extemporally

More books!

Caucasia, by Danzy Senna.

O man, the things I loved about this book. I feel like a list would be appropriate:

1. Birdie's relationship with her sister.

We were trying to block them out with talk of Elemeno. Cole was explaining to me that it wasn't just a language, but a place and a people as well. ... The Elemenos, she said, could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again. She said they were a shifting people, constantly changing their form, color, pattern, in a quest for invisibility. According to her, their changing routine was a serious matter - less a game of make-believe than a fight for the survival of their species.

2. Her parents, who were so great, even as they were tearing each other apart:

He was on a roll now, in the middle of one of his monologues. He said she was ten years too late to be storing radicals, that she never knew when to stop. Didn't know when to stop eating. Didn't know when to stop drinking. And she damn sure didn't know when to stop this game of cops and robbers. The movement, she bellowed, had shifted gears, and she was still living in another time, another era, not realising everyone had moved on to other tactics or had dropped out of dropping out.

My mother replied that intellectuals like him were parlor-pink creeps who never really practiced what they preached. At least, she bellowed at him, she was trying to do something to change the world, not just writing about it.

Looking at those photographs, I remembered how my parents had never said "I love you" to each other. How they had said only "I miss you." At the time, I hadn't been able to figure out what this meant. but now it seemed clear: this was how they defined their love - by how deeply they missed each other when they were together. They felt the loss before it happened, and their love was defined by that loss. They hungered even as they ate, thirsted even as they drank.

3. Or just Birdie, god, Birdie and the way she is about her dual heritage and her nascent queerness:

The women of Aurora often had talked about what lies they had lived as Stepford wives - before they had become real, roaring, natural women. I thought about Bernadette and my mother, their blatant kisses and hugs and nude romps to the lake. About Alexis and me, our games of honeymoon. In the context of Aurora, it had come to seem as natural as anything else. And it was my mother's affair with Jim, not with Bernadette, that had disgusted me. I wondered if Ali would turn against me if he knew my full story, if he knew all the worlds I had lived in, worlds I still carried inside of me now.

4. The way this book is so fucking smart about politics:

We ran away from the trouble my mother had left behind on the steps of a Columbus Avenue brownstone. Away from the rubble of revolutionary basements, fisted picks, Nkrumah dreams, and into the underneath - into the world of women without names, without pasts, without documents. Women who didn't exist. Women who had been discarded by the radicals they once loved. And so - bruised, disillusioned, erased from the history books - they found one another.

5. The way Senna writes about Boston-in-the-seventies, right from the fucking start:

This was back when Boston still came in black and white, yellowing around the edges. You could just make out the beginnings of color: red-eyed teenagers with afros like halos around their faces, whispering something about power and ofay to one another as they shuffled to catch the bus; a man's mocha hand on a woman's pale knee. I disappeared into America, the easiest place to get lost. Dropped off, without a name, without a record. With only the body I traveled in. And a memory of something lost.

This is what I remember.

6. The way she's so acute about racial experience:

The cop laughed a little. Then he touched my shoulder and pulled me away from my father and the other cop, so we were leaning into each other. Secretive. He said in a whisper, "You can tell us, kiddie. He can't hurt you here. You're safe now. Did the man touch you funny?"

I felt sick and a little dizzy. I wanted to spit in the cop's face. But my voice came out quiet, wimpier than I wanted it to. "No, he didn't. He's my father" was all I could manage. I wondered what my sister would do. I figured she wouldn't be in this situation in the first place, and that fact somehow depressed me.

Her father, god, the way he won't look at her after that happens. Because how could he? But how was any of that remotely her fault?

And the way in which her mum is so great in so many ways but also just incredibly privileged:

She would call me her mushugga nebbish with exaggerated relish. She enjoyed telling the women at Aurora that I got my dark looks from my Semitic side and that she had been on the verge of converting to Judaism before David died. When we were alone she also liked to remind me that I wasn't really passing because Jews weren't really white, more like an off-white. She said they were the closest I was going to get to black and still stay white. "Tragic history, kinky hair, good politics," she explained. "It's all there."

