The Old Drift (Serpell)

It is hard to describe the epic quality of Namwali Serpell’s epic first novel, The Old Drift. It is over 100 years in the lives of 3 families over 6 generations. It’s filled with memorable characters (see Sibilla) and evocative scenes (wait until you get to the astronauts). At times surreal, it is also funny, sweeping, incisive, political and wise. Serpell, who apparently worked on this novel (on and off) for quite a while, knows just when to pull the camera back and just when to focus.

We see here the impact of colonization over time as well as the increasingly devastating impact of what Serpell calls The Virus. We know she means HIV, but right now, though, that word, capitalized. And there is also something of a glimpse into the future. The last section takes place in 2023.

It is only in this last section that I felt a bit let down. I am trying to avoid spoilers, so I will just say that given what’s on the minds of our protagonists at this point, it’s not surprising that they are giving speeches; they are just not very compelling to read. They are reminiscent of those speeches that villains give before failing to kill the hero because the speech has given them time to be rescued.

Overall, I’d place this book under Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and well above Jeffrety Eugendies’ Middlesex in terms of sweeping and sometimes surreal generational epics.

I really hope that it doesn’t take another 18 years for her next book to appear.

 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537834/the-old-drift-by-namwali-serpell/

Anisfield-Wolf award 2020

 

STAMPED: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Reynolds & Kendi)

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the race-related resources out there – all of the books, podcasts, articles, links, movies, talks, webinars, trainings, etc. – and are wondering where to start, then I have your answer. Right here. In a little over 250 pages, Jason Reynolds has taken Ibram X. Kendi’s 608-page Stamped from the Beginning (itself a masterpiece) and remixed it into a compelling case for exactly the question that has prompted the flood of suggested resources: How did we get here?

Reynolds, whose fiction for young adults is consistently great and is absolutely the platinum standard, shows he can do it with non-fiction as well. He is talking to you and he’s telling you a story. It doesn’t matter how old you are; everyone loves a great storyteller.

Once you have read and grappled with this, you can move on to the question of what we need to do. But this is your first step. Make it soon.

The Skin of Meaning (Flynn)

I have the same problem with long poems as I do with a lot of art. How does the person creating it know when to stop? I once got up the nerve to ask an art teacher who was working on an abstract piece how he knew he was finished. He said, “When there’s no part of it that I hate.” That response didn’t satisfy me.

I found that in Flynn’s excellent collection, I liked the longer poems more. I began to resent that they were broken up by my need to turn the page. Some of this is because I found it hard to track the subject of a subsequent section, but mostly because it broke the rhythm of his writing and my reading. I wondered about a smaller font. Or printing sideways. Or me just getting over it. In any event, I’d backtrack to read out loud and that helped.

I relish Flynn’s poetry because he is not working on a grand scale. There are no poems about war or heroes. (There are poems about love. It’s poetry. There have to be poems about love.) The poems are about the small things we can do, for others and ourselves, to make ourselves just a little bit better as people. In “The Force of Compassion,” he writes:

Sit with things and listen long

and the singing will begin.

turn your free fall into

a voluntary act.

 

We need to ‘sit with things’ because, as he says in “The House of Dance and Feathers,” the very next poem, our perception / is only narrowed when our brain feels / threatened because, he writes at the end of this compelling and long poem

The higher we climb, the world lays

wider in our scope. The more I know,

the less certain I am, and my self-

 

deception grows commensurate with

my ignorance. What we have is here,

where we are is now, in Time’s despicable,

multi-tentacled clutches, in the habitat

of dance and feathers, building our

headdress and staking our territory,

lending our love’s disguise to the march.

 

And we are here to ask questions even though and because to live in inquiry is to abandon / the safe proximity of childish expectation.” This is taken from “Context,” which contains I am going to steal for my work of teaching literature – “Context is a faith that cuts both ways.”

I don’t want to limit myself to applauding just the insights here. The imagery in “The Bookmobile” which mixes books, ice cream, and children is wonderful and is amazingly managed in just 10 lines. (Okay, I guess I liked the short poems too.)

There are too many incredible poems here to name them all – “Nostalgia as Entropy,” “Democracy,” “Clinton Redux,” “Wall Street.”

He is incredibly inventive around the power of language in many poems, including “The Bookmobile.” In “Baby Boomers,” he explains that they are dying in a language /they have never understood. The imagery at the end of “Portrait of the Artist as a Spark” is very powerful and his description of poets in “Tranquility & Tremelo” is spot on –

poets are fractured and unfulfilled

walking the on the fragments of language like a child

 

measuring the steps upon rocks across a river.

