Tag Archives: Claudia Rankine

The Book Group and Percival Everett’s Trees

Posted on 4 May 2023 | 4 comments

Percival Everett, The Trees: A novel (Graywolf Press 2021)

Before the meeting: This is another excellent book I wouldn’t have read but for my wonderful book group.

The book moves disconcertingly from genre to genre. After a bit of hayseed comedy, it develops into one of those murder mysteries where wisecracking out-of-town detectives arrive to help resentful local cops with an apparently insoluble case. Then there’s some social satire as the detectives, who are both African-American, make fun of the racism endemic in the small town. It’s all good TV detective show fun with an anti-racist bent.

Then the corpses multiply, each murder scene featuring a dead and mutilated White person paired with a long-dead Black person whose clenched fist holds the other’s severed testicles. It could be a highly implausible serial-killer yarn, or a revenge ghost story about racist violence in the USA (against Chinese people as well as African Americans, as the narrative makes unnervingly clear). A magic realist parable, perhaps, in which the murder scenes eerily evoke, and partly reverse, iconic images of lynchings? Or a tale of witchcraft? Certainly one key character identifies as a witch, but then she is also an amateur archivist who has accumulated records of thousands of lynchings from 1913 to the present. Or maybe, as the plot widens, it’s a zombie apocalypse, one whose allegorical meaning lies right on the surface. And Donald Trump makes an appearance. In the end, it’s a genre mash-up that manages – perilously – to stay coherent.

It’s all – to quote Quentin Tarantino from another context – ‘so much fun’. But it doesn’t lose sight of the monstrous historical reality. For example, one chapter consists of a ten-page list of names, in the manner of a spread in Claudia Rankine’s brilliant book, Citizen (my blog post here), and reminding me of Nana Kwama Adjei-Brenyah’s short story ‘The Finkelstein 5’, in which Black vigilantes kill random white people while shouting the names of Black people who have been murdered (my blog post about Friday Black, the book the story appears in, here).

A book that plays around like this with form and genre, that preaches a little, chills a lot and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, has to work brilliantly at the scene level and even the sentence level. This one does. I could give lots of examples, but take the moment at about the one-quarter mark, when the detectives, Ed and Jim, visit the juke joint on the edge of town.

The narrator doesn’t say so, but everyone in the joint is Black. Apart from one character who passes for White and another who is revealed to be Black late in the book, this is Ed and Jim’s first encounter with the town’s Black people. (In classic movie structure the one-quarter mark is the second turning point, often involving a change of location.) When they walk in, everything stops:

Jim and Ed stared back at the staring faces.
‘Yes, we’re cops,’ Jim said loudly. ‘And we don’t like it either. Everybody carry on. Have fun. Break the law, if you like.’
A couple of people laughed, then others. There was the sound of someone breaking a rack at the pool table in back. The dancing and chatting started up again.

(Page 75)

Maybe you have to enjoy writers like Elmore Leonard to be tickled by moments like this. I do and I am. You almost don’t notice that what is being described is a tacit alliance, or at least deep mutual understanding, among the Black characters, whether they’re cops, people relaxing at a bar, or possibly murderers.

What happens as Ed and Jim question the bartenders continues on that note. The bartenders express no sorrow for the racist White men who have been killed, but it’s different with the photograph of the Black corpse whose face has been beaten in. This corpse has appeared at the first murder scene, disappeared, turned up at the second murder scene, and disappeared again. Soon after this scene he will be identified [rest of this sentence whited out, but you can select it with your cursor if you don’t mind spoilers], mistakenly but with great thematic impact, with Emmett Till, whose murder sparked outrage in 1955. At this stage, most of the townspeople, Black and White, believe that this ancient corpse is somehow the murderer.

Jim pulled the picture from his pocket. ‘This is kind of hard to look at, but tell me if you recognise this man.’
The man cringed at the sight. ‘Ain’t nobody gonna recognise him. What the fuck happened?’
Jim shrugged. ‘If this man is alive, we want to find him before that cracker sheriff and his deputies do.’
‘How can that man be alive?’ the bartender asked.
Jim shrugged again.
‘Franklin, come here and look at this.’
The other bartender came over. Jim held up the photo for him to see. ‘Lord, have mercy. What’s that?’
‘That’s a human being,’ Ed said. ‘Somebody did that to another human being. Do you recognise him?’
The second man shook his head. ‘He must be dead. Is he dead?’
‘On and off,’ Jim said.
The man offered a puzzled look.
‘We don’t know,’ Ed said.

