Category Archives: social justice

by

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

Best Books I Read in 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were the best books you read in 2022?

by

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston

barrac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown

9781556594861

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What poems astonish you?

by

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

caspian

When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian upon the death of Caspian IX but now calls himself the king. Miraz prohibits any mention of Old Narnia: the talking animals, dwarves, the dryads and other what we would call mythological beings, and most of all Aslan himself. He dismisses Caspian’s nurse for telling the child such stories and replaces her with a tutor.

Dr. Cornelius turns out to be just as devoted to the old ways but more circumspect, and it is he who warns Caspian to escape when a son is born to Miraz and his wife, thus putting Caspian’s life in danger. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who had become Kings and Queens in Old Narnia are dragged back to help Caspian and the remaining Old Narnians in their attempt to restore the rightful king to his throne.

I came to the Narnia books in my late teens, not as a child, but it was a time in my life when I was on the lookout for magic, spending time in the woods, studying Transcendentalism, and caught up in the 1960s whirl of possibilities. Charmed by the magical aspects of the Narnia books, I found the overtly Christian foundation a little off-putting, though tried to fit it into my then-exploration of different religions. I was also dismayed by the treatment of women and what I now know as colonialism, but recognised where these fit in the context of Lewis’s time.

On rereading the book now, I’m less struck by the religious overtones than by the similarity to today’s political climate. As Mikalatos says:

Imagine, if you will, a political climate in which truth has been completely discarded. Even the history books are full of falsehoods that advance the narrative of those ruling the nation. Stories of the past have been ignored, abused, or outlawed. In the midst of this political rule, certain classes of people have been persecuted, harmed, sent into hiding.

That is the world of Narnia during Prince Caspian.

As Hamlet says: “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” Lewis himself said the book was about the “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Leaving aside the religious aspect, the theme of a disordered world needing to be set right can’t help but resonate for me as I watch so many people who claim to follow democratic ideals betray them. At one point, after the children have been attacked by a non-talking bear, Lucy says:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

Lucy’s question about talking and non-talking animals illustrates a technique that Lewis deploys throughout the book of using pairs as foils or complements. We have Prince Caspian and the four children; the separate narratives of the boys who pursue the war against Miraz and the girls who with Aslan dance and sing and awaken the Old Narnians. The latter pairing carries forward the scene early on when Dr. Cornelius takes young Caspian up to the tower to witness the conjunction of the two stars Tarva, The Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, which together indicate a great good is coming to Narnia. Note that both victory and peace are needed.

There’s also the contrast between belief and skepticism. In the first book it was Lucy who first visited Narnia and the others did not believe her. Here, she is the first to see Aslan and the others say they do not believe her, with terrible consequences. Believing in Aslan and the Golden Age of Narnia is what sets Miraz and his people apart from Caspian and his magical beings. I don’t see belief and skepticism as absolute good and evil, though understand why Lewis made them such here. To me, like victory and peace, both are needed.

Lucy’s reaction to not being believed illuminates a more important theme, that of doing the right thing even when no one around you agrees with you. Of course, the difficulty is that even they think they are doing the right thing, though as in this case a deeper look at their motives reveals more complexity. The question of what authority to follow is here handed off to religion, the old religion of Aslan. In our world and as adults this question has become more complex.

Much of my thinking about this book has been informed by Mikalatos’s posts and the ensuing discussions on them. He says of Lewis: “For him this is all about myth and fairy tales and what they signify. The stories we love are all about deeper truths.”

In my creative writing classes I often talk about tackling big ideas. As Donald Maass says in Writing the Breakout Novel:

A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.

What deeper truth has a book you’ve read recently explored?

by

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

beale

This is a story of young love up against a society determined to keep them apart, yet it’s a story like none you’ve heard before. Tish, 19 years old, and Fonny, 21, have known each other most of their lives, friends first, then lovers, and now pledged to marry. However, in 1970s New York, like today, it can be a crime to be black. Fonny has been jailed for raping a Puerto Rican woman, framed by a white policeman who was still smarting from an earlier encounter with Fonny.

