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The Roving Tree, by Elsie Augustave.

May 17, 2013
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The Roving Tree, by Elsie Augustave.  OpenLens (2013), Paperback, 300 pages.

A poignant novel about a young Haitian woman, raised in the United States, discovering her roots in Haiti and Africa.

Numerous books are now being published about individuals who have migrated from Africa and other parts of the once colonized world.  Often these reflect the movements of their authors’ lives.  The Roving Tree tells the opposite story of a talented young woman failing to find herself in the “developed world” and needing to return to her homeland and then to her people’s African roots.   This is the story of Iris, a Haitian girl adopted at the age of five by a white American couple.  An anthropology professor and a gallery owner, they become her loving parents, but she has little contact with other Haitians, or even other blacks.  When the mother who gave her birth dies, Iris returns to Haiti and grows to know the relatives she had left behind.  While they complicate her life, she is enriched by the experience.  Then, as a talented and skilled dancer, she is hired to work in Zaire, helping a dance troupe combine classic and native dances.  Here her life takes on an expanded quality, despite its dangers.  The opening section covering Iris’s childhood in the United States seemed sketchy, but when the novel expanded to Haiti and Africa it took on depth and interest.  Both Haitian and African myths and traditions become important.  The reality of dictators cast an ominous shadow on the personal affairs of Iris and those whom she came to love.

Augustave is a talented writer who brings her varied characters to life and shows readers parts of the world that few of us have experienced.  Her book is an excellent anecdote to books about immigration that, intentionally or not, present the western world as the favored or inevitable destination.  Like Iris, she was born in Haiti, lived in the United States, and choreographed for the prestigious National Dance Theater of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I strongly recommend The Roving Tree to all those who are interested in Haiti, Zaire, and African traditions more generally.

I received this book as an advance copy from Akashic Books through Library Things Early Review program.

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from → Africa, Caribbean, Family relationships, Fiction, GLOBAL WOMEN OF COLOR, Indigenous peoples, North America

“Speaking through the Silence,” in Unspeakable: Feminist Ethic of Speech, by Betty McLellan

May 16, 2013
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“Speaking through the Silence,” chapters 6 and 7, in Unspeakable: Feminist Ethic of Speech, by Betty McLellan.  Australia: Spinifex Press, 2010.

Rather than review this book in its entirety, I decided to write about it section by section so that I could discuss its points in more detail.  This is my comments on the last section.  Earlier remarks can be found here, here, and here.

In the closing section of Unspeakable, Betty McLellan returns to some of her earlier themes of differences among feminists and the ways in which feminists are silenced.  As an ethicist, she also discusses points we need to consider before speaking and acting and assesses where feminism is today.  Although speaking out may feel liberating, she points out that we may hurt ourselves and our cause.  Mainstreaming issues may result in their dilution and distortion.   Yet women have made gains because of those who have spoken out in the past.  We must face the fact that the struggle for better lives for women is a long one, and we must not become discouraged over the backlash that occurs after each set of gains.

With the rise of conservatism, in recent years, feminism has continued to be attacked.  Yet as McLellan points out gains continued to be made, especially by non-western feminists. She offers examples from places as diverse as Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the islands of the Pacific.  She also describes the state of feminism in the western world which is often said to be in decline after the attacks of conservatives in various countries.  Agreeing that feminism in these countries is not as optimistic and visible as it was in late twentieth century, she identifies how feminists must continue their tasks of analysis and challenge.  As in other parts of her book, she affirms the need for a radical feminism that does not water down its message in order to be more acceptable to powerful men.

As I finished reading Unspeakable, I was again grateful to her for laying out issues that those of us who claim to be feminist need to consider.   She does a fine job of explaining issues and making distinctions clear.  I agree with much of what she says, although I would not make the lines between feminists as sharp as she does.  While I agree that feminism must be an oppositional force, naming men as oppressors especially in their violence against women, my feminism extends more tolerance for others who share my goals.  I am also unsure if the solutions she seems to support would be effective. Yes, men should be held accountable for pornography and prostitution, but I doubt that legislation or other specific acts will have any impact without larger societal changes to insure that no people are treated as objects.

Some of my disagreement with McLellan may have to do with the changes I have witnessed since her book was published just two years ago. My own opinion about the future of feminism has altered dramatically as I have witnessed the strength of the “war against women” being waged by ultraconservatives, many of whom hold leadership positions in the Republican Party. These are men in positions where they can make or break policies within the USA.   In states where they hold power, they have been able to prohibit legal abortions or make the procedure so dreadful that women will not seek to have them. They also openly oppose birth control.  Across the board women’s access to health care is under attack, while austerity measures have disproportionally lessened women’s ability to be financially secure whether or not they are married.