(Page 76)

‘Somebody did that to another human being’ lands like a well placed rock in the middle of the hard-boiled humour. It’s a sentence that is to gather force like a snowball in an avalanche. An awful lot of the writing in this book is as impeccable as that.

Why The Trees? Trees don’t feature in the book much at all. But a character sings the Billie Holiday classic (written by Abel Meeropol / Lewis Allan):

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

Nearer to the meeting (spoiler): On Friday 28 April news broke that Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusation led to a notorious racist murder, had died. Percival Everett got there just before Real Life: in the novel Carolyn Bryant, aka Granny C, is the third person to die in the presence of the small Black corpse. It’s unlikely that the Real Life Carolyn Bryant even heard of this book, but the timing!

After the meeting: Tragically I came down with a heavy cold (not Covid) on the morning of the meeting, and spared them all the risk of infection. It’s now a couple of days later and the customary brief account of the evening hasn’t materialised, so all I can say in this section of my blog post is: a) one chap beforehand said he could barely read for tears of laughter, until the book went dark and the laughter dried up; b) on the night itself, the conversation turned – as it does – to identity politics, including pronouns (several of us have gender non-conforming family members or friends); and c) they all had a good time while I stayed home nursing a stuffy nose.

4 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , ,

This is Happiness, Niall Williams and the Book Group

Posted on 8 December 2022 | 5 comments

Niall Williams, This Is Happiness (Bloomsbury 2019)

Before the meeting: When we discussed Niall Williams’s History of the Rain in October, a number of people had also read his next book, This Is Happiness. December’s chooser, impressed by their enthusiasm, decided we should all read it.

The book’s first sentence, ‘It had stopped raining’, which sits on a page by itself, is pretty much identical with the final sentence of the earlier book, and the tiny, backward village of Faha in West Ireland is again the setting, but the bulk of the narrative takes place in an earlier period, and there is no obvious reference to the characters or events of History of the Rain. It’s the story of the coming of electricity to the village; a coming of age story of young Noe, who has taken leave of the seminary and is telling the story as an old man in the USA; and a big romantic story of love lost and found by Christy, an older man who befriend Noe.

Page 75* must be one of the book’s few pages that doesn’t mention the absence of rain. It happens in the thick of one of the book’s comic set pieces. It’s not the set piece when the lights go down and the cinema comes alive with amorous grapplings, or the one where Noe goes to the communion rail at Sunday Mass in order to get a good look at the woman Christy left at the altar, or the spectacular one where he is knocked unconscious by a falling electricity pole. On page 75 Noe and Christy are on the first of a number of epic pub crawls.

These pub crawls are as much about music as about alcohol, music performed by men who are shy and nondescript until they start playing, and then are brilliant conduits of a great folk tradition. On this first adventure, when the evening is well under way, Christy startles Noe and everyone else in Craven’s pub by starting to sing:

Not only was Christy singing, he was singing with screwed-up eyes and fists by his side a ballad about love. He was singing it full-throated and full-hearted and before he had reached the second verse it was clear even to Roo the dog that a passionate truth was present in that place. It wasn’t only that this didn’t happen in Craven’s, it was that there was something raw in it, something deeply felt, that was, even to those who had descended blinking into the umbrae and penumbrae of numberless bottles of stout, immediately apparent and made those who first looked now look away.

(page 73)

Christy has come to Faha as a worker in the great electricity project. This episode is our first inkling of his profoundly romantic reason for signing up for the work. Not so obviously, it prepares us for the major role music is to play in Noe’s story. Page 75 itself is a beautiful piece of misdirection. After Christy has sung, Noe writes:

I did the only thing I could do. I went to the counter and got two bottles of stout.

