BOOK REVIEWS | summer 2006
Reviewed in this issue:
Alentejo Blue By Monica Ali
Barefootin': Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom By Unita Blackwell with JoAnne Prichard Morris
The Potbellied Virgin By Alicia Yánez Cossío
homegrown: engaged cultural criticism By bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains
The Dead Hour By Denise Mina
Gaiutra Bahadur
Alentejo Blue
By Monica Ali
Scribner
Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane,
won her kudos and condemnation.
She earned the kudos for gracefully
telling the undertold stories of
Bangladeshi immigrants in London.
The condemnation came from some
of those very immigrants, who
denounced her portrayal of their community
as “insulting and shameful.”
Ali’s second book removes the
Dhaka-born, British-raised writer
from the spotlight—and the crosshairs—of her ethnic
background. Alentejo
Blue unfolds in Portuguese
corktree country—nowhere near Dhaka, or its outpost
on Brick Lane. And, if Ali has any literary
debt to pay, it’s not to
Salman Rushdie, Anita
Desai or any other
South Asian writing in
English. Ali evokes the
village of Mamarrosa
the way American novelist Sherwood
Anderson did the town of Winesburg,
Ohio, in 1919—with spare prose,
through interior monologues built on
a foundation of silence.
In the quietly lyrical opening chapter,
an octogenarian named Joao finds
the body of his friend Rui hanging
from the mossy branch of a cork tree.
As he cuts down and cradles the body,
the arc of their friendship and its erotic
subtext emerges through flashbacks.
Fishing by the riverbank one day, Rui,
an agitator for workers’ rights, questions
Joao about conditions at his factory. He wants to know if the barracks
bring men closer. Joao, who knows
what species of furtive closeness the barracks promote, does not want to
talk about it. He barks, “No.”
“‘All right,’ said Rui. ‘Let’s be quiet, then. We are not afraid of silence. ’” In nine spare chapters, Ali
tests that declaration. She introduces
us to a series of village regulars who
must cope with silences loaded with
the baggage of relationships, mortality
and God.
At the end of a long day, Vasco, the cartoonishly fat cafe owner, meditates
on a question of great moment: Should he eat the almond pastry, or
not? Memories of his life in America—and the death of his wife in childbirth—crop up in the vast pauses arount that question.
Chrissie, the mother
of a family of slovenly
English transplants,
seems at first to have
given up the fight
against dirt, chaos and despair. One character
describes her as a “dishcloth.”
Her daughter, Ruby, is the town tramp.
A writer has an affair
with both women, but primarily because he is
bored and in search of material. Still,
the mother dutifully takes the daughter
for an abortion, illegal in Portugal,
and is kicked out by her alcoholic
husband for the deed. In her banishment, there is nothing to do but listen
to the rain and reflect, in a stream of consciousness.
In Alentejo Blue, the characters
matter more in dialogue with themselves
than in their interactions with
each other. And, despite the dramatic
details of affairs and a criminal abortion,
characters matter more than the
plot. If anything, Mamarrosa is the
kind of place that annihilates plot.
Nothing much happens, except for
the schemes of the young to escape its
nothingness, and the bargains made
by the old, who no longer desire escape.
That nothingness provides the
central tension of the book, symbolized
by a clock that drives Teresa, a
20-year-old longing to break free of
the village, absolutely mad. It’s stuck
at 20 past three, the clock hands as
immobile to her as all of Mamarrosa,
with its Internet café where the computers
don’t work.
Gaiutra Bahadur is a staff writer
for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her
essay about growing up immigrant in
Jersey City will be published next summer
in the anthology Living on the
Edge of the World: New Jersey
Writers Take On the Garden State.
William Jelani Cobb
Barefootin': Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom
By Unita Blackwell with JoAnne Prichard Morris
Crown Publishers
It is easy, at this distant
remove, to take heroism for granted.
We have seen the grainy footage, the
fire hoses and police dogs. The quiet
persistence and the bloodstained balcony
in Memphis. Given the scale of
courage and collective commitment that the civil rights movement mobilized,
the acts of individuals—beyond the marquee names of King, Young
and Jackson—are all but obscured. This memoir by activist, organizer,
politician and sage Unita Blackwell is
a valuable chronicle of one woman’s
heroism in the face of the brutality
that was Jim Crow-era Mississippi.
Born during the Great Depression, Blackwell grew up in a world of nearly
unquestioned white dominance—a world where black sharecroppers
nevertheless learned to create a sustaining
community. Her
early life was filled with
the companionship of dozens of cousins, aunts
and uncles. Her mother
moved from Lula,
Miss., to West Helena,
Ark., to improve her
daughter’s educational
possibilities, and young
Unita was fortunate
enough to have a
teacher who prodded
her to make something
of her life.
But for all her nostalgia, this is not
an unblemished, romantic portrait of
the community that reared her. In one instance, a black minister urges Blackwell
and her husband, Jeremiah, to give
up their attempt to become registered
voters. The clergyman, she writes, spoke in the service of local whites:
“We knew that the sheriff—or some other white man—had enlisted
him to convince us to leave. You always
had black folks like Preacher
McGee who did what the white men told them to. Some of them were
scared not to. Others just wanted to
pick up a dollar or two. I believe
Preacher fit both of those categories.”
In another case, after her work as a
civil rights advocate became well-known, a random black man trampled
her garden and picked an
argument with her. He drew a gun
and threatened her. She walked into
her house. He later admitted that he
had been paid by a white man to provoke
a conflict and then kill her.
An embryonic activism was nurtured
when Blackwell challenged a
white bureaucrat who had threatened
to cut her husband’s grandmother’s
welfare payment. That unrehearsed
act of defiance became a turning
point. When SNCC activists arrived
in Mississippi in 1964, she joined their
voters’-rights efforts.
Within four years she
would travel across the
country to challenge the
seating of the Mississippi
Democratic Party at the
1964 convention, befriend
and work with national
political figures,
be arrested for her work
and subjected to obscene
abuses in prison, and be hired by organizer
Dorothy Height to coordinate
a national housing program. In
1973, she traveled to China with
Shirley MacLaine. Four years later, she ran for
office and was elected as
mayor of the same town that had once rejected
her application to vote.
In an age where memoirs thick with falsifications
top bestseller lists,
it is unusual that this
book’s sole shortcoming
is its brevity. At 258
pages, Barefootin’ covers
all the touchstones of
Blackwell’s life, but one can’t help
wanting more. Still, this is an important
and compelling book—a testament
of both a movement for social
justice and a single extraordinary life
intertwined with it. William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D., is an
assistant professor of history at Spelman
College, specializing in post-Civil War
African American history, 20th-century
American politics and the history of the
Cold War; he is also a critic, essayist and
fiction writer.
Helena María Viramontes
The Potbellied Virgin
By Alicia Yánez Cossío
University of Texas Press
In the 1960s and '70s, the so-called
Latin American literary boom
took off with Gabriel Garcia Marquez leading the pack. Suddenly “magical
realism” became as ubiquitous as
ketchup. With the exception of
Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska,
though, rarely did we read Latin
American women in translation.
I was a young Latina writer back
then, raising my consciousness in the
women’s movement and marching the
streets in the Chicano
movement. I sought
models such as Adrienne
Rich and Audre Lorde, who gave me
permission to write in
microcosm the lives of
women while exposing
the macrocosmic social
conditions of their existence. Those pioneers
provided writings that
were layered, richly
textured, politically astute,
honest and beautiful, for they
never forgot that beauty is the artery
that pulses, and language the artillery
that penetrates.
