-
Assata Shakur,
Assata: An Autobiography (1987)
CULTURE
i must confess that waltzes
do not move me.
i have no sympathy
for symphonies.
i guess i hummed the Blues
too early,
and spent too many midnights
out wailing to the rain.
Review:
i read this book a long time ago, or at least, i thought i did, because the text file i
read in my late teens terminated at chapter eleven, right after Assata and Ronald Myers
are acquitted.
And in reading the book completely this time, i found i'd been robbed all those years
ago, of what appears to me to be the meat of the narrative: Assata Shakur's account of
her coming in to consciousness of the world, contemplating it, and learning how to
change it. i found her honesty refreshing, for many so-called revolutionaries tell tall
tales of being shot out of their mother's wombs fully conscious, clutching an annotated
copy of Das Kapital (in the original German, of course), which they studied
meticulously over the course of their gestation, and having entered the world, they are
ready to 'smash capitalism' etc.
Assata, on the other hand, is clear in expressing that she grew up in a sense of unease,
but without knowing the coordinates of its origin. Certainly, she is aware of racism,
but merely reflexively, as a consequence of experience, experience that awaited deeper
contemplation. Only in her conversations with students from Africa does she come to
learn of the complex structures of oppression she endures everyday. And on learning
this, Assata digs deeper, studies, reflects, and demonstrates to the reader that what
is not known, can be learned. i think the clarity with which she lays out her
initial ignorance and its amelioration is what makes Assata a revolutionary: she tells no
lies, she exposes lies wherever they are told, she masks no difficulties, mistakes,
failures, she claims no easy victories.
As an aside, there's a brief passage where Assata chides Huey P. Newton for delivering
impenetrable speeches about the negation of negation at the Black Panther party office,
and this is clearly intended as a criticism, however, no single sentence has ever
endeared a historical figure to me as that one did. Huey Newton sounds quite wonderful,
i will be tracking down these overly philosophical speeches as i continue exploring the
history of Black Liberation in the United States.
i read this in memory of Assata Shakur, only to find i hadn't know her in the
completeness she'd presented herself in for many years, and yet i'd admired and
respected her. Now that i know her just a sliver better, i think i love her more, and i
mourn her passing. At least we still have her prose and poetry to remember her by.
i'd write more, about the details of her trial and incarceration, about the structure of
the book, but i fear i've become contemplative at the thought of Assata's passing.
Perhaps we shall speak of this another time.
-
Jacqueline Harpman,
Orlanda (1996)
He shrugged: “That's all I know. You were reading, I was bored, locked away
inside your soul when it was a nice day and there were plenty of men who were very much
alive, and who are not so unlucky as to have lost their sexual identity. This handsome
young man you see before you also looked bored and I felt like going over to him.”
Review:
This book was chosen by Katja for Reading the
Globe '26, and it's also why i re-read Orlando last month. Now, it is
only obliquely that Orlanda borrows from Orlando's premise, and i think
the borrowing
has a very specific logic to it, though i wonder if Harpman was aware of it.
While discussing Orlando last month, i made a note of Virginia Woolf's racist and
imperialist tendencies. This time, i would like to declare that while there are no
excuses for Woolf's attitude, i much prefer her plainspoken approach to prejudices.
Woolf weaves Orlando's adventures into the fabric of English history; she does not shy
away from laying bare the realities of colonialism for her readers, in fact, she makes
it crystal clear that it is the plunder wrought by the Crown and its associates that is
the very condition of Orlando's leisure, for his adventures, for her eventual literary
fame.
In contrast, Harpman appears utterly unconscious of the material reality of her novel's
setting. Viewed at a distance from the internal monologues of Aline and Orlanda, this is
the story of a bourgeois woman murdering a working class man, but not before colonising
his body and taking it for a test-drive, wherein she proceeds to tear his life and
family apart, indirectly killing his mother. Oh, i knew from a mile away that Lucien's
gun would be trained on his own heart, though not necessarily by his own hand. In some ways,
the English empire that dominates Woolf's tale is refigured into the individual
fantasies of a disgruntled English literature professor, who believes that everything
about a text can be found within the text itself.
In short, this book was not for me. It had its intricacies, certainly: Harpman brings up
the question of science fiction, Aline's guilty pleasure, but the author never ruminates
on the potentialities Orlando explored in the genre. Woolf was a contemporary of
H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, she was certainly aware of the discourses surrounding
that inchoate literary form that Wells called scientific romance. But Harpman
only employs science fiction as a popular genre, an anti-thesis to the
canonical literature Orlando represents, what a respectable English
professor like Aline is meant to be reading. It's almost as if Harpman nearly hit on
something interesting, but missed it entirely, and i could not tell you why.
