DebThink: A Great Story About Helen Suzman, A Great Lady

Books

Monique Truong: The Book of Salt: A Novel
Written from the perspective of Binh, the saucy Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B, this delightful novel allows the reader to indulge in the sensual pleasures of 1930s Paris. As someone who could care less about the cooking of food and its related movements--slow, fast, meandering, etc. what I found most enjoyable were Binh's subversive yet loving digs at the royal couple. I started this book on a plane and devoured it in a hammock.
Colm Toibin: Brooklyn: A Novel
Eilis Lacey grows up in 1950s Ireland in the shadow of her gregarious older sister Rose. Family circumstances dictate that the more reserved Eilis will accept Father Flood's offer to help her get a job and re-locate to his Brooklyn parish. Expertly paced, the story of Eilis' adjustment to her new environment unfolds with calm, beautiful, simple language. Torn between the old world and the new, Eilis must make a choice between two men she has grown to love. Colm Toibin portrays the inner life and social world of Irish women with great mastery, insight and affectionate respect.
Louis Maistros: The Sound of Building Coffins
Wandering around the Fauborg Marigny, I came upon the gay bookstore and went in search of a book I had read about. I couldn't remember the name, but the review had said, "No novel since 'A Confederacy of Dunces' has done such justice to New Orleans." That is how I described it to the skeletal man behind the counter, standing indifferently amid claustrophobic piles of books. He immediately pointed down to this one and I grabbed it. I didn't start reading it until weeks later, eagerly anticipating wry, knowing chuckles a la "Confederacy." No chuckles ensued. The book opens with a boy rebirthing fetuses in the moonlit Mississippi River. The boy's name is Typhus Morningstar, brother of Malaria, Cholera, Diptheria and Dropsy. Louis Maistros, a former forklift operater, has woven a very dark and complex tale that is really unlike anything else I have read. He captures that very thin vibration between vice and beauty that is the essence of New Orleans. The story is set in 1891 and ends with a flood. Bodies rise; time is circular; curses are lifted at great expense; and the water trumps all--inexorably.
Lisa Mullins: Diane Nash: The Fire of the Civil Rights Movement
This slim and humble volume underscores the glaring lack of recognition for Diane Nash as a key leader in the early civil rights movement. Without her courageous confrontation of Nashville mayor Ben West over segregation and her even more pivotal insistence on continuing the Freedom Rides despite massive repression, we might not be patting ourselves on the back for having Barack Obama as president today. SO, it is very clear that while we have made enormous strides in confronting racism, we have a long way to go toward challenging the insidiousness and intimacy of sexism. If anyone's story could inspire the nation to do so, it is Diane Nash. While Lisa Mullins has laid down the basics of a biography, I would love to do a full-scale biography of Diane Nash, using the insights of women's history and intersectional analyses.
Peter Carey: His Illegal Self (Vintage International)
Wow, this book took me in a completely unanticipated direction. I thought it would be a romantic romp with seventies radicals, but it was actually a wild, heart-breaking tale told from the point of view of the seven year old son of one of those radicals. Che Selkirk, yes, that's his name, goes on a physically challenging journey that is also a quest for self, roots, and mother-love. This narrative picks you up and runs with you, haunting even after the last page is turned.
John Lewis: Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
This is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read and I read it feverishly. "The boy from Troy" (Alabama), as Martin Luther King called him when they first met, is an exquisitely sensitive and honest moral being. John Lewis gives me hope in humankind--not because he is a living saint, as Time magazine once dubbed him--but because he shows his feelings and flaws in a way that only heightens the courage of the many correct stands he took at pivotal moments in movement history. How did John Lewis become who he is? His job on the farm was to tend to the chickens, and after he took care of them physically, he tended to their spiritual needs by preaching to them. His earnestness is leavened by a dry wit that hasn't left him yet. We get many nuanced portraits of people we think we know. His account of the fight over his speech during the March on Washington is priceless--several of the big guns arguing behind Lincoln's back (literally) to get him to make his speech less radical. MLK is also demystified, which in no way diminishes Lewis' reverence for him, even when SNCC radicals castigate him for that stance. The memoir recounts many poignant instances when John Lewis paid a price for sticking to his beliefs. The most painful to read was what he calls his "de-election" as SNCC chairman. His close friendship with Julian Bond is also compromised in the rough play of Georgia politics. A combination of vision, tenacity, hard work, commitment, willingness to suffer, stubbornness and faith made him who he is--and our country has benefited enormously from every time he was willing to go back into the fray after being beaten, jailed, and disrespected. While the memoir is exceptionally moving from a personal perspective, it is also one of the best histories of the movement I have ever read. So run out and grab this 500 page tome--you will be glad you did.
Margaret De Wys: Black Smoke: A Woman's Journey of Healing, Wild Love, and Transformation in the Amazon
De Wys has written a refreshingly clear-headed description of her journey into the Amazon jungle with an indigenous shaman named Carlos. Restlessness with her middle class life as a college music professor and a diagnosis of breast cancer propel her on this quest. Cancer-free and wildly alive, she becomes an apprentice to Carlos. The very graphic descriptions of what it takes to experience shamanic healing demystify the process, facilitating the reader's suspension of disbelief toward some of the more out-there visions and challenges de Wys encounters. The author is also refreshingly candid about some of the contradictions she cannot fully reconcile herself with: the treatment of girls; the clash of cultures; and her erotic relationship with her mentor. The politics of such relationships is engaged in a subtle and honest way.
Toni Morrison: A Mercy
