July 22, 2013
“Like life is always fucking subtle”: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“I’m going to blog about that.”/ “I knew you’d say that.”
I am really excited about the forthcoming anthology Friend. Follow. Text. #storiesFromLivingOnline, which will include short fiction by Canadian authors including Jessica Westhead, Heather Birrell and Alex Leslie, featuring (I suspect…) stories which were some of my favourites from their collection–Westhead’s story that takes place in the comments section of a lifestyle blog; Birrell’s on an online pregnancy forum; Leslie’s comprised of descriptions of Youtube videos featuring a Bieber-like teen-pop sensation. Even Samantha Bernstein’s memoir in emails Here We Are Among the Living is part of this trend of authors using online and social media to change the shape of traditional literary forms, taking advantage of the uniqueness and peculiarity of online communication to contain modernity in their work, to say something new.
At first, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wouldn’t be the most obvious candidate to be part of this literary trend. Her previous novel Half of a Yellow Sun (which won the Orange Prize in 2007) was a sweeping epic novel about the Biafran War. She is the writer who brought me to Chinua Achebe. Adichie is Africa. She is history. Her scope is huge, when online communication can seem so ridiculous and small, so much lesser. And yet, it is also very much of this world, and it is the world that Adichie is concerned with. As she stated in a recent interview, “I love books that are social in the way that they engage with the real reality.”
In her new novel Americanah, Adichie’s protagonist is a blogger. Ifemelu is a Nigerian expat in America who has established herself as author of the blog Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. She is able to make a living from her blog through advertising and speaking engagements, and has also been made a fellow of Princeton University. Her blog attracts hundreds of readers everyday with such provocative posts as “A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor”, “Obama Can Win Only If He Remains the Magic Negro” and “Thoughts on the Special White Friend”. For Adichie’s purposes, however, the blog exists so she can include sharply-worded, strongly opinionated, polarizing ideas in her novel about race in America, ideas which have been flooding social media since George Zimmerman’s acquittal last week of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. The blog posts–humorous, pointed and passionate–read in tone and language as very authentic, and along with the novel’s references to Facebook, email, and an online forum about natural hair, infuse the novel with a fascinating intertextuality. The blog posts in particular give the novel an edginess that straightforward fiction might be too subtle to provide.
Subtlety was an issue for me as I was reading Americanah though. While it was compelling, the story of Ifemelu and Obinze who begin as a couple in high school and each escape the “choicelessness” of life in Nigeria (for the US and UK respectively) to find their lives taking radically different trajectories, there was a hollowness to the secondary characters these two encountered. “Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” says Ifemelu’s first American employer of a trip to India. She eventually becomes a friend to Ifemelu but also seems to exist primarily as a mouthpiece for other such asinine pronouncements. Where was the depth in these characters, I was wondering, struggling to make sense of its lack in the context of Adichie’s talent as a novelist. Though could this be part of the novel’s satire, I wondered? And if we’re going to turn the tables, is not portraying characters of a certain race as stereotypical stock characters part of an age-old literary tradition?
There was more though. I love a book so textured that the answer to my criticisms are contained inside its very pages. I reached page 335 to find a tirade by Ifemelu’s boyfriend’s sister who is about to publish her first book, a memoir about growing up black in America. She explains, “My editor reads the manuscript and says, “I understand that race is important but we have to make sure the book transcends race…” And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.” Explaining an anecdote, she says, “So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not subtle. Like life is always fucking subtle.”
She continues, “You can’t write a novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them… have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.”
Blog posts, of course, are the very opposite of lyrical and subtle. Adichie has clearly found a way around the matter.
In some ways, Adichie’s novel bears a resemblance to Zadie Smith’s NW and it’s treatment of race and London, though Adichie shrugs off Smith’s experimental approach, preferring to focus on life as lived as opposed to its voices or the complexities of point of view. The story is the point, and the ideas contained within, instead of its delivery. Ifemelu leaves Obinze when she receives a partial scholarship to an American university, though the two promise to remain connect, to not be apart forever. She arrives in America, however, to discover that the reality of life there is radically different from what she’s seen on The Cosby Show or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She must find a job to make ends meet, but she’s not permitted to work legally and has difficulty finding a job under the table as her accent, her appearance, and her lack of American job experience continue to stymy her efforts. She slips into a depression and is just about to hit rock bottom, which would have made this a short book if she’d managed it, when things between to happen for her. In a sense, while Adichie does not portray America or the experience of its immigrants in an easy or flattering light, she does demonstrate that the American Dream is possible, while it is not for Obinze in the UK. Though it must be noted what an exception is Ifemelu–I don’t know if it’s more likely that your average Nigerian immigrant would become a Princeton fellow or a professional blogger. In fact the odds of anyone becoming a professional blogger are unlikely.
