Frannie is the slave and biologically related to the Master Langton, one couldn't say 'daughter of' because there is nothing in his actions or attitudFrannie is the slave and biologically related to the Master Langton, one couldn't say 'daughter of' because there is nothing in his actions or attitudes that bear any relation to his perception of her as being in any way connected to him. He educates her so she can be his scribe for the book he is writing Crania. He wants to know what is under the skin of man, is a man obsessed by his own race's superiority and willing to go to all lengths to prove it, driven by another in London, whom he seeks to impress.
The first part of the book is set in Jamaica as Frannie narrates her story, although the opening pages are set in The Old Bailey courthouse, from where she sits accused of murder and in this short narrative, she addresses "you" the person she is telling this story, her lawyer. We understand she remembers nothing of the events she is on trial for. So perhaps in telling her story, she might remember. And so we go back to understand what brought her to be in this position, back to the Jamaican plantation where she was born, the man who raised her, his wife who knew things but withheld them from her and would banish them both.
It's a narrative where not quite all is revealed in each revelation, so there is throughout a sense of detail being withheld, which might help reader's understand her motive or guess her guilt or innocence and so the author prevents this, by telling some but all of the detail, so that in reading we come up with more and more questions. Although this is designed to build mystery and wonder, it became a little annoying.
The author admits to being a fan of gothic fiction and perhaps The Confessions of Frannie Langton is an example of that, with its elements of fear, horror, death, gloom, as well as romantic elements. It is the suggestion of the horror and the slow build up to it being revealed that delivers the distasteful aspect of the genre and in particular because these white men involved in such activities did actually exist. Man is a horror.
It's a commendable achievement, but I think I'll be more careful before dipping my toe into this genre again. ...more
Maryam Diener reimagines the life of the young revolutionary poet in this heart-felt novella, portraying a young woman who desired to be authentic andMaryam Diener reimagines the life of the young revolutionary poet in this heart-felt novella, portraying a young woman who desired to be authentic and write from the core of her being about her emotional life and loves and losses, in a way that no woman before her had ever dared.
She sought expression for her depth of feeling, wanted to talk about it with others, and would also follow that same passionate way of being in the world into film making, casting aside more structured plans, to again follow her heart and allow others to have voice through her work.
Forough Farrokhzad, The Rebel Poet of Iran
Farrokhzad (1935-1967) published poems that radiated sensuality, plunging depths of emotion, challenging the patriarchal conventions of society and transcending the acceptable boundaries of women’s expression, let alone commit to paper and public record. She wrote of love without shame, removing the invisible but ever present mask the culture adorned women with.
It brought her into the limelight very early on, but also exposed her to jealousy and judgement as her work sparked controversy inside and outside intellectual circles, with dire consequences on her marriage and family relations.
“What sets [Farrokhzad] apart from her predecessors and even her contemporary women writers is her rendering of quotidian experience with no intention to guide, to educate, to lead…(her) poetry is an accurate portrayal of the pain and pleasure of a whole generation undergoing radical change.” Iranian Scholar, Farzaneh Milani
Book Review
This slim 150 page book is split into 7 parts, part one taking up the first 50 pages encompassing her childhood, her marriage, her early success with poetry and its role in the dissolution of her relationship. What really brings the entire book alive is the use of the first person narrator, the “I” voice.
Diener has raised the voice of Forough Farrokhzad and rather than talk about her, steps aside with the utmost respect and allows the poet to speak to us of her life.
The book opens on the day Forough is on her way to the UK Embassy to pick up her visa. She is wearing big sunglasses and an old dress that belonged to her sister Pouran, one that makes her feel protected because it belonged to her closest sibling. As she pauses in front of her favourite shop and admires the notebooks and pens displayed in the window, writers will recognise the yearnings of a lover of words.
At the sight of the notebooks lined up in the window I feel the same flurry of anticipation for clean pages, fresh ink and new beginnings. If only I could crack myself open like a new book, and know that there were hundreds of blank pages waiting to be filled.
Alarmed, she suddenly sees her ex-husband and forgets her task and begins to follow him, leading us to a moment of humiliation by a man exhibiting his power and revenge over a woman and thus we learn of the terrible estrangement and loss of custody of her little boy, whom this man forbids her to see, ever.
My sin was to pursue a career as a poet and to desire an identity beyond that of wife and mother. As a result, I am not worthy of being a significant part of my son’s life anymore. I was written off for daring to believe I could exist as an individual rather than simply an extension of my family.
Family Influence Can’t Stifle Creativity
Her father was an army colonel and managed his family like a troop of soldiers, including the morning exercises. However it was he who attached great importance to education and inspired her love of literature.
I had an urge to mark myself as different, and to say exactly what was on my mind. I constantly wanted to show my father that I was an individual with thoughts and feelings, rather than just a soldier following his orders.
