46: The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

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46: The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

I find myself in two minds about this novel. It's undoubtedly a grand achievement: it takes an almost pointillist approach, building a picture of life in an industrial town in the People's Republic of China in 1979 by hopping around from character to character, showing us this person's daily routine, now this person's, now this person's; always letting us know something of their pasts, their hopes, their fears, and their illusions before moving on to the next one. The narrative voice is rather distant, and that's the only way something like this could have been made to work. If we were fully caught up in the minds of these characters, I expect the POV switches would have been wrenching and disorienting; the distance allows us to see all of what they do and feel and believe without getting lost.

I admired this novel; I enjoyed it. And yet while I turned the pages eagerly once I had the book in my hand, I didn't feel a need to go back to it once I'd put it down. There are a lot of momentous events in this novel, but -- perhaps because of the multitude of characters and the distant narrative voice -- there's not much sense of story. Things happen, one after the other, and you can even see the fuses being set (typically by accident, or otherwise unintentionally) that will end up being lit several chapters later. But for all that, I got the feeling that the omniscient narrator could continue to observe the inhabitants of Muddy River and tell me what they were doing and thinking and feeling for a hundred years without stopping. As I said, I don't think Li could have built and explored such a large cast of characters, and thereby created such a vivid sense of the complexity of the society she's writing about, without maintaining that narrative distance. But in making all of the characters equally important (even the ones who only appear for a paragraph), Li ends up making all of the events equally important as well, which leeches the novel of narrative drive and urgency.

Despite this, the novel is still very much worth reading -- for the excellent writing, for the fascinating characters, and for the glimpse of China during the period shortly after Mao's death, when the pro-democracy movement was first making its presence felt. I feel it's a successful book in many ways, even though I hesitate to call it a successful novel.

(tags: a: li yiyun, china, chinese-american)

17. Mende Nazer - Slave: My True Story

[pauraque]

Content warning: The book depicts rape, beatings, and female genital cutting, but they're not discussed in this post.


This is the story of Mende Nazer, who was abducted from her home in Sudan in 1993 and sold into slavery. Throughout her teenage years she was forced to do domestic work for a wealthy family, before being sent to work for her "master"'s sister, the wife of a Sudanese diplomat living in London. While in London she was finally able to make her escape and successfully seek political asylum. This was a big news story a few years back, some of you may remember hearing about it. Since the book's publication, she has become a British citizen.

The book is well-written and engaging, and tells a story the world needs to hear, a story that is not extraordinary, but rather all too common. The only extraordinary thing about it is that Nazer escaped, whereas most people in her situation never do.

But here's my problem: The co-author, Damien Lewis, who is white. At the time of writing, Nazer had only been studying English for a year, maybe less. She spoke two other languages fluently, but instead of using a translator, Lewis had her talk to him in English, and he interpreted and wrote down what she said in his own style. That it is his own style is obvious from reading his afterword that explains the writing process -- it's the same voice. He says it was done this way because her story was far too "personal" for a translator to come between them. He, and only he, could achieve the "closeness" with her to help her express her thoughts. Hmm. This is my skeptical face.

But it's okay, because Lewis is an "expert" on Sudan, according to his bio blurb. I notice it doesn't mention his age, while Nazer's bio eagerly and irrelevantly informs us yet again (it's mentioned multiple times in the text) that her tribe -- gasp! -- doesn't record exact birthdates. How exotic! It is obvious why she needed this White Expert to render HER story into HIS own words.

Okay, sarcasm off. Sorry. To be fair, several years have passed and Nazer speaks good English now (yay Youtube) and has not, to my knowledge, disowned the book or Lewis. It's up to her how her story is put forth. I just have to be honest about my personal reaction to reading it, which is that I really wanted Mende Nazer's voice, and was frustrated by the feeling of having to dig through layers of Damien Lewis's voice to get to it.

[eta: Note that author Damien Lewis is not the same person as actor Damian Lewis, as Wikipedia believes. Someone oughta fix that.]


tags: a: Nazer Mende, w-a: Lewis Damien, African (Sudanese), Muslim, genre: memoir, subject: slavery, setting: Sudan

(no subject)

[sanguinity]

Four more non-fiction books for middle grades about Native Americans. For context, these are the POC-authored books that were in this collection of books.

13. Richard Nichols (Tewa Pueblo), A Story to Tell: Traditions of a Tlingit Community. Photos by D. Bambi Kraus (Tlingit).

Marissa and her grandmother Fran spend a week together in Kake, Alaska, where they walk lots, talk lots, and grandmother teaches granddaughter about being Tlingit.

Marissa and Fran are the photographer's daughter and mother, and there is a lovely intimacy to the photos of the two of them. The remainder of the photos are mostly of the town and its waterways: they make me homesick for the Puget Sound (which bears some geographic similarity), and renew my desire to see the Inside Passage.

