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Mar. 28th, 2009 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
furyofvissarionBlack Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England & Africa - Ekow Eshun. Ekow Eshun was born in London; when he was a child his parents moved the family to their native Ghana for 3 years. As an adult, he feels out of place in the UK & so travels to Ghana to see if he feels more at home there. You probably know how this is going to end: he doesn't feel a complete sense of belonging there either, as he details in what I found to be a pretty painful read at times. Lots of musing on identity, belonging, & home, as well as on the development of survival tactics in the face of a deeply racist culture. Very worth reading.
The Last Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko. I kind of feel like Lukyanenko should've stopped while he was ahead; the first book in the Night Watch trilogy was amazing, & so was the second, mostly, but I think there were things that were wearing thin by the third. This, apparently, is not the fourth but the “sequel to the Night Watch trilogy,” or so said the cover. I know the whole thing about how there are no new stories, but still, to bring in freakin' Merlin to a setting that revolves around Russians in Moscow? And the ultimate reason behind why this book's baddies do what they do is one that I'm so tired of reading. Plus, when they go to Uzbekistan it's all about the exotic & mysterious East. Sigh.
Cereus Blooms at Night - Shani Mootoo. This is an intense & beautiful novel about people who fall through the cracks, those shunned because of abuse, or sexuality, or gender identity. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanacamara, Mootoo tells the story of Mala Ramchandin, who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Chandin, for years after her mother & her mother's female lover left the family when Mala was a child. Her neighbors all know what's going on, but mostly just cluck about how desperate & torn-up Chandin must be, to mistake his daughter for his wife. No one steps in to protect Mala or her younger sister Asha, who runs away as a teenager. Years later, Chandin has disappeared & Mala has gone mad.
The story begins as an elderly Mala is admitted to a rest home, having been put on trial, for a crime only later revealed to the reader, and deemed to be in need of supervision instead of incarceration. Long a pariah in the town, most of the nurses won't touch her, and so it is left to Tyler, a gay male nurse who is also shunned by the staff, to care for Mala. His sympathies for her stem from their shared outcast status; his awareness of how social networks operate at the expense of the weak or different is poignantly expressed (a theme also seen regarding Mala's mother's sexuality as well as with another character, a trans person).
The novel is framed as Tyler telling Mala's story, as he discovered it while caring for her, & I liked best the parts where Tyler's voice is clear; some of the third-person sections detailing Mala's past drag a little bit, especially in the observations of Mala's behavior as she loses her connection to reality.
Interwoven through the story is an awareness of colonialism and racism; Tyler, already an outcast, seems to get a little bit more resentment from his nursing colleagues because he's the only one to have gone & studied abroad, in the Shivering Northern Wetlands. Mala's father Chandin was adopted by a white missionary family, and one of Mala's childhood friends goes abroad to study, both acts which attempt to separate them from their home cultures & communities.
Mootoo's language is beautifully vivid, & as mentioned, she's good at writing the pain of the outcast:
(& interestingly enough, I think Mala may be a kind of stealth vegan character--mention is made of how Tyler tries to get her breakfast w/o the eggs & other animal stuff that the rest of the patients at the rest home get, & there were a couple of other moments where I wondered.)
Crossing the Border: Voices of Refugee and Exiled Women - Edited by Jennifer Langer. Though Langer does not appear to be a woman of color, I am counting this for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc because many of the contributors are. This anthology collects the stories of women from many different countries, including Algeria, Somalia, Bosnia, Kurdistan, the Congo, and Turkey. Langer mentions in her introduction the difficulties of acquiring contributions, either because of translation difficulties or because of women's lesser rates of literacy and access to writing circles in parts of the world. As you might expect, this book was a difficult read, which I had to absorb in bits & pieces because the stories told within are very painful. Appendices about the different countries' conflict histories, and the role women have played in literary traditions there, provide useful starting points for readers looking for more.
Tescopoly: How one shop came out on top and why it matters - Andrew Simms. More bad news about supermarkets, this one focusing specifically on Tesco, the gargantuan chain that is extremely powerful in the UK & also in other countries (some of which it has supermarkets in, some of which it sources products from).
Much of this stuff I already knew, but this book would be a good intro for folks who aren't aware of the true impact of supermarket chains: Simms explains how much more of each pound spent in a community-owned store stays in the community, versus money spent at a large chain supermarket, for example (for every pound at a supermarket, about 90p leaves the area!), and how big supermarkets actually create far fewer jobs than local food retailers. Simms also notes the climate change impact of the West's desire for out-of-season fruits & vegetables year-round. An interesting point to me was that, for all the venom against immigrants sometimes found in the UK, they do more to contribute to the local economy of the towns they live in, because their rates of entrepreneurship are much higher (specifically cited are immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, & Africa)--I knew this was true for many cities in the US as well.