Meanwhile, Obinze’s American dreams are dashed in light of the September 11th terrorists attacks, when the US tighten their visa restrictions and make him ineligible for entry. He receives a temporary visa to England through his mother, a university professor, and when his visa expires, he remains in the country, working under the name and number of another man who’s helping himself to a portion of Obinze’s wages. He gets a job cleaning shit off toilets, and then delivering kitchens, performing the tricky maneuvre of always watching his back while trying to look forward and desperately cobble together a better future. (Here, Adiche’s explores the world of London’s underground job market for illegal migrants, as did John Lanchester in his novel Capital with his Zimbabwean traffic warden.) The ticket is an arranged marriage to a woman with an EU passport, which can be brought about with the right amount of cash (although the last time he tried this, they took off with his money). Plans fail, however, and Obinze is deported, brought home in disgrace only to discover that things are changing in Nigeria, that there is opportunity for a bright young man who is willing to play the system.
Obinze is established as a big man in Nigeria by the time Ifemelu returns after thirteen years in America, and he is by now married with a child. Neither has ever forgotten the other, though the reasons for their estrangement have become unknown or blurry with time. The stakes for their reunion are high, and in a sense Americanah‘s first 426 pages are just a prelude to this point. Because yes, this is a love story, but it’s a love story with an unabashed agenda, rich and compelling. And while Adichie confesses to not being a fan of experimental literature, it can’t be denied that with her third novel, she has broken new literary ground.
July 17, 2013
Les Ontoulu ne mangent pas les livres
We have to thank my lovely cousin, who is my oldest and one of my dearest friends, for delivering this most remarkable picture book into our life. She’d had enough of waiting for Les Ontoulu ne mengest pas les livres to be translated into English and so gave it to us in its original French, along with her very own English translation alongside. And thank goodness she did–this book is wonderful! It is a story about the Ontoulu family (whose name translates as “Read It All”). Their home is full of literary treasures, and the parents are eager to pass on their love on books to their adorable son Lulu. Because books are their life– the Ontoulu’s read books, write books, collect books, they even eat bo– no! don’t be ridiculous! They’d didn’t eat books!
But when they do introduce books to wee Lulu, figuring that he will love them as much as they do, he promptly sticks them in his mouth. Apparently they feel so good on his teething gums, and the Ontoulu parents are horrified. “Lulu, in our family we don’t eat books,” they tell him and they take the books away until he’s finished teething.
But the next time they give him a book, he throws it on the floor–he loves the music the book creates as it lands. He draws in his picture books. He tears out the pages of a travel book to make into a kite. And his parents are exasperated, while poor Lulu really doesn’t understand both why they’re so unhappy with him and what’s the big deal about books anyway? They seem to only create problems, and besides, he’s never once managed to get to the end of a story.
One day, however, in an effort to cheer up his Papa who is sick in bed, Lulu opens up a book and begins making up a story of his own. His Papa realizes that of all the literary treasures in their home, the amazing stories that Lulu imagines are the greatest of all of them. He and his wife develop a more playful attitude toward their home library, conceding that books sometimes do indeed make fine building blocks for constructing castles and other splendid unconventional things. And with his parents’ more relaxed approach to the bookish life, Lulu begins to understand their passion and decides that he too is going to become a reader of books, a writer of books, a collector of books and an eater of bo–no! don’t be ridiculous! He’s not going to eat books.
How lovely to read a Canadian picture book in our other official language. Merci, ma cousine!
July 15, 2013
Bobcat by Rebecca Lee
(My copy has a blue cover, which I found much more appealing than this one.)
