What if I say the wrong thing?

I'm guessing I'm not the only one struggling to keep my head above (swamp) water at this point, desperate not to give up the fight, but struggling to maintain enough energy and morale enough to do so. I want to keep fighting, and I want to keep learning so I can fight better and smarter and more effectively. But heavy reading is almost more than I can take some days.

Well, whether you have that problem as well, or not, I have a great book for you to read. If you're ready to participate in the Resistance, to make the world a better, safer, more inclusive place for all people, not just for certain groups thereof, then What if I Say the Wrong Thing? by Verna A Myers is a great reading choice. This is a relatively small book and an easy read, told in small, manageable chapters--and yet don't be fooled: the subject matter is so important.

Myers addresses the idea of inclusivity in this book. When I had the pleasure of hearing her speak earlier this year, Ms. Myers talked about how diversity is inviting someone to the party, but inclusivity is asking them to dance. This book is a thorough, easy to understand and follow explanation of how that process of dancing together works, broken down into one topic per chapter. Each topic is posed as a simple question, with easy to understand answers provided. From facing one's own subconscious biases to learning to avoid micro-aggressions, accidental or otherwise, to expanding one's comfort zone and to learning to apologize when needed, the lessons are timely, important, and manageable.

Especially helpful is Myers' explanation early in the book of what others refer to as privilege (white privilege, straight privilege, etc), but which she refers to as "one-ups" and "one downs"--various bonuses or negatives that we experience in life that we probably have no control over, yet nevertheless experience the effects thereof. Treating the idea of privilege as a multi step mathematical problem makes it easier to think about and discuss the complexities of privilege, without the often knee-jerk reaction that often accompanies the term "privilege'. One might be one down, like the author, in gender and race and socio-economic background, but be one up in other areas, by being cis-gender, straight, Christian, native born, and an American citizen, for example. Privileged and unprivileged individuals aren't always as clearly defined as one might think at first, but recognizing the elements thereof is vital if we are going to move forward together.

This book is brief but empowering, and such an important contribution to the ongoing effort of learning to include those who are different from ourselves as well as those who are like us. We won't succeed in our Resistance without all of us learning to work together, and What if I Say the Wrong Thing is a valuable set of lessons on just how we can do that.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie

Every year Maryland selects one book that its citizen can all read at the same time. This program is called One Maryland, One Book, and it's a great program worth participating in, if you're in the state. Not only do libraries carry extra copies of that year's title, but there are book discussions scheduled, and usually events where the author speaks about their book and its topics. This year's selection for OMOB is Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, and it's fantastic.

I know the book discussions are not until September and October, but I decided to read the book selection early this year. I didn't want to have to compete for a library copy of the book, especially if I wanted to listen to Purple Hibiscus on audio. I highly recommend the audio version, performed by veteran audio book narrator Lisette Lecat. There's a lot of the Nigerian Igbo language used through the story, so hearing Lecat pronounce those terms as well as all the characters names is really helpful as someone not familiar with Nigerian languages.

I've read some reviews that suggest that Purple Hibiscus starts slowly for them, but I did not have that experience. The vivid descriptions and breathless tone that Adichie sets from the beginning absolutely mesmerized me. As a survivor of an abusive religious home, I identified almost completely with Kambili and Jaja and their mother. The emotions described are breathtakingly, terrifyingly real. Considering the vast difference in ethnic and socio-economic status between myself and the characters, that's quite a feat of writing.

The story does build slowly, as we come to know Kambili, her dutiful, quiet mother, her smart, responsible brother Jaja, and their obsessively devout, terrifying, loving, abusive, unstable, magnanimous, controlling Papa, Eugene. It's a testament to Adichie's writing that as despicable as their Papa is, he's also almost a sympathetic character, with hints at what horrors must have warped him into the monster he's become.  These character's world is so small and quiet and restricted as the story starts, but it opens, slowly, like the titular hibiscus blooming. Slowly new additions arrive in their circle. Their grandfather. Their Auntie Ifeoma and their three cousins. A new, young, and vital native-born priest. Each character is sharply drawn, distinct and life-like. And where new people enter the circle, so do new places and new experiences.

Kambili, the brilliant and dutiful daughter, mesmerized by her controlling father, has learned to internalize her experiences, due to her home life, which makes her a great narrator. But even she finds herself slowly opening up to new experiences as the story progresses and as she sees her beloved brother Jaja begin to open up. Interspersed throughout their personal narrative is a tale of civil unrest in post-colonial Nigeria, complete with coups and government corruption and assassination and suppression of the press. All of this only adds to the tension in this family's world, as Kambili's father and the editor of the newspaper he owns are outspoken critics of the oppressive government.

Overall, Purple Hibiscus is a mesmerizing look at issues of justice, both large and small, seen through the eyes of several very vulnerable characters. It also offers a bit of hope for what small changes in circumstances can bring about in the quality of life for both individuals and countries. I highly recommend this book. My only caveat would be a content warning: if you're triggered by reading vivid accounts of domestic abuse, both emotional and physical, read with care. Otherwise, please join the rest of Maryland in reading a great book that grapples with so many different but important topics. The more we know and understand about our world, the better we can resist injustice.

Maryland Humanities 2017 One Maryland One Book

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

I admit I choose this book because of the stylish cover and provocative title assuming it would be an historical mystery similar to the Maisie Dobbs series. It had that same well researched, early 20th century, proto-feminist vibe. I got the well researched part right. I was about ⅓ of the way through wondering if I should switch to something easier like The Hammett Hex or Caramel Crush (my Trump era escapist reading list has been heavy on the cozy mysteries.) I glanced at the book’s endnotes and noticed a photo of Constance Kopp dated 1916 followed by a list of sources including documents and newspaper articles recounting a court case involving the Kopp sisters, Constance, Norma and Fleurette, and Henry Kaufman a wealthy scion of a silk magnate associated with the Black Hand. 
 

The Kopp sister’s buggy is hit by Henry Kaufman’s motor car in Paterson, NJ. The women and the buggy, but not the horse, suffer damage and Constance requests that Kaufman pay to repair the buggy. The buggy is the sister’s only means of transportation and they are of limited means. The three women live in a farmhouse in Bergen County, New Jersey and cherish their independence. Because Kaufman was drinking when he hit them Constance, the eldest, assumes he will take responsibility for the accident and pay the repair bill. He doesn’t. In fact rather than pay for the repairs he begins to harass the sisters, going as far as to  stalk them and threaten their lives with his Black Hand compatriots.

Imagine if you will a trust fund kid who has access to too much money and has never been held responsible for his misdeeds. Who doesn’t think the lives of three ordinary women matter. Who uses company money to pal around with his friends, some of whom are rumored to be gangsters. A wealthy young man who thinks poor and working women are disposable and available to him sexually because he is rich. Maybe even their boss. Maybe this book is starting to feel a little too familiar and I need to revisit those cupcake murders. Because this is a book about three ordinary women standing up to a rich, white man who thinks they don’t matter. That he is entitled to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants as long as they have less power and less money than he does. Kaufman has the local police on his side but the sisters have Heath, a rogue Sheriff who wants to bring down Kaufman’s gang.

The novel is a fictionalized account but all of the key elements of the story are true right down to an article in the Philadelphia Sun headlined, “Girl Waits with Gun” (11/23/1914) and the court case that ended the threats to the Kopp sister’s lives and settled the bill for the damaged buggy. There is lot’s of action, a juicy backstory, snappy writing and a side mystery that will keep you reading. Although Constance is the lead character all three of the Kopp sisters hold their own and you will root for them and despite the odds they win. You might even say they persisted.

Queer There and Everywhere: 23 People who Changed the World

If you’re like me right now, you’re struggling. We want to keep fighting. We have to resist. But, wow, some days sustaining that fight is just too exhausting. Some days I don’t have the energy to read a heavy, serious, depressing book about issues, no matter how much those issues matter. Some days I want something that’s an easy read. But why not have an easy read that also addresses the issues I care about?