It’s also a story of family, the strength of black families despite the stereotypes that tell you otherwise. Tish’s family not only supports her in her pregnancy but love Fonny as a son, and all—mother, father and sister—join forces to find a way to get him out of jail. Fonny’s family is dominated by his self-righteous mother who believes her religion puts her above others.

It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.

Fonny’s sisters follow their mother’s lead and there are wonderful snarky scenes between them and Tish’s sister. However, Fonny’s father Frank defies his womenfolk and puts himself on the line to help his son.

“It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.” This is Tish talking about her beloved, but it is also true of the gift of familial love. You can’t take it for granted. One of my friends is concerned about the lack of stories—books, movies, television, news articles—about the strong bonds of love within black families like her own. Something to set against the flood of stories of gangsters and drug dealers, the abused and the abusers. Here is one such story.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Tish’s voice conveys love in a fresh, unsentimental way. It reflects her hard-won understanding of how the world works: when to speak up against injustice, when to just keep going; how to hold onto dreams without getting lost in them. In giving us Tish’s inner thoughts, Baldwin expertly navigates the steady heartbeat of being black in America, almost never shouting, letting the events speak for themselves.

This is also a story about prison and what it does to a man, not just Fonny unjustly locked up, but also his childhood friend Daniel. Only recently released from prison on a charge of which he was innocent, though guilty of holding weed, Daniel is a shadow of his former self. Unfortunately, as Fonny’s alibi, he is also the target of the white policeman determined to make sure Fonny goes down.

The structure of the story reflects another of Baldwin’s themes. While the main storyline follows Tish from when she is three months pregnant to when she gives birth, we constantly dip into the past. Ranging from scenes of their childhood to their attempts to find a loft to rent to the events that led to Fonny’s arrest, Baldwin’s shifts in time are expertly handled, reflecting the rhythms of jazz and blues that he’s known for. More significantly, they summon thoughts about time itself.

Time, the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing: time. In six months’ time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met; somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time’s mercy, we loved.

The contrast of being in time and being at time’s mercy reflect the long, slow path to equality for the black people brought against their will to this country. I am reminded of the early days of the Civil Rights movement when whites and blacks (though mostly whites) told the protestors to be patient, to set aside their songs and marches, that things were getting better, but slowly.

Things are better than they were in the early 1960s, mostly due to those protesters, but not enough.

This subtle book, full of love, unsettled by the dark currents of racism, is as relevant today as it was when it came out in 1974.

Have you read this book or one of Baldwin’s other novels? What are your thoughts about it?

by

Free Food

Screenshot_2020-09-27 Resources – Edible Brattleboro

Today I’m giving away food.

I volunteer with a local nonprofit, Edible Brattleboro, to plant help-yourself gardens around town and, from July through October, operate a weekly Share the Harvest stand where we give away vegetables donated by farmers at the end of the farmers’ market, harvested from our gardens, and donated by local gardeners. This COVID year, when so many are struggling, we’re also part of the town’s Everyone Eats program that funds restaurants to make meals to give away.

Trying to get by on food stamps back when I was on welfare opened my eyes to the hunger in this prosperous country, now broadened to food insecurity. That first winter I quickly realised that most fresh vegetables were too expensive for my tiny food stamp allotment, so I relied on the cheapest things I could find, like carrots, cabbage and turnips. I also put the tops of the root vegetables in a saucer of water and used the fresh greens that sprouted.

Luckily we were not in a food desert; there was always an expensive spa a few blocks away and a cheaper grocery store within a couple of miles. However, when I didn’t have a car, walking to the grocery could take all morning, and I could only carry what would fit in the stroller basket and my backpack. In summer, there was no way to keep frozen food safe on the walk home.

What saved me was being able to cook.

The summer I was 12, my mother boycotted the kitchen and assigned me the job of cooking dinner for our family of eight. My culinary skills were limited—I could make a sandwich, pour a bowl of cold cereal, heat up a can of soup, and make toast—but she promised to teach me. That didn’t happen. Sometimes she’d answer a question or offer a suggestion, but mostly I relied on her battered Good Housekeeping Cook Book.

cookbook

Thus I not only learned the basics of cooking but also the astounding truth that I could learn whatever I needed to know from a book.