I see the current backlash against what women have gained in the past 40 years as having reaching a dangerous extreme.  At the same time, I see women who have been silent speaking out again in angry protest to the actions of conservative leaders.  Their response encourages me to hope that we are reentering a time when feminism can be a rallying point against those who restrict and devalue women.  This is not a time to argue over difference among ourselves.  In such an atmosphere, our task as feminists is to providing leadership and analysis to a broad range of women who oppose attempts to return us to “our place.”

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from → FEMINISM, GLOBAL

Global Women of Color list of books reviewed

May 15, 2013

GWC Reviews through May 5, 2013

 

 

Thanks to all of you who have listed your reviews on Global Women of Color.  Since January, sixty reviews have been entered on the Global Women of Color site.

If you want to go directly a review, simply click on its author and title.  You can see information about the authors’ origin and the countries where their stories are set by going to the Reviews for 2013 spread sheet. A brief comment by the reviewer about each book is founnd there.

If others are reading and reviewing books by global women of color, we’d love to have you enter them here.  You don’t have to formally sign up.

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from → GLOBAL, GLOBAL WOMEN OF COLOR, My Book Lists, Uncategorized

Behind the Beautiful Forever, by Katherine Boo.

May 14, 2013
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. Random House (2012), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 288 pages.

 A compelling non-fictional account of families living in a Mumbai slum.

Near the international airport and hotels in Mumbai is a wall which displays an enormous ad for tile that is said to be “Beautiful Forever.”  On the other side of that wall, hidden from all the glittering progress, is a slum in which families collect and sort garbage to survive.  Katherine Boo has meticulously researched these individuals and tells their stories in prose that reads like fiction.

Several families caught up in the crises of daily life provide the core of the book.  The Husiains are Muslims, therefore vulnerable in the Hindu-dominated slum.  More damning is the fact that, primarily through the hard work of the eldest son, they have managed to improve their lives in minor ways. Then the husband and eldest son are imprisoned and beaten for a crime they never committed. Next door lives a woman born with one crippled leg who finds her only satisfaction from sex with assorted men while her husband is at work and her daughters at school.  Never knowing respect, she has a vile temper, especially toward her more successful neighbors.  Nearby is Asha, a woman striving for advancement in the Hindu, anti-Muslim political organization.  Manipulation of her neighbors is her primary tool.  Her daughter seeks a different kind of escape through going to school and learning English.  The husbands in these families are, for different reasons, weak and passive although demanding of female subservience from wives on whom they depend for survival.

Out of this material, Boo creates characters that are distinctive and alive, and often full of contradictions.  For them small gains are quickly lost when a dramatic event occurs.  People who are powerless against those that oppress them turn on each other.  Death, even suicide by young people, is part of life in the slum.  Those who earn their livings by sorting and reselling trash can see another possibility in the glittering airport nearby and some harbor unrealistic dreams of escaping the hell of their existence

At first Boo’s dramatic prose kept me from being depressed by the conditions she recounted, but I found the arrests and treatment by the police difficult reading.  Although the book reads with the smoothness of a novel, there is no grand resolution with everyone living happily ever after. A few individuals have a small glimmer of hope.  Hatred of each other, favoritism, and corruption block the paths of most of the residents.

Boo herself is an American journalist who married a man from India ten years ago.  Loving him meant she came to care for his land and its people.  She turned her skills and her talents to this particular Mumbai slum.  In her fascinating afterward, she explains how and why she created this book.  For over three years, she conducted interviews with the individuals she wrote about tracing their lives and asking them about their thoughts and motivations. Since they were seldom introspective, she returned time and again until she became a familiar figure to them.  Finding children to be the least biased observers, she gave them cameras to record life in the slum.  In addition, she combed through hundreds of records kept by various governmental agencies tracking their records of those she was studying.  She found her subjects’ accounts confirmed, and corruption and cover-ups widespread.   Boo does not offer solutions for her subjects or for creating societies that would deal more equitably with their needs.  Her role, as she sees it, is to describe these people so that others may understand their plights. Perhaps the first step is simply to see those mired in poverty as human beings, a task at which Boo excels.

I strongly recommend this book for all who care about understanding the full range of human experience, including what it means to be trapped in poverty anywhere in the world.

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from → Asia, Non-Fiction

The Pea-Pickers, by Eva Langley.

May 12, 2013
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The Pea-Pickers, by Eve Langley.  Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1942.

