Lalita Tademy’s Cane River – There can be no happiness in slavery

Sometimes, being a self-professed reader, people stick a book in my hand and tell me ”you have to read this”. Cane River by Lalita Tademy is one of those books that was foisted upon me by a well-intentioned co-worker of mine. And, well… I’m game.

Cane River (2001) takes place in the Louisiana swamps and the theme is slavery. It’s another of those sweeping family tales that span over four generations and it works its way through the matrilineal history of the female slaves who are sold, impregnated and generally treated like chattel by their owners who seem to be taking the whole “white man’s burden” with an absurd amount of self-righteous sincerity.

Slavery is never going to be anything less than a horrific blight on the history of mankind and the idea that you choose to treat some as lesser merely for your own convenience is, no matter how you try to justify it, inherently wrong. That doesn’t mean we, as a collective, don’t keep doing it.

However, and this is an interesting “however”, I can’t help but be reminded of Tom Waits who, in concert, once pondered “when you’re watching a really bad movie and it says in the end when the credits roll “based on a true story”… does it help?” (I’m paraphrasing at best, but you get the gist).

Lalita Tademy, a fortune 500 technology company vice-president, woke up one day after discovering her great-great-great-great-grandmother’s Bill of Sale and decided she had to write a book about her family history. That means this is a well-researched, well-intentioned and very personal story. She has supplemented her narrative with all manner of documents and pictures and historical facts. It doesn’t make the dialogue any more true… or the narrative itself any less fictitious, but that’s what you get with a drama-documentary semi-eyewitness account. As a piece of literature it’s an easy read, there’s lots of high drama and you can feel the deep affection the author has for the women she depicts, from the dark-skinned Suzette to the pale-skinned Emily who probably could pass for white.

So, what is it that bothers me about all this? Well, one of the strong points of the story itself is that it does make it very clear that the relationships between the owners and the slaves isn’t as cut-and-dried as you might think. The smaller plantations around Cane River force the two casts into closer contact and that makes for a different kind of interaction. But there’s a certain lack of … well, something I would like to think of as “spirit”. Mostly the leading ladies of this tale have worked out the systematic rape by white men as another chore they have to undertake, and I guess from a survival point of view that becomes necessary. The line they live by says that they can hate the fathers as much as they please, but they love the children. Again, that’s probably a smart way of looking at things. And very humane, which I find intriguing in its own way.

What’s missing from the tale is what I would consider the necessary vitriol from the perspective of those subjugated. Whatever condemnation is inherent in the attitude of the slaves is toothless, essentially. I don’t doubt that there are many things necessary for survival if you are a part of a slave caste anywhere in the world at any point in history, but the false perspective of a historical account doesn’t help at all here. Instead there’s a project on the part of the slave women to “bleach” the line, a form of eugenics that is really vile in its own right.

No matter how much I sympathize with the women of this tale, and no matter that they are portrayed as strong and capable, there is never any real apostasy on that point and that’s uncomfortable. The reader can draw their own conclusions, and this reader certainly does, but none of the things I’m thinking are present in the text. It reads as a family tale in some ways and as a pseudo-historical document in others and I suppose that’s why it isn’t keen on being rough with the attitudes of its main characters, but rather focuses on their will to survival.

So, even though this text doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming misery porn, it certainly isn’t nearly strong worded enough on the themes and topics it deals with. I think I would have preferred it to be a little less polite all around.

Mule

Abdellah Taïa: Salvation Army (2006) – From Salé to Geneva with young Abdellah

This is a short little piece of work. It really is a piece of work, though.

I’m a believer in the inherent instability of reliance on a narrative voice. It’s one of the things that make me deeply, deeply suspicious of the whole concept of autobiographical work. There is something sly about the whole notion of selling any chosen words as truth that always niggles at the back of my brain, meta-narratively aware and liquid modernity thinking. That is not to say that there is no truth to the words chosen. It’s just that in the act of choosing the narrative voice has already started the process of eliminating, selecting and enhancing.

It’s inevitable, that part of the process, the way shades and gradients are carefully chosen, even when an author is not necessarily portraying themselves, or the idea they have of themselves, in a favourable light.

That being said, this particular narrative does introduce itself as autobiographical and it’s not shy about the fact that the main protagonist is the author of the work. It maintains a completely un-ironical attitude towards that premise too. I’m still a little leery of being seduced into thinking that I in any way know Abdellah after having read this bricolage of images and ideas and familial relations.

We follow young Abdellah through the insights of growing up, of realizing where his sexuality lies, of finding a relationship and leaving Morocco to come to live in Europe and it is all told in short passages, some with a philosophical tint, some with the deep love for family and for his home that make it feel like a much bigger story is being told through deceptively simple means.

I find I like the voice more than the story, if that makes sense at all. Or maybe the voice is the story, whether we’re treated to a description of Abdellah watching TV with his big brother, or a visit to Tangiers, or falling asleep on a park bench in Geneva. The acuity is there, as well as the feel of an authorial voice that knows literature, but that isn’t focusing on showing off that knowledge at the moment.

There is also a spark of youthfulness to this, of first love and big hopes and bad disappointments and estrangement and insights and melancholy and it’s all very low-key, very honest for any given value of that.

Abdellah Taïa has made a name for himself as being an openly gay Moroccan writer, which is of course not a popular thing to be in a society that is entrenched in homophobia and where same-sex sexual activity is illegal. It’s no great surprise that the author lives in exile. It makes the opening chapters of Salvation Army all the more interesting for the way Abdellah describes the pleasure of living, of sexuality and just a lust for life as one of the defining characteristics of his early family life, and the lives of those around him.

You get the sense that this is just the springboard for the young protagonist and that he is in for a world of trouble, tumult, love and pain. That’s actually very appealing and very straightforward in a good way. The novel also leaves me with the sense that I’ve been allowed a glimpse into a very different cultural sphere were the subtext is so dissimilar from mine that I saw something vaguely new and unexpected. As heavy as the subject matter is, this is actually a very charming piece of literature, as odd as that description might sound. And for that reason I certainly think it worth reading.

Mule

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule