting some book recommendations! :)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The rest can be found through my "world literature" tag here.

Assata Shakur, Assata

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:05:40 GMT

51. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography.

I picked this one up after browsing through Tupac Shakur's personal library over at LibraryThing. Before reading Assata, I knew next to nothing about the Panthers and absolutely nothing about Assata Shakur. Her autobiography isn't meant to be a primer, so I'm feeling a wee bit underqualified to do a write-up.

This was an engaging read: Shakur knows how to tell a story, and she calls 'em like she sees 'em. Chapters alternate between her life before going underground in 1971, and her life after being captured on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. The before-underground chapters are a narrative of her increasing education and politicization, beginning with her childhood among the Talented Tenth in North Carolina, and culminating with her membership in the Black Panther Party in New York and going underground after being targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO. There are some moments in the chapters about her early life that delighted me in their recognizability -- I love that as a newly-minted wage-slave, she confused her identity with her employer's. Also, that when employed by a bar to chat men up and have them buy her "drinks," she pretended to the men that she was a mathematics student: after all, no one knows anything about math, and they don't want to risk exposing that by talking about it. (It worked beautifully, right until she ran into a mathematics professor.) I also enjoyed her penny-drop as a teenager when she was talking with some college students and they asked her what she thought of the U.S. going to war in Vietnam. "I guess it's all right," she said. After the shocked silence, when pressed for how she came to that conclusion, she parroted all the newspaper headlines she had been reading, never realizing until that moment that she didn't know the first thing about what any of those words meant, let alone what other notions they were designed to deflect her attention away from. The moral of that story? Know your history, and never let someone else pick your enemies for you.

Eventually, though, she gathered experience and knowledge, and the increasing politicization that went with that pushed her to join the Black Panther Party. She doesn't spend much time giving background on the Panthers, instead discussing her evaluation of their effectiveness and weaknesses, especially critiquing their education program for members (lots of socialist political theory, but no history) and their lack of emphasis on self-critique. In the chapters about the Panthers she also describes being under surveillance by the FBI. (Particularly eerie to me was the detail about how when she stopped paying her phone bill because she could no longer afford a phone, the phone company never cut off her service. Instead, the phone bills just stopped arriving.) She also describes COINTELPRO's successful attempts to sow discord within the Panthers, eventually disintegrating the organization from within.

The alternating chapters, all set after the shoot-out on the New Jersey Turnpike, are a detailed portrait of how the U.S. treats -- or has allegedly treated, depending on how generous toward the U.S. government you wish to be -- its political prisoners, and the ways in which Shakur and her lawyers (most notably Evelyn Williams, her aunt, and William Kunstler, "the most hated lawyer in America") fought back. Shakur's story of the New Jersey Turnpike trial (which was the last of seven, and the only one in which she was convicted), is an unremitting account of judicial bias and government conspiracy. She tells of jurors who were family members of New Jersey state troopers; jurors reading Target Blue in the jury room; her lawyers' offices being burglarized; one of her lawyers dying under suspicious circumstances and the legal strategy documents in his possession being confiscated as evidence, and not being returned by the police.

There are two major silent periods in her autobiography: the time between her membership in the Panthers and her arrest in New Jersey (the time period that spanned the alleged crimes she was indicted for), and the time between her deciding to escape from prison and her resurfacing in Cuba, where she now has political asylum. (According to Wikipedia, since the FBI offered a $1 million bounty for her capture in 2005, she hasn't been very visible in Cuba lately.) Both periods are jumped without announcement or explanation -- not that an explanation is needed, but I did experience a bit of "Wait, what just happened?" each time. And also, much curiosity as to what she would have to say about those periods, if she had the freedom to say it.

I shall absolutely be following up on this one with more reading about the Panthers (including Elaine Brown's autobiography, if I can find it) as well as the autobiographies of Shakur's lawyers Evelyn Williams (again, if I can find it) and William Kunstler.