A lush, lyrical Australian classic about two young women going off to work among other rural laborers in southeast Australia in the 1920s.

In The Pea Pickers, the narrator and her sister leave the genteel poverty of their Melbourne home , to work the crops in southeastern Australia.  Dressing as men, they take the masculine names of Steve and Blue and enter the countryside in Gippsland where their mother grew up.  Steve, the narrator, considers herself a poet. The book she narrates is not a coming-of-age story, but a vibrant ode to adolescent emotions and enthusiasms.

Steve is a wonderful, moody adolescent, said to be created from Langley’s journals from her own adventures.  Highly idealistic and dreamy, her moods swing widely from extreme happiness to extreme despair caused by her awareness that loss and death are inevitable.  She is spunky and delightful, if self-centered in a young, naive way.  With her we enter a remembered or imagined place when we were not limited by responsibility.

We were adventurers, jongleurs, actors and singers, come to stay for the wet season, to entertain, and laugh and sing, and then to depart without paying.  In every way, it was understood between us, that we should avoid paying tribute to life.

Most of all Steve is forever longing to be loved.  Her male attire is not convincing up close and does not stop her from attracting first one and then another young man.  The pride that she and the men take in their “innocent and pure” love reads strangely, however, in the twenty-first century.  And readers can easily see, as Steve does not, that whatever her dreams of a lifelong love, which is unlikely with the man on whom she showers her affection.  Despite her awareness of inevitable loss, she tries to believe that her love will last forever.  And at other times, she expects another better love eventually to engulf her.  Mostly she suffers loudly and long about her lost love.  At times wishes she were a man, primarily so that she won’t have to deal with fickle male admirers.

The Pea Pickers has no strong plot driving its action.  Instead Steve describes places and people and incidents that occur.  She loves the land and describes it in detail, first in Gippsland and later in “the Australian Alps.”   Objects in the landscape take on life and motivation for her.  But often her vision of it is a melancholy one.

Purple mists came swimming across the silver sedge to us, and in the mist was God, was all eternity.  Purple were the waters and brown and blue the twilight, chill the wind and solemn my heart above the mother-hushing waters. White pelicans stood on peninsulas of sand and opened their mouths as we passed, giving a silver salute of fish; above flew white cranes.  And I loved that land with the intensity of death.

Often she saw the Australian land with eyes trained in European romanticism.  When hiking in the mountains she observed “the blue gum-covered hillside” with “sphinx-red” earth. They fascinated me, those Greek curls on the ranges. The sense of dry red flesh underneath and the curled, fleecy beard above, and home like an arrow to my Grecian heart and almost stifled me with ecstasy…. I worshiped at the home of my first gods, the Greeks.

Gippsland held a special appeal for Steve because it was the land where her mother had been raised, but had left when she married.  Steve and her sister owned no land and envied those who did.  “Ah, Gippsland, I cried inwardly, we, too, own a share in you, by right of birth and power of desire; but it is denied us.  We have nothing to call our own.”  Steve and her sister were only “pea pickers” working the land, “Painfully, with aching backs, we knelt to serve her; Gippsland, the lordliest Her we had ever known.”

In addition to describing the land in detail, Steve writes about the people around her.  They are an interesting mix, one I never expected in an Australian novel.  Many of the farm laborers are immigrants from India, Afghanistan, China, and Italy.  While enjoying the other workers, Steve clearly shares the racism of her time and believes herself superior to them.   The Italians are some of her favorites although she speaks out against intermarriage with such a different “race.” .  Her sense of superiority also extends to other Australians, both the Indigenous workers and those of European descent.  At the same time, she praises the man she loves and a few others for being pure Gippslanders.

I recommend this book to all who want to broaden their view of Australia and Australian literature.  And to those who want to be reminded of youthful living, perhaps in a time more dream than reality.

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from → Australia/Pacfic, Fiction, WOMEN

Medicine River, by Thomas King

May 10, 2013
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Medicine River, by Thomas King. Penguin Books (2006). Paperback, 264 pages

Another wonderful novel by Native American storyteller Thomas King, about a young man making a life for himself in his home town.

Thomas King is one of my favorite novelists.  I love his wry humor and the precision with which he creates his characters, especially his strong women.   In this, his first novel, King tells the stories of Will, a young photographer in a small Canadian town near the US border.  In some ways, Will is typical of young men and women everywhere, and a variety of readers will easily identify with his curiosity about his past and his indecision in the present.  But Will is an Indian, as he expresses it, living in a town with a strong Indian community and near an Indian reservation.  Although Will grew up in a city apartment, Medicine River was home to his mother and a link to his roots.  Through him, readers can learn respect for his heritage.