Those bottles are followed by another two, and then another. Greavy the guard arrives and declares that it’s Closing Time (as Noe says, this is one more way in which Faha lags behind the times), but the two of them are incapable of moving. Alcohol-based humour usually leaves me cold, but Niall Williams’s version made me laugh out loud. I suppose the whole book could be read as an extended Irish joke: the villagers have an almost superstitious awe of the one telephone in town, and the coming of electricity has almost cosmic significance for them. If you read the whole book like that, the stereotypical Irish drunkenness in this passage is representative (including the sly invocation of Waiting for Godot):

Getting up proved aspirational. There was the idea of it, quite clear. Unmistakably clear now. There were hands placed on knees for push-off. There was a Right now. There was another when that failed to produce action. A Right so following. And still nothing. Between thought and verb a vacancy, not intended, but not grievous, just gently perplexed, and in that perplex the realisation that Craven’s was not in fact such a bad place at all, was downright comfortable in fact, in fact there were few places on this earth as agreeable. True? Too true. A person could stay here, could stay right here and be quite happy now, quite, for a very long time. What’s your rush? There’s no rush. All the problems of the world could be settled right here.
Right.
Will we go so?

I don’t want to minimise the book’s humour. Far from it. But there’s a seriousness to it that page 75 gives no clue of. Christy’s romance is genuinely touching. The villagers’ resistance to the coming of electricity is more than comic: and these villagers are described as custodians of their land, defending an ancient culture under siege by capitalism – without being at all heavy handed, the narrative reminds us that the Irish were the first people to be colonised by the English. The dramatic decline in the Catholic Church’s power since the 1950s is deftly evoked both in Noe’s commentary and in his own story: his turning away from his priestly vocation is a tiny reflection of the ending of Church-domination in Ireland at large.

After the meeting: There were seven of us. Covid–19 and other coronaviruses kept some away, while one or two had better things to do – and one sent video of spectacular drone art over Sydney Harbour.

This was our end-of-year meeting so we had other business besides the book, but it generated quite a bit of discussion. The discussion was unusual in that quite a few of us read out favourite passages. Indeed, two of the absentees sent lists of quotes – it’s that kind of book. One interesting insight was that the narrative as we receive it is created by an old man looking back on a key moment in his youth, making a story out of it, and casting a benevolent glow over the community in which that moment happened.

Other business, besides of course the plentiful food including a splendid pavlova, included a Kris–Kringle book exchange with the usual mixture of cautious delight and polite almost-hidden dismay, and a poetry reading. We were each supposed to bring a poem, and most did, even one of the absentees.

Poems were a nonsense poem by CJ Dennis (‘Triantiwontigongolope’), a poem about climate change (that was me – Kit Kelen’s ‘Parable’), a Thomas Hardy (‘Heredity’), a Robert Frost (‘A Time to Talk’), a poem from Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (‘sound and fury’), and two poems of Australian patriotism that couldn’t have been more different (Sara Mansour’s ‘My Australia‘ – link to her performing it on YouTube – and a poem whose name and creator I don’t remember celebrating the lump in the throat brought on by, for example, Anzac Day). This little reading, including by two people who said they felt awkward reading poetry aloud, left us reeling.

And that was a wrap for the Book Group for 2022.

* Currently when blogging about books I take a closer look, arbitrarily, at page 75 – moving on to page 76 at my next birthday if the idea works well enough.

5 Comments

Posted in Book Group, Books, Page 7x/47/7

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Claudia Rankine’s Just Us

Posted on 5 September 2022 | 2 comments

Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (Penguin 2021)

This is a wonderful book.

Note to Australian (and possibly other non-US) readers: Don’t be put off by the book’s self-description as ‘an American conversation’. It is deeply, intimately USian, but Claudia Rankine’s mind is to be learned from and loved by anyone with a heartbeat. The book’s central question is how people can reach for each other in human ways given the horrors of racism that divide us – and racism isn’t a uniquely US phenomenon.

Note to white readers, especially white male readers: Though these essays are mostly about racism as enacted and mistaken for reality, don’t read them in the spirit of self-lacerating virtue or grudging worthiness. They are exhilarating, challenging, inviting, occasionally funny. Almost every essay is written as part of a conversation. People quoted in the essays (including white men and white women) are given right of reply, adding unexpected perspectives and enriching the conversation wonderfully.

The title is a pun. The first of the book’s two epigraphs is a line from Richard Prior’s stand-up comedy:

You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find, just us.