The text runs a bit stilted -- there's something awkward about how the text moves between the grandmother explaining things and the narrator explaining things -- but between the two, they cover a lot of ground.


14. Danielle Corriveau (Inuit), The Inuit of Canada.

Oh, I loved this. A just plain fun read, lots of info I didn't know, and lots of pride evident throughout. Overall, paints a portrait of a very competent people, whose members have rich, interesting, and often happy lives (or so one might gather from the people shown in the photos), who live in the present like the rest of us, but who also have clear continuity with their own cultural history.

Really, I can't say enough good things about it. I've gotten to the point where I kind of loathe The $Tribalname books, but this one was a cut above the rest, and I sincerely enjoyed it.


15. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Sicangu Lakota), The Nez Perce.

Overall, my comments would be very similar to my comments on the other title I reviewed from this series, The Apaches.

Some things I particularly liked: Again, beginning with a/the Nez Perce origin story, and again, no verbal hedging about whether it "really" happened or not. There was a succinct two-page spread about the Nez Perce sending a delegation to William Clark (yes, that William Clark, who was by then an Indian Affairs commissioner), to ask for a teacher, but instead getting missionaries who thought they had authority over the Nez Perce. In a similar vein, I found that Sneve's explanation about the political split within the Nez Perce over treaty-making with the U.S. to be very clear. She does have a nice touch at conveying, in a few short, simple sentences, not only a non-EuroAmerican point of view in a dispute, but the reasonableness of that point of view. That's a lot harder to do than it looks.

Things I didn't like so much: Lots and lots of past tense, and the "Nez Perce Today" section was incredibly short: one paragraph. (Going by headings, it was nominally two pages, but most of those two pages were spent on Chief Joseph's "Fight No More Forever" speech.)


16. George M. Cochran (Cherokee), Indian Portraits of the Pacific Northwest.

Published in 1959, each two page spread has four or five short paragraphs of information about a northwest tribe on the left-hand page, and a full-page charcoal portrait of a (usually male, usually older) person on the right hand page, quite often in regalia or traditional dress. Altogether, thirty tribes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are represented.

There's a lot about this book that just irritates me. ( In which I do go on, and spend too much time poking around on Google Books, to boot. )

So, to sum up the irritating: frequent use of pseudo-objective, condescending, and sometimes sensationalizing language, all of which is completely decontextualized from the mid-nineteenth century Europeans whose words they are, plus portraits that are presented without any information about who the individuals pictured are -- even Chief Joseph goes unidentified.

Plus, also, lots of Relentless Past Tense. The book doesn't even bother to say that the text and portraits all refer back to the early nineteenth century -- apparently it goes without saying. When else would Indians have lived?

For all that, there were some things I liked about the book, the most prominent of which was, hey, thirty peoples of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with enough information to give one a sense of how happening an area this was. (Thirty peoples, by the way, is not a complete count for these three states: in the Puget Sound, f'rinstance, Cochran mentions only the Puyallup and Nisqually, and just off the top of my head, there are at least also the Lummi, Swinomish, Suquamish, Duwamish, and Skokomish. And I'm probably still a half-dozen short, if not more.) Although the blurbs about each people are short (and sometimes irritating and always context-free), there are clear suggestions of much larger stories here, with enough info that you could go looking for them, if you cared to. The book is mostly ordered by geography, which is helpful: he works his way around the Olympic Penninsula, then up the Columbia, and so forth. Cochran is also fairly consistent about saying where each people is now -- given what a mess treaty-making was out here, something along these lines is nice just as a basic whos-who factbook of some of the peoples in these three states. I mean, I can almost see handing this over to a kid, with the hope that they spend a lot of time pouring over it and end up saying things like, "Oh, hey! We're in Klickitat territory now!" whenever we go on road trips.

Almost. In the alternate fantasy world inside my head. Because actually, this "factbook" insists on making pronouncements about who's bloodthirsty, who's treacherous, and who changes into clean clothes regularly.

...I've been talking about the text all this time, mostly because I've got lots of easily-verbalized thoughts about the text. But Cochran, from what I can tell, was principally an artist, not an author. The text, you could argue, is not the point of this book; the charcoal portraits are. (Which does not make the text magically go away, of course.) So, the portraits: a few of the portraits are weaker than the others, but overall, I have spent a lot of time looking at the portraits. They are compelling. As irritating as the text is -- by turns sensationalizing and condescending -- the portraits are the opposite of that.

...yeah, I don't know if you can tell, but I have become downright fascinated with this book, in an sociological/historiographical artifact sort of way. I have spent way, way too much time thinking about it, wondering who Cochran was, why he wrote this book, and why he wrote it this way.

But -- and maybe I'm selling fourth-graders and their critical-thinking faculties short here, and if so, I'm willing to take that under advisement -- I have a very hard time imagining treating this as a children's book. Anything that straight-facedly discusses who's bloodthirsty and who's not? Just, no.