So years later, when I realised I couldn’t afford fresh vegetables, I turned to books for the new skills I needed. They taught me how to turn a vacant lot into a vegetable garden and how to can the excess tomatoes it produced. They taught me how to make jam from the wild blueberries I gathered and applesauce from seconds at nearby orchards.

Before I moved away from Maryland, I volunteered with Maryland Hunger Solutions whose motto is “Ending Hunger in Maryland”. They work with state and community partners to help Maryland residents get nutritious foods. As a former food stamp recipient I helped bring a real-life perspective.

One thing that was quickly brought home to me was how lucky I had been to be able to cook meals from scratch. Many people living in poverty either don’t have cooking facilities or never learned to cook. One food bank organiser told me she often couldn’t even give away pasta because people didn’t know how to cook it. Many people rely on expensive and less nutritious packaged foods they can simply heat up.

The founders of Edible Brattleboro—”Grow Food Everywhere for Everyone”—were inspired by a Ted talk by Pam Warhurst, explaining how the tiny village of Todmorden in England turned plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens. We have also been inspired by Ron Finley’s work creating gardens in open land in South Central LA. He says, “Growing your own food is like printing your own money.”

We’ve also been following Leah Penniman and Soul Fire Farm, which defines itself as “a BIPOC*-centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. . . *BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”. I am especially drawn to their commitment to the ancestors. “With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of our ancestors, we work to reclaim our collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system.” Penniman’s book is called Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land.

Back when I was gardening in the vacant lot, I also got involved with a group starting a land trust, a fairly new concept in the 1970s, in the hopes of eventually renting a farm through them.

Over the years I’ve heard of land trusts for conservation purposes, but was excited to learn recently of the BIPOC Land and Food Sovereignty Fund organized by The SUSU Healing Collective, whose purpose is to help BIPOC farmers here in Vermont. There is also the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Both are worthy of our support.

Let us look for a moment at what we have in common rather than what divides us. We all need food. We all want to feed our families the best food possible and to support good causes. So I’m off to give away free food to anyone who comes by the stand.

Note: While I call this a book blog, it is essentially about stories. This post is full of them: Pam Warburton’s, Ron Finley’s, Leah Penniman’s, my own.

by

Harlem Renaissance Poets on Poetry Foundation, Part 1

HR poets 2

Books are my primary focus on this blog, with an occasional foray into magazines and music. Today it’s a website. While pretty familiar with the more well-known writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, I wanted to delve into the work of other, less familiar poets. The Poetry Foundation website is a great place to start.

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of creative and cultural life in the early 20th century, loosely dated from 1916-1935. Partly a result of WWI, a huge wave of southern Blacks moved to northern cities to take advantage of job opportunities and a seemingly less oppressive society. Known as the Great Migration, this influx brought together a significant number of Black artists and writers as a group for the first time. Harlem alone saw over 175,00 new Black residents. This new sense of social and creative community was fertile ground where the arts could thrive.

Claude McKay, born in Jamaica and committed to social justice, is the author of “If We Must Die”, an enduring trumpet call for freedom which begins: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot”. But it is his poem “America” that moves me to tears and stays with me week after week as we ride the current wave of potential change. It begins:

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

His love for this country despite its failures is front and center in this poem. Grateful for its gifts, he comes as a rebel but one without malice. Change is coming, he says. It may take time; it may take a lot of time, but it is inexorable.

Like a number of poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Anne Spencer never lived there, but was close to several key figures and worked with them to establish the Lynchburg, Virginia chapter of the NAACP. Her tribute to Paul Dunbar, a forerunner and model for the Harlem Renaissance poets, is brief but wrenching. And her poems such as “Lines to a Nasturtium” are a master class in how to use nature to explore the human heart.

