Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic and a much anticipated civil rights movement —we’re enthusiastic for your stories, and for the year ahead. The month of June has marked an unforgettable milestone, bringing light to developments in a radically energized plan for racial justice, beginning with structural reform. Although, there is much more work to be done. Make sure to stop by our announcements page to access the organizations that we hope you will spend some time researching, joining, and donating to. We also have a confession to make, we’ve put our heads together to share with you what we’ve been reading during quarantine, and amidst all of the changes taking place. We’re excited to recommend the books we believe are essential companions, for however you decide to spend the rest of your summer.
Knut Hamsun — HUNGER
James Baldwin – Giovanni’s Room – At the age of 32, Baldwin completed one of his most outspoken autobiographical pieces that has yet to disappear from view. Giovanni’s Room is not to remain solely a testament of sexual rites and disparities, it is also a dramatized crisis at the helm of self delusion and highlights the importance of the art of seduction. James Baldwin’s work has always dealt with the euphoric state of love and exile. The story follows the path of David, an American man exploring his sexual relationships with men, and women, while residing in Paris.
The unpredictable aspects of desire is presented through an ambiguous story, one impenetrable. A story about bisexuality, while further addressing the manner of how desire barges its way into our lives, promising a new identity. Baldwin’s enigmatic prose is both nourishing and unpredictable.
David, our narrator, describes unsparingly his observations and is entrapped by regret. He repents for his sins. Yet with vivid evocations, he becomes an observer of intimacy, delivering a terror, a wisdom, a human characterization not yet exposed to an audience of the 1950’s.
It could be said that I have a soft spot for Giovanni’s Room, as it was the first piece I’d ever read by Baldwin. But I have to admit to you this, it is his best work, whether or not you read it first or after picking up his other works; read it when you first wake, bring it with you to the protest, when you need a friend who understands —as a witness to his humble testimony: James Baldwin, you have figured the rapture, and spoken for those of us who had yet to realize the words we must surrender to; his mind, out his mouth, JAMES! —this wondrous and profound being, he has your heart under a spell. It is the spell of a truth so revealing, and we cannot resist any longer.
Bharati Mukherjee — The Tiger’s Daughter — Recovering ones roots as an immigrant is not a widely discussed topic when one resides already in America, especially within a family of many a privileges. Albeit is it is a discussion, and one revealed through Mukherjee’s works, which foregrounds a dismantling of all we’ve been lied to about. The visible effects of racism in India are also boldly addressed with the Naxalite uprising in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
"She sat in an uncomfortable chair in the hall, under a framed photograph of her great-grandfather, trying to compose a letter to her husband. Her parents, she said, were very well; of course, they worried about the bombings and recurring strikes. Tara idly scratched grease from the photograph about her head." Bharati Mukherjee, the Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer, delineated in her writing the cultural changes and alienation of the immigrant experience.
Mukherjee's debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), tells of a sheltered Indian woman shocked by her immersion in American culture and, on her return to India, dismayed by an unrecognizable Calcutta.
“We immigrants have fascinating tales to relate. Many of us have lived in newly independent or emerging countries which are placed by civil and religious conflicts …. when we uproot ourselves from those countries and come here, either by choice or out of necessity, we suddenly must absorb 200 years of American history and learn to adapt to American society … I attempt to illustrate this in my novels and short stories. My aim is to expose Americans to the energetic voices of new settlers in this country.”
Alfred Jarry – UBU ROI – Translated by Barbara Wright – A drama in five acts -translated from the French, canonized by the surrealists, ridiculed and celebrated; “Pooh what a dreadful beast.” spoke the poppy and the dandelion. Jarry’s intention was to shake up the elite back in the 1890’s – the aristocrats whom seemed to be too tepid and uncultured for Jarry’s liking.
Lest we misunderstand the Latin spewing orgy scrawling down the walls of snowy Lithuanian cliffs in UBU ROI; these are not madmen, nor crackpots -these are the revolutionists, destroying the reputation of the French Czar- tempting the bourgeois to climb out from their polished shells.
If you know his work, then you know his life. Jarry was an ether addict, and was said to have lived in a filthy room with a sagging ceiling, his two pet owls, rotting flowers, and personal effects of the many Belgian girls who visited his squalid flat. Smells like home. “Scum yourself! How did such a crummy creature as you ever get slapped together?” - the gritty brilliance of Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI.
Ta-Nehisi Coates — We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy — A collection of essays originally published from The Atlantic Magazine, between 2008 and 2016 over the course of the Barack Obama administration. “The notion that writing about race, which is to say, the force of white supremacy, is marginal and provincial is itself parcel to white supremacy, premised on the notion that the foundational crimes of this country are mostly irrelevant to its existence.”
Coates takes his title from the haunting words of Thomas Miller, a black South Carolinian who had been elected to state office during the years of Reconstruction after the civil war. Black people in South Carolina significantly outnumbered white people and, for a time, dominated the legislature.
They had, in fact, as WEB Du Bois showed in his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America, instituted “good Negro government”; the very thing, Du Bois said, whites feared most.
