This Town Sleeps - Dennis E. Staples / Butter Honey Pig Bread - Francesca Ekwuyasi / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong / A Burning - Megha Majumdar / Thirty Names for Night - Zeyn Joukhadar

I changed jobs and am trying to read again. I've not been able to finish Woman on the Edge of Time - it's too much work for me to sit and read it on paper. And it's woefully depressing but that's another thing (but was also very very good). I'm not sure how to update otherwise.

Mostly, I don't want to wallow off about how horrible I've been doing.

But I also am trying to state I'm trying. And trying has been better. And sometimes I am doing better.

I started writing this post and read the books in question a while back now so let's try and finish up my recollections shall we?

This Town Sleeps - Dennis E. Staples

This town sleeps is the story of Marion, a gay Ojibwe man living at the reservation he grew up on on his own. Over the course of the novel we follow him and a few other characters connections to each other in the past and present, the two inevitably linking to each other on a physical level. This mostly comes to a head for Marion when he starts seeing a revenant of a dog connected to a murder from years ago on the reservation of a young man.

I feel that's a vague description but I also think the plot is actually about this not just the fact that Marion is also gay and having DL hookups with his childhood best friend. Really, that part of the plot is just another connection of Marion to a past that manifests itself as part of the mystery. Most the synopses focus on that aspect before the others but a good half of the book is taken from other people's perspectives and completely divergent to anything with Marion's relationship with his own sexuality - something he's confident with and rather the world around him he explains the fumbles of.

I liked This Town Sleeps a lot but I think like many others on here, I find it occasionally a bit light or distracted with its own story - for instance and with a spolier warning, the murder to me was clearly going to be about the two boys queer connection and it never is - instead a vague unexplored element of internal reservation family politics. Other areas though that are explored are really something. I love the way it talks through the black widow trope, and its interesting to think about how Marion now fits into that story of gender and family as a gay man. I also find that the exploration of queerness in small towns/communities connects a lot of these books for me that I'll probably get into later, or even how all of them have the same continued thematic elements may say something else.

Butter Honey Pig Bread - Francesca Ekwuyasi

I randomly chose this for its title and the synopsis pointing to it being a multi generational narrative. I was hoping for a modern Love in the Time of Cholera - which it is not - and instead got this multiperspective exploration of family and shared trauma that while also not perfect, really hit me in the right places.

In Butter Honey Pig Bread a family - Kambirinachi and her two twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye - is meeting up at their childhood home in Laos after years of indeterminate distances across continents. The distance too is that they all are nervous and out of contact with each other, Kehinde in particular having almost completely cut off communication with her mother and sister. The novel uses the space of them all coming together at this house as a means to flash back into each's lives, never following it in a direct path of what happened in order, rather, going to different points at each's life.

For me, Kambirinachi has the most interesting sections, particularly for how they are colored by diversions from the reality most other characters experience. While her daughter's parts are in objective 3rd person and first person, Kambirinachi breaks that mold, and sometimes the fourth wall. This is attributed to her being an Ogbanje. My poor summary for this is that Kambirinachi is an entity who has stayed instead of moving on from being a stillbirth, which her origin is thought to be. The folklore follows all things she does as the others of her collective self - her other life, one less finite and burdened by the throes of human responsibility to each other - are constantly calling for her to come home, sowing doubt in her choices or begrieving her. It's a really interesting folklore and one that also is intrinsic to her othering in the world and subsequent alienations her daughters feel.

It also is a fascinating examination of what the western world may think in terms of schizophrenia, and the impacts of a hereditary "curse" that may or may not be more than what is described. It at the heart of it uses language that the characters self-identify by. I have a friend who grew up with a mother who "hallucinated" (my word, and I think a flawed one) often and this book made me remember listening to them when they would talk of their own experiences.

My own family's connection to mental health too is one often of denial and sadness - a neglect to face trauma for fear of future hurt but all while not realizing that only accepting one's complicated self can we move forward. It makes sense that in the book and my friend's and my own life we too become the other things manifesting inside us and if we avoid any language at all to come to terms with it that the shadows occlude, that we break off. That we feel a little broken.

Some bits are kind of corny and others are kind of weak on the politics, and honestly my biggest complaint is the recipie bit gets dropped so soon (it's so good, very much like Ntozake Shange's cookbook (which I adore)) but as someone who just went home to see family I do not talk to much, Butter Pig Honey Bread made me cry and laugh and appreciate I think much more deeply the possibility of growth together.

A Burning - Megha Majumdar

I didn't love this one. I'm not exactly sure why I finished it beyond it being shorter and Lovely being my favorite. But she's also played up to be a clown/fool character and I think it's...off-putting? The whole book is in partially a satire on the ludicrousness of social and political systems in India, nationalism and the violence that's tied to it. With PT Sir and moments from side character interludes - like the guard at a post in the middle of nowhere who does nothing except check trucks for cows - these work. But I feel off about Lovely, a self identified hijra (separate gender category and history/makeup but on the edge of being identified by ones transfeminity).