This highly concentrated short novel provides another riff on the pivotal theme in Beloved--an enslaved mother casting off her daughter to in order to save her. Morrison excels at viscerally evoking an even earlier era of American history. Her unique contribution is in bringing to life the subjectivities of "characters" who have been heretofore invisible and inaudible in history and literature, except as categories, such as "Native woman," "female slave," and even "Dutch trader." The latter is as ambivalent and complex a character as the women. The women--Florens, Lina, Sorrow, and Rebekkah--have complicated motives, relationships, desires, vulnerabilities and strengths. It is one of Morrison's unique contributions that the narrative pivots around the emotional relationships among two African slave women, a Native American woman, and a white woman whose only option in fleeing religious persecution is to marry a stranger and move across the ocean. Particularly provocative is Florens' erotic desire for a free black man, which ultimately destroys her. Despite its historical specificity, Morrison enables us to identify with this universal human drama of love.
Ishmael Beah: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
What does it mean for people sitting comfortably in their living rooms to read this book? No doubt it is very important, as Beah has written what may be the first memoir by a child soldier about a recent conflict. But Sierra Leone has in no way neatly resolved its recent past. The Special Court for Sierra Leone is operating; the recommendations of Sierra Leone's Truth Commission are just starting to be implemented. The "international community," a relatively small group of specialists, is at work on "fixing" small African countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia, but not far away, hundreds join the millions who have already died in the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What bothered me about Beah's book, and it is really no criticism of him, is that the average reader will come away with no greater understanding of the global and historical CAUSES of conflicts such as the one in Sierra Leone. That is not necessarily the responsibility of a memoir, but true understanding and action are the responsibility of every adult horrified by the idea of a child being forced to watch his or her family die; learning how to kill; being raped and forced into sexual slavery; and wandering their country as if removed out of time. Everyone should read this beautifully written memoir and then everyone should read the reports of the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.
John Nichols: On the Mesa
This book is as spare, eccentric, and alive as the mesa itself--Hondo Mesa, north of Taos, New Mexico. With acute observational skills, passion for the land, and a sharp tongue, Nichols captures in language and images a place that is still unique and volatile. The mesa is ever-changing, and yet conveys a profoundly serene sense of eternity.
Richard Price: Lush Life: A Novel
Diabolically good dialogue wraps together this multi-layered story of the Lower East Side. Price captures the very contemporary moment of gentrification and the entitled presence of aspiring, creative youth. Just as immigrant groups, impoverished minorities, and hipsters vie for space in the neighborhood, layers of history and multiple story lines compete for our attention. Price is brilliant at portraying the moments where one history is about to elide another. At the site of a newly-collapsed old synagogue, an orthodox man on a cellphone presides over the two African American boys he is paying to scavenge valuable objects. Under his condescending and watchful eye, the boys stuff candelabra into a bag for "preservation." The plot pivots around a crime in the neighborhood, which unravels some relationships and psyches, while repairing others.
Louise Erdrich: The Plague of Doves: A Novel
Certain sentences made me gasp with their beauty. As well as their power and wisdom. Louise Erdrich has taken history--personal and collective, Indian and white--and woven a complex story that is ultimately about a different kind of justice, one that twists and turns but resolves itself ultimately in balance. This balance may seem temporary, just as life is temporary, just as relationships can be temporary, but it carries within itself a sense of peace in the order of things. And that peace suggests that behind all the terrible destruction, betrayal, and bad behavior of humans toward each other, there remains a beautiful quality within the human spirit. I have said nothing about the many vibrant characters in this novel--the age-shifting grandfather Mooshum who has a naughty twinkle in his eye; the intelligent growing girl Evelina; her wild aunt Geraldine; the passionate judge Antone Bazil Coutts. They are all spectacularly rendered--but the real protagonists are history and time. I was fortunate to start this novel in New York, sink my teeth into its center in Taos, and complete it in Santa Fe, where I could lie down on a comfy bed quiet and exhausted with awe.
William Zinsser: Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
This is a somewhat homely anthology with a diverse set of contributors talking about the experience of writing a memoir. Tones range from the humble and humorous (Frank McCourt) to the arch (Annie Dillard). Skip Gates writes with surprising and delicate honesty about sexuality. Jill Ker Conway seeks to disseminate a practical feminism by telling her story. Russell Baker, who used to annoy me when I tried to read him in the Times, writes very touchingly about his mother. Mothers figure prominently, both in the narrative and hovering above it: everyone worries about her reading it. All of the memoirists have made a certain peace with themselves and have enough detachment to tell the story. Witnessing that self-acceptance is a gift to the reader of this odd little book.
Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
What stands out in neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's story of recovering from her own stroke is her humility.
Geraldine Brooks: March
Taking off from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," this engrossing novel follows the imagined story of their missing father, Mr. March, as he goes south to minister to Union soldiers during the Civil War. Geraldine Brooks based the character on Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's vegan father. I particularly liked the rich historical detail and the complex moral challenges the characters are driven to face by the narrative. What choices do high-minded people make when faced with war and suffering? How can two partners in a marriage interpret the same phenomena from diametrically opposed perspectives? What does reconciliation really mean on the individual and social level? How to proceed when there is no absolute "right?" These types of questions resonate with the current historical moment, which seems pregnant with both possibilities and disaster.
