untangling race, ethnicity and sexuality

I’m going to start posting revised versions of responses that I have to write for my lovely “Multiculty” seminar. This one is a response to my first reading of James Baldwin’s novel Another Country.

I will admit upfront that I struggled to write a response this week. That’s why I would like to discuss why I struggled–sometimes I find it as fruitful to write about what I know about a book as I do to write about what didn’t work for me.

Here was my problem: It was clear to me that James Baldwin’s Another Country was saying something about race and that it was also saying something about sexuality. But I didn’t think I could manage to work with both of these very large, fraught issues in a short space. Had I tried, this would have easily turned into a 25-page term paper (and I’m just not ready to commit to a topic so early in my exploration of these novels).

So I sat down in an attempt to take Baldwin’s race and sexuality and unravel them. And that’s when the problems started in earnest.
I found myself in real trouble because Baldwin had crafted such a tight web of race relations mixed with sexuality that I could not unravel them. Now I need to slow down and define my terms briefly; these words are not easy words, even if we think they are. When I say race, I guess I mean a character’s visible biology; but when I say race, I also mean how another character interprets a character’s race (and therefore his or her ethnicity). When I say sexuality, I am really talking about two different things: sexual orientation (or sexual orientations) and how the characters in this novel are represented as sexual beings. Trying to unravel these threads of race and sexuality left me with a bigger knot than what I started with.

For example, when I tried to look at how Ida (one of the main characters in a multi-protagonist novel) is represented, I found that there was no way of looking at her as a young, African American woman without looking at her as sexual being (sometimes even a sex object). While that is actually refreshing to see in a novel, it became problematic in that Ida could look at herself as a black woman without also seeing herself as a sexual being engaged in a power exchange through her sexuality.

When she begins her relationship with Vivaldo, she is constantly fighting with him about how her race determines what kinds of sexual relationships she can have with men. Her skin colour, especially, determines what kind of relationship she can have with a white man (even if that white man is Vivaldo: relatively poor, Irish-Italian immigrant, from the wrong side of the tracks, etc.). Ida lives in this terrible self-fulfilling prophecy: she finds herself in a relationship where she is both using her sexuality to get something she wants, but she is being used as well because of her race. Or at least she thinks she is being used. I’m still not on very firm ground when it comes to understanding how Ida’s race and sexuality work together or even work against each other. Baldwin only gives us Ida’s relationships with white men and that gives me only one side of the coin.

When I try to make sense of say, Eric’s sexual relationships in terms of race (and class because class is always lurking behind the word race), I find an even more tangled web. Eric’s background is that of a rich, white Southern male; yet, Eric’s sexuality (whether this is a choice or not in terms of sexuality as a kind of ethnicity) in his Alabama environment means that he is associated with the poor, often black, underclass in the south. Eric has a relationship with one African American man in Alabama then moves to New York where he engages in another relationship with Rufus.

I find the power dynamics in Eric’s relationships very interesting in terms of race: in the south, while Eric loses social power, is he still valued higher in terms of southern society as a white, homosexual man than his black, homosexual lover? In the north, while Eric’s sexuality seems to be more accepted, in his relationship with Rufus, Eric doesn’t hold the power; yet in society, does he? I cannot quite seem to make out where Eric stands in terms of his sexual orientation (that gets even more confusing when he starts a relationship with white, upper-class Cass) and how that then is expressed in terms of his subject position within American society.

That’s the beauty of this novel, that all of the characters are slippery, all of the characters define and redefine themselves based on where they are, and who they are. I suppose the thing I love most about Another Country is the thing that made writing this response so difficult: There are no easy answers in this novel. This novel is messy. This novel is complicated. I’m not sure that the race, ethnicity and sexual knot is meant to be untangled.

This was my first taste of Baldwin, but it’s clear to me that he is a very keen story-teller, one that I will be revisiting in the future. Anyone have any advice on which Baldwin novel I should tackle next?

my citron review publication

Here is my latest publication: “Boneyards and Other Places to Sleep” at the lovely Citron Review. It took the editors and me quite a few days to settle on a title that we both liked enough to pin to this piece of writing forever. And I will say while the process took a long time (through a series of emails volleyed back and forth and sometimes forwarded to other editors), I was really pleased that the people at the Citron Review cared enough to find the right title.

I will admit that in its draft form, this piece was not near by favourite piece of writing to come out of my poetry workshop last semester. I thought the piece was long, drawn out, confusing and not nearly as beautiful as it should be.

The revision process helped me to get it closer to where it should be. And as luck or fate or whatever would have it, my least favourite piece was the first of that set of prose poems/poetic prose to be published. I guess that’s just how the world works.

Read it and enjoy!

 

entering year 2 of the great phd adventure/torture session

And with August coming to a close, I’m already back at it. But in my head, this is the end of summer, the last long days before school starts again and new routines take over. In Canada, school never starts before Labour Day. It’s just how it is.

Here in America, we’re back the last week in August. So I’m fighting the death of my summer days but I’m also looking forward to a new year.

I’m ready to get back in front of the classroom. I can’t wait to start teaching a new class and to interact with real, live students in person (my lesson this summer: online teaching is not my favourite thing because I miss the personal interactions that you lose online).

