Tag Archives: african american literature

Book Review | ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison

16 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in 1001 Book Challenge, Book Review, Excerpts

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BelovedBeloved by Toni Morrison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

This is Morrison describing why and how she went about writing ‘Beloved‘. When I first came to read the novel, I noticed a very uncomfortable gap, or rather ‘jarring’ between what Morrison was trying to say and what she ended up saying. Nothing was straight forward, even the first opening sentence felt as if it had been dragged out backwards from the psyche. The ‘slave experience’ that she mentions, and the claustrophobic memory of the dead that continually pervades the living is the catalyst Morrison uses to break down the hindering effect of language.

As a novel of extremities, ‘Beloved’ explores the limitless depths of love and hate, showing the places where they intermingle and become almost interchangeable. This is much more than just a ghost story, much more than the angry, persistent haunting of a mother who loved her baby so much, she had to choose between the better of two evils. The haunting is one that clings to the skirts of an entire race. I have often heard people say how disconcerting Morrison’s prose is apt to be, and how many have turned away from this fine novel with confusion, misunderstanding or even sheer disgust. I implore that they look again, for their own good.

Personally, after much wrestling with the novel, I have found that this disjointedness provides the perfect rhythm to a story about a people whose hearts are scarred by the unspeakable. This is not just about slavery, the evils of that practice nor how people escaped. It’s about what happens after; how a person goes about mourning for ones own wasted life, but also for those that came before them and those that might come after.

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

Because it is only after, when fate or a change in ones’ circumstance allows a moment of reflection, that the sting of the whip begins to reverberate in the soul.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

Every character in this novel has their own tragedies. Even though Sethe is the main character and her infanticide the focal point on the novel, there are other more gruesome events. I can sympathise with Sethe, because Morrison boldly takes the reader down a very dark path to her particular reasoning. It is not something I could personally achieve on my own, but thanks to characters like Ella and Baby Suggs, I felt I could access the delirious logic of a woman on the edge of reason.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

This is not an easy book, it is hard to read and harder to understand. It works on many levels and tackles a lot of very thorny issues. Not for the faint-hearted nor the narrow-minded. It’s a mental workout which leaves you drained at the end. I’ll not be re-reading it for a while, because I feel this one will be staying in my mind for a long time. However I am glad I read it, because no literary work I have read thus far has ever looked at slavery as boldly as ‘Beloved’.

If you like your novels to have a bold streak in them, then ‘Beloved’ is for you.

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Book Review | ‘Giovanni’s Room’ by James Baldwin

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Book Review, Excerpts

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Giovanni's RoomGiovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Americans should never come to Europe,’ she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, ‘it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.”

Wow, just… wow. Sorry, I’m still reeling after the amazing wordplay that is ‘Giovanni’s Room’. Reading this slim book has set me straight about a lot of things regarding good writing. And I don’t mean that in a ‘readerly’ sense. Oh no. James Baldwins’ novel is much more than a modern classic of gay literature; it is also one of the strongest statements about the definition of ‘author’ and the perceived limitations of a writer that I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

In this review I will try to cover what those are, and through them hopefully convey some sense of what makes this such an important novel for anyone interested in reading beyond mere words. Therefore you have due warning; this won’t be your average review where I analyse characters, settings, plot twists etc. It’s more like me banging on about my thoughts and feelings on the author.

Being Baldwin’s second novel, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ wasn’t received very well when it was published in 1957, because people did not like the idea of a black author writing about gay white men. As far as the public was concerned white people were none of his business, and the book was considered by his publisher as career suicide. By writing a novel about a sensitive subject like white sexuality Baldwin was going where no other black author had gone before. The novel represented a transgression, an outright challenge to the time-honored norm that like white writers, black authors were expected to stay within a certain spectrum of acceptable themes. Baldwin totally blew that away, as he was one of the first black authors to write about homosexuality using caucasian characters.

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

And as a reader I found that (ashamedly) I was quite shocked too. I mean, why should I be shocked? Can’t different races write about each other? Of course they can. Can’t a black author write about the cultural, social and sexual taboos surrounding his white peers? Absolutely. So why the shock? Why the ‘wowness’ of it all? I suppose it all comes down to a certain type of conditioning, of reading material like Alice Walkers ‘The Color Purple’ and Toni Morrisons’ ‘The Beloved’ and the naïve preconception that black people would naturally stick to and write about their own histories, that they are (and should be) playing catch-up with other races in forging their own racial mythologies and what have you.

Well, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ was like a wake up call. It’s as if Baldwin is saying ‘Look, we are much more than just a colour. Enough with the slave stories.’ Well, that is not what he said actually, what he REALLY said was that sexuality IS a race issue and it always will be, because of the mutual social alienation and stigmas attached to them both. Through his writing (the very cadence of which is carefully stripped of anything remotely resembling the earthy, mystical, otherly tones commonly related with African culture), he taught me a long eye-opening lesson about what a real writer is: a pen that is raceless and therefore free to write about anyone, anywhere and about anything it wants. In this sense I have often considered authors to be the most complete ‘method actors’ around, in that it is their job to be all characters at once. Authors are what a steel rod is to lightning: a conductor channeling raw energy from the ether of the imagination.

‘Giovanni’s Room’ is all of this and more, as we not only witness France in all its’ degenerate glory or the nauseous guilt and fear that accompanies sexual confusion and vice; we witness it free from the literary trappings of race and colour.

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Book Review | ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker

19 Saturday Jun 2010

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Books Finished: The Color Purple Alice Walker (1001 Booklist)

Currently Reading:
The Devil and Miss Prym Paulo Coelho (1001 Booklist)
The Lost Estate Alain Fournier
I have never had so many books on the go. Six in total. That is a mammoth list. I look at the pile next to me and I wonder just how many of these can I squeeze into February. Right now it’s looking like the Coelho or the Guevara might just make it. The Morrison will definitely NOT. There are days when I feel like all this reading is going to amount to something, but what that will be, I have no idea.
Right now, I’m stumbling through titles that I thought I’d read, but I’d actually left half-finished. The Color Purple was one of them. It was an inspirational book despite the awful things that happen to the characters. The themes of incest, rape and lesbianism were worked into the story in a way that didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might. The love of one woman to another did not strike me as particularly shocking or forbidden… given the terrible things the female characters go through.

Walker raises important questions about love, hope and what it’s like to be a woman in today’s society. Even though the book is set in the early 1900’s when slavery was still fresh in the minds of African Americans, Walker also concentrates on the oppression that was prevalent within black society. Or rather more precisely, the domestic violence against black women.
While this is the key ingredient of the novel, what shines through is the steely strength of these women who have suffered generations of racial abuse. The female characters in the novel all have their own unique strengths and weakness, but they all eventually pull through in the end, and become stronger women by sticking together and helping each other. It is this sorority, the faith they find in themselves, that brings them closer to happiness and the freedom they desire. The most important message would have to be that we often choose to make ourselves a slave. Walker’s characters, whether they be men or women, in the end  find a way to release the trapped self within them. They begin to love the person they are, and look forward to the person they want to be.
Walker shows us that staying shackled to the past, is the sickest form of slavery. After all, in a situation like the one she portrays, who is the master and who is the slave? Who holds the whip, and who bears the lashes?
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