 

I love the way he writes about music in several poems. In “Louis and the Wolf,” for example, he says that a bluesman will survive, staring straight into / the sun like a rifle with eyes. The ending of “This Rock is Gonna Roll” and “Glenn Gould in Carnegie Hall, 1962” are wonderful.

(You’re probably wondering about how you feel about long reviews at this point.)

There’s a great deal of wisdom here, often wrapped in nature or music or the world. If we could listen to the likes of Flynn and slow down enough to accept ourselves and others, then we just might find the better angels of our nature more often. And that’s one reason I love poetry so much, especially these days. A good poem – even a long poem – makes you slow down and pay attention. And Flynn’s book is filled with them.

From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal (translated and edited by Jessie Sandoval)

I bought this book by accident. A friend recommended Ernesto Cardenal’s From Nicaragua with Love (which is now on its way to me thanks to that friends and the awesome City Lights bookstore), and somehow, in searching for it, I turned it into letters and found this book instead. And I am glad I did.

Amidst all of the noise that surrounds us now, it was nice to read something so quiet and contemplative. It made me wonder about the future of collections of letters. Will we soon be seeing things like The Collected Emails of. . .?

Initially, I wished I knew more about Merton, Cardenal and even Nicaragua. I wished for footnotes. I knew enough about the time to recognize some of the concerns they were alluding to, and occasionally I’d stop to read one of the poems that one or other of them mentioned.

But this was still a compelling read even without much background knowledge (though now I am looking for some – if you have any biographies or histories to recommend). I just focused on the letters, the friendship between the two men and their humanity as they negotiated their religion, the world of publishing, and themselves. Of course, I’ve heard of church politics, but have never heard how much it could impact one individual.

I envy those who can take their faith so seriously, while retaining their skepticism. And to have what we might call a ‘thought partner’ for this kind of internal investigation seems wonderful indeed.

I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t comment on Jessie Sandoval’s translation. In the end, I appreciated that she left the poet-priests to speak for themselves and was grateful for her introduction because it allowed me to some insights into why the project was so personal for her, and I was happy to find some Cardenal poetry and a Merton essay at the end.

This is an example of what I’ve decided to call a ‘gateway’ book in that it makes me want to learn more, not only history and biography, but also poetry, the last of which Sandoval reports, is very important to Nicaraguans. As with so many other things in this book, I had no idea.

We Made It To School ALIVE (Harris)

You have to look at the real cover to get the full impact of the title. ‘WE MADE IT TO SCHOOL’ is in black ink and a pretty standard font size for a cover. ‘ALIVE’ is close to twice as big and in orange. There’s no need for an exclamation point; it’s already there. And then it hits – what a thing to celebrate.

The orange used in the word ‘ALIVE’ is picked up the orange of the butterflies, strapped like angels’ wings to the two young black boys pictured on the cover.

And this leads the reader to “Butterfly in the Flesh,” a seemingly gentle and innocent story of boys slowly moving closer to butterfly to take a closer look. To do so, “they raise their hands / to prove their unarmed,” and the image of black boys with hands raised indicates there’s much more at stake here.

Then you might turn to “Alive,” a depiction of a classroom with children at play. “stefon,” for example “blows bubbles across the classroom” and “marshawn stands on his desk.” I’m not usually a fan of using italics for emphasis, but Harris’ italics in the last line – “my god, my black students are alive” – is less about emphasis and more a kind of quiet revelation. One can almost hear the teacher, perhaps Harris himself (I don’t know his biography, but a number of poems suggests that he knows the inside of a classroom from both sides of the desk) exhaling the words as a kind of prayer.

As I meditated in the white space that follows the poem, I realized that the teacher almost certainly is black. A white teacher who saw that kind of behavior would likely be the screaming one we find in “Cultural Literacy,” who “ties her students’ name tags around bullets, /trains them by feeding their tongues candy / wants their mouths as quiet as a curfew / [because] black mouths are black holes,” and that is so threatening that the lawmakers – in “What Lawmakers Really Mean When They Say ‘High Poverty Districts'” want to “install new locks inside their throats.” These boys grown up to be the ones Harris describes in “Boys” as hanging around “trying to build a muscle out of anything” and “waiting for a reputation to / justify [their] rage.”