David Sedaris: When You Are Engulfed in Flames
He cannot possibly get funnier and then he does. It is fascinating that the sick and silly and acute observations of a neurotic 50-year old Greek-American gay man born in North Carolina and living in France capture the zeitgeist so well that his book shoots up to number one on the New York Times best seller list instantly, even though most of us have already read most of these pieces in the New Yorker. Nevertheless, for the title alone, and the essay "What I Learned" (at Princeton), I would have gladly spent my $25.99. I haunted the bookstore waiting for the book's release and gleefully snatched it up, reading in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep. Speaking of his undergraduate days at Princeton (his acceptance having redeemed his parents' entire existence), Sedaris recalls (self-consciously noting that he was dating himself) that at that time they followed a pass/fail system. "If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that's now the Transgender Studies building." That sentence does so many things with such economy. It's hysterically funny. It captures the angst of mid-life crisis, when the gulf between then and now feels so enormous as to encompass centuries. He captures changes in U.S. higher education, gay life, post-modernism, queer theory, and the trajectories of the thinking/writing classes. His near-pathological anti-pretentiousness is endearing, though when he crosses the line into juvenile grossness, it's hard to follow him willingly (but you do anyway). Sedaris uses language, character, and setting so effectively that he drags the reader just to the edge of the abyss and then pulls us back laughing and shaking our heads. And while we're shaking our heads, we begin to contemplate some pretty tough material. Yet the symmetry of his essays, in addition to their humor, makes looking at life bearable.
Valerie Steiker: Brooklyn Was Mine
I loved my borough long before it was the hippest place to be and I felt possessive when I picked up this anthology in an ultra-pretentious new artspace in DUMBO last weekend, slogging my way through Europeans gleefully exploiting the exchange rate. Yet the Brooklyn-love of strangers actually heightened my appreciation, seeing others revel in the small joys I have guarded jealously throughout my life. Darcy Steinke's ode to Prospect Park as a haven of meaning and survival after a difficult divorce is best captured in her lovely image of an "egret stepping expertly around a used condom." In the introduction, Philip Lopate warns us to brace ourselves for Jonathan Lethem, but I adored his crazy riff. This lovely little anthology reminds me to see my neighborhood more clearly, to embrace the yearning for community that pulses underneath the daggered wheels of the baby carriages lethally trolling Seventh Avenue. Today, we just stumbled upon the 5th Avenue street fair. A band of chunky, aging hipsters funked us a good version of "Like A Rolling Stone," sending out a happy birthday to that boy from Minnesota. A bald older man hung above the band, over his second floor windowsill, in a building that appeared to be abandoned with shuttered windows and doors on the ground floor. What stories lay hidden? What did he have to do to survive and to cling to this neighborhood through all the gentrification? Brooklyn is full of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories; ones that I want to hear.
Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book: A Novel
A gripping tale that hops across centuries and continents portraying diverse people who live and work intimately with books. Not for the fainthearted are scenes from the Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain, the Venice Ghetto, Sarajevo during and after the recent wars, and Yad Vashem after dark. Hidden Jews emerge from every corner. The main protagonist, Hanna, shares a noble profession with my friend Jan--she is a conservator. It's refreshing to see a woman portrayed with highly specific skills and equally refreshing to have an ending that redeems her knowledge after a period of betrayal and self-doubt. The physical descriptions of the extraordinary Sarajevo Haggadah glow off Brooks' pages; she weaves a multicultural tapestry that portrays the world as our hearts would like it to be.
Russell Banks: The Darling: A Novel
This is the life story of Hannah Musgrave, born into New England privilege, who first joins a distant offshoot of the Weather Underground and later follows a colleague to Africa. During Liberian President Samuel K. Doe's regime, she marries one of his Ministers; bears three sons; and befriends the soon to be infamous Charles Taylor. Banks goes to great lengths to show that the bisexual Hannah is an "unnatural" woman. She demonstrates more love in trying to save Liberian chimpanzees than she is able to show for her own sons. The novel starts in the present, where the aging Hannah is living on and running a farm in upstate New York with an intergenerational bunch of women, several of them lesbians. The story of her life as a radical and a wife and mother in Africa unfolds through flashbacks. Banks masterfully intertwines the narrative with historical events in the U.S. and Liberia. It is hard to decide which dimension Banks portrays more brutally--the actual bloody recent history of Liberia or the emotional realities of a post-idealistic, aging baby boomer. Banks conveys with devastating accuracy the unfolding of Hannah's recognition that she has spent her life operating in several realms of self-delusion. One can admire the narrative and descriptive skill Banks deployed in creating this joyless novel, but I'm not sure I should encourage any one to do what I did--reading it compulsively in the middle of the night even though I did not want to face its horror. Proceed with caution and admiration.
Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
My first time reading the popular Lamott and I find that we are kinswomen, which seems to be what everyone finds, hence her popularity. She is a disciplined essay writer with a funky sensibility, great descriptive abilities, and an excellent sense of humor. It's refreshing to have spirituality coupled with the inevitable sense of doom possessed by any sentient being living in this country for the past 7 years. I like her un-self-consciousness about both her radical politics and her radical spirituality. Mention of Jesus makes me a bit nervous, but his name functions to represent her inner struggle to transcend herself and that we can all appreciate. Lamott expresses the weariness of my tail end of the baby boom--just old enough to catch a whiff of the 60s but condemned to spend our adult lives in Ronald Reagan-land--and now, incredibly, in Bizarro World.

