Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird AND “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Tatum

I finished two books yesterday,  and  “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Tatum and Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird.

First, I read Tatum’s book, which I had bought a used copy of at a small indie bookstore two summers ago, for a discussion group at work. It was written in 1997, which struck me because it is a stark reminder that back then, although I would have said I wasn’t racist, I was not actively antiracist and would have been surprised by much of what Tatum writes about. Knowing what I know now, I was not surprised, but I will say this is a very interesting book because Tatum is a psychology professor so she approaches antiracism from the perspective of an educator, researcher, and psychologist.

Which is not to say this is dry or academic — it’s smart and thorough but completely accessible and replete with anecdotes from her classes and her life as a Black woman, mother, and professor. Her approach is to address racism as it impacts Black or multiracial people from childhood through adulthood as they develop their racial identity. Whatever your race there is much to learn about these stages of development. Whether reading it for your own education and understanding or to support a loved one or friend, Tatum’s sensible advice and authoritative voice will be helpful.

For example, in a chapter on “The Development of White Identity,” Tatum describes how white people, especially those who have gained “an intellectual understanding of racism as a system of advantage” struggle to deal with self-consciousness, guilt, fear, and even blame. Sound familiar? It did to me. But Tatum cautions, “We all must be able to embrace who we are in terms of our racial and cultural heritage, not in terms of assumed superiority or inferiority, but as an integral part of our daily experience in which we can take pride.”

I am really looking forward to the conversation about this book!

Into the Silent Land is one of the books I’m reading as a discerner in the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. Longtime bookconscious readers will know I’ve read a LOT of secular books on meditation, and have practiced mindfulness (practice being the operative word) for a long time. I also have a regular prayer practice, and have read about and tried meditative forms of prayer, mostly unsuccessfully. Laird, also a professor, has written a concise and highly informative handbook, which makes me want to try again.

Drawing on the history of contemplative prayer as well as the practical aspects of practicing it, Laird is both systematic and supportive. The combination of practical advice, encouragement, and ancient but still highly relevant wisdom is terrific. I’ve made tentative steps towards trying contemplative prayer. It’s a little chaotic around here right now, but maybe that is a good time to try stillness.

As Laird notes, “When we first begin the inward turn to quiet prayer we are faced with chaos, and the prayer word serves as an anchor in a storm, a shield and refuge from the onslaught of thoughts, feelings, storms of boredom, and fidgeting. But with some practice with the prayer word we grow in recollection and concentration and begin to see that there is something deeper than the chaos within. . . . What exactly is the prayer word doing? The prayer word excavates the present moment. The resulting interior focus eventually sets off and maintains a process of interior silencing.”

Sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it?

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Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

On a whim, I checked one of my public library’s eBook apps on the day Kelli Jo Ford‘s debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, was released last week and lucked into checking it out the same day. Ford tells the stories of Granny, her daughter Lula, granddaughter Janice and great granddaughter Reney, four Cherokee women living in Oklahoma (Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation herself). The stories range from the 1970s to a time in the 2000s that isn’t specified but seems to be in the future.

Granny’s son, Janice’s Uncle Thorpe, is a preacher in a Holiness church, a Pentecostal denomination where people speak in tongues, and Lula, after her husband leaves her with three little girls, embraces church life wholeheartedly. She raises the girls to wear “modest” clothes for the Lord; Justine is the youngest, and she rebels against the long skirts, preferring bell bottoms that she hides from her mother. She’s just a kid, trying her best to live in the world and navigate her family’s world as well, and then suddenly she’s sixteen and a single mom, working in factories and trying to provide a better life for Reney than she had.

There is a sense of loss throughout the book, not least because all four women have broken marriages and violence is everywhere — between men and women, mothers and daughters, and in the harsh elements of the dry Oklahoma and Texas settings, where fires and tornados are regular threats. As the stories unfold, we learn more about the trauma that winds through the generations.

Beyond violence loss of culture, language, and tradition are part of the pattern as well. Like other books I’ve read recently, Crooked Hallelujah is also about the systemic racism in our country, and how people live through it. Granny grew up in boarding schools, sent away to unlearn her native culture, but she is the only one who speaks Cherokee well. Justine at one point is cleaning out the junk at Lula’s house and imagines the boxes of language tapes warping in the heat in her own house in Texas. Reney asks her mother, after she moves away to Oregon, about their family history, about being Cherokee. Readers don’t really learn what Justine tells her. Like Reney, we get snippets.

