"I was thinking about all the rubbish, the flopping plastic in the branches, the shoreline of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my"I was thinking about all the rubbish, the flopping plastic in the branches, the shoreline of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up..." Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Objects can hold great personal power. It could be a toy from your childhood, your first, car, for Henry Hoke it is stickers. As our personal artifacts become increasingly digital, the power of small objects can tell the story of a life. In Henry Hoke's book, Sticker, he uses a series of stickers to detail his life and the community of Charlottesville, Virginia leading up to the deadly Unite The Right Rally in 2017.
Growing up in Virginia can make you unaware of the dark history within. This can be represented in how local holidays are celebrated. Lee-Jackson-King Day was celebrated (Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, both Confederate War Generals celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Day from 1984 to 2000) instead of Martin Luther King Day. Hoke blends this local history and symbolism with his own. Hoke focuses on objects from his childhood. A constellation on the ceiling of his room or an anarchy sticker during a rebellious phase. Finally the Charlottesville sticker, a C-HEART-Ville to commemorate the community's resistance to the deadly White Suppremicist rally that led to violent clashes and death on August 12, 2017.
Each chapter focuses on a sticker with a story that follows, much like a writer's prompt. I liked this technique. It makes the experience very visceral. Some aspects felt very nostalgic for me (video stories, music choices, etc.) It is a very moving series of essays that are inspired by very small objects. Objects like these can carry powerful symbols for both evil and for good....more
When you read a series of essays from the 1930s one might assume the content or the perspective to be dated. One might read it as a reflection on how When you read a series of essays from the 1930s one might assume the content or the perspective to be dated. One might read it as a reflection on how far we have come. One would be wrong. Zora Neale Hurston's essays are eerily prescient to our current time. These essays focus on the strength of Black humor, how American society is built on the back of Black art, the domination of Black subjects by White authors, stolen creativity, and the lifting up of only some people as an exception rather than the rule. Hurston's essays sometimes use old-fashioned and outdated terminology, but the subject topics can feel like they were written yesterday.
Here we find essays about John de Conquerer, a man who doesn't have the power to set people free, but free minds and fool those in power. Essays that demonstrate the rich inner mind to create, to hope, and to build while the body is forced to perform menial tasks. The mind is set free. Essays on Black creativity such as the invention of Jazz and how many white performers tried to co-opt it as their own (so similar to today's stolen Tik Tok dances). How White people can create an example that proves one's progressive nature but hides a racist heart. Even the essay about the worst Jim Crow experience that did not happen in the South but in a New York doctor's office. The last quarter of the book details a murder trial and Hurston's shocking epiphany of how race and power can control every aspect of life.
These essays should not be relevant today. These could have been written yesterday. An important collection to bring to light with some of these essays never published and others almost lost to history. ...more
Book banning is on the rise according to the American Library Association. New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi's new book, Read DangerouslyBook banning is on the rise according to the American Library Association. New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi's new book, Read Dangerously, is an antidote to these turbulent times. As a lecturer and Fellow for Johns Hopkins University, she informs us on how best to use literature to combat hate. Written as a series of letters to her dead father, she uses literature to map out the troubles in the world. By reading, we arm ourselves with imagination. One of the few tools that can defeat fascism.
She writes five letters between 2017 and 2020. She discusses the death threats Salman Rushdie received for writing The Satanic Verses. She points out how fast his book was targeted. She further elaborates on how so many other books are targeted for banning even though they do not even remotely criticize a government or group. She takes a moment to point out how little this happens in the United States which turns out to be ironic considering what’s happening now in this country. Banning books is an early sign of a fascist state. She also includes Fahrenheit 451 in this section. The governments need to attack ideas, criticism, different ideas, and imagination itself.
