Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Reading and Writing: A Personal Account by V.S. Naipaul
Two short essays by a writer about how he doesn't really feel comfortable as either a reader or a writer and would have probably ended up in other media if that had been an option when he was younger. I'm probably being unfair to these pieces, and they might have been more interesting if I knew more about Naipaul personally. But I don't, and I was bored.

Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto ed. Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware
A variety of pieces by Queers of Colour about living in Toronto within and without the queer community. I found this super interesting, but Toronto is my hometown and I'm not sure it would have the same resonances if you're not from around here. But if you want stories of QOC resistance from the 60s on, it's very good.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor
A thorough and well-researched description of precisely the ways that the British screwed over India during the colonial period. Anyone with an interest in history should read this: it puts all the crimes of the British in India into one long list. It's not new information, but it's extremely well laid out here and Tharoor is not willing to let the British off the hook for anything, which is refreshing. He's not quite so clear-sighted about the current government of India, I think, but everyone has their flaws (and he is a sitting politician). (Obviously, I'm not criticising the concept of Indian self-government here, I'm criticising the government they've got, particularly given current events in Kashmir. And colonialism was worse. Just wanted to be clear.)

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe by Tina M. Campt
I really wanted to like this book, but it was so frustrating. The author has access to these two awesome photographic archives: first of Afro-Germans in the 30s and 40s, second of Black Carribbean immigrants to England in the 60s. If you want to look at the pictures, the reproductions of them in the book are great. But the actual prose gets distracted constantly by metaphors about how photographs can teach us things or release emotions and then not actually going into the things taught or the emotions released. For example, there's a fascinating section where Campt describes an interview she had with a Black tailor of the 60s who looked at the second archive of photos and had a million things to say about things like what different suit styles said about the photographic subjects. But she doesn't actually put the information into the text, just the fact that she learned these things! Instead we get a lengthy musical metaphor about how historians need to resist the urge to think they know individuals from their photos, but we can still learn things about people in the aggregate. What she learned about these populations in the aggregate? We don't find out. Just that the learning exists. The whole book is like that: the author does serious research -> the author writes a metaphor; a different set of interviews -> another metaphor. And yet I read the whole thing because the glimpses of straightforward research into the lives of these two populations were very interesting. I just wished she'd actually written a book about them.

If I Could Write This in Fire by Michelle Cliff
A series of essays and some poetry. Cliff talks about being queer and Jamaican and light-skinned and a writer and living outside and inside of Jamaica as all of those things, and it's all lovely and furious and important.

nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
A memoir in essays of the author's experience growing up queer, non-binary, and First Nations (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux) in the Canadian Prairies. Nixon is open about the messiness of life, about being punk and fucking up and the various complexities of their family situation (adopted by a white couple as a baby, now with a complicated relationship with their birth family as well and a furious relationship with the Canadian system that keeps allowing this to happen).

Special Lecture on Korean Paintings by Oh Ju-seok
This is clearly the book I should have read before I read these books on Korean art, but alas that was not the order in which my library holds arrived. This is about how to read Korean paintings on their own terms: the direction in which your eyes are intended to move, various ideals the artist might have been aiming at, that kind of thing. Lots of color plates make the points very clear and it's very engaging. The author is proud of Korean art to the point of being unintentionally humorous (for example, he insists that a particular picture of a tiger is not merely a world-class picture of a tiger but the best tiger picture in the world), but by the end his insistence that his audience recognize Korean art on its own terms becomes endearing and understandable. Highly recommended.

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz
As the title suggests, this is in part a response to Reading Lolita in Tehran. Keshavarz writes a clear and lucid critique of RLiT's central premise and approach, but also waxes lyrical about her experiences with literature that she feels are part and parcel of her Iran, from her whole high-school class breaking down over the death of a favorite poet, to discussing literature earnestly with her devout uncle. Her recollections of her family members are rose-tinted and loving, but she isn't interested in painting a picture of a perfect Iran, merely a more complicated one that contains a literature of its own and a reading public to go with it, as well as an interest in international writing. Her writing is eminently readable and this is an excellent source of further readings in Iranian literature, if that sort of thing interests you.

Evidence of Being: The Black, Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence by Darius Bost
An account of Black, gay artistic communities in the 80s and 90s and their activism and art. Introduced me to several writers I hadn't heard of before and made me see the ones I had heard of in their community context. A great counter to often white-specific narratives of AIDS, plus some excellent discussion of how AIDS wasn't the only thing these communities were facing at the time.

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez
Essays on a variety of subjects including race, family, language, writing, etc. An interesting autobiographical perspective on a writer I've heard about, but whose fiction I haven't actually read. Most of the immigration narratives I've read have been either from earlier or later, whereas Alvarez' family immigrated from the Dominican to the States in 1960, so that was very interesting to me.

Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop by Imani Perry
In depth music criticism of various hip-hop artists. Excellently argued. I don't personally know a lot about music, let alone hip-hop, but she definitely makes the case that hip-hop is as sprawling as any other genre and deserves the same level of critical analysis. I think needing to make that point is slightly dated, but it wasn't as much in 2004, and it's useful to know where to look for a concise expression of her argument.

My Soul Looks Back by Jessica B. Harris
A memoir of (mostly) the author's time on the fringes of the Black artistic circle in NYC that included Baldwin, Angelou, Morrison, etc. in the 70s. A slightly awkward book because the author's primary connection to this circle was as the much younger girlfriend of Samuel Floyd, so her perspective is at once overwhelmed by how cool and famous all these people are, and curiously detached from the actual things going on within that circle except for the surface interactions (i.e. X and Y were besties, Y and Z were frenemies level stuff). It's odd because Harris is a moderately famous food writer in her own right, but the entire arc of her career is narratively subsumed by how excited she is to tell you about the people she knew in the 70s. She appears to go from being a girl with a BA working on the edges of publishing to a writer with many books under her belt without doing much other than hanging around these famous people and I know that's not true, it's just that she elides so much in this book. She does write great descriptions of food, and some of the best parts of the book are about her various culinary triumphs and disasters as she tries to entertain her new friends to the degree she thinks they deserve, but I'm not sure it's worth reading just for that. Also, Floyd may have been artistically and politically important in his own right, but he also sounds like a fucking terrible boyfriend and I'm so over reading about bad heterosexual relationships, especially ones with a significant age gap that the older person seems to have done little to mitigate.

Everything's Trash, But It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson
Humorous essays on every topic that pops into Robinson's head. Whether or not you enjoy this one depends on whether or not you enjoy Robinson's super casual tone and the awkward amount of personal detail she likes to give you. I think she's very funny, but sometimes it was a little too much information about exactly which actors she'd like to bone.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Essays on writing, being Korean-American, trauma, and a bunch of other things. Beautiful lyrical writing that lulls you in and then smacks you in the face with something heavy. On the strength of this collection, I suspect his novels of being amazing and also too dark for me, but I would happily read any further essays he'd like to write.