Not even the long sections recounting Melanie Klein's interpretation of
Freud'psychoanalytic theory (for that is the contemplative heart of the novel) managed
to distract me from the fundamental carelessness of the novel, and more than that, the
final word on morality put me right off the book. i could go on to read Marion Zimmer
Bradley's Darkover Landfall, or something by John Wyndham to explore the text
more thoroughly, but i simply am not interested. Not in the least.
-
Zohra Drif,
Inside the Battle of Algiers (2017)
After living through that staggering night of February 2nd on Impasse de la
Granada — that horrible night when human beings, torturers and the tortured alike, were
reduced to a beastly state — I came away with the deep conviction that no one can predict
in advance his own capacity to resist torture, nor the reaction of anyone else subjected
to torture. But above all I came away convinced that to judge the victims of torture is
to forgive the act and exonerate the torturers, which turns you yourself into an
accomplice of the criminals and extends the crime even beyond the victim's death.
Review:
In December last year, i'd resolved to learn all i could about Frantz Fanon. Learning
about the Algerian War of Liberation is an extension of this, and while i will be
reading more 'objective' histories of the period when the time comes, i am very glad i
read this first. Zohra Drif is a wonderful storyteller, in addition to being a resolute
revolutionary. She tells a harrowing tale with grace, she does not shy away from
describing the horrors of the French settler colonial occupation and its greusome
torture methods, nor does she omit the moments of joy that accompany the revolutionary
struggle.
What stood out to me most was the fact that to this day, the guerilla war remains nearly
identical to what it was in the '60s. The opressor's fire power has advanced
technologically, but guerillas still fight on three fronts: the first against the
military of the oppressing power, the second against the reactionary militias recruited
to harrass and murder civilians, and the third, the political front. The first two are
straightforwardly violent wars of attrition, but it is the third front — in which the
revolutionary forces gather and consolidate the support and cooperation of the people
they fight for, as well as the support of the world at large — where, despite lost
battles and grave sacrifices, wars of liberation are won. Zohra Drif participated in the
third front, and it is this that she meticulously recounts. It is exhilarating to read,
i read the whole book taught as a bowstring, and was reminded once again that the
operatives of a covert guerilla operation are only ever arrested as a result of
betrayal.
As Drif was recollecting the events of the Battle of Algiers, she happened to mention
Djamila Bouhired's lawyer, Jaqcues Verges, and i was very glad to have learned of him.
His rhetorical strategy of turning the tables on the French courts by proclaiming that
the A.L.N. were not, in fact, 'terrorists' outside the law, but people who loved their
country and were merely working towards its best interests, was genuinely enlightened.
Verges, of course, was unable to to win his argument, mainly due to the violence of the
audience in the courtroom, but that doesn't matter, it was a question of optics, and
Bouhired, Verges, and their comrades shone in that courtroom, as far as i'm concerned.
The only aspect of the war Drif omits is its incarnation in the wilayas, which she
would have had no direct knowledge of, she was an urban operative, after all. This is
just my curiosity getting ahead of me, Inside the Battle of Algiers is quite
possibly one of the best books i have ever read, and i hope to revisit it again, and
again.
-
Richard Wright,
Native Son (1940)
Then their eyes were riveted; a slate-colored pigeon swooped down to the middle
of the steel car tracks and began strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat
neck bobbing with regal pride. A streetcar rumbled forward and the pigeon rose swiftly
through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer that Bigger could see the gold of
the sun through their translucent tips. He tilted his head and watched the slate-colored
bird flap and wheel out of sight over the edge of a high roof.
Review:
i was led to Native Son by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and it
is the longest book i've read this year. When i was in school, a decade ago now, we read
To Kill a Mockingbird, and i think we should have read this book instead. i take
issue with Mockingbird in that it paints a very bland picture of Tom Robinson,
and that the story is told from the perspective of a little white girl, a position that
presumes naivete in the matter of racial discrimination, and implicates the reader into
that naivete. This is not a criticism of Harper Lee, she wrote what she knew, and she
wrote with as much sensitivity as she could muster, but the heroes and villians of her
story are white, and Tom Robinson a rhetorical device to expound on the actions of white
people. Black people remain entirely marginal in Mockingbird.