The second letter references Hurston and the need for dignity. The need to participate in society as you are and not to sacrifice your identity for an opportunity. The third letter focuses on writers who write about war. How one side will try to dehumanize the other to make it easier to kill them, but getting to know them is to get closer to peace. The fourth letter discusses Atwood and her book The Handmaid’s Tale. She points out how eerily similar the events in the book follow events in Iran after 1979. Even though the book has sci-fi elements, Atwood points out there is a historical element to each part, something that has already happened.
The general theme circles back around the power of imagination. A fascist government wants you to worry about your survival or how you may be targeted. They want you to focus on how things could be worse, be lucky they are not. However, imagination gives us hope. We can imagine a better world, make fun of those who would oppress us, and point out how there is no message or power behind the hate. Imagination tells us that things can be a whole lot better and to fight for that better future.
Favorite Passages
Introduction In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s claim that “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.� In the United States, it is mainly we, the people, who are the problem; we who take the existence of challenging literature for granted, or see reading as solely a comfort, seeking out only texts that confirm our presuppositions and prejudices. Perhaps for us, the very idea of change is dangerous, and what we avoid is reading dangerously.
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Reading does not necessarily lead to direct political action, but it fosters a mindset that questions and doubts; that is not content with the establishment or the established. Fiction arouses our curiosity, and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, this desire to know that makes both writing and reading so dangerous.
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First Letter
We enter dangerous territory when we blur the lines between fiction and reality, or weaponize fiction to further an agenda—be it political, religious, or personal. The totalitarian mindset breaks the borders between fiction and reality, and, in the same manner, it imposes its own fictions and mythologies on the realities of its people, speaking and acting on their behalf.
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We need the poet to constantly question things as they are, to jolt us out of our comfort zones, to make us to look at the world through the eyes of others and seek to understand experiences that are not our own.
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The most seductive aspect of a totalitarian society is the security it offers. The truth is uncomfortable, and a dictator promises an abdication of responsibility from it.
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We don’t need a supreme leader to deprive us of our hard-earned freedoms. When we stop reading, we pave the way toward book burning; when we stop caring, we make way for someone else to take over control; when we prefer personality to character, and reality show or virtual reality to reality itself, then we get the kind of politicians that we deserve.
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Second Letter
I did not like the possibility of being arrested, humiliated, and flogged. I did not like the prospect of being expelled from my job or having my books censored and banned. But there was something greater than fear—or more magnetic than fear—that was driving me: an instinct for self-preservation. I knew that giving in to them meant self-negation. It meant a public abdication of who I was. It had nothing to do with being an intellectual or sophisticated. It was a matter of self-worth and what Hurston called “self-revelation� and, of course, a matter of preserving dignity.
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War, by nature, dehumanizes the enemy. Story gives the enemy a voice, forcing us to confront him as a human being, to look him in the eye. And through this process, we restore our own humanity.
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Living in a totalitarian society is similar to living in a disaster zone. Individuals experience a different kind of fear: the constant anxiety that the way you look, the way you act, the way you think or feel is illegal and punishable. At any moment, you could be reprimanded, arrested, or jailed simply because of who you are.
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Writing requires empathy, opening up oneself to other people’s hearts and minds. It implies not just how things are but how they could be, which is the essence of hope.
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Fourth Letter
HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE role that ordinary, often decent, people play in bringing about a totalitarian state? Such systems may seem to appear out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning. But, really, this is because many choose not to see the warning signs, even when they become all too obvious. Slowly, over time, there is a buildup. At first, the rulers may target people and things that are unsavory to us, and that we dislike or disapprove of—as they did in Iran, when they executed officials of the former regime. So we shrug them off, or we might even approve, but our time will come when they take away what pleases us, what is important to us.
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Dear Baba, do you notice how, under totalitarianism, banal rituals like putting on body lotion or holding hands with a loved one in the street suddenly become strange and extraordinary? Ordinary people wanting to have a decent, normal life learn that nothing is normal—not really, we only carry the illusions of normalcy. If we don’t pay attention, if we don’t guard against this loss of normalcy, it is easy to lose. This is what we see Offred doing her best to guard against as she tries to avoid the numbing of feelings and emotions that a totalitarian system imposes on us.