Maybe just at her end. Other times Lovely is delightful - the entire basis that people give her money to bless their babies, weddings, etc just because she's "not normal" and therfore must have spiritual powers is funny while also unmistakably sad because trans people over the world did have places we survived and were revered in.

I just bought a copy of Living the Spirit because it has been on my mind lately, and is the other gendering history I know the most about through that book and others (b binohan's de/colonizing gender 101 as well). Living the Spirit for me is a recognition of the fact that it is not being outside colonizing ideas of binary gender but rather the colonizing binary gender itself that removes people from their culture, their communities, and the respect and love that inclusion can have. Instead, often it's violence. 

I'm glad Lovely gets to be a movie star. But I don't believe she would have given up on someone of her community like this, regardless of fear of failure when she knows too what it's like to be cast aside as an inconvenient truth.

That all said, there are also elements on the poltical side I'm less knowledgable but did also want to see more of - the base plot is that Jivan, a young woman living in the Kolkata slums is near a terrorist attack on a train platform and is convicted as the orchestrator of the event because on Facebook she makes a comment. The right often fear this reality under freedom of speech in America, and the left more experience it - the hyper surveillance of radicals to pacify and cultivate the social order. Saying or doing the wrong thing to legal or authoritarian decision makers without a protection tool can get you in some deeper shit, especially if you're insurrectionary. Which is why Buy A VPN is the sponsor of today's video.

I wish it talked a bit more about the tech monopolies companies like Whats App and Facebook have in India and other areas of Asia, where often while either repurposing or avoiding their own marketing directly engage in profiteering off the sparks that lead to horrific violence. Which of course they also do in my neck of the woods.

I also think Jivan's true recollection and grief is glossed over some and was the most important piece for me. It's clearly a book that has a purpose and I do appreciate it, while also thinking of things that may be missing or I wanted more from.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

I had put off reading this or Vuong at all thinking I just wouldn't get into it. The new queer darling? Even straights read them? Why do we need new ones, I'm not even halfway done with On Lies Secrets and Silence.

I'm never going to catch up. But that's actually a good thing. Us being more and making more is worthwhile, even when we are turned commodity. I don't actually believe in that. But I'm trying to.

I guess the actual thing I need to say is I had an unfortunate reaction to Vuong's rise and it was senseless; petty; ignorant. Something has been dredged into me to avoid the new things we make. I would like to stop doing that, and sometimes am, or, letting myself explore art solely on the basis that someone has made it and I think I can glean gold from any pan if there is passion.

Vuong writes a lot like my own prose was my main thought while reading their not-quite memoir not-quite nonfiction (but really seeming like it) story of a gender-vague child recounting elements of their and their mother's lives. It like Butter Pig Honey Bread explores mental health and gender and folklore and abuse through terms that resist white-defined dismissals and erasurethrough colonialism, but still face their effect at the same time. The hydra is inescapable.

I'm not sure what to tell you is the story of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous beyond it being well, gorgeous. The small town crawl that Staples and Vuong do in their respecctive books hit my small town brain pretty neatly and the type of existence I lived in my own faggotry then. I live in a small town now too, and I am of few resident queers. However, the Dollar General has been getting increasinglyfilled with trans staff and I love that for her. I've yet to do more than clock and feel warmth but in isolating spaces, my fear of a Boys Don't Cry is sometimes obscured when I think of a better ending for Little Dog's youth then future. 

And like Butter Honey Pig Bread again, thats what I sit on - recognizing the pain as it comes for on earth we're briefly gorgeous. That there is a lot which preceeds us and a lot which will follow. That those in our lives are affected and act of their history, and how hard that is to endure as a child. How hard it was to endure when they were. How you want to end the cycles and move forward.

Thirty Names of Night - Zeyn Joukhadar

I had started this back when I was driving around the bookmobile, it's cover and blurb hit me and it's writing does too. Thirty Names of Night is about _____and their life after their mother dies saving them from a building on fire. Their name is crossed out for most the book and the audio book replaces it with the sound of a marker blacking out what it is: their deadname/birthname/a self that was not true to form. 

_____ does eventually get a new name, but I'm going to leave it out more so you can experience when it happens. It's probably my favorite part. Initially the language around birds kept me going but then there were gays in their 20s being gays in their 20s, and I think it does kind of confuse itself or the amount of birds become overbearing. But when _____ finally finds themselves, it puts a big smile to see the egg crack open.

The plot furthers from _____ deciding to try and continue their mother's work studying birds, the home they died in burnt to the ground by arsonist bigots as henchmen to rapid capitalism and gentrification of a historic area of what were Syrian immigrant neighborhoods. A first destruction and displacement is talked about, and then given a voice to its happening, and the themes of self, American violence, and community turn the book from a simple study of birds to its characters interactions being its best part.

Except for that one part where the older sister just irrationally throws a fit. That was weird and I didn't get why it was part of the plot at all. Felt useless.

...

I still cried when they made up. And cried when a pair of obvious characters reconnecting happens. And cried when all things burn.

The overall point is that regardless of anything I read again and am thankful for that. End rambles.