Poet, playwright, and novelist Jean Toomer brings his background to his calls for racial unity. Of both White and Black heritage and having attended both all-White and all-Black schools, his poems combine elements of both cultures. In “Banking Coal” he uses the extended image of banking the coals of a fire with ashes overnight, working it first one way and then another before the shocking but perfect middle:

I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,
Though all with shovels and with ashes,
Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;
Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps
Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone
Would die, but like as not spiced tongues
Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up

He continues to add nuances and layers of meaning without leaving his image, until the stirring end.

Georgia Douglas Johnson lived in Washington, D.C., but her salon became an important meeting place for writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Her poems more than any others I read evoke the despair that comes from constantly having your dreams deferred, as Langston Hughes put it. Being a woman in a male-dominated society is hard enough, but is magnified exponentially by the intersection with race and class. Here is her poem “The Heart of a Woman”:

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

The ambivalence introduced by the last two words—that bars not only confine but also shelter—harkens back to McKay’s difficult love for “this cultured hell”. They, along with my memories of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Civil Rights, Anti-War, Women’s), remind me that times of great change may involve destruction but are fueled and formed by love.

Go to the website and explore their work. More next time.

What poets of the Harlem Renaissance have you read?

by

Passing, by Nella Larsen

passing

There is much to be unpacked in this brief novel, first published in 1929. As it opens, Irene is reading a letter from Clare, someone she knew as a child, asking to see her. For some reason this letter angers Irene.

It turns out that while visiting her father in Chicago two years earlier, Irene had run into Clare by accident at a Whites-only hotel. Irene had been feeling faint and the kind taxi driver who’d taken her there hadn’t realised that the light-skinned Irene was Black. Needing to rest, Irene was confident she could pass at the hotel restaurant.

Unlike Irene who lives in Harlem and is married to a dark-skinned man, Clare has been living as a White person ever since she’d left Chicago after her father died, when the two lost touch, and is married to a wealthy White man who does not know she is Black. Clare presses Irene to visit her, seeming desperate to reignite the friendship, but the visit doesn’t go well, as Clare’s husband appears and, taking Irene to be White, launches into racial invective.

Now, two years later, Clare has turned up at Irene’s home in Harlem and, when Irene pretended to be out, sent this letter begging to see her, saying that she needs a break from her husband’s racism. Irene agrees but continues to be wary of the beautiful and charismatic Clare, who rapidly inserts herself into Irene’s private and social lives, winning over Irene’s husband and sons, attending parties and dances whether she’s invited or not.

Irene is afraid of what might happen if, seeing her at Harlem events, Clare’s husband were to learn she was Black. Irene is also afraid for her own marriage, as her husband spends more and more time with Clare when Irene is absent. Although unspoken, there seems to be a fear as well for herself. Irene’s awareness of Clare’s sensuous beauty and her own inability to say no to the woman signal a deeper attraction.

The story revolves around this issue of pretending to be someone you are not. We see Clare’s frustration and weariness at the pretense she must maintain and her yearning to explore the Black life she might have lived. We see Irene’s attempts to maintain her façade of perfect wife, mother, hostess and civic volunteer, knowing she must do more than any White woman if she is to live up to these ideals.

I was reminded of Du Bois’ idea of the double consciousness Black people must maintain, always seeing yourself not just as you but also as Whites see you, and modulating your behavior accordingly. A White friend pointed out that we all do this to some extent, for example, behaving differently at work than at home. This particular example was brought home to me some years ago when I had to take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment twice, once at work and once at home for a class. My results were diametrically opposite. As a result, I began consciously bringing the two closer together.

However, these mild experiences don’t begin to compare to the soul-crushing constancy of the watchfulness Black people must maintain in navigating a world designed for and controlled by White people. The stakes are higher; the potential consequences more dangerous: handcuffs, a gunshot, a noose.

There is so much in this seemingly simple story of two women: the questions around identity, the effects of secrets and lies, the tradeoff between freedom and safety, the absurdity of racial categorisation and the appeal of racial belonging. Larsen offers no easy answers, instead leaving room for the reader to ponder these ideas, indeed to be haunted by them for a long time after closing the book.

Have you read a book by a Harlem Renaissance author that provides insight into today’s issues?