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Memory becomes one of the most potent weapons against the cruelty of totalitarian regimes and concentration camps.
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Readers become keepers of memory, keepers of truth.
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Conclusion
READERS, OF COURSE, HAVE NO formal organization to promote truth, to bring about change. But they number in the billions. They range across the spectrums of profession, background, gender, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation. Collectively, their power would be immense. Every bookstore, library, museum, or theater that closes; every book that is censored or removed from schools and libraries; every art, music, or literature program canceled in our schools and other institutions—these should all remind us of our responsibility....more
"...my blackness is an honor, and as long as I continue to live, I will always esteem it as such."
"She never lived in a black woman's body, because i"...my blackness is an honor, and as long as I continue to live, I will always esteem it as such."
"She never lived in a black woman's body, because if she did, she'd know that to be like us is to always dwell in a place of war."
Bold essays and memoir on growing up and existing as a black woman in the United States. We see her growing up in a black neighborhood and high school only to move to a white neighborhood when her mother marries. We see her navigating as a teenager in a changing environment. In one case, she needs to avoid being labeled a "fast-tailed girl" and learning to fight against her classmates. When she moves, she then needs to navigate against white perceptions of black women. It is this last part that remains a theme throughout her essays. How to be black with other black women, how to black and fight white bias, racism, and stereotyping, and lastly how to be black in white spaces. She learns Russian and Japanese, travels to both countries and engages in their culture. This reminds me of Coates studying US Civil War history and Audre Lorde traveling to Russia, but her level of difficulty is stratospheric in comparison.
"I call myself black because that is who I am. Blackness is a label that I do not have a choice in rejecting as long as systematic barriers exist in this country. But also, my blackness is an honor, and as long as I continue to live, I will always esteem it as such." p. 170
These white men acted like there was no difference between me and them, but in doing so they made it clear that I had to shed my identity as a black woman. I cannot be perceived as a human and a black woman in their eyes because those two identities are incompatible with each other. My black womanhood cancels out my humanity because black womanhood is inhuman. P183
"...family members who are "too far gone" on certain issues, who have not been swayed by any kind of new argument since the Kennedy Administration...accepting as an act of self-preservation in order to retain our peace..." p. 165
"White, privileged people are always considered clean no matter what they do, while I as a black women have to constantly scrub at the filth that society smears over my body." p. 100
"53 percent of white women decided that a racist misogynist deserved to be president over the patron saint of white feminism." p 40
"She never lived in a black woman's body, because if she did, she'd know that to be like us is to always dwell in a place of war." p46...more
Short work created from two lectures by Mary Beard. The first point she makes is in regard to Telemachus to Penelope her mother. Telemachus, the son oShort work created from two lectures by Mary Beard. The first point she makes is in regard to Telemachus to Penelope her mother. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, is entertaining potential suitors for his mother. When she comes to tell him to stop, he tells her to be quiet and go back to her room. Beard uses this analogy in her lectures to demonstrate how this has been perpetuated over time. Men's voices over women's voices. It is systematic with those in power seeking to retain that power.
In 2016, MP Jo Cox was assassinated after speaking against Brexit. Her voice would be silenced in what would become a precursor to the Brexit and Trump era. Normally, people would be outraged. An event like this would cause people to pause and think about their actions or viewpoint. This did not happen. People continued to post their vile comments and scream loudly to silence the opposition.
It would seem we have crossed some sort of threshold incivility and the treatment of women. However, Mary Beard would argue that we have been demanding their silence going back to The Odyssey. Angry men are allowed to yell, murder, or otherwise silence women and yet they continually get second chances. Women, however, rarely get a single chance let alone a second one.
What can change this? Women in power, women shown more often, and more of their voices. Just as Barack Obama has emboldened many to tell their stories in the media and politics, the same could be said of more women in prominent positions. The alternative is further oppression and silence....more
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