There’s a motif here about the efforts made to control the voices of black students. They are, in “162 VS 537 (1896),” “taught how to obey rules / & unlearn their own handwriting.” There are signs that say “no talking.” This applies to teachers as well. In “On Whether I Should Smile on the First Day of School,” the speaker says, “when we, teachers of color, are told not to smile, what we really / are being told / is be careful when opening our mouths.”

There are bullets throughout this collection as well, but one thing Harris does so well is to turn an expected image enough to create new meaning and invite the reader to notice what he was expecting. (See the use of the rope in “After the Atlantic Post Article” and the framing images of the water in “Ocean.”) This shift can be as simple as the apparent celebration of a “Good Day,” when “not a single bullet pierces the sky.” And then you notice that a good day also includes “no kids pulled over.” “boys make snow angels” in “When God Sees Us” and the stanza break makes the reader return to innocence only to find that they make the snow angels “in gun powder.” Bullets are personified in “Another Funeral” (and hear that word, ‘Another’) when our teacher says, “no teacher guides prepared me / for all the bullets / that would feed upon my classroom.” The 2nd grader who is exhausted by standardized testing “crawled back inside the computer” (“Testing Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story”) becomes, in “I Feel You,” the “kid beat the shit out of his /school computer. fuck these test scores. school called the cops. said he was a bullet. you made me one.”

So why go to school at all? For one, the mother in “When the Morning Comes” “said a prayer /to herself – to gain the power to wake me up every morning / even when her worries to try to pin her /down.” (It just occurred to me; we pin butterflies, don’t we? We capture and collect them, then pin them and put them on display.) But a student gives her own perspective in “Where It’s Warm”: She says, “i go to school because my classroom in where it is warm.”

There are parents here too. The “black father” in “Parent Teacher Conference” who says, “i would have carried a pistol for this /conference, but the school seems coo.” And the mother who walks into a meeting at school in “a room full of jotting pens: ‘i have been through this shit before.'” (As a teacher, I have been one of those jotting pens; no more.) The way “pops” loses his faith in “When God Sees Us” is just heartbreaking.

In “On Whether Black History is American History,” Harris states that “much of the genius of black children is below the / surface.” These minds may be grenades, as in “Ocean.” This image is similar to the one in the first part of “Tamir in Three Parts” in which the speaker tells a police officer that Tamir has been “reincarnated as a lightning bolt.” Consider the potential energy of both a grenade and a lightning bolt.

As much as I wanted the collection to end with the last lines of “Butterfly in the Flesh” –

 

in the beginning

he said let there be light

& a butterfly boy, as black as beginning,

appeared, in the flesh

 

Harris doesn’t stop there. The child – whose sole ambition for the summer is to make a tent at home that will help cool his mother, sister and himself – has to get home and, in a way, Harris joins him when he concluded the last poem, “Walk From School” with this reminder: “we, the sons and daughters of black mothers and father /can run out of blood / but we’ll never run out of meaning”

Harris does not include a period to end his collection and neither, should we – as readers and, for some of us, as teachers – try to insert one.

 

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Rankine)

I will let someone else worry about where to put Rankine’s work in the bookstore or library. This one is categorized as ‘Lyric Essay / Poetry.’ (Translation: We have no idea.) I love the way her pieces – here separated by static-filled television screens – combine words and images to create individual works (perhaps one might call these the ‘poems’ and accumulate to take on the force of a lyric essay. There are a wide range of topics here, including health and the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, but what they all have in common is Rankine’s ability to juxtapose two often unlikely elements, reduce them to their sparest elements, and make meaning from their juxtaposition in the most pointed and poignant way.

Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies (Pacansky-Brock)

Like many others around the country, I am waiting to find out what comes next for schools and trying to prepare for what might come next. This book worked for me when Pacansky-Brock narrated her own experiences with emerging technologies and provided examples of how they changed her own practice and how her students reacted to those changes. Though the book is a few years old, it’s current enough for me to find her suggested resources useful and I appreciated your detailed reviews of the various options.

She’s less successful when it comes to trying to establish what she and her colleagues have learned are best practices. There are a lot of conditional words, like “may” and “might.”

So often, things that are written about teaching with technology are focused on math and science teachers, so it was nice to read something by an art teacher and be able to follow her examples.

You will find some of the book here – https://teachingwithemergingtech.com/open-version/.

Any suggestions about what I should read next to prepare for teaching – at least some of the time – online?

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Abdurraqib)

I was once asked the Desert Island Author Question. If I could only take the collected works of one author to a desert island (I’d love to know your response in the comments below), who would I take?

