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.

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.

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.

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.

R- Rhyming!!!! 

C- Caramels