Her sister was two years older and married at 18 and it was at this wedding that she met Parviz. Their meeting, connection and early period of being together seemed so promising, despite her father’s reluctance towards the match.
It was this transfer of her affections to this man she would marry that inspired her early poems, however once married and living in her husband’s family home she would encounter the disapproval of her mother-in-law who thought she ought to give up personal ambitions and literary expression. The poems rapidly found an audience, acclaim in literary circles but also attracted malevolent gossip, which her husband began to listen to (along with his mother) and eventually resulted in divorce.
My poems spoke the truth – they were how I lived – whereas other poets tried to apply the morals set by society and religion. I saw new possibilities for Persian poetry.
The Poet Becomes Film Maker, A New Medium for Her Message
The middle parts are often only a few pages long, marking various transitions in her short life, her nine months in Europe when she flees Iran enable her to gain a different perspective but also make her realise she can’t be away from her family and her son.
Her return and a job interview with The Golestan Film Unit introduces her to her great (but complicated) love; her moving from secretarial work into the creative aspect of film making bring her the opportunity to direct and produce a documentary about a colony of lepers, her award winning film The House is Black (1963). (It won the Grand Prize for documentary film in the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1963).
While the men wanted a film to break down people’s fear of leprosy and awaken the governments responsibility to them, Forough had additional ideas.
Although it would be about the leper colony of Bababaghi, the film would also explore the fact that great trouble and suffering is caused when we reject certain parts of ourselves and bury our unwelcome feelings, rather than facing up to our problems and searching for a solution. The story of a community being rejected due to a lack of access to proper medical help would draw wider attention to how societies are willing to condemn anything that is different to themselves, rather than to confront their fears of the other.
Once they walked around and engaged with people her ideas continue to evolve, abandoning the script and deciding instead to dedicate their time to just that, meeting and engaging with people, experimenting with editing and expressing social upheaval in a documentary style, creating an atmosphere of trust and cooperation, allowing for flexibility. Her experience at the leper’s colony became even more personal when she adopted a boy from one of the families living there.
She achieves a level of social critique in the film by never directly staging or directly naming an image in the text. The absence of the words leprous, leprosy or leper is turned on its head when coupled with photography. While leprosy is never directly named in the poetry, its symptoms are: inertia, indecision, stagnation, empty desires – in short, the same symptoms she sees plaguing her society. Social ills are shown by way of visual metaphor. Roxanne Varzi
Thirty-one years after its release in 1962, in 1993, The House is Black would win the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival. The following words of her poetry accompany part of the film, heard/seen here in the trailer.
There is no shortage of ugliness in the world If man closed his eyes to it, There would be even more.
Who is this in hell Praising you, O Lord?
Who is this in hell?
Our being, Like a cage full of birds Is filled with moans of captivity.
Like doves, we cry for justice… And there is none.
We wait for light And darkness reigns.
It is in this film that darkness sets the mood of isolation, beyond the closed door where these people live, far from everyone else, disconnected from society, out of reach of people’s understanding.
Blackness will be a leitmotiv that thread and echoes between different scenes. There is an expression in Farsi that says, ‘Beyond black there is no colour.’
The Joan of Arc of Modern Persian Poetry
The book is absolutely wonderful, a heartfelt tribute to an astonishing woman, one of those souls whose life was cut short, just as she was making headway, but also with that characteristic of certain extraordinary beings who come into their human lives for a short period, who work prolifically from a young age, creating an abundant output, as if they know that the window of opportunity for them is short, and there is no time to waste.
Highly Recommended.
Forough was the Joan of Arc of modern Persian poetry. Many worshipped her, but at the same time her bold rebellious voice angered male critics. She talked openly about her feelings and desires, challenged the repressive norms and expressed her despair about the social system of Iran. For more than a decade, she was the centre of controversy. The day she was killed in a car accident at the age of 32, the whole country mourned her loss. She became a cultural martyr, a myth, a sacred figure, the most beloved, respected and popular modern poet. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
I've been aware if this trilogy for a while and curious to discover it because of its international setting (Romania in the months leading up to the 2I've been aware if this trilogy for a while and curious to discover it because of its international setting (Romania in the months leading up to the 2nd World War) though equally wary, because of its English ex-pat protagonists living a life of privilege among a population that's suffering economic hardship and the threat of their being positioned between two untrustworthy powers (Russia and Germany).
The story is chiefly about a young couple and their first year of marriage in Romania on the eve of war. Guy, a young English literature professor returns to Bucharest after a summer in England, with his new wife Harriet, a woman he met and married within a month. We know nothing about that month, or their romance, or why/how they came together so impulsively.
