Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Chinua Achebe and Why I Don’t Read Enough About Africa

March 24, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

When novelist Chinua Achebe died late last week, I remembered that I had several of his books sitting at home and had still not read any of them. I thought for a few minutes about why I hadn’t. Faithful readers of this blog will know that I often read geographically. Last spring I have to have gone through 10 or more Balkan Books in anticipation of a trip to Croatia. And the blog wasn’t extant when I went through my summer of Africana a few years back. But even that summer was mostly filled with non-Africans writing about Africa including Beryl Markham, Isak Dineson, Alexander McCall Smith and V.S. Naipaul.

What Defines an African Writer?

Why, of all the African writers I’ve ever read, is only one Black? Okay, two, if you count Dinaw Mengestu, but The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears was set in the US and was more about the immigrant experience here than it was about Africa. The only Black African writer I’ve read, until this weekend when I finally opened The Anthills of the Savannah, is Chris Abani.

Is it About Race?

It should tell me something about my own relationship with race that I’m unable to decide whether to capitalize “Black.” I’d love to fall back on the PC comfort word of “African American” but although that fits both Dinaw Mengestu and Chris Abani to certain extents, it really doesn’t fit Chinua Achebe.

Maybe it’s Cultural Differences

I want to excuse myself and say that cultural differences make everyone uncomfortable. But that’s not good enough. I preach community and togetherness and world peace, and yet there are wide swaths of the world I have failed to adequately explore, even through literature. Instead, I read books about places I have a relationship with. I’ve lived in both Latin America and Europe and I’ve traveled to Asia. Reading books about those places helps me uncover new layers of the experiences I had abroad. And books, even in the quantity that I read them, are cheaper than a plane ticket. But if I only read what I know, I am only reinforcing my own stereotypes.

Reading Like a Colonizer

My dad always loved Africana while I was growing up, but his books are mostly (because of his interests) the Great White Hunter type. And when I was a kid and my dad and brother went on safari in Africa, I wasn’t interested to go. I could blame it on the weather (I love dreary, damp Seattle). But I have this sneaking suspicion that the place was so utterly foreign to me that I got scared. It was truly the dark continent because I don’t have a relationship with Africa. I think by reading mostly African books written by white Europeans, I was looking for a way I could relate to this place that is completely foreign to me.

All of that is to say I don’t know what makes a writer African. There are numerous experiences of Africa that are all valid, but I have failed to really explore them until now. My failure might be about race. It might be about culture. But it doesn’t matter why I haven’t been reading widely enough about Africa. What matters is that if I want to be the person I think I am, I have to start.

Back to Chinua Achebe and Anthills of the Savannah

Anthills of the Savannah follows school chums Ikem and Chris as they navigate their country’s first post-colonial government, a military dictatorship headed by another friend of theirs. The book starts with this obsequious tone as Chris, the Commissioner for Information, tries to appease the dictator. The language is also florid and bureaucratic as Chris talks around whatever offense His Excellency perceives at the moment. This portrait from the inside is an elegant way of showing the fear and instability of a new government.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was how Achebe portrayed the power of women. In many, many literary traditions, women are soft spoken or working the only power they have—their sexuality. In Anthills of the Savannah, the women, even the uneducated Elewa, are equally savvy as the men and it’s Chris’s girlfriend Beatrice who first sees the danger brewing. Throughout the book, men and women complement each other and learn from the way the other sees the world.

The tension builds quickly in the book and soon Ikem, the editor of the paper of record, is in trouble and Chris has to figure out whether to help him and how. In the US, a political circle this tight would feel like a contrivance (although it’s more true than I’d like to admit), but in the fictional country of Kangan, it’s a genius way of illustrating how much power changes people. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but I particularly liked the way Achebe worked in comments on dictatorship throughout the book:

“Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass… The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, just what is up and what is down.”

He also writes about some of the subtler effects of colonization:

“Beatrice smiled wryly. So, two whole generations before the likes of me could take a first-class degree in English, there were already barely literate carpenters and artisans of British rule hacking away in the archetypal jungle and subverting the very sounds and legends of daybreak to make straight my way.”