A fair chunk of the book discusses the behavior of large supermarket chains when they open stores abroad—Tesco has been powering through eastern Europe, for example. Supermarkets haven't yet made inroads into China, partly because, as the USDA bemoaned, the supply lines are too irregular, based largely on small family-based farms with a variety of produce. The USDA recommended that this change (into the large monocrop suppliers that supermarkets prefer)--not for the good of the Chinese, but for the convenience of the supermarkets!
Something else shocking, but not surprising to me, was the foolishness of the UK exporting, say, 1.5 million kg of potatoes to Germany in 2004, only to import 1.5 million kg of potatoes from Germany that same year (the book provides several examples of this depressing nonsense).
The story from the book that most horrified me, however, had to do with suppliers—who I know by now are treated like absolute crap by supermarkets. Simms talks about a farm in Zimbabwe that grows snow peas (mange tout to the Brits) for Tesco. No expense is spared for growing the snow peas, yet the workers often live w/o running water in their homes & their children do not have access to school. The workers earn 1p for each pack of snow peas that sells for 99p in Tesco. Yet when Tesco buyers fly out, business class, every year, the farmers have to pay for it. And they are treated like royalty—Simms explains that some of the workers believed that Tesco was a country & its staff their ruling family. The impoverished community set up a feast for Tesco, dressed up its children & had them sing songs to Tesco (“Down the valley, up the mountain, Tesco is our dear friend”). Horrifying.
Anyway, Simms does include stories throughout the book of communities who resisted Tesco (some successfully, many not, especially due to the cost of fighting legal battles, which many local councils cannot afford) & provides resources in the back. Still, I wasn't left feeling like the tide was turning, just... kind of stunned & appalled.
I'd spent my adult life running from my childhood. I shunned intimacy. I lived by myself and worked alone. Yet suppose it didn't have to be that way? What if the past wasn't a singular burden? What if home wasn't a place at all, but a nexus of histories?
The Last Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko. I kind of feel like Lukyanenko should've stopped while he was ahead; the first book in the Night Watch trilogy was amazing, & so was the second, mostly, but I think there were things that were wearing thin by the third. This, apparently, is not the fourth but the “sequel to the Night Watch trilogy,” or so said the cover. I know the whole thing about how there are no new stories, but still, to bring in freakin' Merlin to a setting that revolves around Russians in Moscow? And the ultimate reason behind why this book's baddies do what they do is one that I'm so tired of reading. Plus, when they go to Uzbekistan it's all about the exotic & mysterious East. Sigh.
Cereus Blooms at Night - Shani Mootoo. This is an intense & beautiful novel about people who fall through the cracks, those shunned because of abuse, or sexuality, or gender identity. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanacamara, Mootoo tells the story of Mala Ramchandin, who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Chandin, for years after her mother & her mother's female lover left the family when Mala was a child. Her neighbors all know what's going on, but mostly just cluck about how desperate & torn-up Chandin must be, to mistake his daughter for his wife. No one steps in to protect Mala or her younger sister Asha, who runs away as a teenager. Years later, Chandin has disappeared & Mala has gone mad.
The story begins as an elderly Mala is admitted to a rest home, having been put on trial, for a crime only later revealed to the reader, and deemed to be in need of supervision instead of incarceration. Long a pariah in the town, most of the nurses won't touch her, and so it is left to Tyler, a gay male nurse who is also shunned by the staff, to care for Mala. His sympathies for her stem from their shared outcast status; his awareness of how social networks operate at the expense of the weak or different is poignantly expressed (a theme also seen regarding Mala's mother's sexuality as well as with another character, a trans person).
The novel is framed as Tyler telling Mala's story, as he discovered it while caring for her, & I liked best the parts where Tyler's voice is clear; some of the third-person sections detailing Mala's past drag a little bit, especially in the observations of Mala's behavior as she loses her connection to reality.
Interwoven through the story is an awareness of colonialism and racism; Tyler, already an outcast, seems to get a little bit more resentment from his nursing colleagues because he's the only one to have gone & studied abroad, in the Shivering Northern Wetlands. Mala's father Chandin was adopted by a white missionary family, and one of Mala's childhood friends goes abroad to study, both acts which attempt to separate them from their home cultures & communities.