I’m ready to keep chipping away at the years I have left in this apprenticeship I’m living. I’m ready for more of the same, but I’m hoping to be surprised.

I want to be engaged by what I do everyday.

I want to keep at my writing. This summer I’ve been good about submitting the pieces that are ready to be seen by the world, but I haven’t been so dillegent about actually writing new pieces. It’s a process. I’m really good at part of the process, and only half the time.

I want to keep reading for fun, but I know that will fall behind quickly. So in a way, I’m warning you all that things will slow down here. I’ll try to keep new posts coming (you’ll be on the up and up of my seminar books, that’s for sure). But know that if I’m not posting, I’m buried somewhere under a pile of old books, hiding from my students.

the book that showed me I’m still naive

Another one of my mom’s bookshelf selections, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah quickly reminded me that I am more naive than I think.

This came to a shock to someone who considers herself both educated and fairly worldly in the street-smarts sense. Usually I’m not surprised by world events, even the most horrible ones. I think the last time the world surprised me was on a cold morning in September when I was in the 11th grade, watching TV newscasters take over the syndication of Jerry Springer while waiting for a friend to get ready so we could car-pool to school. It’s been years since the world surprised me. But Beah’s story made me aware that I do not know everything (duh, I suppose) and that I can’t see the world as clearly as I think I can.

While reading Beah’s narrative, I felt scared for him every time the RUF got near him because in my twisted mind, the “revolutionaries” who were killing villagers for no clear reason were the bad guys. If the bad guys got a hold of Beah, he would become a child soldier. And since this memoir was about Beah becoming a child soldier, I felt as if he was safe when he was with the government’s army.

And then it hit me, when Beah recounts how the legal government of Sierra Leone recruited him. I was honestly shocked.

Now, I feel silly for having so much faith in the “legal” government. I feel silly for boiling the world down to “bad” guys and “good” guys. I feel silly for being so silly. I would never have assumed that the USA would be so reductive. Some part of me desperately wanted to trust that Beah would be safe with his government. Not so. But I love the fact that Beah managed to surprise me, that the writing managed to take the girl who can fairly-consistently predict plot turns and surprise her.

I’m pretty down on “modern” (ie. being published nowadays) literature. Maybe that’s because I’m not being surprised as often as I would like to be. That’s half my fault (for being so blase about everything) and half the fault of publishers/people buying crap books, therefore creating a market for crap books. And that’s another post entirely/a crap book in itself!

Although for me, A Long Way Gone does not make its way into my non-fiction top ten list, I did find it to be worth the read, worth the time and enlightening by complicating my worldview just a little.

the summer of memoirs: one that didn’t satisfy

It seems this summer I’ve strayed away from fiction and settled into a memoir-binge. My guess is that memoir/non-fiction is different enough from what I do all year long that my mind feels like it’s something different, even though it’s still words on a page. This isn’t at all a bad thing; it’s just different reading stories that are true. I guess I expect more from stories that are based in the real, that are telling me that they’re reporting on events that really happened than I do of fiction in some ways.

With fiction, I tend to extend my faith just a little farther than with non-fiction. Why? I’m not really sure. But there’s something about knowing that these words represent truth that makes me a little more skeptical.

I’ve been reporting fairly faithfully on my reading but I’m going to scroll back to a few weeks ago when I read Happy: a Memoir by Alex Lemon. It might be harsh for me to say that my experience of reading Happy was not nearly as multifaceted as I’m used to when I sit down with a book. Granted for some reason, despite the fact that I wasn’t finding beauty or enjoyment or whatnot from reading Lemon’s memoir, I couldn’t stop! I dislike not being able to finish a book, but I’m not so neurotic that I can’t stop reading and put a book in the Did Not Finish pile and move on with my life.

So why was I compelled to stay up into the early hours of the A.M. reading a book I wasn’t enjoying? (Yes, I will admit to scanning the last few chapters, in search of the glorious re-deeming moment as my eyes began to gloss over…) I’ve had some time to think this over, and I’m not so proud to say this, but I think I was reading waiting for horrible things to happen to Lemon. I wanted to see the medical nightmare that the back of the book seemed to promise me. But I didn’t want to see the CAPS LOCK COLLEGE BOYS DRINKING AND SMOKING AND BEING LOUD that was ingrained into the plot and writing style of this memoir. It felt just too much for me to sink into the world Lemon was re-creating for his readers.

Is it wrong of me to have been disappointed for not getting the horrible things in enough horribleness to satisfy the promise I felt the book laid out to me? I want to blame my dissatisfaction on me, but I have a sinking feeling that Happy: a Memoir was written in a style that I was never going to warm up to and that killed any chance of my enjoying it.

a book that sent me canning

I know I’m a little late to this party. For that I appologize. Much of what I see in this book has probably been said before elsewhere. But one of the things that I find interesting about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver is that Kingsolver is a fiction writer, not just someone who decided to do something for a year and write a book and get famous. That gave her a kind of “street cred” in my opinion.

Some background: I’m currently on vacation at my parent’s house and somehow I forgot to pack any books. How is that possible? For someone like me, it’s practically beyond absurd that I managed to travel over two days in a car without a book at all. So when I landed at my parent’s place, my reading selections were limited to what my mother had in her collection. Much of my mother’s collection was what I would claim to be unreadable–yes, I know, this judgment has more to do with my taste and prehaps my (over)education than anything else. But hidden somewhere on one of my mother’s bookshelves I found Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and decided to give it a try.

Since I love reading books about food, I figured that Kingsolver’s experiment in local food would be right up my alley. And boy, was I right. I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle slowly, chapter by chapter over the course of five or six nights, almost savouring it.

What I loved was that this book managed to be accessible, even though I don’t have the time to devote to growing all my own food, even though I’m a broke-as-can-be graduate student, even though I’m a mostly-vegan who is therefore picky about what I eat. I have an acre of yard, but only a small garden plot that I can barely keep alive on my own in this year’s heat wave/drought. I’m really only growing tomatoes, cucumbers (which I not really surviving let alone thriving in this weather!) and a ton of hot peppers. I couldn’t live of this stuff if I wanted to and still spend a bunch of money at the grocery store buying food that was grown all over the world. Kingsolver’s book is and at once isn’t a how-to guide, a model for how we should live. I think that for me, Kingsolver reached a kind of academic-running-an-experience balance that didn’t make me feel guilty for not living my life in the way she was. I guess she left room for the choices I am making to reduce my footprint to fit into her worldview. As I reached the middle of the book and Kingsolver started talking about canning, suddenly, I wanted to can some freaking tomatoes!

As luck would have it, one of my parent’s neighbours left over 50 pounds of garden-grown tomatoes on my doorstep early one morning. I could literally see them rotting on the kitchen counter: I’m housesitting/dogsitting for the next few weeks alone. As much as I love tomatoes and consume them like a crazy person, 50 pounds was well out of my eating-scope. I think that this is one of the first books that has pushed me to put the book down and take direct action.

Whether the action had anything to do with my being on vacation and therefore being motivated to do things, or the fact that the tomatoes landed on my doorstep the day before I read the canning chapter, who really knows. And I’ve canned salsa before, so this wasn’t something new. New actions are usually fueled by the new, the difference. But something about Kingsolver’s words motivated me to do something, that’s for sure. And the evidence is on my kitchen table: I have a dozen jars of homemade salsa to enjoy for the next few months and no rotting tomatoes.

That’s not to say that Kingsolver’s book was flawless. As far as “the year we did this crazy thing” genre goes, Kingsolver was both educational, interesting and well-written (compliments for the genre, that’s for sure). But I expected that from someone who wrote many previous novels, several of which are bestsellers. Maybe the thing that I found least compelling was Kingsolver’s habit to wrap things up so nicely, to make real life read as if it were perfectly scripted fiction, to get a little too sentimental. Some things she was reporting seemed to be so freaking pat. Gardening in her book didn’t feel dirty, didn’t feel time-consuming, even though she admits to the dirt (the blood of harvesting chickens) an and time it takes to weed your garden. But I didn’t quite believe it. Didn’t quite believe her perfect children. Didn’t quite believe that life could be so full of pretty, manicured closure. Isn’t that one of Kingsolver’s fictional faults as well?

I think I would enjoy reading a book about food by anyone, but Kingsolver writes about food knowingly and lovelingly and it was an enjoyable vacation book.

Any recommendations for another food-based book? I’m in the mood to read about food.

fire-bored

I started off my summer of required reading with a lovely little memoir by Paul Guest. After that enjoyable experience, I turned to one of the only other memoirs on my lists: Firebird: a Memoir by Mark Doty. And I found myself deeply disappointed.

I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve read Doty’s other memoir Heaven’s Coast; and I cried and cried and cried, sitting at my center-of-the-room-desk in a computer lab at summer camp. Kids asked me if I was okay and pet my arm. I fear I must have looked like I was having a break down. But no, it was just a very engaging story.

But with Firebird, I never once made a connection. Whether it was the story itself (long, rambling, without a specific focus) or the fact that growing up gay, for people of my generation isn’t really that far outside of the realms of my imagination. Or maybe it was that I wanted to know Doty’s sister’s story so much more. Her story interested me. Doty’s story seemed too normal, too typical.

I didn’t make a fair transition between Guest’s lyrical, almost stark memoir and Doty’s (comparatively) heavy-handed one. I felt bogged down in Doty’s prose, which I was at once surprised by and made to feel child-like by. Surprised because Doty is a poet (and I associate poets with a sparser style of prose). Surprised because I’ve read Doty’s The Art of Description (a craft book) and found it to be quite readable, and quite lovely for a craft book.

But it was feeling like I’d been sucked back into childhood that really killed me. I didn’t have a bad childhood. I had a pretty normal, pretty healthy childhood (let’s just say I’m not writing any memoirs about my under-18 years). While flipping the pages, I felt like I had lived Doty’s childhood before, like I was stuck in it, like I was never going to get out. This is a good thing; this is words being powerful. But for me, I never rose above feeling bogged down.

I was just a little bored.

Next on my reading docket: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.