I had only read the first story in Rebecca Lee’s short story collection Bobcat before I’d ordered a copy of her novel from the bookstore. Why, I wondered already, had this collection not been more hyped? Not until it was awarded the Danuta Gleed Award a few weeks back did it really come to my attention. But one story was all it took for me to realize that Lee is a writer approaching mastery of her craft. As significant, I think, as the fact that she received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is that she received it 21 years ago. That Lee has had time to grow and develop as a writer so she’s no ingenue, but instead her writing reveals a maturity that is most admirable. Her grasp of these stories was so firm, and her voice so strong that I knew I’d be wanting more of it. I look forward to reading her novel The City is a Rising Tide very soon.
Rebecca Lee’s short stories share the same approach as Sarah Selecky’s, the same intimate first-person narration, close attention to detail that sets these characters as very much of this world (lines like “Lizbet basically knew how to live a happy life, and this was revealed in her trifle–she put in what she loved and left out what she didn’t”)–as well as dinner-party settings and fork on the cover. But on the other side, Lee’s marvelous telescoping endings and ultimate broadness of perspective remind me of the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. (I think “Bobcat” may join Lahiri’s “The Fifth and Final Continent” as one of my favourite short stories ever.) These stories were written over two decades and accordingly the collection lacks a certain cohesion, except for (and this is significant) the solidity of Lee’s voice.
“One of the things Strandbakken had been struggling to teach us was that a building ought to express two things simultaneously. The first was permanence, that is, security and well-being, a sense that the building will endure through all sorts of weather and calamity. But it also ought to express an understanding of its mortality, that is, a sense that it is an individual and, as such, vulnerable to its own passing away from this earth. Buildings that don’t manage this second quality cannot properly be called architecture, he insisted. Even the simplest buildings, he said, ought to be productions of the imagination that attempt to describe and define life on earth, which of course is an overwhelming mix of stability and desire, fulfillment and longing, time and eternity.” –from “Fialta”
Lacking a certain cohesion (which in a collection this good is less a criticism than a statement of fact), yes, but there are more than a few points in common. Three of these stories take place in academic settings. These are stories written with an awareness of history and not just a general contemporariness. They are filled with allusions and references to actual places, people, and things. Though “Bobcat” is like this least of all, the first story, about a dinner party and so tightly contained within four walls that the effect is claustrophobic until the story’s incredible ending in which the whole thing explodes. A hostess is acutely aware of the inner lives and workings of her dinner guests, so much so that she’s blind to her own destiny. The people in this story are so vivid and real, and the ending was both incredible and heartbreaking. “The Banks of the Vistula” is a 1980s’ Cold War story (“But this was 1987, the beginning of perestroika, of glasnost and views of Russia were changing. Television showed a country of rain and difficulty and great humility, and Gorbachev was always bowing to sign something or other, his head bearing a mysterious stain shaped like a continent one could almost but not quite identify” [and how I love that “almost but not quite…]) about a university student who plagiarizes a linguistics paper from 1950s’ Soviet propaganda.
“Slatland” is a peculiar story about a strange psychologist and his impact on a young patient who returns to him years later looking for him to translate letters her Romanian fiance is writing to a woman whom she suspects is her fiance’s wife. In “Min”, another Midwestern university student travels to still-British Hong Kong and is enlisted with the job of selecting him a wife, as her friend’s diplomat father is being faced with the morally ambiguous task of deporting Vietnamese refugees. In “World Party”, a female professor during the 1970s’ uses her relationship with her (perhaps autistic?) son to decide the future of a male colleague who has been accused of a sexually inappropriate relationship with a student. And the final story is “Fialta”, in which architecture becomes analogous to story-writing and a group of students enrolled in an elite mentorship program fall in and out of love with one another, learn, come of age and of self, and are each uniquely bound to their teacher for better or worse.