Over the course if the novel we get to know through Harriet's perceptive observations and self awareness of her own flaws and Guy's, what their characters are, why they act in the way they do, and the effect they have on each other, due to their differences. These aspects of personality are reflected through the way they interact and respond to others around them.
It took a little while initially to overcome my semi-reluctance to be among such a crowd, (being somewhat averse to novels where purposeless woman follow their husbands around and wonder why they are unhappy with life) and admittedly most of the characters and their behaviours in the setting up stage of the novel, are often tiresome, but the ability of Harriet to see through each of them, in an effort to better know her husband, after a while becomes more and more engaging.
Harriet lacks purpose and so it's no surprise that her energy and focus turns towards analysing and judging others. In a way she reminded me of Hadley Richardson in Paula McLain'sThe Paris Wife and Zelda Fitzgerald in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, women with aspirations, who find themselves in the shadows of the larger player, their husband's lives, men whom other people are drawn too and seek attention from, leaving the wife as a companion and bedwarmer for those few hours he finds himself solitary.
They too, are stories of the lives of young internationals, professors, diplomats, journalists, the locals they fall in with, the cafes, restaurants and hotels they frequent, the political background constantly a source of conversation, the lack of family and a rootlessness that drives them to seek each other out in this environment that throws people together, who wouldn't otherwise cross paths.
It also reminded me a little of She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir, though that was a book I was unable to finish.
The novel does become even more interesting and ironic when Guy decides to produce an amateur production of the Shakespearean play Troilus and Cressida, diverting the attention of his fans and followers, young and old, at a time when war is creeping ever closer and everyone else not involved in his amateur dramatics is frantic with worry. The play itself is the tragic story of lovers set against the backdrop of war.
Dropped as one of the players, Harriet is upstaged by local Sophie, a woman whose affection for Guy and history that precedes her, adds to the tension of their new marriage, the novel ends leaving us wondering what will happen next, as Europe itself is a bed of tension and danger, depending on where one's loyalties lie....more
One of the best works of historical fiction I have read in a while and all the better because its based on the story of the author's great-great grandOne of the best works of historical fiction I have read in a while and all the better because its based on the story of the author's great-great grandparents, which was a reassuring factor while reading, because so many obstacles get in the way of the two main protagonists the young Irish immigrant Henry O'Toole (who has already had to change his name to Taylor) and Sarah, the black slave he first encounters on the road in a storm, who treats his injured hand.
Henry is making his living as a blacksmith, after the disappointment of arriving in New York and struggling to find work due to discrimination by employers against the Irish. His story begins in the fields of Ireland and as he arrives on the plantation where Sarah works as a house slave, his ignorance of the South and their ways threatens to put her and those around her in danger.
The other main character is Maple, also a slave, but sister to the Master's wife, they have the same father, but she became separated from her mother, husband and daughter when her sister married, forced to move with her. Maple is full of anger and desperate for news of her family. She resents the presence of the blacksmith and would like nothing better than to wipe the smile off Sarah's face.
The novel is written in short chapters, reminiscent of the style of Bernice L. McFadden and there is a subtle rhythm in the narrative, where hopes are raised and dashed simultaneously, for Henry/Sarah and Maple. It's like a universal force that acts on them all at the same time, as their objectives and the means they use to attain them intersect, hinder and/or help them.
It's a compelling read, with great characters and you really are left wanting to know more, wishing to know more about the lives of these three characters and those whom they are connected to. It's a book that evokes a very visual response, I felt at times as if I were watching the scenes unfold and can imagine how much more tense it would have been to see this on screen.
Though I read Caribbean-American author Jamaica Kincaid a long time before encountering the Italian author Elena Ferrante, reading Lucy made me aware Though I read Caribbean-American author Jamaica Kincaid a long time before encountering the Italian author Elena Ferrante, reading Lucy made me aware of a similarity in their characters, in their holding nothing back, allowing even the darkest thoughts to arise, unfiltered stream of consciousness narratives of moments that challenge the reader. They are confronting in their truth-telling and demand to be read beyond the surface.
There is no alluding to, there is cold, hard, observant reality and with Lucy’s arrival to a new country, there is the stark contrast of perspectives between her and those she encounters, that speak to their historical context and how they continue to play out in the present.
Lucy is a 19 year old woman who has left her home in the West Indies and come to America to be an au pair for a family of four young children. The book is set over one year, her experience as a new, young immigrant.
It is both an escape and an adventure for Lucy, to have left everything behind and to strike out on her own independently; she reinforces that feeling in her refusal to open weekly letters from her mother. She does however often occupy her thoughts, moving between anger, resentment, longing and regret.
Lucy quickly develops a close relationship with Mariah reinforcing the complexity of the mother-daughter bond.
The times I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother.
She is surprised when she experiences homesickness for the first time.