Now I am lucky to have The Potbellied
Virgin by one of Ecuador’s foremost contemporary novelists, Alicia
Yánez Cossío. In a highly readable translation by Amalia Gladhart, the
novel (only the second by Cossío to appear in English) covers a time span
from the turn of the 19th century to the 1960s in an unnamed town in
Ecuador’s central Andes. Originally published in 1985, the novel is a
satire of Ecuador’s striving for stability—a struggle against revolving
presidencies, regional wars and a
church that dictated the cultural and
national affairs of the people. But in
the hands of a highly intelligent and
compassionate writer like Cossío, fiction achieves a greater emotional rendering
than historical fact.
Karl Rove might learn a thing or
two from Doña Carmen, president of
the Sisterhood of the Bead on the
Gown of the Potbellied Virgin. Her
ladies of the Sisterhood care for the
Potbellied Virgin, a holy icon who
gets her name from documents taped
to her stomach. These papers are crucial
to the Pandos, a clan of Indians
whose lands were robbed by the
wealthy Benavides, the “white and
blond” people. Under the guise of devotion
to the Virgin, Doña Carmen,
the Benavides matriarch, wields such
power that not one priest in over 30
years could stand to stay in town
because of her demands. Even the
Virgin finds herself wondering why
she’s being used to intimidate with intrigues
and bribes.
Throw into the mix a helping of colonial racism, sexism, classism, a “War of the Mattresses,” badly
spelled graffiti and fearmongering,
and you have a hilarious novel reminiscent
of Jose Saramago’s allegorical
The Stone Raft. In the end, the Sisterhood loses all, and the Benavides patriarchy
takes over as innocent blood
is shed. Cossío suggests that things
are going to get worse, as they do
when men take control.
The Potbellied Virgin is a morality
tale warning us of what might happen
if Bush and Cheney continue to get
their way. Cossío’s comic critique of
church dominance, the gullibility of
the disenfranchised and the conflation
of morality and power is laugh-out-loud funny, but only until you are
silenced by the reality of it all. Helena María Viramontes is associate
professor of English at Cornell
University and author of the forthcoming
novel Their Dogs Came With Them.
Erin Aubry Kaplan
homegrown: engaged cultural criticism
By bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains
South End Press
In this exceedingly timely
book—it references the historic pro-immigration
marches of this past
April and May—renowned cultural
critic/intellectual/art scholars bell
hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains team
up to talk about where and how
women fit into the “new” Latino paradigm
in America, the black
response, and many other things not
directly related to the political topic
du jour, but essential nonetheless.
I mean talk literally: The book is a
dialogue between the two that they allegedly
held across a kitchen table,
though it often reads more like a transcript
of a panel discussion at a university,
something both women could
probably do in their sleep at this point
in their distinguished careers. But the conversation format works. Free from
having to hew to a single voice or thesis,
homegrown rambles with relish,
though always with purpose; from its
first pages it has the intimacy and urgency
of a marathon phone call, making
its heavy academics mostly
palatable and frequently poetic.
In no particular order,
the authors swap
musings about family, home, history, identity
politics, feminist iconography
and the meaning
of multiculturalism
that are both politically
astute and personally
revealing. In one discussion
of Frida Kahlo,
Mesa-Bains admits that
her identification with
the iconic artist/activist intensified
when she discovered that she, like Frida, couldn’t have children. In another
discussion in a chapter called "Resistance Pedagogies"—about as
dry a title as you can imagine—hooks, a native Southerner, effectively details
the grief she felt as a child moving away from the reassuring environment
of an all-black school to the
gaping unknown of a theoretically
better, predominantly white one. I
know the feeling.
At times the book feels like a tennis
match, with the ball idling too long in one court or
another. Yet there is
enough engagement in
the criticism to make the
game not only worthwhile
but consistently watchable. You want to
see how the ball lands.
There is a danger of convergence here, of the
two women’s experiences
and analyses
bleeding at points into
near indistinctness—after all, they’re
both progressive, feminist, antiracist
women of color rigorously educated
and oriented by similar schools of
thought. They use the same jargon.
