Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Hiya, new to the community, please fire if I say anything pantsless, delighted to be here. All links to Powells because Amazon donates to the GOP :)

1. Shaun Tan, The Arrival

I'm going to cheat and count this as my first read for the poc challenge, even though it was actually part of an earlier catch-up-on-what's-happening-in-graphic-novels lovefest. I'm counting it because, even though I read it in January of 2009, I'll be amazed if I read anything better this year.

People recommend Australian books to me all the time, and I plow through 'em, often merely out of a sense of duty. With The Arrival, I didn't even realize Tan was Australian until I was half way through. This wordless novel is a delight and a masterpiece. The experience of moving to a foreign land and trying to remake your life there, missing your family like part of your body, misunderstanding everything in horribly embarrassing ways: nailed.

2. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life

I'd read "Hell is the Absence of God" elsewhere and liked it, so it was a pleasure to spend more time with Chiang. He seems to have two main schticks, closely related. The first group, including "Hell" and "Tower of Babylon", explore with utmost rigour the formal implications of a given system: Babylonian cosmology in the second case and Christian theology in the first. The end of "Hell", which I won't spoil, made me as a recovering Sydney Anglican laugh until tears ran down my face.

"Seventy-two Letters" is arguably one of these tease-out-the-system stories, its system being how golems might work, but it's twisted around a great example of Chiang's other schtick, which is the system, typically linguistic, that he comes up with on his own. In the case of the golems, it's an entirely new mechanism for the transmission of genetic information. In the case of my favourite piece, "Story of Your Life", it's an alien language with a very strange construction of time.

I found the beginning of "Story" very difficult, because part of its premise is the death of a child. I have two daughters and they have changed forever the way I feel about child peril as a plot device. Done poorly it destroys, for me, the suspension of disbelief. The pain of it is like a black hole sucking everything else in. Maybe this is how rape survivors feel about casual rape in fiction, or people of colour about casual racism? Done well it's something I devour: I loved Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination even though it was about the death of her son. The difference can be subtle - respect, maybe, or the acknowledgement of pain.

I was afraid "Story" would be the other kind of story. In fact it's something weirder and subtler altogether, a brilliant meditation on time and free will and language, mediated through a mother's love for her daughter. If you knew then what you know now, would you still have gone ahead and done it? Well, would you? Imagine a different way of being with that question, in the world. This one will remain with me for a long, long time.

3. Anita Heiss, I'm Not Racist But...

4. Doris Pilkington, Rabbit Proof Fence

5. Larissa Behrendt, Home

I'll be including lots of Australian Aboriginal writers in my fifty, because I'm a white Australian expat, and as such, I view Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" more or less as documentary. I could reel off a bunch of stats about the effects on Aboriginal Australians of being dispossessed from their land and made the objects of active and passive genocide for 200 years, but why should I appropriate their stories when my people have already appropriated everything else? The only thing I can do at this point, I think, is to listen. And reading Aboriginal authors is how I'm going to try and listen.

Anita Heiss's poems are not highly-wrought artifacts; they're rants written down to be read aloud, and Heiss's plain, urgent, funny voice comes through loud and clear. The poems are most effective, at least to me, when they're addressed to exactly those white Australians who think they're not part of the problem - professors of anthropology and Aboriginal studies, lefty poets and intellectuals. (Or how about white writers living in San Francisco and posting to anti-racist LJ communities. Hi, Anita!)

In one especially sharp piece Heiss outlines exactly the difference between a white poetry reading (wine and cheese, complaints about the Volvo and the mortgage) and a black one (angry, political, mourning). White privilege is precisely being able to think about racism for a bit, castigate oneself and come to all the approved conclusions, and then go away and think about something else. Privileged people are dilettantes by definition.

Rabbit Proof Fence - the source material for the amazing film - and Home have both been difficult for me, in revealing ways. It's not that I flinch from the subject matter, except insofar as everyone with a pulse has to flinch from child abduction, rape, the long vile litany of abuse. It's actually tough for an odd reason, one that has to do with the different uses to which story is put in my culture and in theirs. I'm a nerdy English major with a yen for the Napoleonic wars and great Victorian statesmen. Narrative, to me, is about character; complex recesses of the psyche illuminated by a bit of dialog, painted with a fine brush on ivory.

Aboriginal stories seem to work in different ways, and this is maybe best illustrated by the myths embedded in Behrendt's Home. Here, Wurranah has stolen two of the Seven Sisters to be his wives. He orders them to go and strip bark off some eucalyptus trees so that his fire will burn hotter.

"But we must not cut bark. If we do, you will never see us again."

"Your talking is not making my fire burn. If you run away, I will catch you and I will beat you."

The two sisters obeyed. Each went to a different tree and as they made the first cut into the bark, each felt her tree getting bigger and bigger, lifting them off the ground. They clung tight as the trees, growing bigger and bigger, lifted them up towards the sky.

Wurrannah could not hear the chopping of wood so he went to see what his wives were doing. As he came closer, he saw that the trees were growing larger and larger. He saw his wives, high up in the air, clinging to the trunks. He called to them to come down but they did not answer him. The trees grew so large that they touched the sky, taking the girls further and further away.

As they reached the sky, their five sisters, who had been searching in the sky for them, called out, telling them not to be afraid. The five sisters in the sky stretched their hands out to Wurrannah's two wives and drew them up to live with them in the sky, forever.

Lots to love there - the Miyazaki-esque trees growing and growing with the girls clinging to their trunks, the upper branches knocking on the sky in an echo of Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon. But I am wondering: why did Wurranah's wives warn him? Did they love him in spite of themselves, in spite of the abduction, in spite of his abuse? The stomach rebels at the thought. Or were they issuing the obligatory Sybiline warning, knowing that he would ignore it and meet his fate? Why warn him, though? Why not just leave him to it, and ride the trees to the stars?

I want to know how the wives felt; I want their motives. But here as when I did oral history with my mother and pressed her like this on points of her story, the answer to my badgering is a tolerant smile and a shake of the head. I am asking the wrong question. I have missed the point. Not everyone's insides work the way mine do. My internal narrator is specific, culturally-mediated and quirky, not a universal human truth. I think? Or have I misunderstood the non-answer?

6. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

So much here, so much to love - the dead-accurate and sympathetic portrayal of a fat science fiction fanboy desperately trying to get laid, the catastrophic collision of third-world dictatorship politics and irresistible sex. But for me, exile, the truest part was that yearning, aching undertow familiar to anyone who has lost his or her moorings:

...after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong...

7. Angela Johnson, The First Part Last

Picked up after I saw it recommended here. A fast, beautiful and shattering read, like a catastrophic blood clot to the brain. So many off-hand character details that slew me: the grandmother refusing to help when the teenage dad was crashing, so he would not learn to depend on her; the warm neighbour who can't save the situation, for much the same reason; the teenage mother's parents, their austere apartment, their quiet hopes for their daughter. The first of three and I can't wait to read the rest.

That's me for now. In my to-read pile: Felicia Pearson's autobiography, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Tobias Buckell, Doreen Baingaina.