Riot Readers

In his poem “Rosh HaShanah,” the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai offers the reader a micro-view of the life of a poet amidst a landscape of brutal, state-sanctioned atrocity. As he watches French news reportage, Shabtai’s life continues as comfortable and as ordinary as ever. He cooks pasta; he browns pine nuts; he eats dinner. He writes a poem. We read it. 

“Rosh HaShanah” is one of the poems contained within Shabtai’s poetry collection J’Accuse, written in the first couple years of the Second Intifada. In the collection, Shabtai accuses the Israeli government of committing brutal atrocities against the Palestinian people. In an interview with Jeffrey Brown, Shabtai elaborates: "When I was young and when I was in love with the land, suddenly we had a land, full of possibility, the ability to make the land beautiful, to grow up, and also to cross the borders for peace. And now, suddenly, it’s another image. It’s an image of closing, of a wall, and the wall is also something that’s internalized in the people. It’s a wall of fear, of hate, of incomprehension.” In his poetry, Shabtai mourns for the Palestinian people as he also mourns for the possibilities for beauty, peace, and justice lost to the IDF’s callous actions. He also wonders how even he, a poet openly critical of the Israeli government, might have a wall built inside of him.

This collection resonated with me. It resonated with me in ways that I am finding hard to unpack. As an American Jew raised in a Zionist community, I have had such a hard time grappling first with the reality that the Israeli government can and has acted in unjust ways, and then with another reality that people whom I love and admire will never speak out about this. It also resonates with me because this notion of “internalized walls” is so familiar to me. I am currently finishing my dissertation (!!!), and actively revising a chapter on Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy. There, too, he speaks about how Jim Crow and architectures of segregation have created “walls in [people’s] minds.” (For more on this, SEE MY DISS!) And then there is Trump’s wall. I worry so much about the damage that wall will do. But I am inspired by acts of resistance. Foolishly, perhaps, I have hope.

I read The Moor’s Account for challenge 20--a novel in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey.  It tells the story of the Narvaez expedition, a doomed Spanish expedition of soldiers and settlers who were supposed to settle the lands of “La Florida” in the sixteenth century.  Three hundred men and women set out, and only four survived at the end of eight years. The journey itself went from Florida to parts of Arizona, and ended in New Mexico.  Growing up in Texas, we learned about this expedition in elementary school--many of its members were killed in a shipwreck on the Island of Galveston, which is where my family actually settled in Texas a century and some change ago.

In school, we read the official account of the expedition, the Relacion of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a royal treasurer.  This book is written from the point of view of the North African slave of one of the other Castilian soldiers--a man named Mustafa, who was baptized as Esteban when he was sold into slavery in Seville.  

Y’all. It’s been a tough last two weeks. I skated into January 20th thinking that I had already processed much of my grief about this election, but found as I texted friends near and far throughout the day that was profoundly untrue. That night, Rachel and I made a last-minute decision to drive to DC to attend the Women’s March. We got to spend some time with some dear pals. We marched in the streets. We returned to Carolina invigorated and exhausted. On Sunday, as I lounged about, I decided to curl up and read a memoir. I chose Firoozeh Dumas’s Laughing in Farsi.

Memoirs are this bookworm’s ultimate comfort food. After teaching a class on memoirs and autobiographies last year, I concluded that memoirs are an extrovert’s genre. I make this claim loudly and often and to anyone who will listen. People are surprised by my proclamation, in part because there is some idea that memoirs are a quiet, solitary, pensive genre.  But that’s now how I experience reading a memoir: when I pick up a memoir, I feel like I am engaging in an ongoing, multi-hour conversation with a new friend. Firoozeh Dumas’s Laughing in Farsi reads like a really charming coffee date. She’s funny; she’s warm; she writes with compassion and honesty.  Would continue to hang out with her (and luckily, she has written more books since)!

I have been escaping into books this year as a way to not get sucked into the spiral that is Facebook doom. As the Trump administration blew through the most hellacious first week in office, Firoozeh was a friend I could turn to.  She could tell me stories about repeated trips to Disney Land and swimming in the Caspian Sea.  Stories about her ameh Sedigeh: her wickedly intelligent aunt who couldn’t pursue an education beyond sixth grade. And then Trump’s administration wrote an Executive Order placing a total ban on anyone entering the country from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. And I was still reading Firoozeh. And my book, my imagined friendship with Firoozeh, reminds me that staying on my couch and reading isn’t enough. My friendship with Firoozeh only goes one way.

Dumas’s memoir is often a light read, but she still is careful to emphasize the difficulty or being Iranian in the US. In her chapter titled “I-raynians Need Not Apply,” she recounts the stark change in how Americans treater her and her family after the start of the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979. “Vendors started selling T-shirts and bumper stickers that said ‘Iranians Go Home’ and ‘Wanted: Iranians, for Target Practice,” she describes. She continues, “Crimes against Iranians increased. People would hear my mother’s thick accent and ask us, ‘Where are you from?’ They weren’t looking for a recipe for stuffed grape leaves.” As Dumas tells the story of how her family suddenly experienced outward bigotry accompanied by economic insecurity (no one wanted to hire her Iranian father), she emphasizes how quickly xenophobia can take root and cause material and psychological harm. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen how very true this is.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me.  Boys like me belonged to the rain.

For my first entry for Riot Readers, I read Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

A friend suggested this book to me when I said that I wanted to read more queer lit.  Even though it won the Stonewall Book Award in 2013 (and many other awards [X X X X]) and has been showered with near-universal acclaim, I was still skeptical because it is marketed as a “young adult” novel.  It is also described as a “coming-of-age” novel, which I tend to avoid, so I was doubly skeptical.  I’m glad I read it anyway, because the hype is well-deserved.  This book is wonderful.