In its original context, which you can see on YouTube, the line could be paraphrased: you look for justice in the criminal justice system but all you find is the targeting of Black people. Rankine’s use implies an additional possible reading: If you want justice, you have to find a way to make us all part of one ‘us’.

The book’s 19 essays and two poems are mostly printed only on the right-hand page of each spread. The left-hand page is sometimes blank, but mostly carries ‘notes and sources’, or images, or fact-checks. When a piece of police brutality is discussed on the recto, the verso might show how it was captured on camera. A general assertion on the right is backed up by statistics on the left. And so on. It’s an inspired design concept.

The opening essay starts with the author preparing to teach a class on whiteness at Yale University. After discussing some of what she asks of her students, the essay takes an interesting turn:

I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself – a middle-aged black woman – walking up to strangers to do so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Indiana, did when his female colleague told him during a diversity training session that he benefited from ‘white male privilege’? He became angry and accused her of using a racialised slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave and a reprimand was placed in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, or Chelsea Handler and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage.

(‘liminal spaces 1’, page 19)

So we follow her as she shies away from the challenge a number of times, before finally hitting paydirt. On the way, she slips in a quick introduction to Peggy McIntosh’s popularising of the term ‘white privilege’, noting in passing that she would have preferred ‘white living’ because ‘”privilege” suggested white dominance was tied to economics’. She seamlessly invokes other scholarly and non-scholarly writing (including some excruciating Twitter threads). We hardly notice that we’re being educated as the suspense builds, and as a white male reader I found I had a lot invested in the project as well.

That essay sets the tone. Rankine is after conversation, not confrontation. She aims not to provoke defensiveness or denial but to learn something.

The subject matter of the following essays include revelatory moments in ‘diversity training’ workshops, including the one referred to in the quote above; her marriage; a meditation on Woman with Arm Outstretched, an art photograph by Paul Graham; white supremacist assumptions in the education system, specifically at her daughter’s school; the way different white and black people remember a cross-burning incident in her college days; a dinner party where she gets to be the ‘angry Black woman’ for insisting on the primacy of racism as a factor in Trump’s election; how racism plays out against Latinx and Asian people; and a brilliant discussion prompted by the moment at an all-Black dinner party when a professor asks her what to tell her black female students who bleach their hair blond. The essay on hair has the distinction of being the only essay/conversation where the right-of-reply takes the wind out of Rankine’s sails, when one of the young women under discussion gets to speak.

This book is evidently the third in a trilogy of sorts. Where this book is mainly essays, the earlier two are a mix of poetry and videos, sharing the subtitle An American Lyric. I haven’t seen Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), but I was completely enthralled by Citizen (2014, my blog post here), so I came to Just Us with high expectations. I was not disappointed. The book opens the world up to great possibilities.

To give Rankine the last word, here’s part of the left-hand-page commentary on the final spread:

A friend finished reading the final pages of Just Us and said flatly, there’s no strategy here. No? I asked. Her impatience had to do with a desire for a certain type of action. How to tell her, response is my strategy. …
For some of us, and I include myself here, remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway, an as-yet-unimagined pathway that allows existing structures to stop replicating. Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.

And here are the final lines on the right-hand page:

What I know is that an inchoate desire for a future other than the one that seems to be forming our days brings me to a seat around any table to lean forward, to hear, to respond, to await response from any other.

Tell me something, one thing, the thing, tell me that thing.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , ,

2015 favourites

Posted on 7 January 2016 | 15 comments

Each December we – that is, me and the Emerging Artist formerly known as the Art Student – compile a list of our favourite books and films of the year. We’ve been caught this year with minimal internet coverage (and maximal sun, sand, beach, bush and rain, especially rain) so we’re running a bit late.

Three movies made both our top five lists:

ToY

Testament of Youth (directed by James Kent), from Vera Brittain’s memoir, screenplay by Juliette Towhidi: A World War One film in the year when idealising  Gallipoli  was big in the headlines, it doesn’t focus on the battlefield but on the effects of the war on the combatants and their families and loved ones. It makes a powerful pacifist argument.