July 15, 2013
The Wild Rumpus
I learned about Story Mobs on Friday, and knew immediately what we’d be up to the next day. What an adventure: “where great kids’ books meet flash mobs with a dash of Mardi Gras thrown in.” Our family met up with many others in a small park behind Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday afternoon with our maracas on hand, along with wolf ears and a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Now, we have a newborn in the family and we’re quite crap at organization (wolf ears created 10 minutes before we left the house), so our preparations paled in comparison to those of others who were exquisitely attired and were carrying amazing props. We took part in a rehearsal of the story’s reading, and then made a parade with all the other wild things to the pool in front of City Hall where we drew attention with strange costumes, samba drums, and the general oddness of our presence. The story began, featured readers projecting their voices across the square and the rest of us participating with responses. My favourite part is when we got to shout: “Oh, please don’t go. We’ll eat you up! We love you so.” Though the wild rumpus itself was nothing to be scoffed at as we danced like wild things around Nathan Phillips Square with a bunch of similarly-minded strangers in the sunshine. (The Ai Weiwei sculptures in the pool added nicely to the effect, I think.) And then Max sailed back in and out of weeks to his very own room where his supper was waiting. It was still hot, which deserved a cheer, we thought, and then we scattered, and the event was over as though it had never begun, except for in the minds of those of us who were there.
Another Story Mob is scheduled for two weeks from now with Jillian Jiggs being performed. Thanks to Bunch Family for bringing this fabulous event to my attention!
July 7, 2013
The Silent Wife by ASA Harrison
For me, last weekend belonged to The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison, a perfect summer book if compulsive page-turning in the sunshine happens to be your thing. It’s a book that’s been compared favourably to Gone Girl, though it’s a very different literary creature. It’s not a whodunit, but instead a “Why’d she do it?” It being murder, of course. We learn at the novel’s outset that Jodi will kill Todd, her husband of 20 years, and the rest of the novel illuminates what would bring a seemingly rational woman to such a point.
“Seemingly” is the key word though. Jodi Brett is rational to the point of near-madness, a therapist who prides herself on psychological acuity. It seems that she is as blind to her own self, however, as she imagines she is to her husband indiscretions. Todd is a cheater, and he’s always been, but the stakes are different now. Natasha, the daughter of Todd’s oldest friend, is pregnant, and she informs Jodi that they’re going to be married. Married. Which Jodi and Todd have in fact never been, Jodi adamant that she will not relive the life of her mother, eternally put-upon by a philandering husband. No, she’s always refused to be married, even when Todd asked her, just as she refused to see that her life has assumed the same shape as her mother’s anyway.
The story is told in alternating chapters from each partner’s perspective. Todd is a convincing portrayal of a guy who just can’t help himself, though that Jodi has tolerated his cheating for two decades suggests that she’s less a victim than an enabler. It is hard to have sympathy for either of them, and what compels the reader instead of any sympathy is curiosity as this disastrous relationship heads toward its inevitable end. Curiosity too to unravel the workings of Jodi’s mind, and while Harrison provides an impetus for her behaviour that detracts from the story, it’s still fascinating to see insanity comes in all matter of forms. That is terms of awfulness, Jodi and Todd are in fact a perfect match.
Harrison manages to craft suspense in a story whose outcome is sure from the beginning, though not entirely sure. The conclusion of The Silent Wife is still surprising, ambiguous and clever, the perfect ending to a really good book.
July 5, 2013
One Whole Month of Iris
When I wrote “Love is a Let-Down”, the point was not to say that new motherhood is necessarily a terrible experience, but instead to underline how different it is for everyone. That for many of us, the experience didn’t align with the greeting card slogans. We’re not over-the-moon but instead completely overwhelmed by a world that has been shattered into pieces and put back together in a still-broken state. And now I worry that in my current state of mind I’m letting down the team a little bit, undermining the message of those who’ve dared to speak honestly about what it is to become a mother. But then again, I’m really not undermining it at all, but instead underlining my main point which is that every woman comes to motherhood in her own way. Because this time, with my second baby, the experience has been everything it wasn’t first time around. I’ve become a walking greeting-card slogan myself—“Everything is going really well!” If I wasn’t living it, I’d be convinced I was lying.
Of course, anyone who’s ever had a second baby will tell you that this is what happens. They told me, actually, but I didn’t believe them, or else I certainly didn’t believe that it could be possible for someone like me who was so notoriously terrible at new motherhood. That this time you know what you’re doing, you learn to ride the chaos instead of thinking you’re doing it wrong, that it all goes by faster and you really do try to enjoy every minute.