The novel follows two Mexican-American teens, Aristotle “Ari” Mendoza and Dante Quintana, who become each other’s best friends.  It is told from Ari’s point of view and does not follow a strict plot, but rather plays out through vignettes, told from Ari’s point of view.  It is very character-driven and focuses on Ari’s thoughts, feelings, and interiority as he and Dante grow up in El Paso, Texas.  Ari is closed-off and emotionally guarded whereas Dante wears his heart on his sleeve.

Sáenz’s writing captures the confusion of being a young, queer, colored teenage boy on the verge of manhood, without being overwrought or melodramatic.  In fact, the writing for Ari’s perspective often comes off clipped, even terse, but with something ferocious underneath the surface—just like Ari’s character.  Ari, the over-it, suspicious loner with a chip on his shoulder, and the way Sáenz writes him reminds me of The Catcher in the Rye, but less cynical and more melancholy (a word that Ari uses to describe himself).  I found Ari’s sense of something inside him being off, of some feeling he has no language for but makes him want to cry and scream, to be an incredibly accurate portrayal of growing up gay: “The summer sun was not meant for boys like me.  Boys like me belonged to the rain.”

Gentle reader: I forgot that I like sports. I thought I didn’t! But as I read Colton’s Counting Coup I found my eye jumping ahead to see whether the Lady Bulldogs would win the game. Spoiler alert: so many overtimes. So much stomach churning. I can’t handle the excitement!! Counting Coup follows high school senior Sharon Laforge, a member of the Crow tribe and star player of a small town Montana high school women’s basketball team.  Colton is doubly an outsider: he is neither an Indian nor a basketball player (he actually briefly played for the Phillies), but his care for both the students and their success and happiness broadly defined allows him to write a deeply compelling story.  In particular, Colton excels at inhabiting the concerns of Sharon and her teammates. Each of the girls on the team emerges distinct and full.  No shallow characters here.

This book is of course about so much more than basketball. As interested as I was in Colton’s narrations of the basketball games (which are beautifully written), I was more interested in Colton’s explorations of race in eastern Montana. At the time of his writing (1990s), Hardin High was equally composed of white students and Indian students, many of whom live on a nearby reservation. In Colton’s story, the two populations struggle to live together: white students feel like they work really hard and are not given as many free passes, and the Crow students know that there are so few opportunities for them under systemic disenfranchisements.  In reading this story, I am reminded that it is okay to acknowledge that it can be hard to live in this world that is not just and is not fair. Productive, even. Colton himself openly struggles with his attachment to the students--that he wants the best for them, and can be frustrated by what they say and the choices they make. As a teacher, I feel this feeling so deeply.  Yet despite the fact that he is just a journalist who drops into their world for fifteen months, Colton’s respect and compassion for the students is not one I ever doubted.

So I’ve been meaning to read this series for a long time, and truth be told, I’m a tiny bit embarrassed by how much I enjoyed it.  Victorian Lady Archaeologist gallivants around Egypt, properly excavates a site, and solves a mystery?  Yes, please!  It’s written as a personal journal from 1885, the product of the indomitable Amelia Peabody, who does, in fact, hit bad guys with her steel umbrella and make Serious Decisions about wearing pants.

In a scary political climate where the future seems bleaker than it has in a long time, I’ve been getting tangled up in the terrors of what might be and trying to withdraw into my own personal cocoon. The only coping mechanism I’ve been able to figure out is to try to dive deeper into the humanity of others, to broaden my own capacity to to feel and imagine even the unimaginable, in the hopes of being a more empathetic (and impactful?) person. Seeking to confront the truths I often avoid, I picked up Wave after reading Teju Cole’s beautiful essay about it.

In this book, Sonali Deraniyagala describes a grief that really does seem unfathomable: deep and long-lasting, murky and dark and changeable. Deraniyagala is the sole survivor after the ocean rips away her entire family (husband, sons, parents -- along with thousands of others) in a tsunami on the morning after Christmas. Visiting family in Sri Lanka for the holidays, she is suddenly stripped of her loved ones, her sense of security, her sense of self. She drinks too much, she toys with suicide. She tries to play ghost to the family that rents out her parents’ old home. For years she doesn’t even let herself plumb her memories of her family; she doesn’t return to the London house she lived in with her family until more than three and half years after she left it. And when she does, the process of grief is, as always, unpredictable.

“For three years I’ve tried to indelibly imprint they are dead on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they are alive. Coming out of that lapse, however momentary, will be more harrowing than the constant knowing, surely. But now I am unmoored simply by the familiar light. This is different from remembering them, warily, as I usually do.  This is tumbling into them, into our life, into our car. This is slipping up.” 

My first book and first entry on tumblr YAY!  This is for “a book that is set more than 5000 miles from you”, and Korea is indeed that far (I googled).  I think this was recommended by an NPR list of “top books of 2016″.

This book is about a woman who decides to become a vegetarian because of a dream she had, and then a bunch of horrible things happen.

I first read a novel by Zadie Smith in 2008, when I was assigned White Teeth in a class on immigrant literature of London. In Swing Time she returns to immigrant London and beyond, focusing on a multi-decade friendship (turned not-friendship) between two mixed-race girls growing up in Northwest London. The girls become close friends both because of their non-whiteness and their love of dance: one is a beautiful dancer, and one loves watching dance. Over time, this is not enough to sustain their friendship.