Back to Life, Back to Reality - Soul 2 Soul

In April I left my home of three years because my friend/roommate had a mental breakdown in connection to their coke addiction/psychosis and refused to be accountable to the horrible slews of abuse, manipulation and threats of violence they raged at their ex partner, our roommates and myself. They continue to lay a false narrative of their underdog status and refuse to accept what they've done as harmful. The legitimate death threats they have tossed mine and others way leave me traumatized every day and will not leave my senses until I know they have finally killed themselves or by proxy placed themselves in prison, something they used to hold in pride to have been finally out of. Both of these are soul crushing realities that I do not know how to process. I want to feel vengeful and I still want to believe in the work of restorative justice but I don't know how to trust anyone who has harmed another again - nor what we can do for those who do not either have the ability or willingness to account for their actions. I just don't know how to heal anymore. I just don't know how to feel. I don't know how to talk about anything I'm doing or feel safe or loved or love anyone or be safe for anyone. Yet I'm trying to.

So that's how my pandemic has gone. I read some stuff and some of it will speak obvious to what I typically read or was going through or I'll talk about it here probably because "who's gonna read this???" They're a little less specific, these ones, because I did not keep a good record or - how the rest of these "reviews" have gone - immediately write up my thoughts following finishing the books.

Native Son - Richard Wright

This is the first book I read after leaving. I read it by audiobook while I walked around the state forest next to my mom's house. It hurts a lot. Bigger is an easy allegory to the person who hurt me but Bigger is far different a character. The best parts of this book are Wright's critiques of white radicals - especially the class traitors. I've not read much of Wright's work, which is odd, and know that I'm glad I read Native Son. I'd like to watch the movie adaptations - an HBO recent that looks like and by reviews has gotten everything wrong and a version where Wright plays Bigger and looks as though it's going to hit the nail on the head with the unnerving to whiteness notions the book has. I probably have more to say, but it's not worth it.

 

What It Is / One! Hundred! Demons! / The Good Times Are Killing Me - Lynda Barry

I first read What It Is, then started on 100 but finished The Good Times... before it. Barry is great. She really tells a story rich in nostalgia and the ease of possibility. I too though had this quote from the review I was going to do - cut off now by the time and not finishing the other works of hers I wanted to:

I am a white person who has [made] a lot of writing about racism. I have a lot of conversations about racism too. Often with nonwhite people, but also as myself keyed as some sort of white knowledgeable person [...] amidst content that does not apply to me. I cue in to the inspirations I have had in theory that taught me the construction of race and antiblackness and sort of find myself deemed white-responsible. The problem in that is there is no need to trust or trust that can be in a white world like this. I am as possible of violence and hate and dehumanizing [the same] as the next white fag.
This is applicable because [when] I read The Good Times are Killing Me [it was] about race from a white woman['s perspective]. It uses an old slur in context in the very first page [...] I want to make two opposing claims: 1) No one is estranged to racist slurs, or 2) white people are estranged to them. Can these two things be true?

I am not strange to these words. I kept reading them. I'm always reading them. In Rubyfruit Jungle and in Rotted Names and in California Über Alles and in Patti Smith and in Spike Lee and in Joni Mitchell album and in my head as a child and in the Milo songs I played last night and in my crying friend's mouths and in my easy sloshed hookup's tongue and in a class about the Harlem Renaissance and in [a Jim or Remus] and a guitar carved in by a stranger before me and a blood put onto the pavement and a whose streets that whipped topping couldn't have raised higher peaks of white to. 

[/] These are unavoidable and personal words. At which point is it so derailed its message of empathy. To stare at the responsibility of language, and our responsibility to not say or enact the violence of it or know how we have and have not is not something I can find some simple understanding to.Why would I be able to. I have only now become someone who feels no shame mentioning the race of others.

I understand The Good Times are Killing Me. And after this reflection, I will go back to reading it now.

So if that wasn't exhausting enough a read, I'd recommend Lynda Barry's work wholeheartedly and with critique as we should as anyone attempting an antiracist ideology. This set of thoughts is also far distant to being specific to Barry and I don't want it to code your entrance into her work. After finishing it, I feel the one I wrote the most on is the one that could easiest be mistreated by a liberal, but see a lot of valor in the way that she actually follows her story, whether or not we have that same responsibility in ours to do different. 

 One Hundred Years of Solidtude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I finally audiobooked my way through this. I tried to do Cholera too but alas. I also...uh...I have only finished this book of Marquez's...

Stop booing me.

I love "magical realism" as much as the next hyper-post-colonial-focused wacko but have mostly experienced Marquez's work as short stories and I may have said this already.

As far as this one goes, my best takeaway is the purpose of names - and it seems an importance to the story itself. When we pass lineages and their histories/legacies/stains on each other. I live in the shadow of my name myself, even in my having anew - and not being known much by the old. But I identify with my past and present, attempting to not be shamed into submission to what I could have been all great and horrifying and boastful. So I guess make sense of that if you can.

Tenth of December - George Saunders

We listened to a few of these stories while we were in isolation with and depending on each other because of them. This messaging lets in more of my story but I don't want to talk about it here. It was funny in a moment where I had not slept for most the days of that month because of the fear waking me up and I checked this out because my professor made us read things like My Chivalric Fiasco in that final seminar about Neoliberalism in America. Sorry for that final essay, I don't know. I can't formulate ideas into writing so easily anymore and I don't know if it will return. An example in this paragraph? What are you talking about? I don't want to talk to you again.

Everything I Never Told You / Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Vanishing Acts - Jodi Picoult

These three books are only together because they were read as an attempt to do a "book club" with my Nana, sister and mom. It didn't work well beyond Nana and I picking Little Fires Everywhere as the most amenable choice.

I was definitely being a jerk in this but also had to remind everyone that it would take a while for my hardcopy to be delivered to Nana who does not know how to utilize the internet or my sister to get a copy under lockdown in New Zealand. I read Everything... in order to fill that time and like it more than Little. I guess I read both while doing shitty manual labor is a thing - I worked in a factory for a day getting evangelized by someone who needed the job and for UPS loading pacakages in the middle of the graveyard in total isolation/panic/filth-coated/dehumanizing/detransitional glory for a month. Ng's a good writer, but it is definitely still mostly pop-fic over lit-fic. I thought the show was being played far to literal in its adaptation in the first episode so I didn't bother continuing. The book is probably better than the show and both books have nice subtleties.

Vanishing Acts was also finished as part of this "book club" and I thought I would hate it more. It's definitely a very messy third act, but there are parts that I thought had some merit. I think as far as racism or understanding of the prison industrial complex or indigeneity or the most basic feminist principle goes, it's one big dud. The book falls flat on its attempts for politic and is where the book falls apart. I wouldn't recommend it, and feel unfortunately bias-confirmed. Sorry, Ginny.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For - Alison Bechdel

I finished this after moving into my new place - no longer having ants and spiders and earwigs crawl across my air mattress and clothing and trash and being some sweat-coated, unshaving monstrous self who was eating out of the cheapest possible TV dinners I could scrounge (most the time anyway I am no longer that) - and what do I gotta tell you. It's Bechdel and it's good. It cut off so sadly...that's the only thing. So many things at the end felt devastatingly harming to the characters I grew close to. There's the obvious pull of the aging  dykes, who I just want to mimic without loss of community as they do. Maybe that hit, as I do not know who I am able to be near in this world again - whether they be restricted by system ignoring/benefitting genocide or just by their human relation to me. I wish that the trusted troupe had a happy ending but we don't always get what we want for others or ourselves.