Bigger Thomas is a different kind of character altogether; he not only implicates the
reader into his life of poverty, longing, and powerlessness, he implicates us in the two
murders he commits. Bigger Thomas is not a nice young man at all, he is restless, he has
neglected to think about the conditions of his existence, and in this, he is a product
of the racist society he has grown up in. When he accidentally murders Mary Dalton,
paralysed by fear, we are in on it, when he hatches an ill-conceived plan to collect
ransom money on the disappeared Mary Dalton, we are in on it (i spent half this book
cursing Bigger for his stupidity, a stupidity that was, by dint of the narrative, also
mine), when he rapes and murders Bessie, we are in on it, and we're in on it when he
forgets to retrieve the money out of her pocket.
And then Bigger is arrested and accused of the crimes he has, in fact, committed, and
now, we as readers are implicated in the judicial system that seeks to persecute him, we
are implicated in the racist society that created Bigger Thomas, a society that now
wishes to destroy him to expiate it own guilt. By embedding the reader in Bigger, and the society that wishes to
erase him, Richard Wright demonstrates the cruel tangle of a society built on
hierarchies of class and race, but Wright is not a pessimist, he introduces a third
variable to the equation, communism, a concrete way forward.
i think, more than merely writing a riveting novel, Richard Wright may have been
thinking, thinking about society by means of fiction, there are paragraphs that veer
deep into philosophy, without the didactic thrust an academic work on philosophy might
employ. i can see why Frantz Fanon was taken by this novel, it meditates on the question
of the black man in much the same way he does, right down to the misogyny. Richard Wright,
however, employs misogyny as a rhetorical device far more conciously and
gracefully than Fanon — the fact that Bessie's body is wheeled in to the courthouse as
evidence, to superimpose upon the body of a white woman, violence she did not bear the
brunt of, was an incredibly harsh indictment of judicial order in the United States, and
frighteningly true, within the confines of the novel itself, and outside of it.
-
Olga Ravn,
The Wax Child (2023)
She fully believed they would never seize her. That she was as invincible as a
star. But I saw clearly that a star such as she was a star made of hair, and the hair
wound slowly outwards like the shoots of the bindweed, latching onto everything in its
path, twisting, sucking the capacity from its surroundings, that it be delivered to its
own starry middle, the empty void where wax children live. They will do right to fear
me, Christenze thought; but to me my mistress was harmless, as invincible as the foam
that tops the wave as it crests into its final peak.
Review:
My problem with The Wax Child is simple, i've read a handful of books which employ
the narrative device of (historical) witchcraft to explore women's oppression, and each
one explored these themes better. Let me name a few that cross my mind, so readers may
understand where i'm coming from: The Crucible (admittedly, this is a play, but
we'll get to that), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, and, Hurricane
Season.
Witchcraft as a narrative device has become rather ubiquitous in our times, a shorthand,
to explore the othering of women. We might even go so far as to say that Silvia
Frederici's theoretical work, Caliban and the Witch (which i have certain
reservations about, in retrospect), might have been partially responsible for the
concatenation of witchcraft with women's oppression. If its influence was indirect,
Frederici certainly had at least one finger in the pie.
The Wax Child re-treads some well-worn ground, Christenze, the protagonist, is a
lesbian, unmarried in her thirties, and a resident of Funen. She resists the ordained
place of women in her day, and for her defiance, she is accused of witchcraft.
Christenze avoids her first arrest and leaves behind her pastoral place of birth to
live in a city where she makes the acquantaince of a number of other women. Christenze and her new friends
go on to form what it later renounced as a witch's coven and the women are eventually arrested
and tried for their alleged crimes, we know how it goes.
Ravn's historical setting is well appointed, she paints a backdrop of the wane of
feudalism and first stabs at capitalism as it began to take shape with the advent of
Dutch colonialism. This aspect Ravn weaves in very well, i think, she neither
underplays, nor belabours the fact. Unfortunately, at least in my eyes, it conforms to
the theoretical thrust of Frederici's argument very closely, a little too closely. The
story somehow seems to be going through the motions, rather than breaking new ground.
This is evident from the fact that it employs historical figures drawn from archival
documents, and in addition to that, the novel is based on a play by Olga Ravn,
HEX. That's why i said we'd be returning to The Crucible; The Wax
Child is in some ways, a return to the Crucible, or an iteration of it.
The one point of interest is the other narrative device of note, the titular wax child,
the inanimate narrator of Christenze's ordeal. While the child is a very evocative
narrator (the book is very beautifully written, i think, though a little hollow), we've
seen Ravn employ inanimate objects as the fulcrum of her narrative before in The
Employees. It's just that this time, instead of the employees reporting on the
stones they found on an alien planet, it is the inanimate object reporting on the woman
who shaped it. In this, Ravn is reflecting on her own prior work, which is interesting,
to say the very least. i would be interested to learn of Ravn's reflections on this
aspect.
