READ THIS BOOK - Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward

NOTE: I wrote this review on November 22, 2014, and never published it. Given how powerful the book is, I wanted to at least put this out there.

In a span of four years, five young Black men in Jesmyn Ward's life, including her brother, died. She tells the story of each death, each person, his quirks, beauties, and foibles in heartbreaking detail. The constant, suffocating grief that Ward deals with throughout her life is visceral. Her words hold nothing back.

There are many things that I took for granted as a child without understanding the consequences, both mental and physical, that would have been part and parcel of my youth had I not been provided with so many of those necessities. Reading Ward's account of life in Mississippi as a Black family and community was striking, poignant, brave, and eye-opening.

There are so many worlds that I am so close to yet so removed from that I can't comprehend the gravity, perils, and consequences that are more inherently borne into lives based solely on circumstances, and many times, the color of their skin. This book helps to provide some insight into one of those worlds.

I wanted to share a few of the most powerful passages from Ward's memoir. Many are bleak but provide insight into Ward's psyche and the psyche of those around her coping with so much.

Nonetheless, I think the last passage shows how Ward, after experiencing so much loss, found something to hold onto.  

(These passages provide brief glimpses of the power of the entire book, so please read the entire book to understand where Ward is coming from when saying these things.)

1.  "The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C.J. knew this. I have no words."  

2.  "What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs."

3.   "After my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman, she raised the seven children they'd had together on her own.  She took what my grandfather left with her, and she built it into something more, and she survived.

"This is a common refrain in my community, and more specifically in my family. I have always thought of my family as something of a matriarchy, since the women of my mother's side have held my nuclear family and my immediate family and my extended family together through so much. But our story is not special. Nor had it always been this way. It used to be that the Catholic Church was a strong presence in my community and divorce unheard of; men did not leave their women and shared children. But in my grandmother's generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who'd grown up with the expectation that they'd have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called "sir" in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who love them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did."

4.   "When I was 12 years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a loathing of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this fostered a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to it's breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: this is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what is, and to make something of it. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother's gifts.

"Without my mother's legacy, I would never have been able to look at this history of loss, this future where I will surely lose more, and write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says: Hello. We are here. Listen.


I can't recommend this book enough and added the Amazon link below. 

READ THIS BOOK - Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a story about wealth and privilege, war and peace, love and the shields that deflect its arrows, whites and blacks, African-Americans and Non-American Blacks, poverty and riches, the United States and the world, and finally, Ifemelu and Obinze. It's a story of many competing themes that never seem to trip over each other; instead, they weave together seamlessly.

Ifemelu is a Nigerian girl who emigrates to the United States after high school to attend college. She begins to blog about her experiences in America, and the blog posts alone are worth the price of admission for this novel. Obinze, Ifemelu's boyfriend and love from high school, has his own travails as he grows into a man. The novel follows both of them with an amazing depiction and vantage point of the lives and countries they see and live.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is also a Nigerian, captures these characters in all of their humanity. All of them are flawed, and the ones that mask their flaws behind their pride prove to be the most insecure and miserable. The many characters that briefly pass through Ifmelu and Obinze's life are also incredibly well drawn. For example, one description of a corrupt politician, "Ferdinand, a stocky acquaintance of Chief’s who had run for governor in the last elections, had lost, and, as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results. Ferdinand had a steely, amoral face; if one examined his hands, the blood of his enemies might be found crusted under his fingernails."

Most impressive was Adhichie's ability to succinctly describe the ease that wealth and privilege enable while the burdens of poverty and "choicelessness" (as she puts it) disable so much. I wanted to provide some of my favorite passages in regards to this in the hopes that a few of you would read this book! (I included a link at the bottom if you have a Kindle and/or want to buy from Amazon).

1.  "There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have.  To take 'charity' for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this…Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received.  To be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy."

2.  "She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty."

3.  "The stories of his wealth made her assume he had changed more than he possibly could have.  People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought – to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet - and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.  He did not boast, either, or speak about things he owned, which made people assume he owned much more than he did.  Even his closest friend, Okwudiba, told him how humble he was, and it irked him slightly, because he wished Okwudiba would see that to call him humble was to make rudeness normal.  Besides, humility had always seemed to him specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.  It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not."

4.  "His friends were like him, sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things… He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being."

5.  "Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor."

6.  "Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.  They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

Americanah
$10.00
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Buy on Amazon