I know I considered Shakespeare, and then decided I needed more variety of forms. I’m sure I went through other possibilities, but I finally landed on James Baldwin, not out of any desire to come across as virtuous, but because if I could really have everything, articles and speeches included, then I would have a wide variety of challenging ideas and a remarkably consistent level, across all of those forms, of great writing. (Okay, I didn’t always love his poetry, but overall, I don’t think he gets credit enough for his writing in all of the genres. I worry about seeing him reduced to a quote machine.)

I think that by the time he’s all finished – which is almost certainly going to be long after I’m finished – a lot of people will have a different answer – Hanif Abdurraqib.

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is powerfully good and destined to become a classic, I hope. I haven’t read A Fortune For Your Disaster yet, but I will. This book, a collection of genre defying short essays (if I have to call it something) is a master class. Abdurraqib takes an entry point (often music I’ve never heard or heard of) and comments on the music itself, its place in the artist’s or genre’s history as well as the larger points his interaction with the music and the moment make. And that previous epic sentence of mine doesn’t even begin to describe what he does and does so well. I’ve been introduced to this form as a “hybrid” essay, but in my experience, that involves two topics that are related and woven together. Abdurraqib’s pieces are a tower of Jenga blocks. Remove one comment about music, about neighborhoods, about his life, about race, about the church, etc., and the tower will almost certainly come tumbling down.

Abdurraqib also has a book called Go Ahead in the Rain, which is about A Tribe Called Quest. I know nothing about the group. After my experience with this one, I’m still going to read it. My only hope – and I wanted it for this one, too – is that it comes with a soundtrack.

Citizen Illegal (Olivarez)

In my experience, poets often start slowly, offering a poem, sometimes even before the Table of Contents, that welcomes you to the book. Not so with Mr. Olivarez. His first poem, the one that gives the collection its title (actually, the title of the poem is “(Citizen) (Illegal)” is less a gentle welcome and more of a shout of manifesto. Whatever you may call it, it’s definitely a thematic introduction. This is a book about what it’s like to be in two worlds at one – both a citizen and (perceived as) illegal, both from the US and Mexico, a son of the father you have and the one you’d like to have, for Ilivarez to be “a long way from the fire [his] parents feared & so close to this new blue flame.”

While there is much about this collection that I’m sure I don’t understand (in part because I don’t speak Spanish), what I can access is powerful, both throughout the individual poems themselves and with sharp endings and humor:

Mexican Heaven

there are white people in heaven, too.

they build condos across the street

& ask the Mexicans to speak English.

i’m just kidding.

there are no white people in heaven.

Tell me you expected that ending. Tell me you didn’t laugh.

Other favorites include “Gentefication” (the bad news is the economists say there is zero economic value on our block. the good news is we threw away the economic textbooks.) and “Poem in Which I Become Wolverine.”

There are too many to list. Read all of them.

I Still Dream About You (Flagg)

I loved the movie, Fried Green Tomatoes, and I remember picking up the book, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, but I don’t remember much about the book at all. I must not have liked it too much because a quick review of Flagg’s other titles tells me I haven’t read anything else of hers.

And I wish I hadn’t read this one.

For a while, it was just puzzling. Maggie, the protagonist, a former Miss Alabama, wants to do something rather drastic. Even though it’s quite clear what it is, Flagg, perhaps thinking she’s reeling us in, doesn’t name for it a while. And then she does reveal it (and Maggie’s ridiculous plan for accomplishing her goal) and pages and pages are going by and nothing, really, is happening. We don’t even know why she wants to take this drastic step.

Then it seems like Flagg realized that she didn’t have much of a plot going so there’s a subplot about a house (Maggie is a realtor) and who is going to sell it (it’s immediately obvious who is going to end up with it) and (cue suspense music) something mysterious that Maggie and her token black friend, Brenda, find in the attic.

Various other characters pop in and out as needed with little development and a great deal of superficiality. The whole story is just unbelievable – not as in amazing, but as in, “I don’t think any of these people are real and I don’t think any of this could happen in the way that Flagg describes.” Even the practical details – like doing with a business with a bank – are only distantly related to reality.

Given that Fried Green Tomatoes was lurking in my mind as I read this, it didn’t surprise me that Flagg  picked up gender issues again. One element has potential but is recounted in exposition which deadens it; the other backfires spectacularly. And when Maggie says her experience with the anger she faced during one event because she was representing Alabama during the Civil Rights protests and Brenda’s whole life as a black woman, I wanted to throw the book across the room.

The ending was perfectly predictable; I was just glad it was the ending.