But overall, i was disappointed, The Employees was a very surprising read for me,
back in 2024, i want to say? And while i haven't read My Work yet, The Wax
Child was a bit anti-climactic for me.
-
Langston Hughes,
A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934)
I remarked at the absence of children in the fields. In the American South they
would be picking along with the parents. “Here, they are in school.” the director said.
Our kolkhoz has a four-year school. And in the village nearby there is a school for five
hundred pupils where the older students go. There is a teacher here for the grown-ups,
too. You will see during the rest period.”
Review:
This was a very short read, barely sixty pages long, but i learned quite a bit from it.
It brought up my old question, when does a published work become a historical text? But
we'll set that aside. i was drawn to the descriptions of schools for grown-ups, an
important institution that my own country sorely lacks. Literacy in my country is
calculated based on surveys where the conductors of the survey interview only the head
of the family and take their word for it, no formal tests are conducted, and just last
year, the consequences of these conditions reared their ugly head in the the utterly
needless 'special intensive review' of the electoral rolls.
You see, i live in a state with a sizeable Muslim population, and the Bharatiya Janata
Party would very much like to take power in the state, but this is quite a task, so the
B.J.P. rolled out their pathetic little ploy to suppress Muslim votes in the upcoming
elections. What complete and utter cowards they are. Either way, the block level
officers assigned to the task of going door to door, disbursing forms, and helping
people fill them out, were in boiling water, partially due to the excess burden brought
on by poor literacy in the rural and semi-rural areas. Some even killed themselves.
Sadly, there were not nearly as many suicides among the block level officers as there
were among the poor and Muslim, who would rather die than be stripped of their
citizenship... oh, right, i failed to mention that the 'special intensive review' is
just a reincarnation of the illegal citizenship laws the central government was hawking
back in 2019.
i went off on a tangent there, but my point is, i was happy to read that there was once a
concerted effort to bring literacy to a nation, and that the efforts were successful.
Perhaps one day, we will repeat those concerted, collective efforts in this land as
well.
-
Jamaica Kincaid,
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)
I then met my other traveling companions, the people who would make my journey
through the Himalaya a pleasure. There was Cook; his real name was so difficult to
pronounce, I could not do it then and I cannot do it now. There was his assistant, but
we called him “Table,” and I remember him now as “Table” because he carried the table
and the four chairs on which we sat for breakfast and dinner. Lunch we ate out of our
laps.
Review:
This was perhaps the most disappointing book i've read this year, because my introduction
to Kincaid came in January with A Small Place which burned with the flames of
anger directed at colonialism. In this book, nearly twenty years later, that fire has
been extinguished entirely, and Jamaica Kincaid, a black woman from Antigua plays the
part of a tourist from the United States, visiting Nepal in the midst of the country's
liberation struggle against the monarchy, and complaining about the freedom fighters —
the maoists.
The war the maoists fought, alongside and against leftist and liberal forces, ultimately
overthrew the monarchy and established a secular state in Nepal. And though we now live
a year
after that state has been dissolved, partially due to its own retrogression, we must
admit, that the abolition of a Hindu monarchist state was politically progressive.
Unfortunately for Nepal, it is bordered by India to the south, a regressive nation state
that is attempting to establish a Hindu nation, not only within its own borders, but
beyond it. Already, as Nepal attempts its difficult transition, imperialist, right-wing,
and hindutva forces are gathering, threating to return Nepal to its dark, casteist,
monarchist past.
But i'm getting ahead of myself as usual; in Among Flowers, Kincaid plays a very
insidious role, she enters the country as a citizen of the United States of America,
working in conjunction with National Geographic, who have paid for her entire trip, and
proceeds to paint the maoists, literal freedom fighters, as blundering terrorists.
Listen, i would go into the role of botany as a weapon of empire (Kincaid reason to
visit Nepal is to collect flower seeds for her garden in Vermont!), but her continuous
complaints about the maoists charging Kincaid and her compatriots 4000 rupees (about 30
dollars by today's standards) for safe passage is infuriating, as is her constant fear
that the maoists will kill her, when the only thing the maoists actually do is make the
party sit through a lecture in Nepali, a language which tourists from the U.S.A.
wouldn't even deign to learn because our dirty little third world languages are beneath
them. I hated reading every word of this book, and while i will continue reading
Kincaid's work, i know her politics now, and i will read her work knowing her as the
imperialist that she is.