I did not know that the sun could shine and the air remain cold; no one had ever told me. What a feeling that was! How can I explain? Something I had always known – the way I knew my skin was the colour brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth, or the way I knew my own name – something I took completely for granted, “the sun is shining, the air is warm,” was not so.
Having never understood and had impatience for characters in books who yearn for home, she discovers a rising and unwelcome longing for all she had willingly left behind. Though her words of home and family are often bitter, she experiences a reluctant and surprising feeling of loss.
Oh, I had imagined that with my one swift act – leaving home and coming to this new place – I could leave behind me, as if it were an old garment never to be worn again, my sad thoughts, my sad feelings, and my discontent with life in general as it presented itself to me.
She replaces the discontent of life in her home and country, with a new melancholy, as she discovers what it feels like to be an outsider, an immigrant.
A Daffodil Isn’t Always A Symbol of Joy
One morning Mariah speaks to her of the arrival of spring, of how it made her feel glad to be alive.
She said the word “spring” as if spring were a close friend, a friend who dared to go away for a long time and would soon appear for their passionate reunion. She said “Have you ever seen daffodils pushing their way up out of the ground?
Lucy thought:
So Mariah is made to feel alive by some flowers bending in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way?
She recalls being forced to memorise and recite a poem when she was ten years old (at Queen Victoria Girl’s School), the praise she’d received afterwards and the nightmare of being chased by daffodils she’d had that evening.
I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.
She recounts the dream memory in anger to Mariah. In a park a few days later they come across a swathe of flowers under a tree that Lucy doesn’t recognise but is filled with the desire to crush and kill.
Mariah said, “These are daffodils. I’m sorry about the poem, but I’m hoping you’ll find them lovely all the same.”
The flowers represent the disconnect between them, the presentation of something as beautiful that recalls the deep-seated, long reaching tentacles of imperial injustice, and Mariah’s colonial-like suggestion, further pressing Lucy to see the world as she does. Lucy reminds Mariah of her humiliating experience, the long poem about flowers she would not see in real life until she was nineteen, and feels guilty in her response.
I felt sorry that I had cast her beloved daffodils in a scene she had never considered, a scene of conquered and conquests; a scene of brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes…It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. But nothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness. The same thing could cause us to shed tears, but those tears would not taste the same.
A Clash of Cultures – Our Circumstances Develop Our Perceptions
Though the family provide her comfortable means to enter this new world, she mock-marvels at how these people came to be the way are, noticing and judging the way they act, the things they say, seeing their similarity to all humanity (in her experience), observing the naivety of privilege, in thinking they might be exempt from certain tragic situations, expressing shock at circumstances Lucy considers normal.
It is a year that changes her further, as she comes to know this new country, makes a new friend or two and begins to see herself as the woman other people see and pursues that self to meet a kind of aloof desire.
Kincaid's biting prose is sublime, never what you expect, she delights in the unfiltered version of humanity and delivers many poignant and ironic insights along the way.
Though it took a little while to get into and fall into the rhythm of this book, once I did and realised what it was doing, preserving a language and Though it took a little while to get into and fall into the rhythm of this book, once I did and realised what it was doing, preserving a language and sharing a culture through it, while telling the story of one who returns to the culture having been separated from it through travel (and having been separated from it through education), I thought it was brilliant.
The story is narrated through three voices, in three styles, across three time periods.
The first person narrative is given to Albert (Poppy) the grandfather, he is no longer living when we read his granddaughter August's account of her return from England to Australia, he is the reason she returns, for his funeral. His words are a casual account of descriptions of words in his indigenous language, like a dictionary, except that apart from the word in bold, his descriptions of the meanings are like stories or anecdotes, to ensure we understand the meaning, they are more than mere words, they preserve a culture, they are evidence of a civilisation.
The second person narrative is the present day account of August's return, of her discovery that her grandmother is being forced to leave the family property because of a mining company and the way it has been presented to them, as if they had no claim to that land or buildings. Her grandmother Elsie isn't prepared to fight, but August becomes aware of her grandfather's project and of what is required to both save the land and reinstate their existence. It is a time of reckoning as she allows events of the past to rise and rather than run from them, can make amends.
The third aspect, is a serialisation of letters from a British/German Reverend who lived in the area in the early 1900's and wrote an account of his attempt to build a mission and recorded the treatment of people, the struggles, the behaviours, the results, the small successes, the failures.
The entire novel is a huge endeavour, encompassing, as it does, this one language of the hundreds that existed and have either become extinct, or are at threat of becoming so.
The way the words and language create a bridge of understanding of a way of life and thinking is a celebration and the thought of one man, spending his latter years in pursuit of this, of sharing all that he knew, so he could pass it on, in the way of the coloniser, using the written word and not the oral stories of the past, that risk dying out is remarkable and uplifting.
I love that stories like this are being written, helping to preserve a much wronged culture and people....more
Brilliant. This short novel evoked so many thoughts and memories and dug up so much that has been buried within me, that it was at times difficult to Brilliant. This short novel evoked so many thoughts and memories and dug up so much that has been buried within me, that it was at times difficult to concentrate on the story. So I reread pages and deliberately took my time, scribbling in the margins, remembering stories and experiences from from schooldays, from participation in marae activities, attendance at the funerals of elders, learning to weave flax, learn poi dances, using sticks (made from rolled up magazines), the legends, the gods, the taniwha.
Potiki is the story of a family and the encroachment on their lives of the now dominant culture that is trying to usurp their way of life. In some ways it has already suceeded, through education, as divisions occur within the community and some are enticed by the greed of the capitalist mentality.
In three parts, the story is narrated by Hemi, his wife Roimata and the son they bring into their family Toko raising him with their three. Grace depicts the family in ways that remind us of the Maori creation myth, of Rangi and Papa and the time of darkness before the children push them apart and bring in the light.
Each of them have their own stories and their stories had a tendency, James's of the earth, and the universe, Tangimoana's of the sea, Manu, in fear of disappearing could not find his stories.
Roimata worries for Manu when he is due to start school:
What would be right then for a little one who called out in sleep, and whose eyes let too much in? What would be right for one who didn't belong in schools, or rather, to whom schools didn't belong?
Rather than go out and become a teacher, she becomes the keeper, teller, listener and sharer of stories, a writer and reader of stories, an enactor, a collector and maker of stories.
Then I knew that nothing need be different. 'Everything we need is here. We learn what we need and want to learn, and all of it is here,' I said to Hemi, but he had always known it. We needed just to live our lives, seek out our stories and share them with each other.
Their home, their land and community is under threat from outsiders, who covet their location and do everything they can to entice them to give it up, to sell, using the offer of money, then more threatening measures to get what they want.
Two cultures collide, but only one side is listening, the other is used to getting their way, is used to the usual tactics winning over. This family and community understand too well what they will lose if they let go of their land, they have already witnessed it. And though it is not them that fight, for their way is to talk openly, there are others from outside who will intervene. Hemi worked the land in his youth but went out to work when his grandfather passed on. Now there is no job, he is back to caring for and caretaking the land.
They still had their land and that was something to feel goodabout. Still had everything except the hills. The hills had gone but that was before his time and there was nothing he could do about that, nothing anyone could do. What had happened there wasn't right, but it was over and done with. Now, at least, the family was still here, on ancestral land. They still had their urupa and their wharenui, and there was clean water out front.
It is a new era, there is more determination which created hope, that turned into confidence and created an energy.
Things were stirring, to the extent of people fighting to hold onto a language that was in danger of being lost, and to the extent of people struggling to regain land that had gone from them years before.
Land, their homes, the meeting house, the foodhouse, the cemetery are all part of a lifestyle and community that allows people to leave and return, to be independent, but to know that they can return, a place for family to come together, a refuge for the lost and broken.
Toko is visionary, a child that almost wasn't, one with a special gift, who sees the stories changing and will become part of the story that is carved into the meeting house, remembered in wood and in these most eloquent and meaningful words, Patricia Grace's beautiful reflection on the death of an extraordinary one.
We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held thay are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.
Emezi's Freshwater was an incredible read and a real insight into a cultural perspective, taking you inside it and experiencing it, so I was very muchEmezi's Freshwater was an incredible read and a real insight into a cultural perspective, taking you inside it and experiencing it, so I was very much looking forward to this next work.
Though we learn that Vivek is dead from the cover and in the opening pages, the novel is in a sense a mystery as the details around the death are not revealed until the end. The novel is set in Nigeria, in a community of mostly mixed race families.
The narrative is multi perspective, told through the voice of Vivek, his cousin and close friend Osita and a third-person omniscient narrator. The first chapter is one sentence:
They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.
The market burning down provides a beginning, a middle and an ending, it features in exactly those places, here as a marker or a clue, in the middle as an observation by a previously unknown character whose wife runs a stall in the middle of the market and at the end, when Vivek's final day is shared.
The first half of the book we get to know the families, Chika, his brother Ekene, married to Mary, then later Chika's Indian wife Kavita, parents to Vivek. The narrative tells the story of their marriage, of how they try to raise their only child. Kavita is part of a group of women referred to as the Nigerwives.
She had learned to cook Nigerian food from her friends - a group of women, foreign like her, who were married to Nigerian men and were aunties to each other's children. They belonged to an organisation called Nigerwives, which helped them assimilate into these new lives so far away from the countries they'd come from. They weren't wealthy expats, at least not the ones we knew. They didn't come to work for oil companies; they simply came for their husbands, for their families.