It is a different experience altogether. That first baby requires “becoming a mother”, which comes less naturally to some of us than others. I’m reminded of the trauma undergone by astronauts when they re-enter the earth’s atmosphere–my experience was the emotional equivalent of that. But this time, I’m a mother already and there is no becoming necessary. There is none of the shattering, the loss of self that was so terrifying to experience. I am fundamentally unchanged by the birth of Iris, except that our family is a different shape and the world is just a little bit bigger.
Motherhood is a storm, is the quote by Laurie Colwin that I seized on, the metaphor that so clearly articulated what I was going through. But it’s not been stormy this time. Instead, I’d say it’s been like a summer’s day, albeit one sometimes experienced from my bed but with the patio door wide open and the sun pouring in. The baby is screaming, her face so red that I’m reminded of a cartoon character with smoke coming out its ears, but this is funny instead of traumatic. I’ve got living proof asleep in a bedroom downstairs that this wretched, squalling foetal creature is in fact going to grow into an actual human being. And so that’s how one becomes a greeting-card slogan, all consumed by how fast the days are flying by and by the smell of the baby’s head.
It has been a good month. My husband has been a huge part of this. Whereas the early days of Harriet challenged our relationship like nothing else, we have been so kind to one another since Iris arrived. That he is able to be on parental leave means that the hardships weigh more equally on both of our shoulders. He has taken extraordinarily good care of me during my recovery. And as I’ve recovered, we have had fun together, with Harriet too when she wasn’t yelling at us. (We now understand why people enroll their children in camp all summer long.) And now that I am nearly recovered, a brilliant summer lies before us. It’s all more graspable than I dared to imagine it was.
We went out for lunch today (of course) to celebrate a month of Iris, and to toast to the three of us for so successfully weathering the last few weeks. And now Harriet’s asleep and Iris is squawking downstairs, so I must go down to feed her, but while I do, we’ll be watching The Hour, which is so so good, and this nightly television thing is the most excellent ritual. Previously, we’d both worked in the evenings and TV was a treat saved for Friday nights (with wine) but now every night is Friday night, and how can you fault a life like that? It might as well be July. And it actually is.
Iris is gorgeous when she sleeps, slightly weird looking awake, and entirely beloved by every member of her family. Her most remarkable attribute was that she was born with a tooth. We are curious about who she’s going to grow to be, but we love her already. She looks a bit like her sister, but more like her self, and a little bit like me who also had ginger eyebrows as a baby. She is usually asleep or calm when people meet her, undermining her reputation as a miserable person. She likes to sleep in my bed in my armpit, which is a bit counter to what the safe-sleep advocates say, but I guess we like to sleep dangerous. I think we’re safe though, because she doesn’t really sleep that much. She took a soother once, and I was overjoyed, but hasn’t done it after. Since her birth a month ago, she’s gained two whole pounds, which is amazing. She gazes at Harriet like she looks at no one else, though I’ve gazed at Harriet myself so I can’t say I blame her. Her mouth is beautiful. She also likes to fall asleep on people’s chests, and she’s not yet discriminating about whose. Her belly button is shaped like an @ sign. She screams a lot and hates most things, but still manages to be adorable. And there is not really much else one can say when describing someone her age, but we’re so excited to get to know more and more about her.
July 3, 2013
Redfish Bluefish
Over at Bunch, I wrote about our new favourite cafe Redfish Bluefish. Read my piece here.
July 2, 2013
Incredible Journeys
We were thrilled to visit the Incredible Journeys exhibit at the Lillian H. Smith Library’s Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. We all loved the pop-up books featuring trains, boats and planes, and the displays featuring storybook characters travelling in balloons, airships, by train, bicycle, public transit, and also “journeys of the mind”. It was exciting to see so many books we recognized–Curious George, Canadian Railway Trilogy, and more*, and also to see so many beautiful old illustrated books for the first time. But the particular highlight was an actual map of the Island of Sodor and several first-edition books from The Railway Series (which was a precursor to Thomas the Tank Engine).
The exhibit is on until September.
*I would delineate exactly which ones, except that I haven’t slept more than 2.5 hrs in a row in a month and therefore my short-term memory has been obliterated. I remember being very impressed though. Really!