I lived under a dictator in Chile, but I was one of the privileged classes and I was a child. By finally opening up a book by Chinua Achebe and reading outside my comfort zone, I gained an entirely new understanding of this form of government. I also learned that gender relations are also a product of culture. I have much to understand about Africa and the rest of the world. I hope all the writers I encounter on my journey are as gifted as Achebe.

Do you challenge yourself with your reading better than I do? What have you learned about the world that’s surprised you?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Anthills of the Savannah from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

March 17, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

Poet Arlene Kim rocked my literary heart at Richard Hugo House’s Lit Series earlier this year with an erasure poem displayed entirely in slides. This haunting response to the abuse of girls changed my conception of poetry. I bought her book, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, immediately and have carried it with me every day since.

Although the video of that evening’s performance is locked somewhere in a vault and I cannot share it with you, I can share this book and what it taught me about poetry. If you’re a returning reader to this blog, you know that I’m fascinated with poetry, but I am only recently learning to write it. So when I read a book like Kim’s, I am reading as much for what I can learn from it as I am for the beauty of language.

What Poetry Sounds Like

I’ve been reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry lately. In fact, it was his discussion of the way tension carries across a line that taught me to better hear poetry. Kim utilizes that tension incredibly well. In “Hollow Tongue” she writes, “The dead can speak / any language, I’d imagine,” and I became enraptured with the way the line breaks. I’ve run it over and over my tongue just to capture the way, as Pinsky has taught me, the line slows the sentence down and the sentence speeds the line up.

Another favorite selection I’ve been studying for line breaks is “Paper Suns,” where Kim writes, “My love. I tended him / after he fell. His charred wing stumps, / his elegy of scabbed feathers. Only then”. The line breaks give an extra charge to a poem already full of rich language and evocative imagery.

The Many Shapes of a Poem

My knowledge of forms of poetry is limited. What I can tell you is that Kim considers the entire page when she writes her poems.

The first poem in the collection, “Rot,” is a series of conventional paragraphs spread across multiple pages whereas “Wind,” also a poem set in paragraph form, gusts across the pages it covers with shifting margins and alignments. “Spool, Book, Coin” is written in very short lines that, according to the endnotes, mimic the wavering walk of a child. The way each of the poems in this book is laid out is so carefully considered and unique to each instance, that I wanted to (and will in the coming days) study them over and over to learn precisely how the layout and syllable counts affect my read of each poem.

Recurring Imagery

There are many images that Kim returns to again and again throughout the book including the woods, hair, and birds. It was the Biblical apple, though, that caught my attention. This was in part because it’s a relatively accessible image and occurs very early in the book, but it was also so lusciously invoked that I wanted to think about it over and over. “Rot” starts, “Begin / An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.” The language was so simple and yet I was so firmly entrenched in Eden. I wondered how she did that and if I had somehow too firmly committed to one interpretation. The poem goes on in the next section:

A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of the apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color.” – Arlene Kim, “Rot”

And so the poem isn’t just about sex and temptation but it’s about surfaces and the way we become beguiled and misled by them. There are many, many things happening beneath the surfaces of Kim’s poems and I look forward to discovering more as I read them. I was grateful for the notes she provides at the end of the book, but the poems are strong enough to do without them if you choose.

Now that I’m getting over my obsession with getting poetry “right” (damn you undergrad English courses), I’m really starting to enjoy reading poems. My favorite prose is usually about the language of a piece and concision anyway, and who spends more time crafting language than poets?

I recommend Arlene Kim’s What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? for poetry newbies like me and also for my more educated poet friends. I learn from you, so please share your thoughts about the craft of this book with me in the comments below. And if I ever find that video of the erasure poem on the web, I’ll post it here.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Gabriela and the Widow: Jack Remick Teaches Writing through Writing

March 10, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

The old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” does not at all apply to Jack Remick. Before I read Gabriela and the Widow, Jack taught me about writing with the insightful questions he’d ask after we read our work aloud during the long-standing writing group at Louisa’s Café in Seattle. Reading Gabriela was even more of an education in the subtleties of craft.