Through the friendships of the mothers, Osita and Vivek become friends with JuJu and Elisabeth. Among themselves, away from school or family and outside of society, they are already a group who is different, and with each other, they are accepting, able to express themselves, though they have each inherited varying degrees of conditioning from their mixed parentage.
Vivek is sent away to school, about which we learn very little, we know he is unhappy and bears scars.
The narrative explores the development of their friendships and sexuality, interspersed with the present day obsession of Kavita, determined to find out how her son's body mysteriously turned up on their front veranda wrapped in a fabric.
Chika didn't want to ask any question. Kavita, though, was made of nothing but questions, hungry questions bending her into a shape that was starving for answers.
Maybe it was intentional, but in creating the element of mystery, much about the character of Vivek is held back, perhaps to recreate the effect of what the parent might have experienced, but for me personally, I found it disappointing that the character of Vivek was compromised and an opportunity missed to inhabit that character more.
The deliberate obscuring heightens the effect of the reveal, but sacrifices the opportunity to share something more profound with readers. It's difficult to develop empathy for a character, when so much is held back and when the potential is clearly there.
That was why they'd kept it from their parents, to protect Vivek from those who didn't understand him. They barely understood him themselves, but they loved him, and that had been enough.
It's a novel of secrets and lies and the debate of truth versus respect, in that belief that the two can't coexist. And the safety inherent within a fear of judgement by some, versus the danger of a lack of fear in others. A theme that is likely to continue to be explored by Emezi.
"Look," she said, "eventually all secrets come out. It's just a matter of time. And the longer it takes, the worse it is in the end."
As I read, I can feel what I am bringing to the narrative, where I want the author to go and by the end they do go some of the way, but not all. And that is on me, it is asking an already courageous writer to go further, to places that us readers, like sports fans, might never go ourselves, but from the benches we shout in encouragement. So I leave the last words to the author, as a reminder to us all of what this is.
I had to remember why I was making this work. I wasn’t making it for institutional validation. I was making this work for specific people — all the people living in these realities feeling lonely and wanting to die because they’re like, this world thinks I’m crazy and I don’t belong here. All the little trans babies who are just like, there is no world in which my parents will love me and accept me. There’s a mission to all of this. Akwaeke Emezi
Totally engaging characters and storyline all the way through, sad to have left them all behind.
Such a tough line Solo, the son of Betty takes, too yoTotally engaging characters and storyline all the way through, sad to have left them all behind.
Such a tough line Solo, the son of Betty takes, too young to know what preceded him, and a mother's dilemma of not wishing to cast her son's father as a villain, while suffering the son's judgement of her, having cast her as the 'baddie' instead.
And the delightful, lost Mr Chetan. Living in a country where he is unable to be himself, yet finding a way to make the lives of those around him better. Cast out from his own, he is everyone's friend....more
"If life is but a passage, let us at least scatter flowers on that passage."
What a refreshing read to end 2020 with, a novel of interwoven characters
"If life is but a passage, let us at least scatter flowers on that passage."
What a refreshing read to end 2020 with, a novel of interwoven characters and connections, threaded throughout the life of Violette Touissant, given up at birth.
When I was born I didn't even cry. So I was put aside, like a 2.67kg parcel with no stamp, no addressee, while the administrative forms were filled in, declaring my departure prior to my arrival. Stillborn. A child without life and without a surname.
When we first meet Violette, she is an adult, she introduces us to her neighbours and many of their characteristics in common (a list of the things they are not), they are an intriguing lot.
My name is Violette Toussaint. I was a level-crossing keeper and now I'm a cemetery keeper.
Her neighbours are the dead and she lives in the heaven of the living, at the mid-range of life having been through plenty of pain and suffering to get there. She is now being rewarded, she has found her place and her people and those who deserved to be part of it, have found her too.
My present life is a present from heaven. As I say to myself every morning, when I open my eyes. I have been very unhappy, destroyed even. Nonexistent.Drained. I was like my closest neighbours, but worse. My vital functions were functioning, but without me inside them.
The 94 short chapters all begin with a thought provoking quote, the narrative seesaws back and forth to moments in that life, sometimes revisiting the same moments, but seeing them from the point of view of Violette, her husband Philippe and the many other pairs of characters we meet, through their connection to those neighbours.
Since taking on the job of cemetery keeper, after meeting one of the most life-changing characters, Sasha, she records details of the events that take place in the cemetery, like diary entries, references that she is able to refer back to when people stop by to have a cup of tea or something stronger, looking for the resting place of someone important to them, not always family, but people with connections that weren't always able to be fully expressed in life.
Death never takes a break. It knows neither summer holidays, not public holidays, nor dentist appointments...It's there, everywhere, all the time. No one really thinks about it, or they'd go mad. It's like a dog that's forever weaving around our legs, but whose presence we only notice when it bites us. Or worse, bites a loved one.