Medicine River is not driven by an overarching plot, but by King’s subtle exploration of its characters.  Different chapters each carry a story which recount different incidents in Will’s life, and include flashbacks to relevant incidents that he remembers.  The incidents are deceptively simple, but they build as Will gradually comes to terms with his past and his present.

Will’s friend, Harlan, is another key figure in the book.  It was Harlan who persuaded Will to come back to Medicine River.  Harlan argued that although the town had other photographers, none of them was an Indian.  He said it was “Real embarrassing, to have to go to a white for something as intimate as a photograph.”  Harlan’s role in the community is to know what is going on and to find ways to help members in need.  He makes it a regular practice of involving Will in his missions, but he is always slow to come right out and ask for Will to help. “Whenever Harlan had something important he wanted to tell me, he’d sort of float around the subject for a while like those buzzards you see around Blindman’s Coulee all the time.”

Through Harlan, Will becomes involved in a local basketball team along with a bunch of misfits.  He explores his relationship with his brother and the stories his mother told. He  becomes friends with a young unmarried mother that Harlan and others want him to marry.  Louise, like many of King’s female characters, is spunky and independent, not eager to be rescued.   Through his interaction with her, readers learn more of Will’s earlier life—a woman in the city he had once loved and his own pain growing up without a father.  But Louise understands that “marriage was always more of a burden on women than on men, that women always had to take on extra weight, while men just fall into marriage as if they were falling into bed.”  Will is suitably ambivalent about Louise’s attitude, but the two of them manage to create a sustaining relationship.

King has a long-time interest in how people regard truth, and he describes Harlan’s view:

But you know, truth’s like a green-broke horse.  You can come running out of the barn and throw on a saddle, leap on its back and plant your heals in its side, but you never know which way it is going to run or who it’s going to kick.  Sometimes it’s better to walk up slow, you know, with a carrot or an apple.  Let it smell the saddle for a while, before you pull the cinch and slide up.

Medicine River seems to have been written from just such a belief. King gently tells us that Indians are really just human beings, like everybody else, once you get to know them, except when they are not.

I strongly recommend Medicine River to all who enjoy well-written, pleasing stories, as well as those who want to know more about being Indian in contemporary North America.

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from → Fiction, Indigenous peoples, Native American, North America

Kayang and me, by Kim Scott and Hazel Brown

May 7, 2013
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Kayang and me, by Kim Scott and Hazel Brown.   Fremantle Arts Center Pr (2005), Paperback, 432 pages. The more recent edition contains photographs.

 AUSTRALIAN WOMEN WRITERS

GLOBAL WOMEN OF COLOR

 

A superb history and memoir written as a dialogue between an Australian Indigenous elder and a prize-winning novelist who share some of the same ancestors.  A history of the Noongar and a discussion of issues around who should tell their history and how.

Kayang and Me is an example for others to follow in the collection and sharing of Indigenous stories.  The book is organized as a dialogue between two individuals and reflects the real conversations that occurred between them.  Hazel Brown lived most of her life among the Noongars of the southwestern Australian coast.  Kim Scott’s branch of her family stayed in the same area, but moved into the white community.  He approached her in his search to learn more about his own roots.  As he recorded her stories, their collaboration turned into a book that captures the best of different perspectives on Australia’s Aboriginal past.  More importantly the book places their accounts in equal, dynamic, respectful dialogue which should be at the core of any inter-cultural understanding.

Hazel Brown is a storyteller of highest merit.  Scott calls her “Kayang,” which means elder or grandmother.  Echoing the language of her people, her unique voice makes this book an utter delight to read.  She is sure of who she is; sassy, opinionated, and capable of making enemies of those whom she challenges. She has no patience with those who advocate inequality. “If God wanted one man to be boss of another man, well, he would have let them be born with crowns on their heads, now wouldn’t he?”

Pride in her bush education runs through her stories. “We learned the essential things in life, you know, like respect, common sense.  We knew how to feed ourselves.”   She and her siblings learned to live in the bush and “From the old people, we learned the rules.”   When offered the hope of a better life working in town, Brown rejected it.

Look, I said, If I can only make something of my life by staying away from my people, I don’t want it.  I don’t want a life without my family.  Without my mother, or my black father, or my black relatives, because life wouldn’t have any meaning at all for me.

In carefully crafted stories, she also proudly tells how she has spoken out bravely to help others in need; seeking decent medical care and fighting for clean water so that so many children would not die needlessly.  “I’ve always stood up, I‘ve always told it how it is.”