That is exactly what you will get with reading Queer There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World, written by Sarah Prager, an author and activist who identifies as queer herself. In short, engaging, and well-researched segments, Prager lays out some basics facts about 23 people throughout history up through the present who fit into the LGBTQ+ category in one way or another. Some of them are household names (Eleanor Roosevelt. Jeanne d’Arc. Abraham Lincoln!). Some are perhaps less famous, but still recognizable names (Alan Turning, Lili Elbe, Frida Kahlo). And others are not household names, but should be (Josef Kohout, Kristina Vasa, Bayard Rustin). Sandwiched among the stories are explanations of related concepts and issues, like pronoun usage and relevant historical and/or cultural perspectives. There’s a thorough introduction, and a glossary of related terms after the stories, as well as a bibliography with further resources for study.

Is this an in-depth look at this important but far too often contentious issue? Not exactly. It’s a short, compulsively readable collection written on a young adult level. But what it is is a primer, an introduction, an easy read that conveys a lot of important stories, including the most important message of all—you are not alone. Regardless of your sexuality you are not alone. You are beautiful and important. Don’t believe the lies. 

So if you don’t think this resistance read sounds heavy-hitting or comprehensive enough for you, pick up a copy to share with someone else in your life instead.  Queer people aren’t a new phenomenon. They deserve as much love and respect as any other human out there, obviously. And it’s good to remind us all of that from time to time. Remind us of why we resist, who we resist for, and how we can keep resisting, like so many of the fierce, beautiful people featured in this book did and continue to do.  

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Last week I posted BookRiot’s list of “socially conscious page-turners” on Facebook and highly recommended Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle as a must read. Unfortunately, I never wrote a review of it, just made everyone else read it. I briefly contemplated re-reading the novel and declaring this the year of the re-read (see The Handmaid’s Tale) but decided there simply wasn’t time. So I offer an alternative from 2008, Napoleon Dynamite meets Paul Beatty in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. 

There has been plenty written about Díaz’s novel. Poor Oscar has been described as a fat nerd, uber-nerd, and a ghetto-nerd. Oscar is not the all American boy, he’s the fanboy in the corner reading comics. Nor, is Oscar a good stereotype of a Dominican. His love of science fiction and role playing games and his inability to get a date makes him stand out as oddball in the New Jersey Latinx community where he grows up with his mother and his older sister;

Sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often) and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family that he’d become the neighborhood parigüayo. Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it.

While the novel is primarily Oscar’s story, we do learn quite a bit about his family, Lola, Oscar’s devoted sister and Beli, the reckless teenage girl from the Dominican Republic who ends up a single mom in Paterson, New Jersey. Writing about Beli’s youth; “This was a country; [the Dominican Republic] a society that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Plátano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible darkskinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still."

Yunior, the principle narrator, tells Oscar’s story with a fluid combination of English, Spanish and urban slang. The writing and Oscar’s inescapable nerdiness conjure up a most peculiar comparison. Think Napoleon Dynamite meets Paul Beatty. I haven’t loved a geek this much since Napoleon hit the big screen and Díaz’s controlled and exuberant writing, bring to mind the poetic language of Beatty’s, The White Boy Shuffle.

If you are familiar with Junot Díaz’s writing either fiction or non-fiction you’ll understand why this is a resistance read. Much like The White Boy Shuffle, Oscar Wao is a socially conscious coming of age story that examines racial and gender issues. These concepts run through all of Díaz’s fiction, “[i]n my books, I try to show how these oppressive paradigms work together with the social reality of the characters to undermine the very dreams the characters have for themselves.” Díaz is a very public writer and you can find interviews and lectures online including these from the Boston Review on writing about race and gender in The Search For Decolonial Love (Parts I and II) and creating political art, “Junot Díaz on Political Art and the Immigrant as Sauron,” in Vox. And then there are the footnotes on the history of the Dominican Republic and Trujillo dictatorship fact checked by the New York Public Library in 2010. 

An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina

My latest Resistance Read is An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina. Paul is better known as the man who inspired the film Hotel Rwanda. This is the story of his time in Rwanda, before and during the 1994 genocide there, told from his perspective. Paul is an intelligent, well-spoken well educated man who is able to not only tell his own story and that of his friends and neighbors in a compelling way, but also to extrapolate greater issues behind the events that happened, draw comparisons to other events around the world, discuss the colonial history that led up to and contributed to these events, and hypothesize about future events, based on the progress of issues so far. 