Mootoo's language is beautifully vivid, & as mentioned, she's good at writing the pain of the outcast:
I wonder at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping, and we each must cope as best we can.
(& interestingly enough, I think Mala may be a kind of stealth vegan character--mention is made of how Tyler tries to get her breakfast w/o the eggs & other animal stuff that the rest of the patients at the rest home get, & there were a couple of other moments where I wondered.)
Crossing the Border: Voices of Refugee and Exiled Women - Edited by Jennifer Langer. Though Langer does not appear to be a woman of color, I am counting this for
50books_poc because many of the contributors are. This anthology collects the stories of women from many different countries, including Algeria, Somalia, Bosnia, Kurdistan, the Congo, and Turkey. Langer mentions in her introduction the difficulties of acquiring contributions, either because of translation difficulties or because of women's lesser rates of literacy and access to writing circles in parts of the world. As you might expect, this book was a difficult read, which I had to absorb in bits & pieces because the stories told within are very painful. Appendices about the different countries' conflict histories, and the role women have played in literary traditions there, provide useful starting points for readers looking for more.Tescopoly: How one shop came out on top and why it matters - Andrew Simms. More bad news about supermarkets, this one focusing specifically on Tesco, the gargantuan chain that is extremely powerful in the UK & also in other countries (some of which it has supermarkets in, some of which it sources products from).
Much of this stuff I already knew, but this book would be a good intro for folks who aren't aware of the true impact of supermarket chains: Simms explains how much more of each pound spent in a community-owned store stays in the community, versus money spent at a large chain supermarket, for example (for every pound at a supermarket, about 90p leaves the area!), and how big supermarkets actually create far fewer jobs than local food retailers. Simms also notes the climate change impact of the West's desire for out-of-season fruits & vegetables year-round. An interesting point to me was that, for all the venom against immigrants sometimes found in the UK, they do more to contribute to the local economy of the towns they live in, because their rates of entrepreneurship are much higher (specifically cited are immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, & Africa)--I knew this was true for many cities in the US as well.
A fair chunk of the book discusses the behavior of large supermarket chains when they open stores abroad—Tesco has been powering through eastern Europe, for example. Supermarkets haven't yet made inroads into China, partly because, as the USDA bemoaned, the supply lines are too irregular, based largely on small family-based farms with a variety of produce. The USDA recommended that this change (into the large monocrop suppliers that supermarkets prefer)--not for the good of the Chinese, but for the convenience of the supermarkets!
Something else shocking, but not surprising to me, was the foolishness of the UK exporting, say, 1.5 million kg of potatoes to Germany in 2004, only to import 1.5 million kg of potatoes from Germany that same year (the book provides several examples of this depressing nonsense).
The story from the book that most horrified me, however, had to do with suppliers—who I know by now are treated like absolute crap by supermarkets. Simms talks about a farm in Zimbabwe that grows snow peas (mange tout to the Brits) for Tesco. No expense is spared for growing the snow peas, yet the workers often live w/o running water in their homes & their children do not have access to school. The workers earn 1p for each pack of snow peas that sells for 99p in Tesco. Yet when Tesco buyers fly out, business class, every year, the farmers have to pay for it. And they are treated like royalty—Simms explains that some of the workers believed that Tesco was a country & its staff their ruling family. The impoverished community set up a feast for Tesco, dressed up its children & had them sing songs to Tesco (“Down the valley, up the mountain, Tesco is our dear friend”). Horrifying.
Anyway, Simms does include stories throughout the book of communities who resisted Tesco (some successfully, many not, especially due to the cost of fighting legal battles, which many local councils cannot afford) & provides resources in the back. Still, I wasn't left feeling like the tide was turning, just... kind of stunned & appalled.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 04:35 pm (UTC)Thanks (again) for talking about the books that you read. I don't always comment, but I do read them all.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 06:41 pm (UTC)Thank you for reading my book entries!!
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Date: 2009-03-28 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 06:44 pm (UTC)Mootoo is apparently Canadian--well, she was born in Dublin & grew up in Trinidad, & then moved to Canada when she was 19... I see online that she's mentioned as spending part of her time in NYC, which I guess could be why she got put in an Asian American syllabus (or they were taking the broader view of "America"!). ;)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 06:49 pm (UTC)Now to put some of these books on my "want" list at the library. I'm glad that they offer a service where I can mark down what I want to place a hold on later on--otherwise I just have too many books waiting to be picked up!
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 12:25 am (UTC)And yeah... supermarkets, BAH. (that doesn't stop me from buying things from them occasionally, sigh...)