Meet the Patels (Geeta Pavel, Ravi Patel 2014): We saw this at the Sydney Film Festival. It’s unlikely to get a theatrical release, but it’s a very funny documentary about match-making among first generation Americans of Indian heritage. It’s really about intergenerational relationships. The EA says it’s a must-see for every parent.

hnmm

He Named Me Malala (Davis Guggenheim 2015): Another documentary, this one could be seen as hagiographic, but Malala Yousafzai is a remarkable young woman. I loved the way she spoke with the absolutism of teenagehood from a position of influence to tell the president of Nigeria to do his job and ensure the safety of the girls abducted by Boko Haram.

The Emerging Artist’s other two:

selma

Selma (Ava DuVernay 2015): A flawed movie, but it conveyed the experience of ordinary people taking part in Civil Rights marches. The leadership of the march across the bridge was particularly interesting: how to think strategically, resisting the push to be seen to take ‘decisive action’. The filmmakers weren’t given permission to use Martin Luther King Jr’s actual speeches, but the ones written for the film caught his style brilliantly.

 The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse 2015): The humour, the flamboyance, the over-the-topness of it. Kate Winslett was marvellous. So was Hugo Weaving. In fact, there were no weak performances.

My other two:

 Ex Machina (Alex Garland 2015): The thing that stays in my mind is the image of the artificially intelligent creations – a fabulous effect where we see the cogs and wheels whirring away inside what is otherwise a human head. The story worked very well too.

ffm

Far from Men (David Oelhoffen 2014): Apart from enjoying the easy irony that there were only men in most of the film (should it have been called Far from Other Men?), I was transfixed by this slow, beautiful film of a pied noir (Algeria-born white Frenchman) escorting an Arab prisoner through the austerely photogenic Atlas Mountains.

The EA’s top five books:

The EA’s reading year was bookended by titles that brought home the harshness of the oppression of gay men and lesbians, even in times and places where one might think it was comparatively mild. Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer deals with novelist E M Forster’s agonising life in the closet, and the part of Magda Szubanski’s memoir, Reckoning, that tells the story of her coming out is genuinely harrowing.

But those books are in addition to her actual top five. Here are those, with her comments:

1846145066

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: This is a bracing book that everyone needs to read. We all know about climate change in a general way, and we know that powerful vested interests fight attempts to respond effectively. Naomi Klein gives detail and challenges us not to look away.

ioc

Jean Michel Guenassia,  The Incorrigible Optimists Club: A novel about Soviet bloc refugees in Paris at the time of the Algerian War of Independence, this includes a coming of age story.

1743319118

Biff Ward, In My Mother’s Hands: Excellent memoir of a 50s childhood. Buff Ward’s father was prominent left wing historian Russel Ward, so the domestic story includes elements of red-baiting. But the real power of the story is in her mother’s intensifying irrationality and the family’s attempts to deal with it.

1408703483

Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City: The birth of liberalism without the US-style individualism. This is not a travel book. It’s very accessible, thoroughly researched history that compelled at least one person to read big chunks aloud to her partner. The history of Europe looks different after reading this .

9781742232430

Vivien Johnson, Streets of Papunya: Vivien Johnson has been involved with the Western Desert artists for decades. An earlier book told the story of the great Papunya Tula artists. This book tells the story of Papunya itself, especially after many of those artists left. Art is still being made there, by a new generation, mostly women.

My top five books:

I read at least 12 books in 2015 that did what you always hope a book will do: delighted, excited or enlightened me, changed the way I felt and/or thought about the world. I whittled the list down to five by selecting only books that touched my life in explicit ways. Here they are i order of reading:

1781251088

John Cornwell, The Dark Box (2014): A history of the rite of Confession in the Catholic Church. The confessional was a big part of my childhood. I’ve dined out on a story of going to confession with Brisbane’s Archbishop Duhig when I was about thirteen. He asked in a booming voice that I was sure could be heard by everyone in the cathedral outside, ‘Would these sins of impurity have been alone or with others?’ Cornwall’s book felt like a very personal unpicking of that moment and the whole cloth it was spun from.

