Politics & Society – Page 6

Just a phone call away

Former NYT star critic, Michiko Kakutani, makes a return to talk with Barack Obama about A Promised Land – the book and all the books that led to it, and the land, and all the promises it makes – sometimes fulfilling them and just as often not. One could say her piece (based on an extended telephone conversation) confirms what one already knows about Obama’s intellectual and literary influences, but it does also reveal a few new things. For instance, about his method of writing – not a disciplined keeper of a diary, rather a collector of fragmentary anecdotes; digitally inclined when it comes to research; very analogue – legal pad and favourite pen – when it comes to the writing.

In her opening paragraph, Kakutani refers to A Promised Land as being, beyond the expected historical record, also “an introspective self-portrait”. Perhaps, not exactly the same thing, but Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, in fact missed “true self-revelation” and bemoaned Obama’s (too) cool detachment. Nor does Kakutani insinuate any discomfort with his handling of race issues, unlike Adichie who is frustrated by what she identifies as his tendency towards misplaced evenhandedness. But, then, Kakutani is not writing a critique. What they both do agree on, though, is the fineness of the prose and the pleasure of the reading experience, and the service done in giving an enthralling account of an extraordinary (too) few years.

Any hesitancy I may initially have had about diving into such a meaty tome – fearing somewhat the insider policy-speak that comes with most political memoirs – was quickly assuaged. Obama talks to us! Every other passage, every turn of phrase, one may well imagine coming from his lips – just without the ums and ahs! The complexities of politics are so well packaged in familiar real world scenarios, and without a preponderance of technical jargon, that they should be understandable to most, and, more importantly perhaps, are embedded in the common warmth of a life being lived.

Asked about what he is reading now, I am absolutely unsurprised that Obama has turned, amongst other things, to Jack for some respite. It would not need me to bring to his attention the significance of his return to Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” opus just now; the first story of which had accompanied him as he traipsed around Iowa in 2007, at the beginning of an odyssey that could have led nowhere, but instead to the highest echelons of power. Did he ever imagine that the (once) “bright radical star” of the Union would play such an important role in his life?

Granted, I must confess, I am only a couple of hundred pages in – chronologically speaking, the first weeks of his presidency – and as one unable to confine myself to just one Lektüre at a time, I do have some reading ahead of me, but I look forward every day to a bit more. And, I will most definitely have more to say.

Titillating

Well, it is not very fair to comment without a full frontal view, but whether this is quite the right way to honour the great Mary Wollstonecraft is debatable!

Irrespective, there is one part of me pleased enough that some more diverse (if you count “women” as diverse!) historical figures, are finding their way into public spaces. And, of course, that Virginia Woolf should find a place now in Richmond, where she lived for a long period, is fitting. Though sitting on a park bench watching the day go by – is that not a bit too Mrs. Dalloway? As the tortured soul she does not have to be depicted, but… And, whether this trend is stretching to people of other ethnic or cultural backgrounds (beyond Gandhi and/or Mandela) I have not heard. Then, there is the sceptical me, one who can’t help but doubt whether any number of busts, statues, plaques, do very much in the way of taking the viewer (or casual passer-by) beyond the public space into the public consciousness; whether they really tell us anything of the person, the time and circumstance, and are in the end only sentimental reflections of a work’s creator and the society and time in which he/she/they lived, rather than that of the subject.

There are indeed enough that one could be well rid of – for instance, Cecil Rhodes; a hullabaloo that spans continents, and Sloane; now put under wraps at the British Museum. A couple of years old now, but this is an opinion on the greater global predicament of just what to do with some of these guys (they are mostly “guys”!). And Jonathan Jones questions the whole “folly of depicting history through the dead art of statues”, and pleads for “serious art” and a contemporary approach that remembers without the false promise of restoration. His “selfie in bronze” description is spot-on – and not unlike my reflections above.

All the above links are to The Guardian.

Obama again, and then enough…

…until I read this tome that arrived on my doorstep the day after publication – courtesy the enormous first printing that demanded a “Printed in Germany on acid-free paper” component!

My copy of “A Promised Land” , Crown Publishers, 2020.

Liked very much this interview given to David Olusoga on BBC Radio 4 – to be followed (from December 14th for two weeks) with an abridged reading of A Promised Land by Barack Obama himself.

David Olusoga has written an accompaniment of a sort for The Guardian, which is an interesting extension to his interview experience and his not terribly optimistic personal observations of the United States post-4 Years Trump.

And a musical accompaniment there must be!

A short story, a loving tribute & a long review

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Another one, most favoured by many, and by me; so elegant her prose, so singular her voice. And, here is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie now, with three quite different pieces of writing, but all seeped with ideas about belonging – to family, to nation; about losing – those we love, freedoms taken for granted; and about fickle power – as a tool to control or to set one free. All are recent, very recent, very contemporaneous in style and subject and intent.

Firstly, Zikora. As modest a work as it is in terms of length, so wide its sociological and psychological scope; and all displayed in the compact first person narrative of a successful professional Nigerian woman, Zikora, about to give birth surrounded by the cool accoutrements of western medicine. At her side, the mother who she does not know how to please, and in the conspicuous absence of a partner, Kwame, deemed “perfect” and then to do “a runner”, and from whom she struggles to let go, and all the while reflecting upon her complicated Nigerian family and their complicated relationships, the awkwardness of her place as an African woman in the United States where her Blackness is always writ large. And, in the end, wondering herself why she persisted in forgiving the men who did her wrong – Kwame was not the first, and then there is the father who had deserted her mother (and her) and started another family, but whose attention she still craved. And when it is over, a new life brought into the world, a realisation is in the dawning that just as her thoughts flew to Lagos and her impossible family, it is alone her mother who has flown to her; her difficult, impossible to please mother who never left her and was with her now.

Interesting, in another respect, is that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has chosen to publish this through Amazon. I dare say this will not impress some, but it does actually make sense for a “small” work at a small price that she would have wanted to make available to as many people as possible.

This links to Amazon.de in Germany (because that’s where I am) but it is of course at every other Amazon out there in the big wide world.

Segregation by Genre

For a couple of reasons Alex Abramovich’s piece entitled “Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie” (limited access so the link is a bit dicey) in the London Review of Books particularly interested me. Firstly, it is a review of Ken Burns’s eight part PBS documentary “Country Music”, and I had read a flattering piece in The New York Times a couple of months ago, and that Abramovich’s is not; secondly, I saw a grainy rerun of Burns’s lauded by some, and lambasted by others, 1990 series, The Civil War, not so long ago – and thought it a very mediocre work – whereby, I mean in terms of the structure and film-making aesthetic (though to be fair it is thirty years old); the historical shortcomings and omissions, as Abramovich mentions, were debated at the time by those qualified to do so, and the criticism has not abated over the years. (I should say just about everything I know about the Civil War comes from Eric Foner, and he was one of the fiercest critics at the time.)

And it is in terms of Ken Burns’s prior work, that Abramovich launches into his criticism of “Country Music”, because, whether one agreed with their perspective or not, a range of historians did contribute to “The Civil War”, whereas in Burns’s succeeding documentaries the input from historians has dramatically declined over the years, to the point whereby “Country Music” has only one, Bill Malone, and it his interpretation alone that frames Burns’s work. And, one should say, even there it seems Malone had more to offer but could only give that which fulfilled Burns’s vision.

What Alex Abramovich bemoans the most, are the half-stories and half-truths that will never add to a whole. Instead, one is left with a blurred vision of a music genre that has never reconciled its shared roots in the poor white and Black South, and instead rejoices in an (often false) nostalgia. Following is an accompanying conversation with Abramovich, that explores, beyond his written LRB piece and the specifics relating to Burns’s documentary, the wider history of segregation in vernacular music and the defining role played by the recording industry.

Alex Abramovich on the history of segregation in music in the US

Finally, this is not the same thing, but related, I think, in that it is illustrative of how music and recordings track the extreme social shifts of an era, particularly in respect to the African American experience, through the twentieth century and into the present. Recently, I read an extraordinarily interesting article, again in the NYT, that examines music – American folk music this time – beyond a matter of categorisation that tends to segregation and exposes instead blatant racism and hate, and considers the ensuing dilemma of how to deal with historical works, once popular and now despicable.

Amongst the great lives, one very great life

John Maynard Keynes

Most people take the economical way to Keynes! Not so me – rather, beyond name recognition, my introduction to one of the greatest economists of the 20th century came via the Woolfs, in whose lives and amongst the other brilliant players in “Bloomsbury”, Maynard Keynes played a significant role. Love it that the young British playwright, James Graham, should choose him as a “great life” in the BBC Radio 4 “Great Lives” series. I hope he retains his enthusiasm, for what great stuff there is in this life – for theatre or for film!

When the next time is now

“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)

Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.

A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.

Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?

But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)

Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.

How political can Black be?

Identity, very real yet permanently theorised upon; the reflection in the mirror or thoughts in the head, the heated arguments, the terminology, and beyond – who is what and who says, variance in usage and acceptability over time and from nation to nation; all this and more is almost impossible to escape these days, and just when one is convinced to be almost on top of it, or given up in despair, there it is again demanding to be considered again. For me, at least, that state arises again this time in reading an opinion article in The New York Times by Kwame Anthony Appiah; throwing a spanner in the works again.

Springing from an ongoing debate, some of it fair, and some provocative purely for the sake of provocation (this ranging from the mischievous to the malevolent) about the correct nomenclature when in comes to US Vice-Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, born in California to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Appiah’s thoughtful piece returns half-way home (for him) to the United Kingdom, where ethnicity has been historically approached differently and the matter much more black and white (my pun is intended), to construe his argument.

Appiah describes the “political Blackness” ideology, rooted in the early nineteen seventies and finding legitimacy at the latest in the eighties, and in the wake of recommendations from the Commission for Racial Equality; whereby Asians were officially categorised as Black. (In terms of Britain, important is that here we are talking predominately about South Asians – i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc. dispersed in the wake of Partition and the aftermath – whereas in America one would understand “Asian” to refer to those of East Asian, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Southeast Asian, for instance, Vietnamese, descent.) While historically and unofficially, Black people were always seen to be anyone who was not absolutely white, that categorisation was then embraced by many in minority communities that were not sub-Saharan or from the African diaspora.

Under the “umbrella” of their Blackness, it is easy enough to understand that its proponents envisaged power, not only in numbers, but shared experiences and just grievances, mostly extending from the remnants of Empire and colonisation. It is also clear: there are disadvantages inherent in claiming too “big a church” for too “diverse a congregation” (my unoriginal metaphors). Appiah also agues on the point of the immense range of internal diversity; cultural and religious (e.g. consider alone India: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, etc., languages and dialects ad infinitum, socio-economic status and caste) that further complicate sympathies and allegiances.

Today the project still remains highly contentious – for every example of mutuality sought there is at least another of repudiation and offence. But, as an “idea” of inclusivity, it is not dead and that is something.