Race, Politics, & Underwater Caves

Recently, I've been reading my way through the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver. I enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible in high school, but though I was curious about her other books, I put off reading them at the time. In the back of my mind, I think I was suspicious they'd be "too girly" (and, then, I might have found them so). I'm glad I went back. Homeland reminded me that short stories can be satisfying. The Bean Trees and later novels entertained, made me think, and presented pleasantly complex female characters.

I started with an old box set that included Homeland, The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, and Animal Dreams. I went to on to re-read Poisonwood Bible, then bought and read Prodigal Summer. When I got to The Lacuna, however, I hesitated. The title alone sounded unpleasantly postmodern. I'm a Frida Kahlo fan, but I've read plenty of books that sacrificed soul to documentary accuracy when they tried to mix in historical figures. Plus, books (and movies) about McCarthyism tend to leave me feeling ineffectually angry rather than roused, motivated, or edified. The Lacuna, in other words looked like an ambitious, possible "important" book -- one that seemed likely to be worth reading but didn't promise much pleasure along the way.

So, I decided to take a break. The Native American themes in Kingsolver reminded me of another writer who had been, for me, a one hit wonder. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony was the highlight of my required reading list at about the time Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible came out, but I had never read any of her other books. In fact, I didn't know she had written other books until a few years ago, when a friend who had studied her oeuvre in a college course suggested some of her other books might blow my mind. I appreciated the various feminist mythologies that played into Gardens in the Dunes, but at times I felt disengaged, the distance between the characters and the reader too great. Silko's massive Almanac of the Dead, one the other hand, became a labrious read: It's hard to fault an author for expressing anger or for describing distasteful realities (or almost-realities); still, Almanac struck me as a book that seemed to take more from the reader than it gave. Moreover, after more than 700 pages of reader investment, the ending seemed anticlimactic. [True, I'm not one to pick up on numerical subtleties, and calendars run through; maybe someday I'll do some background reading that will help me appreciate some of the extra layers to Silko's tale.] There is heart and soul to Almanac (heart and soul that I think inhabit very much the same place they do in Silko's powerful Ceremony), but it's deeply buried.

I worried that Lacuna, too, might prove more effort than entertainment. I couldn't have been more wrong. The book drew me in right away. The first chapter has some beautiful prose and introduces the intriguing characters of Salome and Leandro, but the story really picks up when the diary entries start. (And, for a reader who generally prefers third to first person, that's saying something.) The narrator (one of Kingsolver's rare male protagonists) is likable, and there's a subtle tension in his desires to reveal as well as conceal.

There's a danger in beginning with a fourteen-year-old protagonist, but Kingsolver makes the narrator's youth both interesting and integral to the unfolding story. She also avoids the potential solipsism of a novel about a writer. True, the most vibrant passages describe the narrator's Mexican cooking, not his writing. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo add color and energy; they spring to life just as I'd imagined them. (If there's a fault to their portrayal, perhaps it's that they're too much as one might imagine, too likable despite their faults.) Trotsky -- though portrayed even more sympathetically -- comes off less larger-than-life. The historical figures are tied into action as well as theme; they don't come off as mere decoration, and they don't steal the scene either.

Though the reader has a pretty good idea of where things are going, there's enough mystery to keep the pages turning. Kingsolver's creation, Harrison William Shepherd, is a protagonist well worth getting to know.

The Lacuna is much more than a political statement, but politics has an unabashed part to play. In the author interview following the novel, Kingsolver reveals that one of the inspirations for the book was a question: "Why is the relationship between art and politics such an uneasy one in the U.S.? Most people in other places tend to view these as inseparable."

I've seen and read plenty of works deploring the censorship and persecutions of the McCarthy era. The Lacuna is the only one that's made me wonder: What happened to bring the McCarthy era to the end?

That said, don't let worries about politics or postmodernism keep you away from The Lacuna. It is, first and foremost, an engaging story.

A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor

I very much enjoyed this selection of poems by contemporary poet Maram Al-Massri. Al-Massri was born in Syria and lives in France; she writes in Arabic.

Her poems are short; they make use of simple but evocative diction. They are passionate, erotic, complex.

In fact, the poems appear so deceptively simple that part of me wondered why I liked them so much. Was I responding to the fact of their being translations with a hint of exoticism, imagining the poet as some kind of modern-day odalisque? But as I read further, swept along in Al-Massri's complicated, questioning, and daring search for fulfillment and for herself, I knew I could let myself off the hook: there's meat to these brief, intense lyrics and the sequences they constitute.

One certainly feels that Al-Massri is in dialogue with a long tradition of Arabic poetry; this is sensed in the themes and images of love, and in the ways in which the individual poems are like episodes that reflect, challenge, open up, and refract each other and Al-Massri's themes. Al-Massri speaks, however, with a distinct and vibrant, modern voice.

Here are two selections from the series A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor, originally published in 1997:

2

How foolish:
Whenever my heart
hears a knocking
it opens its doors.

64

She set out
to offer him
her pores
and her nails
adorned with cherries
which he ate
ravenously.

She left
with the basket
of her heart
emptied out.


And here the ending of I Look to You, originally published in 2000:

99

Whenever a man
leaves me
my beauty increases.

100

Increases...


Both sequences explore themes of love and betrayal, power, freedom, abandonment. I admit to preferring the earlier Red Cherry, which includes more moments of innocence and awakening; more poems in the later sequence reflect on burdens, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. Despite this, I found the entire volume a pleasure to read. Al-Massri speaks with energy, authority, and honesty.

Although I confess that the Arabic text of this bilingual edition was Greek to me, translator Khaled Mattawa (a poet in his own right) continues to impress me.

This volume was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004.