Because, the racialism of blurring minorities together aside, don't you see, don't you see, the hurt Birdie goes through by passing as white and denying her black heritage, ow.

7. Or, just the way she writes:

But it is true that one night I was drifting into sleep when I head a car door slam down on the street below, then my mother's voice, muffled by the windowpane. I lay beside Cole in bed. It was two o'clock in the morning, and now I was wide awake. An indigo darkness blanketed the room, interrupted by bars of light from the street. I could make out only the shapes in our preteen sanctuary. A stuffed animale that, in the darkness, had acquired the profile of Karl Marx. A poster of an afroed Jackson Five that in the half-light appeared as a cluster of dark, swaying lollipops. A sock-monkey doll with red felt buttocks, which in the darkness created a second smile.

Love, love, love. ♥

Oreo, by Fran Ross.

This is a retelling of the myth of Theseus, and I definitely thought it was a disadvantage that I didn't know enough about Greek mythology - it was definitely a parody of the bildungsroman as well as the genre of racial memoir, and it was really playful in that sense. So I enjoyed a lot of the jokes in here, but I don't know that I understood them completely? In that sense it reminded me a lot of (a smarter version of) Julian Gough's Jude: Level 1.

That said. It was extremely funny:

Once in an adjective-adverb drill, Oreo wrote: "He felt badly." The professor was furious and viciously crossed out the ly. He was ashamed of Oreo.

Oreo looked him dead in the eye and said, "I am writing a story about a repentant but recidivous rapist. In the story, this repentant rapist catches his hand in a wringer. Therefore, when he goes out, recidivously, to rape, he feels both bad and badly."

The professor kissed Oreo on both cheeks.

Oreo was still angry with him for doubting her, and in her story about the rapist she added such abominations as: "The Empire State Building rises penisly to the sky. As architecture, manurially speaking, it stinks." She felt it appropriate to employ genito-scatological adverbs to express academic vexation.

Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng.

If you grew up in Singapore in the 90s, you would have watched Growing Up, that family series about... growing up in the 60s. It was quality Singaporean television before (sadly) "quality Singaporean television" became an oxymoron; one of those absurdly sincere pieces of television about a hardworking nuclear family and their various trials and tribulations that worked. If you talk about it with any Singaporean they will tell you that episodes always ended with them eating at the family table with a bonus cheesy voiceover, and that the show went completely and utterly downhill when Ma died.

WHICH IS TO SAY. This book was great! \o/ Also that I miss vintage 90s TV and that I can't find the recordings anywhere. :( :( :(

Also:

"First my brother will kill me, then my father will kill me," he wailed.

"You... you think you're v-v... very clever," Guan said, punching me on the shoulder. Stutter or no stutter, Guan could get a sentence out when it mattered.

"Wah," said Aziz to no one in particular, "Even here, he can find us."

"Even in another country, he'll find us," I retorted. "Why do you think he is a Geography teacher?"

lololol. Also, Vicky is THE GREATEST.

ETA YOU WANT TO WATCH THIS VIDEO:

(Vicky is the arch-looking one in very fashionable outfits <-- that right there is a trufax accurate summary of why I love her.)

The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block.

Seriously, THIS WAS SO GREAT. I feel like that's how you write about magic amidst a backdrop of relentless (dare I say the word?) modernity, this is how you write about faeries and changelings and weird unsettling episodes and Wikipedia and the Internet and cafeterias. We need more stories like this.

This was my first Francesca Lia Block. And she writes so well:

She got up from the table. The cafeteria floor was so sticky that her sneakers made a soft popping when she moved; it sounded as if someone was following her. All around her was noise and the sickening smells of grease. Her stomach tumbled, nauseous, and the faces of the other kids eating their lunches glowed with a bilious yellow-greenish light, the color of fear. Why had she talked to him at all?

"Wait."

But she was hurrying away from him. In the glass cafeteria wall a girl was running beside her.