January 01, 2009

A Great Story About Helen Suzman, A Great Lady

Several years ago, I was sitting in my friend Rhoda's office in Cape Town talking about my quest for anti-racist Jews and how striking it was that so many white anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. She said, "You should talk to Helen Suzman." I said, "I'd love to but how could I possibly contact her?"

Rhoda, in her inimitable fashion, picked up her phone, dialed and said, "Helen, I'm sitting here with my friend Debra who would love to have lunch with you. When would that be possible?"

Once I got over the shock and awe, I hopped on a plane to Jo'burg and found my way to Helen Suzman's house. Rhoda insisted that she was a very accessible person and would enjoy talking to me. "Just be yourself," she commanded.

The taxi was buzzed in past a security gate, I got out and rang the bell. The front door opened and just as I was smiling down at a diminutive, beautifully-dressed gray-haired lady who was smiling charmingly at me, a small dog jumped three feet in the air to lick me and almost knocked me over.

"Benjamin, you naughty, naughty dog," Helen scolded, but you could see she got a huge kick out of it.

"I'm so sorry, do come into my study and let's talk."

"Thank you, I'm so happy to meet you--and Benjamin."

We walked into a book-filled study with photographs of Helen with Nelson Mandela and many other dignitaries.

"May I offer you a drink?"

"Oh, no thank you, I'm fine."

"You're sure you wouldn't like to join me?" as Helen poured herself about half a glass of Scotch (this was at noon).

We chatted amiably for awhile (actually, I mostly listened and asked excellent questions, as I am known to do).

Then Helen rang for her -- there is no other word for it--maid--and asked her to prepare the dining room for lunch.

We entered a lovely room, the table set elegantly with china.

As we sat down, I looked toward the back of the table. There, in a beautiful silver frame,
sat a picture of a Siamese cat.

The three of us dined together and we had an even more intimate conversation after that.

I'm very honored that Helen liked my book and provided a blurb for it.

As I woke up to the new year today, I was sad to learn that Helen died. I feel extremely lucky to have had this wonderful afternoon with a woman who was and always will be a world-class hero.

And from the way she knocked back that Scotch, I could tell that she had a damn good time living her life. And that's the way to do it.

Posted at 11:01 AM | Permalink

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DebThink

Reflections of a social change historian

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January 01, 2009

A Great Story About Helen Suzman, A Great Lady

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