It’s terrifying to hear how seemingly quietly and easily his country slipped down the slippery slope, from class and ethnic tensions to brutal, intentional, terrifyingly efficient genocide. How the government-sponsored media gradually, effectively spread the flames of hatred and encourage and abetted the violence. How the world just turned its back to ignore the inconvenient events happening in Rwanda. How neighbors and friends, ministers and congregants, public officials and their citizens, even husbands and wives could turn against each other, in the most horrifically brutal fashion imaginable. It was also fascinating to see what patience and calm conversation, as well as some alcohol and some well-placed bribery and sometimes the reminders of favors owed, could do to spare the lives of at least a fraction of those slaughtered. Paul remarks multiple times throughout his story that he and his actions were not extraordinary. That what he did manage to achieve seems so small in comparison to the death toll of that brief time. And that others did what he did, in their own ways and to their own capacity, without the recognition that his socioeconomic position and status gained him.

It's difficult to read Paul’s story and hear how his country went from tensions to violence so completely and so relatively quickly without feeling some concern about parallels to our own country’s growing political division and hostility. But perhaps we should take a page from Paul’s advice as well. He strongly urges conversation between opposing factions. He says that if one truly listens to and talks with someone, even if both parties still disagree, it is difficult not to see them as human, as real people with real concerns. The silence between factions and refusal to dialog about issues of ethnic tension and injustice were a contributing factor to the genocide in his country, but they aren't helpful to any country functioning properly. When we cease to see others as humans, as neighbors and friends and coworkers, but instead see them as “other”, it becomes easier to imagine the formerly unthinkable, to treat them in ways we would not treat those we know and care about. And nothing good can come from that.

“He [Mugesera] was preaching an ideology—and an identity—based on nothing more than a belief in the murderous intentions of the enemy....That was merely the cover story, the cheap trick that could rouse a mob into supporting the strong men. And that was the true purpose of all the revolutionary rhetoric: It was all about Habyarimana and the rest of the elite trying to keep a grip on the reins of government....It was a revolution, all right, but there was nobody to overthrow. The Hutu government wanted all the anger in Rwanda pointed towards any target but itself.”

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

"It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress, and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.

I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary."

"There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared. And when it was known that the police, or the army, or whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped. A few things were blown up, post offices, subway stations. But you couldn't even be sure who was doing it. It could have been the army, to justify the computer searches and the others ones, the door-to-doors. . . .I didn't know many of the neighbors, and when we met, outside on the street, we were careful to exchange nothing more than the ordinary greetings. Nobody wanted to be reported, for disloyalty."

The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliantly written terrifying look into a dystopian future version of the United States, a religious fascist ‘Republic of Gilead’, where women are valued only for their ability to bear children, where LGBTQ citizens and religious minorities and abortion doctors and political dissidents and anyone else who displeases the regime are executed and hung on a wall to rot in display, and where the “children of Ham” (a conservative Christian term for those of African descent) are being ‘resettled.’  We glimpse inside this terrifying, suffocating world through the eyes and scattered memories of a ‘handmaiden’ named Offred, learning the complicated history, personal and national, by which she has come to this intolerable position. Segments of the story seem too far-fetched to be possible—but are they? As you learn the slippery slope the led the USA into the Republic of Gilead, the future that Margaret Atwood imagines may not seem so far-fetched after all.

I’m not sure I’d call The Handmaid’s Tale a fun book, but it is an important book. It speaks truth in a way that is easy to read and hard to put down, that may follow you to sleep at night, that may echo in your mind when you hear the news and talk to those who endorse the joining of church and state. If ever there is a resistance read, this book is it, and is highly recommended for provoking thoughts of what could come if we are silent and complacent, and what we must do in order to ensure that this story is not our future. 

In addition, or if you are unable to read The Handmaid's Tale at the moment, Hulu has a new version of the story being released as a TV show, and it looks just as timely and chilling as the book. I can't wait to see it.