Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

My wife had raved about Edwidge Danticat‘s writing for years, and finally, on a couch on Maui, I read Krik? Krak! in a couple days.  Again, I am confirmed in my decision not to do a doctorate: the freedom to read widely is a real help to my understanding of the world and one which I would not have were I a specialist.  The book is a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Haiti, the country of Danticat’s birth.  She emigrated to New York City (a city about which I have had numerous dreams recently, for some reason), and writes in English, interestingly.  I had assumed, picking up the book, that I would read a translation.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

Bira Almeida, Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form

At the start of this school year I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more books.  Rather, I would use the library or would borrow books from other people.  I have in the past spent a fair amount of money on books, though never that much compared to what I have spent on restaurants.  It’s more a question of space to store books—we don’t have a ton of it—and the fact that I haven’t re-read a book in I don’t know how many years.  I get it in my head that I’m going to re-read The Master and Margarita one of these days, but then some new book I haven’t read before steps up and I read it instead.

I’ve read things, then, for which I would not have put down money but which I’ve appreciated.  In the case of Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form, my path to it began with comic book I’ve been reading, Daytripper.  It’s top notch.  Not to give too much away, but the basic conceit of the series is that the main character dies at the end of every issue.  That is, the same person dies, over and over, in differing circumstances.  The writer and artist are Brazilian and the whole thing takes place in Brazil.  In one issue, the main character and a friend holiday in Bahia.  They meet a beautiful woman and the main character strikes up a flirting relationship with her, thinking he will get lucky.  Turns out that she is Yemanja, the orixa associated with the sea.  He follows her out into the ocean and drowns.

I don’t want to make anything seem more spiritual than it is, but the thought of Yemanja stuck with me, knowing nothing about her, or about candomble generally.  What I can say for certain is that I grew up going to the beach, and spent a lot of time in the ocean as a kid.  I miss it terribly on occasion, one of two things I ever get nostalgic about.  (The other are ice cream trucks.)  In any event, I popped on to Wikipedia one day and looked her up.  A novel was mentioned in the article: Sea of Death by Jorge Amado, which the article read dealt extensively with Yemanja.  I put a hold on the book at the library, and never got a response that it was on hold, despite the fact that the computer showed a copy on the shelf at the Mission branch of the SF Public Library.  Frustrated, I popped down to the Mission to get it off the shelf myself.

This is why actually going to the library beats ordering books either from an online retailer or even having holds put on things over the computer.  They had at the Mission branch a shelf entitled “Latino Interest” or something like it–a wall actually, quite extensive–and I couldn’t immediately figure out how it was organized.  There were clearly like books with like, so it was subdivided somehow, but I couldn’t figure out the logic, and it wasn’t clearly marked.  So I ended up going through each subsection and following the alphabet, looking for Sea of Death.  One stumbles across all kinds of great things one would never find if one approached things intentionally.

I chose the capoeira book rather than a number of other things partially because it was something I knew absolutely nothing about and partially because the book was relatively short and had pictures.  Also, I have as I indicated earlier been reading about the black diaspora for a while and capoeira is an essential part of that process.  The book absolutely did not disappoint.  One thing that was particularly nice was that it’s clear that Almeida is not a professional writer.  The writing was absolutely clear, but at the same time totally without literary conceit.  His intent was to put various ideas about capoeira on paper, not write something that made himself look artsy.  Each chapter tackles a different aspect of the art, from technique to history to the spiritual dimension of it.  Well worth the read.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I don’t read books as quickly as I seem to be writing posts about them.  I work with a couple of students who for various reasons can’t attend regular school, and one in particular is very bright and curious.  At our first meeting I pointed out that for her English credit we could either read from the regular English textbook or choose novels.  She thankfully chose to read a novel.  It turns out she, as a high school freshman, had read both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and had Down and Out in Paris and London on her shelf ready to read.  I’d never read it, so I agreed happily to read it as well.

I haven’t read much Orwell, and as an adult had only read “Shooting an Elephant,” which I taught for a few years.  I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school, but that was long enough ago that I can’t think that I have anything intelligent to say about them.  “Shooting an Elephant” impressed, though I know well that its perspective is limited and that regardless of Orwell’s intent it is, even if polemically anti-imperialist, ontologically imperialist.  One imagines, or hopes at least, that Orwell would own up to that.  Regardless, it impressed, and not just for its prose style.  Orwell was a proper socialist, fundamentally humane, and himself aware of his coming-to-awareness of the absolute awfulness of capitalism, in this case in its colonialist manifestation.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a semi-autobiography or autobiographical novel, for lack of a better term.  More important is that the writing has a palpable authenticity to it.  Orwell did indeed know poverty, the analytical subject of the text, first-hand.  He comments here and there, a few times at length, that those who don’t know poverty or poor people directly are more or less inevitably prone to misunderstand the matter.  It’s very true.

The book jibed very well with the Marx we’re currently engaged with in my reading group.  In particular–and I have this sense that this is more applicable to London than Paris, and possibly more to the United States than England–one sees how poverty and therefore class is, regardless of all the rhetoric about social mobility, a closed system.  There is nothing in a capitalist economy that exists to faciliate social mobility upward, only down.  One sees this again and again in Orwell, in concrete situations.

I came to the realization a while ago that while I get a lot out of reading history, and while therefore I’ve read a lot of it, I do well to balance historical or theoretical writings with novels.  One gets a feel for things with novels that one does not get with any work of history or theory.  This isn’t an original observation, but I’ve re-learned that it’s true in the last six months, when I’ve spent a lot of time with novels.

Last: I don’t need to say too much about the anti-semitism and homophobia that pop into the book every now and again.  It’s a problem.