We are taken back to her early adult life, from the age of 18, already married, the year she discovered an 821 page novel that would stay with her all through the years, L'Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable a French translation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, a book known to open minds and hearts, eliciting compassion for a set of circumstances no one really thinks about, making the reader look at the world in a slightly different way. Which is in part, what Fresh Water For Flowers does, taking characters in unconventional circumstances and sharing their stories, watching how those stories can shock and then enlighten others.
Violette too will have to deal with death. A death that develops into the more significant mystery at the core of the novel. And with it, innumerable twists and turns, suspicions and revelations.
Life is but an endless losing of all that one loves.
Every summer she spends time in the chalet of her friend Célia, in the calanque of Sormiou, Marseille, the landscapes of Marcel Pagnol's trilogy. A place of refuge and rejevenation, that Perrin too brings alive and elicits the recovery this nature protected part of the Mediterranean offers humanity.
It's a gentle novel because even though there are moments of tragedy, they are seen through the eyes of the most empathetic character, so even the most villainous, unlikable characters are given a generous, understanding hearing.
The details of the life of a keeper, whether it's the level crossing or the cemetery are so realistic, evocative and visual, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that this book will soon be turned into a series; it's too long for a movie and with so many interconnecting lives, it even feels like it could have continued, just as life and death does, always someone arriving, someone departing, and someone there to soothe the way through those transitions.
It is an interesting reading exercise to have read an author's work of creative nonfiction before reading either of her two novels, so I come to Sara It is an interesting reading exercise to have read an author's work of creative nonfiction before reading either of her two novels, so I come to Sara Baume's novel, knowing her as a sculptor of birds, an acute observer and thinker about migrations, someone who spends her mornings at her writing desk and her afternoons evenings working with her hands, accumulating and gathering things around her, writing about objects and things, a ponderer.
So when I meet the 57 year old man in Spill Simmer Falter Wither, it takes me a while to think of him as that, because seeing through his eyes and listening to his inner conversation with OneEye, the undisciplined dog he has just adopted, I can tell this character has been sculpted with as much care and detail as one of her many and varied birds in Handiwork.
Her incantory style of storytelling, the repetition of words, the focus on certain words are all giveaways. I loved it, Handiwork was such a sliver of a book, it was over so quickly, like small morsels, often only a paragraph to a page, so it was delightful to go on a journey, once we were able to get him out of the house.
What great characters, what eccentricity gently portrayed, what clever use of the first and second person narrative, what a revelation, what tension, what joy that finally here is a relationship of unconditional love, even if it causes him such anxiety for much of the time.
I think the title and structure are brilliant, only a lover of words and perhaps a scrabble player or reader of the dictionary or thesaurus could have come up with four words that represent the four seasons and almost begin with same two letters and just mildly suggest what the four sections of the book are going to experience. In total awe.
When I opened I, Tituba to begin reading, on the first page there is a quote from the author Maryse Condé that reads:
Tituba and I lived for a year on
When I opened I, Tituba to begin reading, on the first page there is a quote from the author Maryse Condé that reads:
Tituba and I lived for a year on the closest of terms. During our endless conversations she told me things she had confided to nobody else.
It gave me such a good feeling to read that, to know that Condé was doing here, what she does in her novel (though she calls it a work of non fiction) Victoire: My Mother's Mother, when the grandmother she had never met, would awaken her from her dreams and talk to her from the corner of the room, chastising her.
Sometimes I would wake up at night and see her sitting in a corner of the room, like a reproach, so different to what I had become.
‘What are you doing running around from Segu to Japan to South Africa? What’s the point of all these travels? Can’t you realise that the only journey that counts is discovering your inner self? That’s the only thing that matters. What are you waiting for to take an interest in me?’ she seemed to be telling me.
But that book won't be published until 20 years after Condé is having conversations with Tituba.
I, Tituba is the first novel written after Segu and The Children of Segu, historical masterpieces that disrupt and provoke, however the initial reaction was such that she'd declared she would never write about Africa again.
Tituba came to me or I came to her at a period of my life when really I wanted to turn toward the Caribbean and start writing about the Caribbean.
Tituba existed, she was accused and ultimately set free, however, though there were shelves of books about the Salem witch trials, there is very little factual information about her, about who she was, or who freed her, or her life after release from prison.
I felt this eclipse of Tituba's life was completely unjust. I felt a strong solidarity with her, and I wanted to offer her her revenge by inventing a life such as she might perhaps have wished it to be told.
If we look for her story in the history of Salem, it isn't there. Condé too, looked for her history in the colonization of the continent and found silences, omissions, distortions, fabrications and fleeting, enigmatic insinuations.
