Book Report

Amongst a thousand things that have me worried, the old idea (for new reasons) that everyone should stay in their corner with their tribe is disconcerting. The new reasons are understandable. We need to find people who share our experience or race or class or gender or sexual preference or age group etc. to feel more understood in a world where such groups are often marginalized or disdained or dismissed. The rise of affinity groups, women’s groups in the 60’s, men’s groups in the 90’s and more created safe spaces for people to share their experience. They can be important steps towards claiming one’s place in the world and feeling the support of like-minded people. 

 

Yet at the end of the day, we all have to share space on this tiny planet and figure out how to be with whoever happens to board the bus. In my field, the current mis-thinking is that one group can’t sing the songs of another group without being called out for cultural appropriation. Not that such appropriation isn’t real. The entire history of rock and roll where white folks rose to the top on the shoulders of black music often without payback or acknowledgement is just one of many cases in points. But the cultural sharing that has Americans playing taiko, Japanese playing bluegrass, Canadians playing gamelan, Indonesians playing jazz, black artists singing opera, white folks singing the blues, is proof that we are all deeply connected in our psyche’s foundation, all dancing together in what Carl Jung called (110 years ago!) the Collective Unconscious. While being mindful of the reality of power dynamics and histories of marginalization, we should not only refuse to stay in our own tiny corner, but actively cross the tracks to the many other sides of town. *

 

This on my mind having just finished a book that did precisely what I mentioned in the post Unthawing the Frozen Sea. When I finished, I just sat there longer feeling the echoes of these deeply inspiring and courageous characters I had just spent time with, deeply touched and moved by their stories. The book? The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I had seen the movie (which I loved) but never read the book. After finishing listening to The Calamity Club, her latest, it felt logical to read her first book. 

 

When I mentioned I was reading the book, many of my friend’s reactions was typical these days. “Oh, that’s on the bad list, this white woman writing about black people.” How often that happens in our confused contemporary culture. Even a hint of cultural appropriation and the discussion is closed down, the book or piece of music or person dismissed. (Just happened with people writing about Gloria Steinem’s “white feminism.”) Gone is nuance and complexity and changing perspectives and the conversations we actually need to have. 

 

Ms Stockett was well aware of the leap she was taking daring to try to capture a black person’s experience. But isn’t that all of literature? Yes, some get it wrong, bringing too much of their assumptions to the venture, but some are extraordinary in their ability to imagine the other. Men who write about women, women who write about men, black authors writing about white people, white authors writing about Asian people, 20^th century people writing about 12^th century people, young people writing about old people. In Arthur Golden’s book, for example, he crosses three lines as a white man writing about a Japanese woman Memoirs of a Geisha during the 1930’s through 50’s.W.B. Yeats was 28 years old when wrote The Song of Wandering Aengus, his extraordinary poem about an old man. 

 

As a reader far from the culture of Mississippi in the 60’s, I’m not qualified to speak about what details Ms. Stockett may or may not have gotten wrong or what assumptions she brought into her writing. But I felt her love for people on both sides of the tracks and her determination to uncover their deepest humanity, alongside her rightful impatience with those determined to bury such humanity in both themselves and others. How I loathed both Ms. Hilly and Minnie’s husband Leroy, how I loved Minnie and Abileen and Miss Skeeter! 

 

I’ll close with the classic end to the read-out-loud book reports we used to do in 5^th grade: 

 

If you like great characters, a compelling and suspenseful story, people who find their inner courage and undergo big and small transformations, all told in eloquent and colorful language, then I suggest you read this book. 

 

*  When people have been defined by others and their own voices shut down, it is understandable to be skeptical of such line-crossings. My hope is to hear from people who live across the tracks while not forbidding such needed line-crossing. It is a great evolution in culture that more and more previously marginalized authors get to tell their own story in a white male-dominated publishing business— from earlier authors like George Eliot, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Wolfe to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison to more contemporary authors like Khaled Hosseini, Isabel Allende, Elif Safak, Orhan Pamuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Haruki Murakami, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, Yaa Gyasi, Britt Bennet, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tommy Orange, Louise Erdrich, Sally Morgan and so many more.