Kayang also retells less polished stories of older generations of Noongar people, back to the great grandfather that she and Scott share. It is the history of her people in their first encounter with the English soldiers and settlers.  Some of this story, Scott retold in That Deadman Dance.  At first the whites seemed no threat, and the Noongar cooperated with them, often serving as their guides and helping whites find good land.  The grandfather that the book’s two author share was a figure, a hero or a man who turned traitor on his own people.  White men took Noongar women; sometimes casually and sometimes willing to care valiantly for their wives and mixed-blood children.  This didn’t last, however.  “Within a single generation an unequal partnership had been confirmed as a master/servant relationship.”

Kim Scott won the 2012 Miles Franklin prize for his fine novel, That Deadman Dance.  His voice breaks into the narratives that Kayang tells.  It is more distant and analytical; Scott tells his own experience learning and interacting with his aunt.  He describes his relationship with Brown and the differences in their perspectives.

Her emphasis was on the authority of the old people’s word and their sense of the importance of place.  I respected that authority; I liked that belief in the significance of being descended from a specific and Indigenous tradition, of being part of a community of descendants, and I wondered at the possibility of more meaningful than a simple biological kinship.

Yet Scott also liked “genealogical diagrams and sheets of paper,”  Although basically a novelist, he has the instincts of a professional historian carefully assessing the “facts” while interpreting the evidence from a clearly personal perspective, always making clear to readers his own involvement with his subject and sources.  In addition to working with Brown, he spent time burying himself in archives, white people’s account of their settlement of the Noongar lands, relating what he finds there alongside Brown’s oral traditions.

In a particularly insightful section, Scott explores the meaning of Aboriginal identity for a lighter-skin person, like himself, raised outside the community.  He wrestles intensely with some of the same questions that Anita Heiss raises in Am I Black Enough for You?   If being Indigenous means being poor and uneducated, as it does for many blacks and whites, then why anyone would chose to claim that identity.  While Heiss claims that image is simply unfair, Scott’s thoughts are ambivalent, nuanced, and touch on the darker side of such identity.   He confronts the issue of who has the right to speak for Aboriginal people and his own “particular, anomalous ‘place in the community’—the apparently flimsy basis of my own Indigenous identity, and to question the role of an Indigenous writer.”

For both of the authors learning involved much more than words.  For them language, culture and land are all connected.  A sense of place runs through the writings of both of them.  Brown describes carefully where the events of her life and the life of her tribe took place.  Some of her stories focus specific locations such as Dog Rock where dogs turned into seals.  Although Scott is obviously a person skilled in the use of words, he minimizes their ability to tell the story of his people.  Learning the Noongar language from Brown, he saw his people’s past differently.

As if, in making the sounds, I make myself an instrument of it.  As if in uttering such sounds and making such meaning, I not only introduce myself to ancestors named Winnery, but beckon them closer to me.

In addition, he describes his own reaction to the places where Kayang takes him.  For him the spirit of the land is potent and still has much to tell.  “Even in colonized, southwestern Australia there are messages left in the rocks, and stories to be read from the land itself.”

Scott is sometimes hard on those who would trivialize Indigenous history and use snippets of its art and culture causally.  But he also has a sense of mission in seeing his people’s stories shared.  He believes that this can only be done by those who share respect for each other and the shared stories that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have with the land.  What he envisions is “shared heritage,” “a nation state fused to its continent by Indigenous roots and blossoming arrivals.”  For such a future to be possible, people must take “that liberating leap from polemics to story; that right to imagine and act on possibility.

Although only one of the authors of this book is female, I am including it in both my Australian Women Writers and my Global Women of Color.   I did this partly because Hazel Brown’s voice is so fine and distinct, and in part because of the insight with which Scott deals with the whole issue of insider-outsider collaboration which is important in assessing gender and writing as well as the colonist-colonized relationship.

This is a must-read book for all individuals interested in the Australian Indigenous past and present.  In fact, it is a must-read for all who care about inter-cultural understanding and all who want to explore the changing awareness of historians, professional or personal, with their subjects.

The experience of being an Indigenous Australian is very diverse, and I am glad to see an increasing range of individuals now writing their own stories.  I am partly heartened to read a book like Kayang and Me in which the authors are gifted with the particular insight and skills to transform what they know in such a meaningful manner.

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from → Australia/Pacfic, Autobiography/Essays, Colonialization, Family relationships, GLOBAL WOMEN OF COLOR, HISTORY, Indigenous peoples, MY FAVORITES, Myths
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