Speaking of snippets, this is described as a novel in stories, but mostly reads like a novel. But there is one story that didn’t seem to me to fit — Then Sings My Soul. It appears more or less in the middle of the book and although Justine is mentioned, it isn’t about any of the women who are the book’s main characters. In fact the characters who feature in this story don’t come up again. It’s also a brutal story, almost unbelievably so. I’m still not sure exactly why it is there.

Perhaps it belongs somehow because it’s a story about love and identity and belonging and the way family makes us who we are. The rest of the book is definitely about those things. In one chapter towards the end of the book, Justine is driving back to Texas after a visit home to Oklahoma where Lula, in her eighties, is ailing. As she drives, she thinks,

“For a long time I thought harmony was just people using air and vibrations at the same time. I thought that once the singing stopped it might as well have never even started. But when the heavy hospital doors close behind me, there is a ringing in my chest like a song. When I close the door to my truck and later when I cross the state line, I can still feel the voices. They carry me home.”

I don’t want to give away too much, but this scene — a daughter driving away, but feeling her family is still with her somehow — is repeated throughout the book. It’s a book about sorrow that is deep in the characters’ beings, even when they are happy. I’m glad I read it.

 

 

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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I’d wanted to read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for some time; there were holds on it, I forgot about it. Then this summer book group I’m in at work selected it (that was also why I read Honour), and I remembered. I’m so glad. I found it to be an absorbing read. Interestingly this is two books in a row with a narrative that shifts from character to character and to different times and places — something I thought I didn’t like — that I’ve really enjoyed. Maybe I don’t enjoy when it’s not done well, but this book was wonderful.

In Homegoing, there are characters whose lives span a few centuries, in Ghana first, then later, in America and Ghana. As the stories unfold, you see the ways the different characters relate to those who came before. Right from the start, slavery impacts all of them, directly or indirectly. Readers meet people involved in the capture and sale of other people, and their descendants. As Gyasi winds through the generations, it’s easy to see how the tendrils of trauma wind along as well, wrapping around each family. More than once, I was reading before bed, and instead of getting sleepy, couldn’t put the book down. There are so many good stories, and so many interesting people, in this novel.

The writing is lovely, too. Here is a passage from a section about Yaw, a bachelor teacher who has hired a younger woman to care for his house:

“He pretended to be annoyed when she rolled off her list of endless questions, but since that first day, he always answered them all, each and every one. When it was not raining, he would sit outside under the shade of a big, bushy mango tree while she drew water from the well. She carried it back to the house in two buckets, and the swollen muscles of her arms would flex, and the sheen of sweat would appear on them, and when she passed him she would smile, the gap so lovely it made him want to cry.”

And like Honour, Homegoing, incredibly, is a hopeful book. There is plenty of heartbreak and greed, bigotry and hypocrisy, violence and degradation. But there is so much love. And as the book comes to a close, with people who are perhaps of Gyasi’s generation, there is a sense of transcendence. After generations of seeing people beaten down by systems they cannot overcome, these two young people seem like they are able to be themselves. And you feel hopeful because if their ancestors (mostly) survived, even better for these two whose circumstances are finally better.

Which makes even clearer the urgent need currently felt around the world, and especially in America, to end systemic racism. Because what if all the people in this long line down through the generations had been able to be themselves?

I’m excited to read Yaa Gyasi’s forthcoming book — out in September!

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Honour by Elif Shafak

I read Honour, by Elif Shafak, for a discussion group at work. it’s a complicated novel about Adem and Pembe Toprak, Kurdish Turks who have emigrated to London in the 1970s with their children, Iskander (whose English friends call him Alex) and Esma. In England they have a second son, Yunus. While the family has a decent life in London, both Adem and Pembe bear the scars of their childhoods in Turkey, where rules about propriety, violence, and shame deeply impact them and their families.