But this is what makes homegrown
unique: having the courage to eschew
the (very male) Crossfire approach to
American public discourse and being
unafraid to agree, because ultimately,
the conversation is more important
than the personalities having it. Tension
and misunderstanding between
blacks and Latinos is at an all-time
high, and hooks and Mesa-Bains
know that the two of them simply
publishing a colloquy that stresses
commonalities is a valuable symbol.
But homegrown happens to be valuable
in deeper ways; though a book of
the moment, its full-circle and full-hearted
examination of how we got to
where we are—black, brown, women,
men—makes it one for the ages. And
though it offers no solutions, it does
offer something in this dark age of
political and emotional detachment
that’s as important: faith in better relationships
ahead. Change, the writers
counsel, has to begin at home.
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles
Times and a former staff writer for the L.A. Weekly.
Margy Rochlin
The Dead Hour
By Denise Mina
Little, Brown, and Co.
Scottish crime-fiction writer
Denise Mina’s novel opens with
Paddy Meehan, a female 20-something night-shift cub reporter for the
Scottish Daily News, following a police
radio report of domestic violence to a
Victorian villa in Bearsden, an upper-crust
suburb of Glasgow. Although
Paddy momentarily locks eyes with a
battered-looking high-society blond,
she allows the well-dressed man
answering the door to bribe her with
a bloody 50-pound
note. Envisioning all
that she can buy her
poverty-ridden mother, father and siblings—for
whom she is the sole
support—Paddy leaves.
So much for sisterhood.
The next day, the
blond, an affluent attorney
named Vhari
Burnett, is found dead,
her head smashed in. It
is Paddy’s feelings of
guilt, as much as her nagging fear
that her boss will sack her when he
finds out about her transgression,
that mobilizes her to determine Burnett’s murderer—and that should
cleave mystery lovers to this sharp-but-flawed, resolutely human crime-solver.
But this is the niche that Mina,
over the course of six novels, has
made her own.
As with Maureen O’Donnell, the alcoholic, child-incest-victim protagonist
of Mina’s award-winning Garnethill Trilogy, Paddy’s personal
obstacles allow Mina to weigh in on all manner of feminist politics, from
issues of economic class to the way Paddy is dismissed in the testosterone-
fueled newsroom because she is young, female and sloppily overweight. “Hoi, fatso!” is how Paddy is disparaged at one point, but while
she’s self-conscious enough to try and fail at crazy fad diets, Mina avoids
making her pitiable and never lets her heroine’s bulk keep her from attracting
men and enjoying a sex life.
Like its predecessor, Field of Blood,
this second installment in a planned
trilogy is set in the grubby, blunt-spoken
world of ’80s-era newspaper
journalism, and Mina gets the particulars
of beat reporting right. Her
plotting skills are top-drawer, but it’s
in character description where Mina
combines a painter’s eye with a social
worker’s keen perspective. She
seems incapable of rendering characters
like working-class mums
without acknowledging the totality
of their lot in life: years spent on
their feet, stretching
meager paychecks to
feed their unemployed
families. “Ten o’clock
mass would be coming
out soon,” Mina writes. “When it did, there would be a queue of
women with pelvic floors
ruined from carrying too many children.”
Mina, who was getting
her Ph.D. in mental
illness in female offenders
when she became one of the
U.K.’s leading crime writers, naturally
has a flair for gory details. (She was
recently recruited to write an installment
of the dark comic book series
Hellblazer.) When a cokehead party
girl fends off a thug by driving the
business end of a spike-heeled shoe
into his eye, Mina describes the moment
vividly enough that more
squeamish readers may have to close
the book momentarily. But Mina isn’t
trying to out-grisly her genre counterparts
with such passages: Violence
in her books always feels like the last,
worst mode of communication a tortured
soul can use. Margy Rochlin is a Los Angeles
writer and frequent contributor to The
New York Times. |
