Tag: racism

Book review: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

the people in the trees book cover

I have had The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara on my to-read list since it was published more than 10 years ago. It was her first novel, before the worldwide phenomenon that was her follow-up A Little Life. Which I read and loved, but it is devastating, and I think that made me delay reading more from her. And it has to be said that this book also deals with heavy, shocking themes. I think it’s brilliant, but it is not an easy read.

On the first page we are told that the main character, Dr Norton Perina, has been arrested and charged with rape, statutory rape, sexual assault and endangering a minor. What follows is his protege Ronald Kubodera’s attempt to exonerate him, wrapped around Perina’s memoir written from prison. Kubodera does not claim the offences didn’t happen. He thinks everything Perina has done is justified. It is an unsettling angle from which to approach the story. And it is also extremely clever, because it allows Yanagihara to show both the full extent of Perina’s awfulness and the fact that he truly did not see any problem with his own actions.

Perina is an American doctor who, we are told, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for discovering a medical condition that retards ageing. This condition existed only in a remote tribe in a Micronesian island country called U’ivu. We also learn that over a period of decades, Perina adopted 43 children from U’ivu and raised them in the US. It isn’t hard to connect the dots between the facts revealed in the first two pages, but the full horror isn’t revealed until near the end of the novel’s 360 pages.

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Book review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

HomegoingI’ve had Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi on my TBR for a few years and I had put off reading it from fear that it would be sad or tough. I shouldn’t have worried. While it deals with tough subjects and has sad moments, it is also a highly enjoyable read with a lot of joy in its pages.

Effia and Esi, born in the 1750s on the Gold Coast of Africa, are sisters but they have never met. Raised in different villages, as they reach marriageable age they are in very similar positions, with promising local matches, but fate has something rather different in store.

Effia is married off to a white trader. She loves him but can never fit in with the other wives in the British fortress. Esi is captured when war breaks out between tribes and sold into slavery. She is shipped to America from the very fortress where her sister is living.

Gyasi traces the lineages of these two women through to the 21st century, through them telling the story of Ghana and the USA. From plantation slavery to missionaries, from colonialism to Harlem slums, there’s a lot to cover here and a lot of it is serious stuff, but this book has enough light moments and warm characters to never feel heavy.

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She had once been threadbare, with seven lives to weave from darkness

Betty Shabazz book coverBetty Shabazz: a Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X
by Russell J Rickford

A late-night read on my Kindle while trying to get the dog to sleep, I was starting to feel bad about how long it was taking me to read this autobiography until I saw on Goodreads that it’s over 600 pages. In fairness Dr Betty Shabazz lived a full and fascinating life that deserves every one of those pages. She was so much more than Mrs Malcolm X, though of course that marriage made her famous and opened the door for her to be an activist and ambassador.

Rickford says in his introduction that he will concentrate on Betty’s life before and after Malcolm, but inevitably their seven years of marriage form a lot of the narrative and at times this veers into being yet another Malcolm X or Nation of Islam biography. He also refers to her as “the widow” a lot, which somewhat undermines his stated mission to depict her as more than that role. Not that it was easy role to hold.

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She is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude

Underground Railroad book coverThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead

Not that I ever doubted it, but this book is excellent. It depicts many details of the awfulness of slavery while also being a highly readable adventure narrative. Please forgive the short review – this book deserves more analysis but it’s now a while since I read it and I just want to share my praise for it before I forget even more.

Cora is a slave in Georgia. She is an outcast of sorts among the slaves on the plantation, tarred by her mother’s reputation of madness and her own fierce protection of the tiny garden her mother left her. On the verge of adulthood, new threats raise their ugly head and an offer is made: does she want to attempt an escape with recently arrived slave Caesar? Her journey across America, making use of an underground railroad that is an actual railway underground, is astonishing, terrifying, entertaining and upsetting.

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I should have known that someone would come along and spoil it

Queenie book coverQueenie
by Candice Carty-Williams

I loved this novel. It starts out riotously funny and gradually introduces its themes until it becomes clear that it’s talking about some very serious shit. But it remains extremely enjoyably readable to the end. Which is saying something right now, as having a puppy is very distracting.

We meet Queenie texting her boyfriend Tom from the stirrups of a gynaecologist’s table, while she waits for a series of nurses and doctors to come and take a look. Through the rest of the day, between her aunt Maggie’s ceaseless chatter and her quiet evening at home, we learn that all is not rosy between Queenie and Tom. But the reasons for that take a while to emerge because they are filtered through Queenie blaming herself and idolising Tom for “putting up with” her. While she is frank about some things in her life (sex, mostly) she is less open on other matters.