Review On a ship sailing for Barbados, Christ the King, young Abena was raped by an English sailor. Tituba was born from this act of aggression. Sold to a planter along with two male slaves, she was employed in the household until her pregnancy discovered whereupon she was banished to the cabin of one the male slaves Yao.
A short reprieve, they would find comfort in each other's company and Tituba would be named and loved by a man, more father to her than any other. But that joy in Yao that lightened and lit Abena's life, was seen by the master, who desired it for himself, she struck back, was hung for it and for his concubine's crime, Yao was sold.
Driven off the plantation, Tituba was taken in by an old woman, Mama Yaya, still grieving for her two sons, who had cultivated the ability to communicate with the invisible.
People were afraid of her, but they came from far and wide because of her powers.
Mama Yaya teaches her everything she knows, all her herbal remedies and after meeting her own mother in a dream:
Mama Yaya initiated me into the powers of knowledge. The dead only die if they die in our hearts. They live on if we cherish them and honour their memory, if we place their favourite delicacies in life on their graves, and if we kneel down regularly to commune with them.
And so Tituba is given a past, skills and knowledge and might have remained in that life, had she not grown into a young woman with desires herself and fallen for the man who would become her husband John Indian, who belonged to Goodwife Susanna Endicott in Carlisle Bay, who we encounter in the opening scene of Ann Petry's Tituba of Salem Village.
After a short period in that household where John has lived most of his life, things deteriorate and in an act of revenge the mistress sells them to Samuel Parris, even though Tituba is no slave, but for her husband, whom she could not leave.
In Boston, with the mistress unwell and in a room upstairs, Tituba spends time with the daughter Betsey and orphaned niece Abigail, who makes trouble for her, trouble that spreads like a contagion to other young girls in the community, as they fall prey to strange fits and mass hysteria.
I also recognized Abigail and Betsey's companions in their dangerous games, those young girls whose eyes were shining with excitement. They were dying to roll on the ground too and to attract everybody's attention.
And so the bad behaviours of girls are given credence, turning into accusations of witchcraft against Tituba and others, they are jailed and many lose their lives, until the Govener writes to London for advice on legal proceedings concerning witchcraft resulting in a general pardon and Tituba is condemned to live.
Prison costs mean she can only leave if someone pays and a man with nine children who has lost his wife claims her. And it is through this relation that she will gain her freedom and return full circle.
If the first part is written from compassion and revenge, the second part initially seems strange and challenges the reader, in its use of parody. I found this part difficult to understand, the reader isn't given the satisfaction of a gratifying ending, yet reading further into the essay and interview, I find myself confronted with my own subconscious bias and lack of understanding, a clever and deliberate intervention by the author.
And so Tituba is granted her revenge. We are all complicit.
I found that reading the book and then the few days of thinking about it after reading the interview resulted in a deeper reading experience and consideration. My feeling while reading was no doubt heightened by having read Ann Petry's sympathetic youth version first, Condé hadn't written a story to give hope or courage to today's youth, she was reckoning with the past.
I suggest that though Petry's version was written 30 years before, it might be better to read her more optimistic version last, if one wished to end on that note, despite the fact that her novel is as much fantasy, as Condé's is parody.
Like Condé, who knew and knows nothing of witchcraft, (she uses lots of literary inventions in the glossary at the end), I have decided to read a contemporary book next, one published in 2020, to see what's going on in the world of witchcraft today.
I read this for two reasons, one I've been wanting to read Ann Petry for a while, The Street and The Narrows were republished in 2020, so I'm looking I read this for two reasons, one I've been wanting to read Ann Petry for a while, The Street and The Narrows were republished in 2020, so I'm looking forward to reading them, but the main reason I chose this title is because I'm an avid reader of Maryse Condé, who wrote I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem having been inspired by Ann Petry's book.
I've read nothing about the witch trials before, though I'd heard of them, but I'm glad that this was my introduction, to see this little segment of American history, through the eyes of an innocent black slave, Tituba and her husband John.
As the book opens and Tituba and John are in the kitchen of the Barbados home they live in, the scene is so evocative, you can't imagine how their lives are going to change so abruptly, having been so stable for so long - but then the harsh reality of them being commodities, sold like jewels, to pay a debt, their lives irrevocably changed, within 24 hours they are on a ship heading for the Bay Colony of Boston.
Petry's descriptions of the environment are so evocative, the contrast so great, from the warmth of the island to the damp, unwelcoming cold climate of Massachusetts.
Tituba is a wonderful character, depicted with compassion and understanding, put in a situation where young people are drawn towards her but unable to overcome their own inner hurts, exaggerate and invent scenarios, combining imagination and superstition creating drama that spirals out of control into very real consequences for those accused of "witching", until the farce that it is, becomes all too clear, though not without lives having been lost....more
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