The Agenda

So, tonight at 8:16 sharp, a bit late but, okay, i tuned in to The Agenda with Steve Paikin on TVO. It was a round table of sorts: four black women, 'successful' black women, i must add, and two 'successful' black men. What was the topic? The status of "Today's Young Black Women." Now, lets do a quick check list/run down of the kinds of precautions that any educated host would take:

The Blacks called upon are

1. From diverse backgrounds with diverse histories and experiences
2. Diverse in their opinions about blackness and race (one woman said that she grew up "raceless")
3. All agree that there are systemic problems in the "black community"

Okay, so we are good. No one will be criticized for being essentialist. But what do all these "black" people have in common? They are all being called upon to explain and account for black experiences, barriers and level of success in Canada (especially Toronto, the dominant loci of black hyper-visibility) against the backdrop of the systematic media violence that promotes blackness as hostile, criminal and dangerous. These men and women are pulled together to counter--explain everything from slavery to the role of the church as a moral centre in black life in Canada. Indeed, the called upon ness of these black men and women is part of the same narrative of the media base "black problem", a part of the same narrative of each speaker's 'race' and 'otherness', a part of the same narrative of Canada's covert (ethnic) multicultural marginalization, a part of the same narrative of the migrant subject as uprooted, displaced and problematic. There is no way out, it seems as if blacks will always be trapped; trapped in the doubleness of having to live and, then, simultaneously, having to explain to white Canada how it is that they live, with the popular stereotypical views always lurking in the background. I think that what needs to be changed is the systematic ways in which blacks (and people of colour, in general) always have to explain and account for themselves. The revolution should start with the government taking care of its peoples (not 'citizens' as is generally expressed: some are "permanent residents") through an anti-racist-educational-and-economic-system approach.

Oh, and what percentage of the Canadian population would have received this (positive) counter-discourse to the stereotyping of mainstream media? The same percentage that would have happened to "tune in" and/or were randomly switching channels and decided to take note of TVO's 'agenda'.

Reading and Housekeeping

So, yesterday i cleaned and moved around some furniture. Today i did the laundry and continued reading Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN in prep for my grad-English-lit class next month; it is, by far, waaaaay far, far, the bloodiest and most nauseatingly disgusting book i've ever read! I won't give a full review because then i would only be exposing myself for torture. But, boy, it's nasty. The setting is 1849 wild wild west, American frontier, manifest destiny kind-of-idea complete with the hunting, scalping and massacring of Indians. Every couple of pages, the reader is treated to gruesome murders, mutilations and all manner of body butchery. Men are eating raw buffalo liver, raw mule, raw horse meat, raw whatever *puke*. I'll stop there. What kind of imagination does this author have??? I know the book is based on real historical events, but lord! No wonder he avoids interviews :( . One blurb (in the book) about the author says, "McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly- envied." Yea, sure, whatever. The book is extremely well written, but i wouldn't recommend it, unless you have really good control over your gag reflex!

On a more palatable note, I had some really nice baked chicken for dinner today, and guess who cooked? Moi! I know, i'm just so full of myself :) I don't enjoy cooking though. When i get rich i will be sure to hire a chef, that's it. I can handle everything else :) Hmmm, i will leave you with a happy note:

Roses are red, or yellow, pink, white... whatever,

violets are blue, i think,

sugar is waaaay too sweet,

and so are you!

...by the way, i did finish that Margaret Atwood book, ALIAS GRACE. Yea, the one that weighs 12pounds. It's thick, but superb. I'm not a huge Atwood fan, yet, but she is an amazing writer, simply amazing...

Who is "the reader"?