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Musical interlude: Hell You Talmbout

This protest song written by Janelle Monáe, performed by members of the Wondaland collective, is incredibly powerful, and this seems like the right time to be resurfacing it. Say her name: Breonna Taylor.

There is a tax on success

PachinkoPachinko
by Min Jin Lee

This is an epic family saga spanning two countries and most of the twentieth century. It took some time to lure me in, but once in I really loved it.

Pachinko starts in Korea in 1910 – the year when Japan invaded and occupied the country. Lee briefly sketches the family background of the woman who is to become the heart of the book: Sunja. She is the only surviving child of a couple who run a small boardinghouse in a fishing village near Busan. Their tenants are mostly fishermen and their income is small, but their reputation is strong enough that even as times get tough in Korea, they manage to get by.

Sunja is poor, uneducated and plain-looking, and as such she doesn’t expect to marry, but circumstances conspire to match her with an educated man who wants to take her with him to Japan to build a new life, so in 1933 they emigrate. But in Osaka she discovers that there is a form of poverty that is far worse than the way she was raised – because it is based on and maintained by racism. No Japanese company will hire Koreans except for the lowest of menial tasks.

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Harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison

I have been meaning to read this for years, and especially so since I added it to two of my reading lists: Classics Club and the Luke Cake Reading List. I finally bought a copy after seeing the Gordon Parks photography project of the same name in Berlin last year (Parks and Ellison worked together on the project for LIFE magazine), which was a really moving experience.

The novel is also moving, but equally brutal and shocking. It opens and closes (aside from the slightly abstract, essayistic prologue and epilogue) with its most shocking scenes. The un-named narrator starts out as a successful scholar whose family can’t afford to send him to college. His one chance is to impress the local rotary club – i.e. powerful rich white men. At the club he finds himself in a group of black young men who are stripped to their underwear and forced to fight each other while blindfolded. Afterward they are made to scrabble on the floor for their pay. It’s upsetting, humiliating, dehumanising, and the outcome is that the narrator is given a scholarship to a black-only college. It seems that his life is set.

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Maybe if I keep trying, I really won’t feel anything

Lies We Tell Ourselves
by Robin Talley

When this book was chosen by my book group I was worried it would be a tough read due to the subject matter. But it turned out, the problem I had was with the narrators’ tone and voice.

That’s not to say the subject matter isn’t tough, but I was reading this at the same time as dipping in and out of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and by comparison, well, it shows that Talley’s book is intended for a young adult audience.

It’s 1959 and some school districts in Virginia are holding out against integration. Sarah is one of 10 black pupils who were specially chosen to attend the white-only Jefferson High School after years of court battles. No-one at Jefferson wants them there and more than that, they don’t understand why the black students would want to come to their school.

“I wipe the tears away and stare at my reflection until my face smooths out and my eyes go empty.

This is how they have to see me. If they know I feel things, they’ll only try to make me feel worse.

Maybe if I keep trying, I really won’t feel anything.”

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Free speech is unthinkable

Burmese Days
by George Orwell

I’m always nervous of contemporary books about colonialism but I figured I’d be in safe hands with Orwell. Like A Passage to India, the major theme is the racism inherent to colonialism, but Orwell does a better job than Forster of clearly separating his characters’ racism from his own opinions on the subject.

The first character we meet is U Po Kyin, a middle-ranking Burmese official who has plotted and bribed his way to where he is and continues to plot his way further up. The next step in his plan is to destroy the reputation of Dr Veraswami, the local doctor. The biggest hurdle he faces is that the doctor is friends with Mr Flory – a white British man, in a country where the ruling British are unassailable.

For the most part the rest of the novel follows Flory as he tries to keep a grip on his awkward position in society. They’re in a small town in northern Burma and the Europeans-only Clubhouse has just eight members, most of whom are, like Flory, timber merchants who spend most of their time in the jungle. Aside from Flory they keep themselves apart from the native population and refer to them with racial epithets that are shocking to modern ears, and I suspect even at the time would have been frowned on “back home”. Flory makes clear by his friendship with the doctor that he doesn’t agree with the prevailing opinion, but he rarely opens his mouth to object when racist things are said.

“[Flory said,] ‘I don’t want the Burmans to drive us out of the country. God forbid! I’m here to make money, like everyone else. All I object to is the slimy white man’s burden humbug. The pukka sahib pose. It’s so boring. Even those bloody fools at the Club might be better company if we weren’t all of us living a lie the whole time.’
‘But, my dear friend, what lie are you living?’
‘Why, of course, the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them. I suppose it’s a natural enough lie. But it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine. There’s an everlasting sense of being a sneak and a liar that torments us and drives us to justify ourselves night and day. It’s at the bottom of half our beastliness to the natives.’ ”

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