Shafak changes point of view and time period frequently, which is something I don’t usually like and often find confusing. But I managed to follow what was happening in Honour, and the shifting narrative works well in this story. Different perspectives remind the reader that the same event, viewed through a different lens, might appear differently. And she is telling different generations’ stories, so the shifting comes naturally.

We learn early — right in the first chapter, from Esma, that she has a brother who is a murderer. The rest of the book marches steadily towards that moment. But it also veers back into the past, into Pembe’s childhood, where she and her twin sister, Jamila, grew up in village, in a family of eight daughters, and where their mother died trying to bear a son. And into Adem’s childhood, where he grew up with an alcoholic and abusive father, whose actions destroyed his family, even though his wife, Adem’s mother, is the one who brought them shame.

This is one of the book’s themes: men do plenty of dishonourable things, but women are the ones who bring shame to the family. And yet, there are a few kindly or wise men, and a few women who judge things shameful or enable or mete out the punishment to those who have brought shame; Shafak doesn’t oversimplify the moral universe of her book. She touches on extremism, nationalism, the pressures to conform to western standards of beauty, the dangers of forcing men and women into set gender roles, and the painful consequences of capitalism, all without forcing any of these things on readers — they unfold in the novel naturally.

Religion and belief play a strong role, but Shafak is once again skillful and nonjudgemental; even the most extreme beliefs appear within their contexts to be part of the lives she portrays. She doesn’t over-dramatize or make the God the culprit when humans act outside their own interest, but she also doesn’t belittle the strongly held beliefs some of her characters have. Love is also a central theme, and the relationships between family members, friends, and lovers. There wasn’t a relationship in the book that felt forced for the plot or unrealistic, and that’s saying something in a story this complex.

Shafak manages to write a book that doesn’t feel heavy or brutal, but empathetic and somewhat hopeful, even as she tells the story of people burdened by heartbreaking circumstances. A very interesting read, that took me into other people’s lives. I always love a book that transports me and this one did that, whether to Istanbul, a Kurdish village or remote areas of Turkey, London, or a jail cell in Shrewsbury. Oddly, there is even a brief outbreak of a deadly virus.

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Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

Human Voices is a short novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, set during the blitz at BBC headquarters. Fitzgerald worked there herself at that time, when she was in her 20s.  She writes about one department where Sam Brooks is “RPD” (Recorded Programme Director) and he has a young staff of assistants who manage much of the work while he signs endless piles of letters prepared by the motherly Mrs. Milne and designs field equipment for the time in the not too distant future when he expects BBC teams will be sent into Europe to cover the war on the ground. His longtime friend Jeff Haggard is “DPP” (Director of Programme Planning), higher ranking and often in a position to defend the somewhat eccentric and self-absorbed RPD.

Against this backdrop of the men in charge, Fitzgerald also weaves in the stories of the young programme assistants who work for the RPD of the younger people, like Willie, who is constantly planning for a future ideal society; Vi, who comes from a large family and is waiting for her boyfriend in the merchant marines to come home; Lise, a half-French girl who only works a short time in the RPD’s office and has one of the most dramatic scenes in the book; and Annie, still a teen and recently orphaned, who stands up to the RPD in ways none of the others has.

The DPP has another good friend, the American broadcaster Mac McVitie, who breezes in and out of London with gifts. There’s a scene where he’s given out oranges and the assistants in the Recorded Programme office are dividing them among themselves that makes clear how unusual McVitie’s presents are for the Londoners. When he’s there, he records at the BBC and goes out looking for a drink or a chance to meet ordinary people on the street with the DPP.

What’s most striking is that quirky as they are — one team sent into the countryside to preserve quintessential English sounds come back with hours of recordings of a church hall door opening, creaking louder when it’s opened wider — Fitzgerald portrays the entire enterprise as devoted to truthful broadcasting. And despite the tone, which is mainly breezy and focused on the younger people’s cares, which are much like young people’s cares anywhere, anytime, Fitzgerald shows very skillfully how the tension of the time creeps into every aspect of life. Relationships, work, leisure — everything is impacted by the struggle to overcome the daily strain of working in a war zone.

I enjoyed Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, and this was just as enjoyable. I happened across it on Hoopla, when I was going through a list of books I’d hoped to find at the library at some point. Entertaining, but with enough humanity and pathos to keep me thinking about it long after I got to the end.

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