I am staring down Lawrence Hill's BOOK OF NEGROES on my shelf thinking: "do i really want to start reading this?" It's pretty long, 469pages. I bought it five months ago with the intention that i would read it when i get the time. I know that it is supposed to be an important book for Afro Canadian history and that its contents represent fifteen years of research and hard work; after all, i had been to Hill's presentation on the book. The trouble is, just from flipping through the pages and stopping now and again to read a paragraph here and there, i am not connecting with the narrator. Who would have thought that connecting with a narrator would be so darn important to the reader? It's weird. The voice just does not... umm, it's not engaging. I don't know, i'm imagining an old African woman but the words on the page do not seem to be coming from her mouth...

It's not that i am intimidated by the length of the book, God knows, i've had my share of big books! I can usually tell from the first four pages, because you get a feel of the tone, mood etc., if a book is going to be great. Austin Clarke's, THE POLISHED HOE, is just as "big"; the difference is that as soon as i read the first four lines from Clark's text i knew, immediately, that i would be in for a treat. Almost instantly, i could see and hear Mary-Mathilda speaking and i recognized who she was and where she was coming from. I don't know, i hate to past a judgement on THE BOOK OF NEGROES so early but i just don't feel this one. Hence, its place on my shelf, and me glancing over every now and again savouring its elegance and sheer size among my other "slim" creative texts. Hopefully, one day i will summon up enough courage to read it. I feel my conscience kicking in a bit, but nothing distresses me more than having to read a book only to find it disengaging; that's just painful. Gosh, it's painful just to write those words. Anyways, if i'm going to have any shot at being a critic, i'd better start learning that being harsh is part of the game!

Review (Beah)

I just finished reading Ishmael Beah's memoir, A LONG WAY GONE, and had to take a few minutes to compose myself and "take in" all the unsettling nuances of the text. A LONG WAY GONE is about Beah's experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leon in the early 90s and the mind boggling atrocities and brutalities that helped to shape his life as it is. I first saw Beah in a television interview with Steve Paikin on TVO's, "The Agenda" back in May about his abovementioned book. I recalled taking issue with some of the questions Paikin was asking Beah because the politics of race and violence was still fresh in my mind. I nonetheless kept the book's title in the back of mind, never thinking that i would actually go out and buy it. Turned out i did, on July 06, 2007, and here is my review:

The memoir is more than a dictation of Beah's experiences; it is a riveting account of the realities of war and what it means to exist in a war torn country with no breathing space for hope, freedom and redemption. His memories of his experiences in the army are profoundly disturbing and it forces you to psychologically negotiate your own humanity, not in the context of war because you still can't imagine being forced to participate in and help to direct the course of a civil war bent on miming and executing others, but through sheer perplexity and bewilderment. When reading Beah's work, you sometimes close the book and dream with him, you go through war, rehabilitation and more war. You open your eyes, but you cannot keep your mouth shut because you are seeing all the blood and dead bodies, children and women screaming for their lives and warlords sporting AK47s and machine guns which the author vividly describes.

By the second half of the text, the plot starts to feel like something fit for the silver screen; it just becomes more and more riveting, nauseating, heart piercing and unfathomable all at the same time. You fall in love with Beah because you admire his courage, determination and resilience when, in fact, given the situation of the war, you would want to lay down and beg someone to shoot you. Undoubtedly, this is a demanding text. It demands your attention, exclusively, and demands that you spend some time in your own head deciphering what you have witnessed between the pages of the text. It makes you contemplate the innermost questions of what it is to exist among others by showing you the extent of your own evil, which, if given the circumstances and space to breed, can transpire above and beyond your wildest dreams of your own capability. This is a text that scares you, if only to reflect upon the values and structures of your own society. It offers you no answer to the pain and trauma that surrounds the text like a golf of smoke, but asks that you think about them, meditatively.

With the present-day international conflict predominating the media and our coffee shop conversations, this text is good timing because it speaks to the broader global, historical and human problems that we face in this post-modern era. A LONG WAY GONE is about a child soldier engulfed in a "mad" civil war but it goes beyond the the problem of recruiting and exploiting children to touch upon the very meaning of war and what it means to fight for change and national morality. It is a text worth reading a million times over.