Significant Detail

Driven from her village in Mexico by a civil war that kills her family, young Gabriela faces many hardships. Remick uses details like a “cotton blouse embroidered by hand in the faint light of the evening fire” to convey tender allusions to what Gabriela’s life must have been like before the war. When La Patrona, a woman who has “rescued” Gabriela, then takes this blouse and says she will burn it, the reader has a deeper understanding of how fully the woman is stripping away the essence of Gabriela.

When Gabriela craves a pair of white Nikes, it is easy to see that what she is really craving is a life like the Norteñas who wear these shoes. Later, Gabriela will be coaxed into other shoes, but even then the Nikes serve as a grounding point to indicate how much Gabriela is changing.

Objective Correlative

Terrible things happened to Gabriela when the war came to her village. Remick could have detailed them and we’d be struck by the horror without ever really getting inside Gabriela’s experience. Instead, Remick creates a correlation in Gabriela’s mind between toads and the horrible events—events that she refuses to quite remember. The reader sees her visceral reaction over and over anytime toads cross her path and in this way learns to empathize with her.

Remick builds on Gabriela’s reaction to toads throughout the story. What makes this relationship for me is when Gabriela begins remembering times of innocence that involved toads as well. The glimpse at what life was like before is heartbreaking and the tension between the dark and light memories makes both exponentially more touching.

Myths Retold

Gabriela finds safety in the North where she takes care of an ailing widow whose memory is failing. Gabriela helps her work on a list of objects and photographs and what they meant in the woman’s life. In return, La Viuda teaches Gabriela about what it means to be a woman. Though La Viuda has a somewhat colored view of the experience of womanhood, she doesn’t let her life turn her into a Miss Havisham. Instead, La Viuda intersperses myths and stories of great women with her own stories. Through tales about everyone from Helen of Troy to Xipe Totec, she helps Gabriela create an identity based on strength and womanhood as she transfers her life force to the young girl.

There are hundreds of things I could say about the reasons I loved this book—like the way Gabriela and La Viuda seamlessly slip from English to Spanish and back in their conversations, the magical realism (especially in relation to mirrors), or how in answer to La Viuda’s aging forgetfulness, Remick creates a shifting repetition that grounds the reader and also builds the narrative. What you need to know is the elegant craft reveals just the right amount of information to engage you, the reader, in telling the story.

Jack Remick can teach and he can sure as hell write. Read Gabriela and the Widow and find the things that speak to your writing. You’ll fall in love with the story and you’ll be a better writer for it. Although my work schedule doesn’t allow for weekday afternoons at Louisa’s anymore, I am grateful I can pick up Gabriela and learn from her and from Jack any old time.

Lisa Robertson Finds Poetry in Architecture

March 3, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I requested a review copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson, I was working as the managing editor of an architecture magazine while earning my MFA. The irony of my experience was how many architects used convoluted and turgid language to describe designs that were pared down to their purely minimal essences. The days I spent sorting through jargon like “fenestration” and “tectonics” were great training for nights spent finding the clearest way to communicate an idea in my own writing.

Essays on Art and Architecture

“We believe that the objective of architecture is to give happiness.”

A poet, Robertson uses her command of words to blend the architectural vernacular with everyday language. She writes in the persona of the Office for Soft Architecture which speaks in the first person plural about a wide range of issues that affect the urban environment from architectural style and color to invasive species.

One of the ways Robertson displays her skill with language is by pairing a simple sentence with a truly dense one:

“The Himalayan blackberry escaped. The plant’s swift rhetorical trajectory from aestheticized exotic, to naturalized species, to invasive alien, all the while concealing a spurious origin myth, displays a typically hackneyed horticultural anthropomorphism.”

At times, I found myself lost in the richness of her vocabulary, but the writing was so well crafted that I felt I still understood her meaning on some subliminal level. Just when I thought I might truly be done for, Robertson reeled me in by tying the lascivious undertones of strawberries in Jane Austen’s Emma to the Arts and Crafts Movement in British Columbia.

Some of my favorite essays in this book were commissioned to accompany art shows. I enjoyed leafing through the full-color illustrations of those shows and guessing what Robertson might have to say about them.