1555976905

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). What can I say? I’m white. In laying out the way a word or phrase between friends or strangers can disrupt day-to-day life, so that the ugly history of racism makes itself painfully present, and linking those moments to the public humiliations of Serena Williams and the violent deaths of so many young African-American men, the book is a tremendously generous gift. It and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me share this generosity of spirit.

dmfp

David Malouf, A First Place (2015): I haven’t blogged yet about this collection of David Malouf’s essays. It feels personal to me because David lectured me at university, but also because he is a Queenslander, and these essays explore what that means. Even though he is from what we in north Queensland used to call ‘Down South’, these essays fill a void I felt as a child – I was a big reader, but the world I read about in books only ever reflected the physical world I lived in as an exotic place.

talking-to-my-country

Stan Grant, Talking to My Country (2016): I was privileged to read this ahead of publication. Stan Grant is a distinguished Australian TV journalist. This book, part memoir, part essay, gives a vivid account of growing up Aboriginal. It includes the most powerful account of a ‘mental breakdown’ I have ever read, not as a medicalised episode of ‘depression’, but as the result of generations of pain inflicted by colonisation refusing to stay at bay.

The-Fox-Petition

Jennifer Maiden, The Fox Petition (2015): I love this book in all sorts of ways. I love the way the image of the fox recurs – a literal fox, a fox as in Japanese folk lore, Whig politician Charles Fox. I love the chatty voice, and Jennifer Maiden’s trademark linebreaks after the first word of a sentence. I love the argumentativeness. I love the playful, almost silly, resuscitation of the distinguished dead to confront those who claim to be inspired by them. I love the way Jennifer Maiden makes poetry from the television news the way some poets do from flowers.

And now, on to 2016! I’m already about eight books behind in my blogging.

15 Comments

Posted in Books, Movies

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me

Posted on 15 October 2015 | 2 comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Text 2015)

bwm

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for the US magazine The Atlantic. He’s a very engaging blogger, and his writing about racism in the USA is revelatory. Between the World and Me is an extraordinarily generous book on that subject, framed as a letter to his fourteen year old son in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

When it was announced that no one would be indicted for that killing, the teenager said,’I’ve got to go,’ went to his room, and could be heard sobbing. The book is his father’s attempt to reach out to him, to spell out ‘the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country that is lost in the Dream’. (‘The Dream’ in this book is the version of the USA that ignores ugly realities like racism, and which allows the Dreamers to perpetuate those ugly realities.) Coates describes this as the question of his life. So the book is something of an apologia pro vita sua – and like John Henry Newman’s contribution to the genre it transcends its immediate stimulus.

The title is from a Richard Wright 1935 poem. In that poem, what comes between the world and the speaker is the charred remains of a man who has been lynched. In the book, the construct of race and racism rises up in a similar way, a threat to the integrity of his body and his son’s body.

I was having trouble thinking what to say about this book apart from READ IT, IT’S GREAT, when I came across a ‘review’ on the Internet, which gave something to argue with:

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a diatribe against white people by a paranoiac black writer. I don’t even think it is well written.

Well, maybe not argue with so much as repudiate.

1. It’s not a diatribe

It’s not even a polemic. Instead, there’s a substantial memoir that gives us an insider’s view of Baltimore as fictionalised in The Wire, where street and school were the poles between which a young black life had to be negotiated, and where harsh discipline accompanied the safety of home; that takes us to what Coates calls his Mecca, Howard University in Washington DC, a campus where he experienced the diversity of African and African-heritage people; and that shows us his growing understanding of racial politics in the US, from his youthful disdain for what he saw as the passivity of the Civil Rights marchers, through his embracing of Malcolm X, to an understanding that African-American experience in the USA is deeply complex.

There’s also some beautiful, richly suggestive thinking. I love this:

Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism – the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them – inevitably follows from this inalterable condition …

But race is the child of racism, not the father … [T]he belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organise a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible – this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

Many subjects are touched on that could sustain whole books of their own. For example, at the very end he draws a line between the habits of mind that led to slavery and those that are now threatening the environment (‘It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age.’).

2. It’s not against white people

I don’t see how any careful reader could think this book was against white people. Even if you dismissed as mere rhetoric Coates’s argument that there are no such beings – that there are only people who believe they are white – it remains true that the problem isn’t white people, but deeply embedded institutionalised racism. And facing up to it, he recognises, is a massive challenge:

The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practised habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered versions of your country as it has always declared itself and turning towards something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.

Those last two sentences, it’s worth pointing out, are addressed to his son. That they are all the more true for white readers, and not only those who live in the US, is not a point he labours.