Seven Walks through a Changing City

“Imagine a very beautiful photograph whose emulsion is lifting and peeling from the paper. There is no longer a negative. To preserve it you must absorb this artifact through your skin, as if it were an antique cosmetic comprised of colloidal silver. You must absorb its insecurity.

The seven walks in this book are poetic journeys through a rapidly changing Vancouver. They are not meant as guidebooks. In fact, it would be impossible for an outsider to replicate the paths Robertson is describing. Instead, they impart the feeling of a city as it evolves around you. Sometimes she references architecture directly:

“Ruined factories rising into fog; their lapsed symmetries nearly gothic. The abandoned undulations of the vast mercantile storage facilities…”

Other times the walks become more emotional journeys.

“There was no window in the city that was not overtly moralistic – the roadways were illuminated and my decadence seemed to soak the asphalt so it shone.”

But the language is always evocative and it feels as though the setting is pregnant with potential stories even when Robertson is merely conveying a mood.

In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson finds poetry in the language of architecture and finds a new way to convey the experience of urban geography. It is a book architects will appreciate for the careful consideration of form and context and writers will appreciate for the plasticity of Robertson’s language.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Heidi Julavits and The Uses of Enchantment

February 24, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Was Mary Veal abducted from a high school field hockey practice or was she playing a sick joke on her family? Even after she resurfaces more than a month later, the answer is not clear. The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits explores what exactly happened to Mary using three interwoven stories that capture the angst of being a teenaged girl better than anything I’ve read in a long time.

Interwoven Narrative

These expertly linked tales give three very different views of Mary’s life. One tells what might have happened to Mary. It’s a story of a girl so desperate to be noticed or have something happen in her life that she runs away with a stranger. It could also be the story of a girl parroting another girl who made up a similar abduction years before.

“Let’s say that I tried to tell the truth and nobody heard me. Let’s say, then, that I’ve decided telling the truth got me nowhere. If I want anyone to listen to me, I have to construct a scenario that appears true, but isn’t.”

A second story is composed of Mary’s therapist’s notes from his sessions with her as he begins to develop a theory of “hyper radiance” based on Mary. It is a theory of how some girls take the negative energy of sexual repression and instead of allowing it to crush them, they turn it outward as a destructive force—“A work of art.”

The third narrative thread encounters Mary 14 years after the abduction as she returns to her family after her mother’s funeral. Here Julavits creates a compelling portrait of family dysfunction and denial dating back to the Salem witch trials. Because each character is richly drawn and plays a key role in the family’s enduring misery, the sections about them are fascinating rather than a trial of endurance à la The Corrections.

“Helen was a shadowy pro at expressing her own feelings by attributing them to others.”

Each story is so fully inhabited that I was guessing to the very end what really happened to Mary. And while I was focused on whether Mary told the truth, Julavits was feeding me all kinds of information about Mary’s experience that created this incredibly believable world of a young girl who feels lost, alone, and ignored.

Capturing the Essence of the Teen Mind

Like Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (I really have been on a teen angst reading binge lately), The Uses of Enchantment explores how truly wicked it is to be a teenaged girl and how that makes girls behave.

One of the things I love about this book is that Mary is ordinary. She’s smart but not necessarily brilliant and pretty but not remarkably so. Most of all she is in the middle of the torment of being a teen. All of the factors are there: the drama with siblings and peers, the complicated definition of self in relationship to parental expectations, and the pure work of trying to distinguish oneself just as you are learning who you are.

Mary uses the tools she has, manipulation and a budding sexuality (a real threat in a family where her mother cares more about whether she was raped than the actual abduction), to get noticed by her family. And the futility of being a teen comes through in Mary’s experience. She wields the power she thinks she has, but the people around her often fail to notice her efforts.

I highly recommend this book. While it isn’t exactly a mystery, it held me in suspense until the end and the world that Julavits creates is so well imagined in so many ways (dialogue, characterization, setting), that I think any writer will find something that relates back to your project and that you can learn from (all while you’re enchanted by a really good book).

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Uses of Enchantment from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.