3. It’s not paranoiac

To read this book as paranoiac would take extraordinary mental nimbleness. True, Coates describes mid-teenage years in which

each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not – all of which is to say that I practised the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

And he describes other moments when he felt the threat from racist institutions with terrifying immediacy. Racism is felt viscerally, he says. But still, surely what he is describing are social realities. (Come to think of it, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric would make a great companion book.)

4. It is well written

The book is a very fine example of an extended lyric essay. I want to quote passage after passage. Here’s just one, more or less random:

‘Make the race proud,’ the elders used to say. But by then I knew that I wasn’t so much bound to a biological ‘race’ as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform colour or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream. Not long ago I was standing in the airport retrieving a bag from a conveyor belt. I bumped into a young black man and said, ‘My bad.’ Without even looking up he said, ‘You straight.’ And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe that we call black. In other words, I was part of a world.

Indulge me if I quote a little more from this passage:

And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds – the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes – my beautiful eyes – were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.

Do seek out this book. As Toni Morrison says on the front cover, ‘It’s required reading.’  Jeff Sparrow’s review in the Sydney Review of Books is also worth a read.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , ,

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

Posted on 6 February 2015 | 4 comments

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press 2014)

In the current instalment of his regular ‘Critic Watch’ feature in Sydney Review of Books, the formidable Ben Hetherington reflects on the state of poetry criticism in Australia. The article, ‘The Poet Tasters‘, is well worth reading, but I mention it here as an occasion to protest my ignorance. Hetherington says that all the reviewers he discusses seem to have taken ‘the same two courses at university: “British and Irish poetry from Wordsworth to Heaney” and “Modern American poetry from Whitman to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’”.’ Well, they have left me in their dust: I hadn’t read Heaney, or Larkin, or Ted Hughes-for-adults, before I started blogging, and I barely know how to pronounce L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (though I do know the meaning of ‘poetaster’, which Hetherington had to google).

1555976905One feature of my ignorance is that, deep in my heart, I want poetry to be about something. It’s no disparagement of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen that it definitely satisfies that desire: in a word, it’s about racism.  It gets right inside that word and lights it up, makes it ultra-visible, ultra-clear, from death-by-a-thousand-cuts micro-aggressions to brutal murder.

In short pieces – prose poems / flash fictions / case studies – she gives us moments among friends or strangers when racism intrudes, the kind of thing a recent Beyond Blue anti-racism ad called ‘casual racism’; Claudia Rankine is much more incisive with her language than that. These moments are of a kind with the ‘joke’ made by the white MC at last year’s US National Book Awards. Claudia Rankine isn’t interested in stirring up a twitter-storm like the one that followed that remark: she wants something deeper than our outrage or our guilt, she’s trying to understand and invites us to join her.

A friend argues that Americans battle between the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self self’. By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest, and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.

That mightn’t look like poetry to you, but, what can I say: don’t let category problems put you off. If poetry is about language at its most intense then this book is the thing.

There’s a brilliant essay on Serena Williams’s moments of rage and exuberance on the tennis court, and a number of pieces about well publicised moments of brutal racism and sometimes violent reactions to it. Some of the latter are labelled as scripts ‘for Situation video[s] created in collaboration with John Lucas’. At least some of these videos are on line and well worth seeking out, but the scripts stand alone as prose poems. The one on Zinedine Zidane’s tragic moment at the 2006 World Cup works well on the page: much of it consists of quotations and here the sources are given as they aren’t in the video; and the pages’ illustrations do at least some of the work of the video. But even on a tiny browser window, the video packs an enormous wallop as Rankine reads the poem while those moments on the football field play out in stop motion over 6 minutes. Here’s a link: ‘October 10, 2006 / World Cup‘. As a public service, here are links to two more: ‘February 26, 2112 / In Memory of Trayvon Martin‘, ‘Stop-and-Frisk‘.

The book makes up for being typeset in an unpleasant sans-serif font on shiny paper by being illustrated by a number of brilliant and brilliantly apposite artworks. It has reached a much wider audience than usual for poetry, with more than 40 000 copies sold (though it’s not so easy to get in Australia – Gleebooks ordered my copy in from the US).  It’s in the list of finalists for two of the US National Book Critics Circle Awards – poetry and criticism – the first book to have managed this. There’s coverage of its success on Harriet the Blog.

4 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , ,