OVERVIEW A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles Windmill Books 2016

        When we discover Count Rostov at his trial at the beginning of the book, with his titles, his “festooned” jacket, his nonchalance, we might think we are dealing with a reincarnated Oblomov. But differences become immediately apparent: contrary to the latter, Rostov has humor and he has a truly superior intelligence. To these qualities will be added many others as the story progresses: Rostov possesses a solid healthy physic, authentic cultural and philosophical depth and above all, real humanity. In no time at all, we become attached to him.
	Towles’ writing espouses the personality of his character. Elegant, supple, precise. A tale told by a narrator-bard who comments events directly in the text, sometimes with a certain irony, and even relates authentic historical elements in footnotes.
	At the beginning of the story, the reader understands the general historical context: we are in Moscow in the Metropol Hotel in 1922, when the revolution has practically ended and the Bolsheviks are fully in power. The hotel—a form of unity of place—is a microcosmic world,  isolated from the outside: ideal to permit the observation and evolution of Rostov’s personality through his interaction with a limited number of characters and events.
	Not isolated, in fact. The outside world comes into the hotel already in the first chapters in the form of a Railway Workers Union meeting in the hotel. As the story develops, we are more and more conscious of the things that are happening outside, via the introduction of certain characters and events inside the hotel and via remarks of the narrator.
	However, the day-to-day is always inside the hotel, and the story is centered entirely on Rostov. 
	While creating a memorable portrait of a person, Towles helps us understand the tragedy and contradictions of Russian society in the period from 1922 to 1954. And he catches the reader off guard: from a simple tale, the story evolves surreptitiously into a superb thriller.

After Reading >> Thoughts  A Gentleman in Moscow 

A Gentleman in Moscow THOUGHTS Amor Towles Windmill Books 2016

        If we think about it, over the time period of the story, 1922 to 1954, the hotel hasn’t changed that much: its basic activities are the same with its rooms and restaurants and bar and reception rooms and associated personnel. As for Rostov, no doubt the Rostov of 33 years old at the beginning is different from the Rostov of 65 years old at the end, and we even identify more with him as the story progresses; but in a sense his most endearing and noble personality traits have remained much the same throughout.
        I have the impression that the first third of the novel was written in one continuous trait. It flows along with leisurely elegance. The last part of the novel must have been conceived before the main body of the story. There may be some loss of inspiration in the middle part, but some readers might say the contrary.
	Towles never masks the fact that his story is fiction, as his storyteller remarks and historical commentaries show. Many sequences are treated as pure comedy. At the same time, the historical context, which we know to be real, adds verisimilitude to the situations and personages.
	Certain things in the mid-third of the novel seem quite artificial: the geese let loose in the hotel; Sophia’s fall in the staircase, her hospitalization, the immediate arrival of the surgeon through Osip; Sophia learning to play piano at age 17 to become a virtuoso and prize winner; perhaps even Osip’s “diplomatic” studies with Rostov. In the last part of the novel, pure fiction takes over through the suspense, and a semblance of realism—if it ever existed—is no longer important at all.
	Among the memorable scenes of pure comedy, we might mention the Railway Union debate on the word “facilitate”:..

...a proposal to amend the Union’s charter—or more precisely, the seventh sentence of the second paragraph, which the Secretary now read in full.
	Here, indeed was a formidable sentence—one that was on intimate terms with the comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard. For its apparent purpose was to catalog without fear or hesitation every single virtue of the Union including, but not limited to: its unwavering shoulders, its undaunted steps, the clanging of its hammers in summer, the shoveling of its coal in winter, and the hopeful sound of its whistles in the night. But in the concluding phrase of this impressive sentence, at the very culmination as it were, was the observation that through their tireless efforts, the Railway Workers of Russia “facilitate communication and trade across the provinces.”
	After all the buildup, it was a bit of an anticlimax, conceded the Count…
	...The resolution to replace facilitate with enable and ensure was adopted by a unanimous show of hands and universal stomping of feet. While in the balcony [where Nina and Rostov are looking on] a private acknowledgment was made that perhaps political discourse wasn’t always so dull, after all. (p68)

	Numerous scenes center on food, wine and refined cuisine, something introduced early in the novel. Particular mention: Rostov’s  detecting that the herb which Emile has tucked under the ham in the saltimbocca was nettle and Emile’s marching to the Count’s table and declaring “Bravo, monsieur,...Bravo!”  Also the secret midnight fest of the Triumvirate (Rostov, Emile and Andrey) savoring a bouillabaisse. Or the tasting of the honey with Abram on the roof:

...Dutifully, the Count put the spoon in his mouth. In an instant, there was the familiar sweetness of fresh honey—sunlit, golden, and gay.  Given the time of the year, the Count was expecting this first impression to be followed by a hint of lilacs from the Alexander Gardens or cherry blossoms from the Garden Ring. But as the elixir dissolved on his tongue, the Count became aware of something else entirely. Rather than the flowering trees of central Moscow, the honey had a hint of a grassy riverbank...a trace of summer breeze...a suggestion of a pergola….But most of all, there was the unmistakable essence of a thousand apple trees in bloom.
	Abram was nodding his head.
	“Nizhny Novgorod,” he said.
	And it was.
	Unmistakably so.
	“All these years, they must have been listening to us,”    Abram added in a whisper.
	The Count and the handyman both looked toward the roof’s edge where the bees, having traveled over a hundred miles and applied themselves in willing industry, now wheeled above their hives as pinpoints of blackness, like the inverse of stars. (p166)

	The Count’s estate was in  Nizhny Novgorod, to where he will return at the end of the novel and where there are forests of apple trees which marked Rostov’s youth.
	The characters around the Count are sketched with remarkable economy, acquiring depth and real humanity. This is true not only for those who are closest to Rostov, the chef de cuisine Emile and the maître d’ Andrey (with Rostov,  they are “the Triumvirate”), young Nina, Sophia, Anna, but also for the secondary characters, Abram, the handyman with his bee hives on the roof and Marina, the seamstress.
	Young Nina, by showing that the Count is no “fuddy-duddy,” as she says, brings us right from the early stages of the novel into the deeper traits of his personality. By her guidance in their “excursions” throughout the hotel, the reader also discovers all the lesser-known parts of the hotel:

Having lived at the Metropol for four years, the Count considered himself something of an expert on the hotel. He knew its staff by name, its services by experience and the decorative styles of its suites by heart. But once Nina had taken him in hand, he realized what a novice he had been. (p56)

When they fall upon a room stock full of a Sèvres service,

...the Count shook his head to express a sense of mystification.
       “Surely, the Bolsheviks have discovered this windfall. I wonder why it wasn’t carted off?”
Nina responded with the unclouded judgment of a child.
       “Perhaps they need it here.”
Yes, thought the Count. That’s it precisely. (p59)

	It’s Nina who drags the Count to the balcony to watch the Railway Union debate. Intimate knowledge of the hotel’s layout and Nina’s passkey will play an essential role in the last sequences of the novel.
	Important character who gets a real development: Anna. She confesses half-way through the story that she has invented her past. Contrary to the Rostov, she is from very modest origins. Yet she has gone to stardom and riches, only to lose her privileges. So she is something of a parallel to Rostov:

Like the Freemason, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those of the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile. (p196)

	The relationship of Anna and Rostov will become deeper throughout the novel, as they both have to adapt to their situations, and it is Anna whom Rostov joins at the end in the inn near his mansion in Nizhny Novgorod. On the subject of adaptation:

Some years later, the Count would come to understand that he had been looking at the matter upside down. The pace of evolution was not something to be frightened by. For while nature doesn’t have a stake in whether the wings of a peppered moth are black or white, it genuinely hopes that the peppered moth will persist. And that is why nature designed the forces of evolution to play out over generations rather than eons—to ensure that moths and men have a chance to adapt. (p336)

	Perhaps the moment we get a clear indication that Rostov has really changed (age 62) is at the two-thirds point of the novel—this clearly is one of the themes of the book—when he confesses to Anna:

“I’ll tell you what is convenient...To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered.”(p352)

	Other important personage: Mishka, Rostov’s best friend from university and before the Revolution. Mishka the revolutionary idealist who believes “...that we may witness the end of ignorance, the end of oppression, and the advent of the brotherhood of man.” He is the antithesis of Rostov and will become in the latter part of the novel the symbol of the catastrophe of Soviet communism. That his refusal to censor a small sentence of his book of collected letters of Anton Chekov would warrant the Goulag is both ironic and symbolic, of course. The passage concerned simply Chekov’s mention of the good taste of bread in Germany. When he comes back years later from the Goulag in beggar's clothes, it will be with

the smile of the sarcast. (p288)...[Michka: ]“...as a people we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.” (p290)... [And on parting he will conclude:] “Who would have imagined...when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.” (p292)

Ultimate irony: revealed near the end of the novel, the famous poem quoted as a preamble to the novel, Where Is It Now?, to which the Count owes not being executed and only condemned to house arrest in the hotel and which is attributed to him, was actually composed by Mishka.
	Only two apparatchiks appear in the novel, the Bishop and Osip Glebnikov.  Osip appears at the end of the first third of the novel, where he starts “diplomatic” lessons with the Count. Later, in the chapter Antics, Antitheses, an Accident, Osip reappears just after the final scene with Michka. As the chapter title indicates, Osip is the Count’s second antithesis. Having become a fan of American films, Osip sums up the official doctrine:

“By marrying American tempo with Soviet aims, we are on the verge of universal literacy (p297)...we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it. But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.” (p297-298) 

       Near the end of the novel, Rostov will notice how Osip, now fluent in English, is totally caught up in the film Casablanca, unaware that the film is practically a scenario for the double escape at the end of the novel.
       Casablanca is symbolic of the Hotel Metropol. In the last pages of the novel, Viktor Stepanovich, who helped Rostov in his escape, observes when he views the film:

	...here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of searchlights, was Rick’s Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music, to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count’s friend had observed, the saloon keeper’s calm response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some order in the world? (p458-459)

	In the last part of the novel, we are unprepared for the suspense that will capture us, because we have accepted Rostov as an almost voluntary prisoner in the hotel. We have accepted his view of the world:

...the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour—disdaining even to wear a watch—he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or a stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and catching trains), probably could have waited, while those deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention…
	...But ever since Sofia returned that night in late December with word of the Conservatory’s tour, the Count had had a very different perspective on the passage of time. One hundred and seventy-eight days, to be exact; or 365 chimings of the twice-tolling clock. And in that brief span, there was so much to be done…
	Given the Count’s membership as a younger man to the ranks of the purposefully unrushed, one might have expected the ticking of this clock to buzz around his ears like a mosquito in the night; or prompt him, like Oblomov, to turn on his side and face the wall in a state of malaise. But what occurred was the opposite. In the days that followed, it brightened his step, sharpened his senses, and quickened his wits. For like the rousing of Humphrey Bogart’s indignation, the clock’s ticking revealed the Count to be a Man of Intent. (p391-392)

WORD-PLAY

These are hypothetical interpretations: we must ask the author:

the count’s mansion: Idlehour in Nizhny Novgorod: idle hour or time of an
	idyll
(Anna) Urbanova: new city
Alexader Ilyich (Rostov)	Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov: Russian revolutionary, 	elder brother of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. 
	Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov:  character in Tolstoy's War and Peace
Nina Kulikova:	her father may be Viktor Kulikov (1921–2013), a Soviet
	military leader and Marshal of the Soviet Union
Osip (Glebnikov): Osip: first name of the revolutionary poet Mandelstam

etc. ...probably many more similar references...

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***

Arctic Dreams OVERVIEW Barry Lopez Vintage 2014 (1986)

OVERVIEW continued...

	During those summer days on Ilingnorak Ridge there was no dark night. Darkness never came. The birds were born. They flourished, and then flew south in the wake of the caribou. [xxvi]
...       Among the gravestones was one marking the burial place of Edward Israël, a shy young man who sailed north in 1881 with Lieutenant Adolphus Greely. Greely and his men established a base camp on Ellesmere Island, 450 miles from the North Pole, and explored the surrounding territory in the spring of 1882. A planned relief expedition failed to reach them that summer, and also failed again the next year. Desperate, Greely's party of twenty-five retreated south, hopeful of being met by a rescue party in 1884. They wintered at Cape Sabine, Ellesmere Island, where sixteen of them died of starvation and scurvy, another committed suicide, and one man was executed for stealing food. Israël, the expedition's astronomer, died on May 27, 1884, three weeks before the others were rescued. The survivors remembered him as the most congenial person among them.
	I remember…seeing Israel's grave in the falling light. What had this man hoped to find? What sort of place did he think lay out there before him on that bright June morning in 1881 when the Proteus slipped its moorings at Saint John's, Newfoundland?
	No one is able to say, of course. He was drawn on by the fixations of his own imagination, as were John Davis and William Baffin before him and as Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson would be after him. Perhaps he intended to make his mark as a scientist, to set his teeth in that high arctic landscape and come home like Darwin to a sedate and contemplative life, in the farmlands of southern Michigan. Perhaps he merely hungered after the unusual. We can only imagine that he desired something, the fulfillment of some personal and private dream, to which he pinned his life. [xxvii] ...
	...These two incidents came back to me often in the four or five years that I traveled in the Arctic. The one, timeless and full of light, reminded me of sublime innocence, of the innate beauty of undisturbed relationships. The other, a dream gone awry, reminded me of the long human struggle, mental and physical, to come to terms with the Far North. As I traveled, I came to believe that people's desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra. And, too, that the land itself existed quite apart from
these.
	The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make if it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable. The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces—the nod of a flower, the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal—trying to [xxviii] fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement.  [xxix]
...    Arctic climatic patterns are further characterized by unpredictable and violent weather.
	The communal alliances of far northern plants and animals we call ecosystems are distinguished from more southerly ecosystems by larger biomasses and lower overall productivity. Instead of many species, each with relatively few individuals in it, we find relatively few species, each with many individuals—large herds of caribou, for example, or vast swarms of mosquitoes. But, generally speaking, these large populations do not include enough surviving young each year to keep their populations stable. The size of the population often changes, dramatically, as a matter of course; the violent weather typical of early and late summer routinely wreaks havoc on some arctic populations, particularly those of warm-blooded animais. [32]
...	Biologists, for these mostly climatological reasons, characterize arctic ecosystems as "stressed" or "accident-prone," underscoring the difference between them and temperate and tropical ecosystems. With their milder climates and longer growing seasons the latter are more forgiving. In the South, the prolongation of spring permits birds to lay two or even three clutches of eggs if the first is destroyed by predation or adverse weather. An arctic nester, by comparison, has only a short period of solar energy available, which it must take swift and efficient advantage of for rearing its young, laying on reserves of fat for its southward journey, and accomplishing its [32] own molt, a fatiguing process that its southern relatives can spread out over several months. [33]
...	The verdant, fertile valley of the Thomson River is striking country in part because so much of the rest of the island is a desert of gravel, of bare soils and single, far-flung plants—a patch of yellow cinquefoil blooms, say, or a bright green cushion of moss [p42] campion. On the west bank of the Thomsen, where I am camped between Able and Baker creeks, the landscape is stark: gully erosion has cut deeply into a high-rising plateau to the west. But even here is a suggestion of the refugelike character of the Thomsen River Valley, for these desert-colored shores were never touched by Pleistocene glaciers. Like most of western and interior Alaska, much of Banks Island went unscathed during the glacial epoch. These, in fact, might have been the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean 20,000 years ago.
	I have come here to watch muskoxen. The muskox, along with the American bison, is one of the few large animals to have survived the ice ages in North America. Most all of its companions—the mammoth, the dire wolf, the North American camel, the short-faced bear—are extinct. The muskox abides, conspicuously alone and entirely at ease on the tundra, completely adapted to a polar existence.
	I am sitting at the edge of a precipitous bluff, several hundred feet above the Thomsen, with a pair of high-powered binoculars...
...    The broad valley in which the muskoxen graze has the color and line of a valley in Tibet. I raise my field glasses to draw it nearer. Beyond the resolution of the ground glass the animals look darker, the tans of the hills more deeply pigmented, and the sky at the end of the distant valley is a denser blue. The light shimmers on them. I recall the observation of a Canadian muskox biologist: "They are so crisp in the landscape. They stand out like no other [43] animal, against the whites of winter or the colors of the summer tundra."
	I put the glasses back in my lap. A timeless afternoon. Off to my left, in that vast bowl of stillness that contains the meandering river, tens of square miles of tundra browns and sedge meadow greens seem to snap before me, as immediate as the pages of my notebook, because of unscattered light in the dustless air. The land seems guileless. Creatures down there take a few steps, then pause and gaze about. Two sandhill cranes stand still by the river. Three Peary caribou, slightly built and the silver color of the moon, browse a cutbank in that restive way of deer. Tundra melt ponds, their bright dark blue waters oblique to the sun, stand out boldly in the plain. In the center of the large ponds, beneath the surface of the water, gleam cores of aquamarine ice, like the constricted heart of winter. [44]

	Precise scientific facts, figures, and hypotheses. Abundance of surprises concerning animal life and geology, even mirages. Eskimo knowledge and legends. History of explorations. And finally: magic language, prose poetry. I have rarely put inside a book so many little page markers to come back to for re-reading, if only for the pleasure of the prose.

…    The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce. It is not that the land is simply beautiful but that it is powerful. Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life. Its power flows from the realization of how darkness and light [392] are bound together within it, and the feeling that this is the floor of creation. [393]

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Circe OVERVIEW Madeline Miller Bloomsbury Publishing 2018

There are books that change the way you see things, that transform the feelings and concepts you espoused up till the moment you read them. Such is the case with Madeline Miller’s Circe.
       Greek mythology has always been a source of interest and pleasure for me. Outside of the inevitable Iliad and Odyssey, I have enjoyed the mythological evocations in Greek drama−Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes−and in Latin poetry−Ovid, Virgil−and in the French theatre of Racine and Anouilh.
       Since I knew Odysseus’ adventures, I expected Circe to be a genre of fantasy literature and therefore a simple amusement. Madeline’s Miller’s book proved otherwise. It is not only beautifully written, with poetic language and imagery, but it is profoundly philosophical. The drama, the magic, even the spectacular are all there, for sure; but they are a sort of background to the real story, with the nobler and deeper emotions and thoughts that constitute the essence of the book. The original myth is transcended, enlarged, and put into a new perspective.

Circe THOUGHTS Madeline Miller Bloomsbury Publishing 2018

       The story follows Circe from childhood to maturity. It is beautifully developed throughout, with the first and last quarters of the book being the most original and emotionally stimulating.

       When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. [p1]

       Right from the start Circe considers herself apart. When she is telling us her story, she implies that she has really become a being different from her origins.

       They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. The word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language it means not just goddess, but bride. [1]

       When she is small, Circe knows she is considered ugly compared to Helios’ other off-spring and she receives the nickname ‘hawk.’ She concludes:

       Such were my years then. I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I’m afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days. [9]

       What puts her apart is her immense curiosity. Still a child, not yet knowing what mortals are like, she questions her father Helios, who replies: 

       You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale. [3]

She dares ask chained Prometheus what a mortal is like:

	It was a child’s question, but he nodded gravely. ‘There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?’
	‘I know it,’ I said. ‘But I do not understand.’
	‘No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.’
	A chill shivered across my skin. ‘How do they bear it?’
	‘As best they can.’
       The torches were fading and the shadows lapped at us like dark water. 
       ‘Is it true that you refused to beg for pardon? And that you were not caught, but confessed to Zeus freely what you did?’
	‘It is.’
	‘Why?’
His eyes were steady on mine. ‘Perhaps you will tell me why. Why would a god do such a thing?’
       I had no answer. It seemed to me madness to invite divine punishment, but I could not say that to him, not when I stood in his blood.
       ‘Not every god need be the same,’ he said. [17-18]
       The torches were fading and the shadows lapped at us like dark water.
‘Is it true that you refused to beg for pardon? And that you were not caught, but confessed to Zeus freely what you did?’
	‘It is.’
	‘Why?’
       His eyes were steady on mine. ‘Perhaps you will tell me why. Why would a god do such a thing?’
       I had no answer. It seemed to me madness to invite divine punishment, but I could not say that to him, not when I stood in his blood.
	‘Not every god need be the same,’ he said. [17-18]

She concludes that

all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water.  I was a creature within it. [19]

Her insatiable curiosity grows through her close relationship with her younger brother Aeëtes who

was strange already, different from any other god I knew. Even as a child, he seemed to understand what others did not. He could name the monsters who lived in the sea’s darkest trenches. He knew that the herbs Zeus had poured down Kronos’ throat were called pharmaka. They could work wonders upon the world, and many grew from the fallen blood of gods. [23]

When she goes to Olympus for the marriage of her sister Pasiphaë, she remarks

       It was like a great chain of fear, I thought. Zeus at the top, and my father just behind. Then Zeus’ siblings and children, then my uncles, and on down through all the ranks of river-gods and brine-lords and Furies and Winds and Graces, until it came to the bottom where we sat, nymphs and mortals both, each eyeing the other. [27]

      Circes will suffer separation from her brother Aeëtes who goes off to a kingdom his father has offered him. And then she will discover her first mortal up close.
       These are the beginnings. In the rest of the novel, through multiple adventures, her character evolves up to the poetic and thought-provoking finale.
       Madeline Miller never idealizes her characters. Her portrait of Odysseus in the last part of the novel is even devastating. If we reflect, we can see that it's all in the Odyssey, yet we usually see Odysseus as a sort of Hollywood hero. When you finish the novel, you will never be able to see him like that again. In like manner, Circe is usually seen as a dangerous witch. Miller portrays Circe as a being of considerable complexity.
       The novel sings praises to certain qualities: curiosity, patience, observation, experimentation, love of nature, admiration for the creation of beauty, modesty, honesty. Particularly, strong will. Finally, respect for simple humanity. But all of these, through the intricacies of the poetic imagination.
NOTE: Always useful and fascinating: Robert Graves The Greek Myths.

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Days Without End OVERVIEW Sebastian Barry-1 Faber & Faber 2016

       Never would I have thought to read a novel that is a Western. Sebastien Barry's Days Without End has it all: a real Western with cowboys, Indians, troopers in the Far West, shoot-outs, skirmishes, the normal stuff. Admittedly, in films, I tolerate these ingredients only in the greatest of the genre, essentially films with anti-heroes, those which attain a dimension of reall tragedy or, why not, real comedy, those which go outside the stereotype. Thank goodness, this is the case in Sebastian Barry's novel.
       But still: how incredible to read a Western?! Clearly, it's something more: among so many other things, for example, an expression of profound humanity devoid of sentimentalism. Or also, a spontaneous embrace of the bewitching beauties of the landscape. These observations of nature--practically prose poems--are perfectly integrated into the hero-narrator's personality, without ever giving us a feeling of incongruity. A tour de force. This is writing of the highest caliber.
       Narrator, Thomas McNulty, looks back at his experiences in and out of—mostly in—the US Army mid 19th century out West. He has a unique Irish twang, which catches us right from the start, along with a colorful, rather philosophical, view of things.

       The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake. Like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather than death. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp-oil into a state never seen when they were alive. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmer sure didn’t like no whiskers showing. No one that knew him could have recognised Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Anyway Death likes to make a stranger of your face. True enough their boxes weren’t but cheap wood but that was not the point. You lift one of those boxes and the body makes a big sag in it. Wood cut so thin at the mill it was more a wafer than a plank. But dead boys don’t mind things like that. The point was, we were glad to see them so well turned out, considering. [1]

	Thomas flashes back to his fortuitous encounter with John Cole before they went into the army.

	John Cole and me we came to the volunteering point together of course. We was offering ourselves in a joint sale I guess and the same look of the arse out of his trousers that I had he had too. Like twins. Well when we finished up at the saloon [where, adolescent boys, they had worked as dancers dressed in women’s clothes to amuse miners] we didn’t leave in no dresses. We must have looked like beggar boys. He was born in New England where the strength died out of his father’s earth. John Cole was only twelve when he lit out a-wandering. First moment I saw him I thought there’s a pal. That’s what it was. Thought he was a dandy-looking sort of boy. Pinched though he was in the face by hunger. ...

After reading >>Days Without End THOUGHTS

Days Without End THOUGHTS Sebastian Barry-1 Faber & Faber 2016

[...fortuitous encounter with John Cole...]
...Met him under a hedge in goddamn Missouri. We was only under the hedge as a consequence the heavens were open in a downpour. Way out on those mudflats beyond old St Louis. Expect to see a sheltering duck sooner than a human. Heavens open. I scarper for cover and suddenly he’s there. Might have never seen him otherwise. Friend for a whole life. Strange and fateful encounter you could say. Lucky. But first thing he draws a little sharp knife he carried made of broken spike. He was intending to stick it in me if I looked to go vicious against him. He was a very-kept-back-looking thirteen years old I reckon. Anyhows under the hedge aforementioned when we got to talking he said his great-grandpa was a Indian whose people were run out of the east long since. Over in Indian country now. He had never met them. Don’t know why he told me that so soon only I was very friendly and maybe he thought he would lose that blast of friendship if I didn’t know the bad things quickly. Well, I told him how best to look at that. Me, the child of poor Sligonians blighted likewise. No, us McNultys didn’t got much to crow about. [3]

	So that's how Thomas spins his yarn, a tone of sincerity and simple reflections that gives authenticity to all he will describe: the life at the fort, the weeks and weeks of treks on horseback across endless land sometimes in the most extreme conditions, preparations for combat against the Indians and against the Confederates, long waits, explosions, charging with bayoneted muskets and swords, massacre, starvation, captivity. Always Thomas observes, listens, reflects in his captivating poetic language.

	The breath of three hundred horses makes a curling twisting mist in the cold November air. Their warm bodies were steaming from their exertions. We were obliged to try and keep formation but the ancient redwoods didn’t care about that. They were parting us and cutting us as if they were moving themselves. You could have tethered fifty horses to the girth of some of them. The curious birds of America were calling among the trees and from the far heights dropped the myriad speckles of frost. Now and then something cracked in the forest like musket fire. There wasn’t any sense the trees needed us there. They were about there own business certainly. We made a racket of harness, spurs, equipment, things knocking and shrugging from movement, and hooves skittering and clacking on the earth, but the troopers barely spoke a word and for the most part we rode in silence as if by prior agreement. But it was the trees that pressed the silence on us. (p.35)
...	Just four or five hours later we begin to see a country whose beauty penetrates our bones. I say beauty and I mean beauty. Oftentimes in America you could go stark mad from the ugliness of things. Grass that goes for a thousand miles and never a hill to break it. I ain’t saying there ain’t beauty on the plains, well there is. But you ain’t long traveling on the plains when you begin to feel clear loco. You can rise up out of your saddle and sort of look down on yourself riding, it’s as if the stern and relentless monotony makes you die, come back to life, and die again. Your brain is molten in its bowl of bones and you just seeing atrocious wonders everywhere. The mosquitoes have your hide for supper and you are one hallucinating lunatic then. But now in the far distance we see land begin to be suggested as if maybe a man was out there painting it with a huge brush. He is choosing a blue as bright as falling water for the hills and there is a green for his forests so green you think it might be used to make ten million gems. Rivers burn through it with enameled blue. The huge fiery sun is working at burning off all this splendid colour and for ten thousand acres of sky it is mighty successful. A stagger of black cliffs just nearby rise sheer and strange from the molten greens. Then a wide band of red striked across the sky and the red is the red of the trousers Zouave soldiers wear. Then the colossal band of the blue of bird eggs. God’s work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colours so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun. (p.93)

	Thomas is a simple soldier. He describes combat from within. He fires his musket when his officers order him to, he charges when ordered to, then in the mayhem kills to survive. Surprise attacks on Indian camps, non-respect of treaties or of negotiations, taking prisoners or simply eliminating them. Killing your fellow countrymen in a civil war. Famine when taken prisoner. It’s all there. Thomas doesn’t judge outright. But we, who know from his thoughts and actions his profound humanity, his steadfast love for his partner and for their daughter, we can easily read between the lines. Even when you are no longer in the army and want a normal life, violence is always nearby.
	Stories that denounce violence and racism against the American Indian and the absurdity of war in general are legend. But few have a narrator with the disarming sincerity of Thomas McNulty. Fewer still illustrate to this degree simple love and humanity. Even fewer still have such poetic prose. And again much fewer still are in the form of a Western.

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***

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine OVERVIEW Gail Honeyman Harper Collins 2017

       Normally, stories with “too-nice” characters bore me. I have to admit that Gail Honeyman’s book is an exception. The characters are “idealized” perhaps, but they’re also “right-on.” Humanity without vulgarity or over-simplification.
       Eleanor's voice—unique, magnificently developed by Honeyman—catches us right from the start and we never tire of it till the end. Refined vocabulary, superior intellect, acute sense of observation. As Honeyman explains in an interview at the end of the book: ”Once I could ‘hear’ Eleanor’s voice, the characterisation developed from that starting point. I enjoyed the challenge of creating the character, working her out and trying to balance humour with the darker aspects of the narrative. I also tried to ensure that Eleanor was never self-pitying, so that there was space for the reader to draw their own conclusions and, hopefully, empathise with her...I feel that I know my characters intimately—how they smell, the state of their teeth, what they’re scared of…”
       Early on in the book, Honeyman has given us enough hints so we know...or think we know...what Eleanor’s story is. We have to hold out to the end to be sure, and there is a twist...
       Nothing spectacular: just “fine.” Nevertheless and above all, a story you don’t forget.

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Alias Grace OVERVIEW Margaret Atwood-1 1996 Bloomsbury Publishing Virago Press 2009

At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career.
			Susana MOODIE,
			Life in the Clearings, 1853

	So begins Alias Grace. This is a real historical document. Then, a ditty, a rimed ballad, tells the whole story of the murder, the trial, and the imprisonment of Grace Marks. A young doctor wants to understand Grace. Is she a murderess? Is she insane? Is she a dissembler? Who is she?
	The story alternates between Grace unraveling her thoughts in the first person and third person narrative or epistolary exchanges between the doctor and different persons.
	Each chapter is illustrated by a quilt piece: metaphorically we will try to assemble a patchwork.
	For some 530 odd pages, three quarters of which we are in Grace’s mind, Atwood never let’s us go. Characters speak and write in the style of the epoch. Grace’s inner dialogues are without quotation marks. Her observation of details, her analyzing how others think, her reasoning on what to say blur the lines between objectivity and subjectivity and make us share in her thought processes. Her voice is unique: its tone and rhythm become ours and haunt us long after we have finished reading.

... 	He smiles, and then he does a strange thing. He puts his left hand into his pocket and pulls out an apple. He walks over to me slowly, holding the apple out in front of him like someone holding out a bone to a dangerous dog, in order to win him over.
	This is for you, he says.
	I am so thirsty the apple looks to me like a big drop of water, cool and red. I could drink it down in one gulp. I hesitate; but then I think, There’s nothing bad in an apple, and so I take it. I haven’t had an apple of my own for a long time. This apple must be from last autumn, kept in a barrel in the cellar, but it seems fresh enough.
	I am not a dog, I say to him.
	Most people would ask me what I mean by saying that, but he laughs. His laugh is just one breath, Hah, as if he’s found a thing he has lost; and he says, No, Grace, I can see you are not a dog.
	What is he thinking? I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.
	Aren’t you going to eat it, he says.
	No, not yet, I say.
	Why not, he says.
	Because then it would be gone, I say.
	The truth is I don’t want him watching me while I eat. I don’t want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.
	He gives his one laugh. Can you tell me what it is, he says.
	I look at him, then look away. An apple, I say. He must think I am simple; or else it’s a trick of some sort; or else he is mad and that is why they locked the door—they’ve locked me into this room with a madman. But men who are dressed in clothes like his cannot be mad, especially the gold watch-chain—his relatives or else his keeper would have it off him in a trice if so.
	He smiles, his lopsided smile. What does Apple make you think of? he says.
	I beg your pardon, Sir, I say. I do not understand you.
	It must be a riddle. I think of Mary Whitney, and the apple peelings we threw over our shoulders that night, to see who we would marry. But I will not tell him that.
	I think you understand well enough, he says.
	My sampler, I say.
	Now it his turn to know nothing. Your what? he says.
	My sampler that I stitched as a child, I say. A is for Apple, B is for Bee. ..[43-45]

After Reading >Alias Grace THOUGHTS 

Alias Grace THOUGHTS Margaret Atwood-1 1996 Bloomsbury Publishing Virago Press 2009

	I wonder why so many readers are uncertain, at the novel’s end, of Grace’s culpability. In her Afterword to the novel, Atwood writes:

       Whether she was indeed the co-murderer of Nancy Montgomery and the lover of James McDermott is far from clear; nor whether she was ever genuinely ‘insane,’ or only acting that way—as many did—to secure better conditions for herself.  The true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma. (p539)

	Atwood is talking about the historical Grace Marks, not the fictional one she has created. Atwood knows that a great number readers will finish the novel with doubts, and many others will even consider Grace innocent, in particular those who will easily swallow the idea of double personality. However, too many elements put in the fictional story by Atwood indicate that Grace was really guilty of murder, perhaps not by her hand directly, but certainly via her prodding of McDermott to perform the crime.

	As shown in the extract above when Dr. Jordan meets Grace for the first time, Grace is presented as superiorly intelligent, analytical of personalities, observant of details in her surroundings, calculating in her actions, calm, and, we might say, lucid.  In that scene:

	Perhaps I will tell you lies, I say.
	He doesn’t say, Grace what a wicked suggestion, you have a sinful imagination. He says, Perhaps you will. Perhaps you will tell lies without meaning to, and perhaps you will also tell them deliberately. Perhaps you are a liar.
	I look at him. There are those who have said I am one, I say.
	We will just have to take that chance, he says. [46]

	Later, Dr. Jordan asks MacKenzie, the lawyer who defended Grace and helped her avoid the gallows: 

	‘But in your opinion, she was innocent,’ says Simon.
	‘On the contrary,’ says MacKenzie. He sips at his sherry, wipes his lips daintily, smiles a smile of gentle reminiscence. ‘No. In my opinion, she was guilty as sin.’ [440]

	The whole scene of hypnotism, every detail, is shown to be a sham. It takes place in Mrs. Quennell’s library, known for seances of spiritism. Dr. Dupont (Jeremiah) must have been alone with Grace just before—permitting them to put their act together—, because

...he comes in, leading Grace by the hand. [460]

Dr. Jordan is lucid at one point:

…	it’s too theatrical, too tawdry, thinks Simon; it reeks of the small-town lecture halls of fifteen years ago, with their audiences of credulous store clerks and laconic farmers, and their drab wives, and the smooth-talking charlatans who used to dole out transcendental nonsense and quack medical advice to them as an excuse for picking their pockets… [462]

The fake Dr. DuPont (Jeremiah) has to insist:

… ‘It is no spirit. What we are witnessing here must be a natural phenomenon.’ He’s sounding a little desperate. [466]

 Grace, pretending to be Mary, makes a clear avowal and then very directly makes herself innocent:

       ‘She had to die. The wages of sin is death...I am not lying...I no longer need to lie!’… ‘But Grace doesn’t know, she’s never known!’ [468]

At one point Grace is afraid the game is up:

	‘Grace,’ says Simon. ‘Stop playing tricks!’
	‘I am not Grace,’ says the voice, more tentatively. [468]

In the end, Mrs. Quennell—who no doubt is part of the dupery, because it is she who solicited Dr. Dupont (Jeremiah) for the experiment— 

and seems almost happy. [468]

Again it is the false Dr. Dupont (Jeremiah) who suggests, after the seance, the idea of double conscience.

       ‘Nature sometimes produces two heads on one body,’ says Dupont ‘Then why not two persons, as it were, in one brain?’ [471]

	Later, Dr. Jordan’s brain injury and memory loss is useful to Atwood to eliminate the only person whose opinion the reader might trust, were he on the side of Grace’s guilt or not.

	The most condemning evidence is Grace’s “letter” to Dr. Jordan at the end. It is only in her head, which makes it all the more credible:

...    I’ve written many letters to you in my head and when I’ve arrived at the right way of saying things I will set pen to paper… [511]

She reports that she has seen Jeremiah accidentally in the street (now he has a new identity):

…    one of the celebrated mediums...his name is Mr. Gerald Bridges now. He was doing a very good imitation of a man who is distinguished and at home in the world, but with his mind on the higher truth; and he saw me too, and recognized me, and gave a respectful tip of the hat, but very slight, so it wouldn’t be remarked; and also a wink; and I waved my hand at him, just a little...I would not wish any here to learn my true name; but I know my secrets are safe with Jeremiah, as his are safe with me…[529-530]

She admits to playing comedy with her husband, whom she insists on calling ‘Mr. Walsh’ (Jamie):

…     ‘The more watery I make the soup and the more rancid the cheese, and the worse I make the coarse talk and proddings of the keepers, the better he likes it. He listens to all of that like a child listening to a fairy tale.[530]

She admits having done the same with Dr. Jordan:

       ...Now that I come to think of it, you were as eager as Mr. Walsh is to hear about my sufferings and my hardships in life; and not only that, but you would write them down as well. I could tell when your interest was slacking, as your gaze would wander; but it gave me joy every time I managed to come up with something that would interest you.[531]

Jamie has never ceased to express guilt for not having defended her, and Grace now expresses ‘the truth’ and ‘the full weight of it:’

	At first this annoyed me very much, although I did not say so. The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared.
	I had a rage in my heart for many years, against Mary Whitney, and especially against Nancy Montgomery; against the two of them both, for letting themselves be done to death in the way that they did, and for leaving me behind with the full weight of it. For a long time I could not find it in me to pardon them. It would be much better if Mr. Walsh would forgive me, rather than being so stubborn about it and wanting to have it the wrong way around; but perhaps in time he will come to see things in a truer light….
	...But I don’t feel quite right about it, forgiving him like that, because I am aware that in doing so I am telling a lie. Though I suppose it isn’t the first lie I’ve told; but as Mary Whitney used to say, a little white lie such as the angels tell is a small price to pay for peace and quiet. [532]

She is making a quilt, and here is her ultimate confession, with ‘the main story’ and the border in ‘red’:

...    Although I’ve made many quilts in my day, this is the first one I’ve ever done for myself. It is a Tree of Paradise; but I’m changing the pattern a little to suit my own ideas.
	I’ve thought a good deal about you and your apple, Sir, and the riddle you once made, the very first time we met. I didn’t understand you then, but it must have been that you were trying to teach me something, and perhaps by now I have guessed it. The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong….
	...the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same... 
	...without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing…
	...the three triangles of my Tree will be different. One will be white, from the petticoat I still have that was Mary Whitney’s; one will be faded yellowish, from the prison nightdress I begged as a keepsake when I left there. And the third will be a pale cotton, a pink and white floral, cut from the dress of Nancy’s that she had on the first day I was at Mr. Kinnear’s and that I wore on the ferry to Lewiston, when I was running away.
	I will embroider around each one of them with red feather-stitching, to blend them in as a part of the pattern.
	And so we will be all together. [533-534]

	Grace is extraordinarily intelligent and crafty and perfectly capable of conceiving the plot with McDermott to kill and escape to the United States. Why then might we not want to admit her culpability, despite all the evidence that Atwood gives us to prove it? Because she is so calm and reasonable, perhaps. But more, because we have become attached to her from the moment she told the story of her trip to America: leaving Ireland with her derelict father, the death of her mother on the boat, and her first employment and friendship with Mary.

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Americanah OVERVIEW Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [1] 4th Estate 2013

       It’s hard for me to understand why this book is so successful. Is it more so in the US? Is it because its heroine postulates that the color of her skin does not have social significance and is not central to her existence...in Africa and...outside of the United States? Is the book perceived differently in the US, in Europe, in Africa?
       One thing is certain: the writing is elegant, flowing, direct, uncomplicated, and the story intermingles seamlessly present and past. The novel is, however, tainted by demagoguery and discursiveness. Also, the heroine’s life, is very feminine-centered, with multiple preoccupations around feminine physical beauty, hair-styling, etc. which aren’t particularly my thing−although I suppose I’ve opened up more to this world through the book.
       Below is a long passage illustrating the excellent writing:

       ...she finished eating her eggs and resolved to stop faking the American accent. She first spoke without the American accent that afternoon at Thirtieth Street Station, leaning towards the woman behind the Amtrak counter.
       Could I have a round trip to Haverhill, please? Returning Sunday afternoon. I have a Student Advantage card, she said, and felt a rush of pleasure from giving the t its full due in “advantage”, from not rolling her r in “Haverhill”. This was truly her, this was the voice with which she would speak if she were woken up from deep sleep during an earthquake. Still, she resolved that if the Amtrak woman responded to her accent by speaking too slowly as though to an idiot, then she would put on her Mr Agbo Voice, the mannered, overcareful pronunciations she had learned during debate meetings in secondary school, when the bearded Mr Agbo, tugging at his frayed tie, played BBC recordings on his cassette player and then made all the students pronounce words over and over until he beamed and cried “Correct!” She would also affect, with the Mr Agbo Voice, a slight raising of her eyebrows in what she imagined was a haughty foreigner pose. But there was no need to do any of these because the Amtrak woman spoke normally. “Can I see an ID, miss?”
       And so she did not use her Mr Agbo Voice until she met Blaine.
       The train was crowded. The seat next to Blaine was the only empty one in that car, as far as she could see, and the newspaper and bottle of juice placed on it seemed to be his. She stopped, gesturing towards the seat, but he kept his gaze levelly ahead. Behind her, a woman was pulling along a heavy suitcase and the conductor was announcing that all her personal belongings had to be moved from free seats and Blaine saw her standing there−how could he possibly not see her?−and still he did nothing. So her Mr Agbo Voice emerged. “Excuse me. Are these yours? Could you possibly move them?”
	She placed her bag on the overhead rack and settled onto the seat, stiffly, holding her magazine, her body aligned towards the aisle and away from him. The train had begun to move when he said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t see you standing there.”

After Reading  >>Americanah THOUGHTS 

Americanah THOUGHTS Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-1 4th Estate 2013

[passage illustrating the excellent writing]

	His apologizing surprised her, his expression so earnest and sincere that it seemed as though he had done something more offensive. “It’s okay,” she said, and smiled.
	“How are you?” he asked.
	She had learned to say”Good-how-are-you?” in that sing-song American way, but now she said, “I’m well, thank you.”
	“My name’s Blaine,” he said, and extended his hand.
	He looked tall. A man with skin the colour of gingerbread and the kind of lean, proportioned body that was perfect for a uniform, any uniform. She knew right away that he was African American, not Caribbean, not African, not a child of immigrants from either place. She had not always been able to tell. Once she had asked a taxi driver, “So where are you from?” in a knowing familiar tone, certain that he was from Ghana, and he said “Detroit” with a shrug. But the longer she spent in America, the better she had become at distinguishing, sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanour, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people. She felt confident about Blaine: he was a descendant of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years.
	“I’m Ifemelu, it’s nice to meet you,” she said.
	“Are you Nigerian?”
	“I am, yes.”
	“Bourgie Nigerian,” he said and smiled. There was a surprising and immediate intimacy to his teasing her, calling her privileged.
	“Just as bourgie as you,”  she said. They were on firm flirting territory now. She looked him over quietly, his light-coloured khakis and navy shirt, the kind of outfit that was selected with the right amount of thought; a man who looked at himself in the mirror but did not look for too long. He knew about Nigerians, he told her, he was an assistant professor at Yale, and although his interest was mostly in southern Africa, how could he not know about Nigerians when they were everywhere?
	“What is it, one in every five Africans is Nigerian?” he asked, still smiling. There was something ironic and gentle about him. It was as if he believed that they shared a series of intrinsic jokes that did not need to be verbalized.
	“Yes, we Nigerians get around. We have to. There are too many of us and not enough space,” she said, and it struck her how close to each other they were, separated only by the single armrest. He spoke the kind of American English that she had just given up, the kind that made race pollsters on the telephone assume assume that you were white and educated.
	“So is southern Africa your discipline?” she asked.
	“No. Comparative politics. You can’t do just Africa in political science graduate programmes in this country. You compare Africa to Poland or Israel, but focusing on Africa itself? They don’t let you do that.”
	His use of “they” suggested an “us”,  which would be the both of them. His nails were clean. He was not wearing a wedding band. She began to image a relationship, both of them waking up in the winter, cuddling in the stark whiteness of the morning light, drinking English Breakfast tea; she hoped he was one of those Americans who liked tea. His juice, the bottle stuffed in the pouch in front of him, was organic pomegranate. A plain brown bottle with a plain brown label, both stylish and salutary. No chemical in the juice and no ink wasted on decorative labels. Where had he bought it? It was not the sort of thing that was sold at the train station. Perhaps he was vegan and distrusted large corporations and shopped only at farmer’s markets and brought his own organic juice from home. She had little patience for Ginika’s friends, most of whom were like that, their righteousness made her feel both irritated and lacking, but she was prepared to forgive Blaine’s pieties. He was holding a hardcover library book whose title she could not see and had stuffed his New York Times next to the juice bottle. When he glanced at her magazine, she wished she had brought out the Esiaba Irobi book of poems that she planned to read on the train back. He would think that she read only shallow fashion magazines. She felt the sudden unreasonable urge to tell him how much she loved the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, to redeem herself. First, she shielded, with her palm, the bright red lipstick on the cover model’s face. Then, she reached forward and pushed the magazine into the pouch in front of her and said, with a slight sniff, that it was absurd how women’s magazines forced images of small-boned, small-breasted white women on the rest of the multi-boned, multi-ethnic  world of women to emulate.
	“But I keep reading them, she said. “It’s like smoking, it’s bad for you but you do it anyway.”
	“Multi-boned and multi-ethnic,” he said amused, his eyes warm with unabashed interest; it charmed her that he was not the kind of man who, when he was interested in a woman, cultivated a certain cool, pretended indifference. (pp175-178)

       The passage above illustrates the quality of the prose. It also reveals how Adichie integrates a writer’s sense of observation into her heroine’s character. Could there be a lack of distance between writer and heroine?
       Summing up the story: immigration and return. Discovery of American society from the perspective of an outsider, who, through her acute sense of observation, becomes a veritable sociologist. Using the principle of the blog, simplifies the scenario and permits Adichie to expose ideas that normally would be more subtly developed in a more complexe fictional narrative. It’s smart, but also too discursive, and goes against one of the most powerful aspects of fiction in general which is to communicate feelings through progressive identification and accumulation.
       The blogs center on the deep racism in American society, despite people’s sincere efforts to overcome it. “I came from a country where race was not an issue,” [290] declares Ifemelu, who maintains that in America there is no way to escape the issue of race. Is this idea so new? Is it so surprising that race can in different contexts not be an issue? Isn’t it too superficial and too pessimistic to say that 

“the simplest solution to the problem of race in America...[is] romantic love...real deep romantic love...And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved” ? [p296]
“To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.” She had felt clever to have thought of this explanation but Blaine shook his head even before she finished speaking and said, “That is so lazy, to use the Third World like that.” [320]

       Blaine’s critique here could be addressed to the novel as a whole. There is something too categorical in Ifemelu’s impossibility to “understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships” [p320] which taints her relationships with her American lovers to the point of ending them.
       Now that I’ve emptied my bag on the Americanah part of the novel, let’s look at the Nigerianah part, because with the exception of a few chapters on Obinze’s experience in England, almost half of the novel takes place in Nigeria. Here, Adichie doesn’t present a very positive picture either: it’s more political, and it comes out largely through dialogues at receptions and meetings. Politics: Early on in the novel, we know that Aunty Uju is the mistress of a general, and when he dies in a plane crash, she is obliged to get out of the country as fast as possible with her son, Dike. Sociology: Obinze admits that his becoming rich in Nigeria has changed a lot of things:

       “Suddenly your getting all this sucking-up from people, because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad over-coloured painting...Nigerians can be so obsequious. We are a confident people but we are so obsequious. It’s not difficult to be insincere.” [p.431]

       When Ifemelu rents the flat,

“she wrote the cheque for two years rent. This was why people took bribes and asked for bribes; how else could anyone honestly pay two years rent in advance?” [p394] 

       Then there is the question of ethnie: rich Edusco speaking to Obinze:

       “You see, that is the problem with you Igbo people. You don’t do brother-brother...A Hausa man will speak Hausa to his fellow Hausa man. A Toruba man will see a Yoruba person anywhere and speak Yoruba. But an Igbo man will speak English to an Igbo man. I am even surprised that you are speaking Igbo to me.”
       “It’s true,” Obinze said. “It’s sad, it’s the legacy of being a defeated people. We lost the Biafran war and learned to be ashamed.”  [p456] (This is part of the theme of Adichie’s earlier novel  Half of a Yellow Sun.)

       During a discussion, a person declares:

       “Look, it’s very hard to be a clean public official in this country. Everything is set up for you to steal. And the worst part is, people want you to steal.”

Adichie, despite undeniable qualities in her writing, seems too demonstrative. Blogs and meetings don’t make superlative literature.

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

The White Tiger OVERVIEW Aravind Adiga Atlantic Books 2008 Booker Prize

OVERVIEW continued...

      Balram will talk of his childhood in a peasant village, his being chosen for an education: 

A white tiger...the creature that gets born only once in every generation in the jungle. (276)

       Despite this unique chance, he was, like the others, in the Darkness:

       Things are different in the Darkness. There, every morning, tens of thousands of young men sit in the tea shops, reading the newspaper, or lie on a charpoy humming a tune, or sit in their rooms talking to a photo of a film actress. They have no job to do today. They know they won't get any job today. They've given up the fight. They're the smart ones. The stupid ones have gathered in a field in the centre of the town. Every now and then a truck comes by, and all the men in the field rush to it with their hands outstretched, shouting, 'Take me! Take me!' (p54)

       Son of a rickshaw puller, normally he should not have escaped the darkness. Only luck—and intuition—will make him a servant and a driver for a rich Indian. The milieu of servants and drivers as seen from within has its code of conduct, notions of caste and competition. Hindus, Muslims, Rajputs, Sikhs. In the city, “our country mouse, normally taddy, arrack, country hooch”  (72) will not be conform to stereotype nor to his counterparts who wait for their masters for hours by their cars 

chit-chatting and scratching [their] groin, reading Murder Weekly: Murder.Rape.Revenge, and going into bored driver’s asana. (149) 

       Balram will use his free time to think.  And to listen to his masters’ conversations: politics, coal, China. (p71) And to observe his masters: whisky, massages, shopping mall…money, bribery of politicians.

I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand year war of brains between the rich and the poor. (p254)

       Saying this, Balram knows he isn’t saying anything new.
       He has something more interesting to say. As he writes to the Chinese Premier:

When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century of man. The century, more specifically, of the yellow and the brown man. You and me. (p6)

Yes, how

to break the law of the land—to turn bad news into good news—is the entrepreneur’s prerogative. (p38)

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Blindness THOUGHTS Jose Saramago 1  1995 translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero Vintage Books, London 2005

       Often throughout the narrative, the storyteller reveals a character’s thoughts; in many cases, these could well be those of the narrator himself:

…suddenly panicking, she raised herself on the bed, the girl with dark glasses, who was occupying a bed opposite, might have heard her. She was asleep. On the next bed, the one up against the wall, the boy was also sleeping, She did the same as me, the doctor’s wife thought, she gave him the safest place, what fragile walls we’d make, a mere stone in the middle of the road without any hope other than to see the enemy trip over it, enemy, what enemy, no one will attack us here, even if we’d stolen and killed outside, no one is likely to come here to arrest us, that man who stole the car has never been so sure of his freedom, we’re so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognises another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other’s bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist… [54-55]

       True enough: like the characters themselves, we, reader-listeners, have few details if any on the physical appearance of the persons. Similarly, we can visualize the surrounding space mentally (thanks to the overall floor-plan given by the narrator), yet it is only a simplified layout such as could be acquired by orientation and touch.
       Irony is frequent, an irony that moves between quasi-self-evidence and humor.

...For the moment I prefer not to prescribe anything, for it would be like prescribing in the dark. There’s an apt expression, observed the blind man. [16]

...since all the others there were blind as well, what good would it do her to have beautiful bright eyes such as these if there is no one to see them. [93]

...All things considered, things could be worse. So long as they go on supplying us with food, for we cannot live without it, this is like being in a hotel. By contrast, what a torment it would be for a blind man out there in the city, yes, a real torment. Stumbling through the streets, everyone fleeing at the very sight of him, his family in a panic, terrified of approaching him, a mother’s love, a child’s love, a myth, they would probably treat me just as I am treated in this place, lock me up in a room and, if I was very lucky, leave a plate outside the door. Looking at the situation objectively, without preconceptions or resentments which always cloud our reasoning, it had to be acknowledged that the authorities had shown great vision when they decided to unite the blind with the blind, each with his own, which is a wise rule for those who have to live together, like lepers,… [102]

…when the murmur of their counting, as monotonous as a litany, died away, the girl with dark glasses related what had happened to her, I was in a hotel room with a man lying on top of me, at that point she fell silent, she felt too ashamed to say what she was doing there, that she had seen everything white, but the old man with the black eye-patch asked, And you saw everything white, Yes, she replied, Perhaps your blindness is different from ours, said the old man with the black eye-patch. [122]

…there cannot be a single person who has not been within sight of a blind man, If a blind man cannot see, I ask myself, how can he transmit this disease through his sight, General, this must be the most logical illness in the world, the eye that is blind transmits the blindness to the eye that sees, what could be simpler, We have a colonel here who believes the solution would be to shoot the blind as soon as they appear, Corpses instead of blind men would scarcely improve the situation, To be blind is not the same as being dead, Yes, but to be dead is to be blind,… (p.104)

       For some readers, the narrative form employed by Saramago may evoke a mere exercise in style. Yet, considering the radicalism of the hypothesis, considering that it is not a work of science fiction where the reader is invited to transport himself into another reality and believe it in fancy i.e. simple fiction, considering its roots in the present-day, here then, on the contrary, the narrator’s constant presence, his inventing as he goes, his continual hypothesizing, his frequent irony, all show that his storytelling has a purpose: he wants to reach the deepest level, the metaphysical level, the hidden reality. We aren’t aware of how fragile society is: remove just one thing, and you can lose everything... Not quite everything: human beings can also be admirable. Malaise, yet also hope.	
       These are people we might meet in our daily lives. They are identified by epithets only, which they acquire from their first appearance in the story: the doctor’s wife, the doctor, the first blind man, the car thief, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the man with the black eye-patch; the wife of the first blind man, the policeman, the taxi-driver, the pharmacist’s assistant, the hotel maid; the girl from the surgery, the woman who could not sleep, the woman who said wherever you go I go; the leader of the hoodlums; the blind accountant. Through their ordinariness, they become universal. We will know little or nothing concerning their private lives and their individual pasts. Yet each has a personality, personality that will evolve through what she or he will experience in the story.
       The few characters encountered first in the story will remain central throughout, which permits us to better understand them and identify with their predicament. Ordinary people, but not without particularities and complexities. The “unmarried and free” [162] girl with the dark glasses (supposedly a prostitute) will give maternal comfort to the boy with the squint, who misses his mother. The older man with the black eye-patch is calm and open, but will show considerable metal when circumstances require it. The doctor is always trying to be reasonable and logical, but will never adopt an attitude of superiority. Finally, the doctor’s wife, an “ordinary spouse” (p.30), the only person not to have lost her eyesight: her frailties, her hesitations, her suffering will be those that the reader-listener could experience if placed in the same situation. 

I MUST OPEN MY EYES, THOUGHT THE DOCTOR’S wife. Through closed eyelids, when she woke up at various times during the night, she had perceived the dim light of the lamps that barely illuminated the ward, but now she seemed to notice a difference, another luminous presence, it could be the effect of the first glimmer of dawn, it could be that milky sea already drowning her eyes.  She told herself that she would count up to ten and then open her eyelids, she said it twice counted twice, failed to open them twice. She could hear her husband breathing deeply in the next bed and someone snoring, I wonder how the wound on that fellow’s leg is doing, she asked herself, but knew at that moment that she felt no real compassion, what she wanted was to pretend that she was worried about something else, what she wanted was not to have to open her eyes. She opened them the following instant, just like that, not because of any conscious decision. (p.54)

She was watching her husband who was murmuring in his sleep, the shadowy forms of the others beneath the grey blankets, the grimy walls, the empty beds waiting to be occupied, and she serenely wished that she, too, could turn blind, penetrate the visible skin of things and pass to their inner side, to their dazzling and irremediable blindness. (p.56)

For the first time since she had arrived there, the doctor’s wife felt as if she were behind a microscope and observing the behaviour of a number of human beings who did not even suspect her presence, and this suddenly struck her as being contemptible and obscene. I have no right to look if the others cannot see me, she thought to herself. (p.62)

…the doctor’s wife was asking herself, What use is my eyesight, It had exposed her to greater horror than she could ever have imagined, it had convinced her that she would rather be blind, nothing else. (p.145)

       She will prove to have extraordinary moral strength. Never idealized in the story, she comes out in the end as one of the noblest and strongest characters I have ever encountered in fiction.	
       We will follow these people on a descent into hell. In the first paragraphs, colors. Once blindness has started, only black and white or lurid brackishness.

…a dull, yellowish light over the beds, a light incapable of even creating shadows. [68]

…under the murky yellowish light of the dim lamps… [144]

And slimy excrement everywhere:

…no imagination, however fertile and creative in making comparisons, images and metaphors, could aptly describe the filth here. It is not just the state to which the lavatories were soon reduced, fetid caverns such as the gutters in hell full of condemned souls must be, but also the lack of respect shown by some of the inmates or the sudden urgency of others that turned the corridors and other passageways into latrines at first, only occasionally but now as a matter of habit. [125]

       Shouldn’t all order disappear? No, there’s death, of course; instinct of survival; forms of social order, domination and exploitation.
	Constantly evoked in the narration, is the impossibility of such wide-spread physical affliction:

…blindness does not spread through contagion like an epidemic, blindness isn’t something that can be caught just by a blind man looking at someone who is not, blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born. [30]

Eyes that had stopped seeing, eyes that were totally blind, yet meanwhile were in perfect condition, without any lesions, recent or old, acquired or innate. [28]

A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological impossibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms and colours of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities. [22]
	
Blindness all white, blindness with vision?

A whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible. [8]

Like a light going out, More like a light going on. [15]

Everything is white. (p.5)

Blindness qualified in comparisons and adjectives:

An impenetrable whiteness. [7]

…lost in that sterile whiteness, helpless. [92]

Nothing, it’s as if I were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea. [5]

Here, I’m here, she said bursting into tears and walking
unsteadily along the aisle with her eyes wide open, her hands struggling against the milky sea flooding into them. [57]

…running like madmen, were still trying to escape their black destiny. They ran in vain. One after the other they were stricken with blindness, their eyes suddenly drowned in that hideous white tide inundating the corridors, the wards, the entire space. [108]

Colours…things…beings…twice as invisible, impenetrable, sterile, milky sea flooding, white tide inundating, and, we note,…black destiny. Is this really a physical affliction? Is it like death?

…blindness isn’t catching, Death isn’t catching either, yet nevertheless we all die,… [32-33]

But to die just because you’re blind, there can be no worse way of dying, We die of illnesses, accidents, chance events, And now we shall also die of blindness, I mean, we shall die of blindness and cancer, of blindness and tuberculosis, of blindness and Aids, of blindness and heart attacks, illnesses may differ from one person to another but what is really killing us now is blindness, We are not immortal, we cannot escape death, but at least we should not be blind, said the doctor’s wife, How, if this blindness is concrete and real, said the doctor, I am not sure, said the wife,…[280]

       That a physical affliction which would reach all of society must have incredible social-moral consequences is evident. But here, is it literally physical?

Who knows, the doctor could not resist a smile, in truth the eyes are nothing more than lenses, it is the brain that actually does the seeing, just as an image appears on the film,… [61-62]

He went to the bathroom to wash his hands, but this time he did not ask the mirror, metaphysically, What can this be, he had recovered his scientific outlook, the fact that agnosia and amaurosis are identified and defined with great precision in books and in practice, did not preclude the appearance of variations, mutations, if the word is appropriate, and that day seemed to have arrived. There are a thousand reasons why the brain should close up, just this, and nothing else, like a late visitor arriving to find his own door shut. [21]

He turned to where he knew a mirror was, and this time he did not wonder, What’s going on, he did not say, There are a thousand reasons why the human brain should close down, he simply stretched out his hands to touch the glass, he knew that his image was there watching him, his image could see him, he could not see his image. [29]

These observations of a psychological nature, whose subtlety has no apparent relevance considering the extraordinary scale of the cataclysm which our narrative is struggling to relate,… [91]

I’ve spent my life looking into people’s eyes, it is the only part of the body where a soul might still exist… [127]

Were it not for the fact that we’re blind this mix-up would never
have happened, You’re right, our problem is that we’re blind. The
doctor’s wife said to her husband, The whole world is right here. [94]

Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here. [123]

There being no witnesses, and if there were there is no evidence that they were summoned to the post-mortems to tell us what happened, it is understandable that someone should ask how it was possible to know that these things happened so and not in some other manner, the reply to be given is that all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened. [251]

Even when we can see,
I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who
can see, but do not see. [309]

[Epigraph to the novel]
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe.
	From the Book of Exhortations

[???Pentateuch: Deuteronomy? The text does not exist there; an invention of Saramago?]

below: supplementary notes and extracts

Note based on a book I read many ago:
        In 1951 was published a science-fiction novel by John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids. In this novel, the greater part of humanity becomes blind. The events take place in England, probably pretty much around the early 1950’s. All those over the world who watched colorful debris in the upper atmosphere from what was supposed to be a broken-up meteorite have become blind. (The hero will later hypothesize that it may have been a type of satellite weapon that had accidentally detonated in the upper atmosphere rather than close to ground as it had been conceived to do.) Only those who had not observed this super event on the night when it occurred (due to sickness, sleep, etc.) have kept their eyesight. Naturally, society collapses. But it wouldn’t collapse so totally, since there are still some people with sight, if it were not for the scourge of a plant (triffid) that can walk and that possesses a mortal stinger, thus considerably increasing the number of dead and the difficulties to reestablish a viable society.	
       This is not great literature to say the least. The book did, however, have considerable success (500,000 copies sold). Is it possible that Saramago read it? In an interview, Saramago said that the idea for his novel came to him all of a sudden while sitting in a restaurant. There are some images in Saragago’s book that have a resemblance to Wyndham’s: a blind person groping along a hospital hallway; a line of blind people, hand on shoulder, led by a blind person in the streets; stores that have been ransacked for food. There’s nothing here that Saramago couldn’t have been found simply by the logical development of his theme. No importance. Blindness isn’t science-fiction: it’s simply great fiction.
Quotes from John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids 1951 (Penguin 1972)

[p.17:	doctor groping along hospital hallway]
[p.58:	line of people hand on shoulder trudging along behind a blind leader]
p. 113: 	…one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.
p. 113:	man’s supremacy…the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays.
p. 125:	…it’s made me feel closer to people than ever before.

Extracts from Bindness in addition to those included above:

Irony and humor

He’s a doctor, an eye-specialist, That’s a good one, said the taxi-driver, just our luck to end up with the one doctor who can do nothing for us, We’re also landed with a taxidriver who can’t take us anywhere, replied the girl with dark glasses sarcastically. [60]

The doctor’s wife said, We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep, There is no salvation for us, the girl with dark glasses repeated, Who can tell, this blindness is not like any other, it might disappear as suddenly as it came, It will come too late for those who have died, We all have to die, But not to be killed…[93]


All things considered, things could be worse. So long as they go on supplying us with food, for we cannot live without it, this is like being in a hotel. By contrast, what a torment it would be for a blind man out there in the city, yes, a real torment. Stumbling through the streets, everyone fleeing at the very sight of him, his family in a panic, terrified of approaching him, a mother’s love, a child’s love, a myth, they would probably treat me just as I am treated in this place, lock me up in a room and, if I was very lucky, leave a plate outside the door. Looking at the situation objectively, without preconceptions or resentments which always cloud our reasoning, it had to be acknowledged that the authorities had shown great vision when they decided to unite the blind with the blind, each with his own, which is a wise rule for those who have to live together, like lepers, and there can be no doubt that the doctor there at the far end of the ward is right when he says that we must organise ourselves, the question, in fact, is one of organisation, first the food, then the organisation, both are indispensable for life, to choose a number of reliable men and women and put them in charge, to establish approved rules for our co-existence… [102]

…here in the ward, simple things, like sweeping the floor, tidying up and washing, we’ve nothing to complain about there, they have even provided us with soap and detergent, making sure our beds are always made, the important thing is not to lose our self respect, to avoid any conflict with the soldiers who are only doing their duty by keeping us under guard, we do not want any more casualties, asking around if there is anyone willing to entertain us in the evening with stories, fables, anecdotes, whatever, just think how fortunate we would be if someone knew the Bible by heart, we could repeat everything since the creation of the world, the important thing is that we should listen to each other,… [103]

This same girl, there’s no understanding women, who is the prettiest of all the women here, the one with the shapeliest figure, the most attractive, the one whom all the men craved when the word about her exceptional looks got around, finally got into bed one night of her own free will with the old man with the black eyepatch,… [165]

In the busier places, so long as it is not completely open, like the yard, the blind no longer lose their way, with one arm held out in front and several fingers moving like the antennae of insects, they can find their way everywhere, it is even probable that in the more gifted of the blind there soon develops what is referred to as frontal vision. Take the doctor’s wife, for example, it is quite extraordinary how she manages to get around and orientate herself through this veritable maze of rooms, nooks and corridors, how she knows precisely where to turn the corner, how she can come to a halt before a door and open it without a moment’s hesitation, how she has no need to count the beds before reaching her own. [165]

And then there are certain things that are best left unexplained, it’s best just to say what happened, not to probe people’s inner thoughts and feelings,… [165-166]

Then the inexorable rise in the number of cases of blindness led some influential members of the Government, fearful that the official initiative would not suffice for the task in hand, and that it might result in heavy political costs, to defend the idea that it was up to families to keep their blind indoors, never allowing them to go out on the street, so as not to worsen the already difficult traffic situation or to offend the sensibility of persons who still had their eyesight and who, indifferent to more or less reassuring opinions, believed that the white disease was spreading by visual contact, like the evil eye. [117]

…it is always possible to find even in the most depraved souls. To finish on a plebeian note, as the old proverb never tires of teaching us, while trying to cross himself the blind man only succeeded in breaking his own nose. [21]

Ideas

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed, it was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quaternary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we were verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved. [18]

For the moment there are only six of us here, but by tomorrow we shall certainly be more, people will start arriving every day, it would be too much to expect that they should be prepared to accept the authority of someone they have not chosen and who, moreover, would have nothing to offer them in exchange for their respect, always assuming they were willing to accept my authority and my rules, Then it’s going to be difficult to live here, We’ll be very fortunate if it turns out to be only difficult. The girl with dark glasses said, I meant well, but frankly, doctor, you are right, it will be a case of everyone for himself. [44]

…the girl with dark glasses, who was occupying a bed opposite, might have heard her. She was asleep. On the next bed, the one up against the wall, the boy was also sleeping, She did the same as me, the doctor’s wife thought, she gave him the safest place, what fragile walls we’d make, a mere stone in the middle of the road without any hope other than to see the enemy trip over it, enemy, what enemy, no one will attack us here, even if we’d stolen and killed outside, no one is likely to come here to arrest us, that man who stole the car has never been so sure of his freedom, we’re so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognises another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other’s bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist, I can still see but for how long,…[54-55]

Here, each person’s real home is the place where they sleep, therefore little wonder that the first concern of the new arrivals should be to choose a bed, just as they had done in the other ward, when they still had eyes to see. In the case of the wife of the first blind man there could be no doubt, her rightful and natural place was beside her husband,… [95]

Who knows, the doctor could not resist a smile, in truth the eyes are nothing more than lenses, it is the brain that actually does the seeing, just as an image appears on the film, and if the channels did get blocked up, as that man suggested, It’s the same as a carburettor, if the petrol can’t reach it, the engine does not work and the car won’t go, As simple as that, as you can see, the doctor told the pharmacist’s assistant,… [61-62]

For the first time since she had arrived there, the doctor’s wife felt as if she were behind a microscope and observing the behaviour of a number of human beings who did not even suspect her presence, and this suddenly struck her as being contemptible and obscene. I have no right to look if the others cannot see me, she thought to herself. [62)]

Forty persons were sleeping or desperately trying to get to sleep, some were sighing and murmuring in their dreams, perhaps in their dream they could see what they were dreaming, perhaps they were saying to themselves, If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up. All their watches had stopped, either they had forgotten to wind them or had decided it was pointless,… [68]

…shouts and grunts and finally heavy, stertorous breathing. Someone protested at the far end of the ward. Pigs, they’re like pigs. They were not pigs, only a blind man and a blind woman who probably knew nothing more about each other than this. [90]

Were it not for the fact that we’re blind this mix-up would never have happened, You’re right, our problem is that we’re blind. The doctor’s wife said to her husband, The whole world is right here. [94]

…what a torment it would be for a blind man out there in the city, yes, a real torment. Stumbling through the streets, everyone fleeing at the very sight of him, his family in a panic, terrified of approaching him, a mother’s love, a child’s love, a myth, they would probably treat me just as I am treated in this place, lock me up in a room and, if I was very lucky, leave a plate outside the door. [102]

My situation, said the pharmacist’s assistant, was simpler, I heard that people were going blind, then I began to wonder what it would be like if I too were to go blind, I closed my eyes to try it and when I opened them I was blind, Sounds like another allegory, interrupted the unknown voice, if you want to be blind, then blind you will be. They remained silent. [122]

Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here.  [123]

These blind internees, unless we come to their assistance, will soon turn into animals, worse still, into blind animals. [126]

…the doctor’s wife was asking herself, What use is my eyesight, It had exposed her to greater horror than she could ever have imagined, it had convinced her that she would rather be blind, nothing else. [145]

…for dignity has no price, that when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning. The doctor then asked him what meaning he saw in the situation in which all of them there found themselves, starving, covered in film up to their ears, ridden with lice, eaten by bedbugs, bitten by fleas,… [162)]
We would also be alive if I were blind as well, the world is full of blind people, I think we are all going to die, it’s just a matter of time, Dying has always been a matter of time, said the doctor, But to die just because you’re blind, there can be no worse way of dying, We die of illnesses, accidents, chance events, And now we shall also die of blindness, I mean, we shall die of blindness and cancer, of blindness and tuberculosis, of blindness and Aids, of blindness and heart attacks, illnesses may differ from one person to another but what is really killing us now is blindness, We are not immortal, we cannot escape death, but at least we should not be blind, said the doctor’s wife, How, if this blindness is concrete and real, said the doctor, I am not sure, said the wife, Nor I, said the girl with the dark glasses. [280)]

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence, and this is what we have made of it, You speak as if you too were blind, said the girl with the dark glasses, In a way I am, I am blind with your blindness, perhaps I might be able to see better if there were more of us who could see, I am afraid you are like the witness in search of a court to which he has been summoned by who knows who, in order to make a statement about who knows what, said the doctor, Time is coming to an end, putrescence is spreading, diseases find the doors open, water is running out, food has become poison, that would be my first statement, said the doctor’s wife, And the second, asked the girl with dark glasses, Let’s open our eyes, We can’t, we are blind, said the doctor, It is a great truth that says that the worst blind person was the one who did not want to see, But I do want to see, said the girl with dark glasses, That won’t be the reason you will see, the only difference would be that you would no longer be the worst blind person, and now, let’s go, there is nothing more to be seen here, the doctor said. [281-282]

…large square with groups of blind people who were listening to speeches from other blind people, at first sight, neither one nor the other group seemed blind, the speakers turned their heads excitedly towards their listeners, the listeners turned their heads attentively to the speakers. They were proclaiming the end of the world, redemption through penitence, the visions of the seventh day, the advent of the angel, cosmic collisions, the death of the sun, the tribal spirit, the sap of the mandrake, tiger ointment, the virtue of the sign, the discipline of the wind, the perfume of the moon, the revindication of darkness, the power of exorcism, the sign of the heel, the crucifixion of the rose, the purity of the lymph, the blood of the black cat, the sleep of the shadow, the rising of the seas, the logic of anthropophagy, painless castration, divine tattoos, voluntary blindness, convex thoughts, or concave, or horizontal or vertical, or sloping, or concentrated, or dispersed, or fleeting, the weakening of the vocal cords, the death of the word, Here nobody is speaking of organisation, said the doctor’s wife, Perhaps organisation is in another square, he replied. They continued on their way. [282]

…in death, blindness is the same for all. (p.200)

Who knows whether my parents are not among these dead, said the girl with dark glasses, and here, I am passing by without seeing them, It’s a time-honoured custom to pass by the dead without seeing them, said the doctor’s wife. [282]

How should I know, perhaps it was the work of someone whose faith was badly shaken when he realised that he would be blind like the others, maybe it was even the local priest, perhaps he thought that when the blind people could no longer see the images, the images should not be able to see the blind either, Images don’t see, You’re wrong, images see with the eyes of those who see them, only that now blindness is the lot of everyone, You can still see, I’11 see less and less all the time, even though I may not lose my eyesight I shall become more and more blind because I shall have no one to see me,… [301]

I see him going from one to the other, climbing up to the altars and tying the bandages with a double knot so that they do not come undone and slip off, applying two coats of paint to the pictures in order to make the white night into which they are plunged still thicker, that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see. The doctor’s wife did not have a chance to reply, somebody beside her spoke first, What sort of talk is that, who are you, Blind like you, she said, But I heard you say that you could see, That’s just a manner of speaking which is hard to give up, how many more times will I say it,… [301]

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives, Speaking of gambling in a church is a sin, Get up, use your hands if you doubt my words, Do you swear it is true that the images have their eyes covered, What do you want me to swear on, Swear on your eyes, I swear twice on the eyes, on yours and mine. Is it true, It’s true. [302]

…it was unfortunate that there were several superstitious and Imaginative people in the congregation, the idea that the sacred images were blind, that their compassionate or pitying eyes only stared out at their own blindness, became all of a sudden unbearable, it was tantamount to having told them that they were surrounded by the living dead,… [302]

The first blind man was therefore wide awake, if any other proof were needed it would be the dazzling whiteness before his eyes, which probably only sleep would darken, but one could not even be sure of that, since nobody can be asleep and awake at the same time. The first blind man thought that he had finally cleared up this doubt when suddenly the inside of his eyelids turned dark, I’ve fallen asleep, he thought, but no, he had not fallen asleep, he continued hearing the voice of the doctor’s wife, the boy with the squint coughed, then a great fear entered his soul, he thought he had passed from one blindness to another, that having lived in the blindness of light, he would now pass into a blindness of darkness, the fear made him tremble, What’s the matter, his wife asked, and he replied stupidly, without opening his eyes, I am blind, as if that were news, she tenderly held him in her arms, Don’t worry, we’re all blind, there’s nothing we can do about it, I saw everything dark, I thought I had gone to sleep, but I hadn’t, I am awake,… [305]

Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see. [309]

Courage

It is understandable, therefore, that the poor woman, confronted by this irrefutable evidence, should react like any ordinary spouse, two of them we know already, clinging to her husband and showing natural signs of distress,[30]

Keep away, don’t come near me, I might infect you, and then beating on his forehead with clenched fists, What a fool, what a fool, what an idiot of a doctor, why did I not think of it before, we’ve spent the entire night together, I should have slept in the study with the door shut, and even so, Please, don’t say such things, what has to be will be, come, let me get you some breakfast, Leave me, leave me, No, I won’t leave you,… [30]

Human nature:

It would not be right to imagine that these blind people, in such great numbers, proceed like lambs to the slaughter, bleating as is their wont, somewhat crowded, it is true, yet that is how they had always existed, cheek by jowl, mingling breaths and smells, There are some here who cannot stop crying, others who are shouting in fear or rage, others who are cursing, someone uttered a terrible, futile threat,… [105]

THE ARRIVAL OF SO MANY BLIND PEUPLE APPEARED to have brought at least one advantage, or, rather, two advantages, the first of these being of a psychological nature, as it were, for there is a vast difference between waiting for new inmates to turn up at any minute, and realising that the building is completely full at last, that from now on it will be possible to establish and maintain stable and lasting relations with one’s neighbours, without the disturbances there have been up until now, because of the constant interruptions and interventions by the new arrivals which obliged us to be for ever reconstituting the channels of communication. The second advantage, of a practical, direct and substantial nature, was that the authorities outside, both civilian and military, had understood that it was one thing to provide food for two or three dozen people, more or less tolerant, more or less prepared, because of their small number, to resign themselves to occasional mistakes or delays in the delivery of food, and quite another to be faced with the sudden and complex responsibility of feeding two hundred and forty human beings of every type, background and temperament…. [109

The men tried to justify themselves, that it was not quite like that, that they should not dramatise, what the hell, by talking things over, people can come to some  understanding, it was only because custom demands that volunteers should be asked to come forward in difficult and dangerous situations, as this one undoubtedly is, We are all at risk of dying of hunger, both you and us. [160]

As has already been mentioned, there are seven women in this ward, including the blind woman who suffers from insomnia and  whom nobody knows, and the so-called normal couples, are no more than two, which would leave an unbalanced number of men, because the boy with the squint does not yet count. Perhaps in the other wards there are more women than men, but an unwritten law, that soon gained acceptance here and subsequently became statutory decrees that all matters have to be resolved in the wards in which they have surfaced in accordance with the precepts of the ancients, whose wisdom we shall never tire of praising, if you would be well served, serve yourself. [164]

People thinking:
In the busier places, so long as it is not completely open, like the yard, the blind no longer lose their way, with one arm held out in front and several fingers moving like the antennae of insects, they can find their way everywhere, it is even probable that in the more gifted of the blind there soon develops what is referred to as frontal vision. Take the doctor’s wife, for example, it is quite extraordinary how she manages to get around and orientate herself through this veritable maze of rooms, nooks and corridors, how she knows precisely where to turn the corner, how she can come to a halt before a door and open it without a moment’s hesitation, how she has no need to count the beds before reaching her own. [78]

153-155 : what the blind accountant could have thought and what he could have written; the only really blind person; allusion to Homer?

there are certain things that are best left unexplained, it’s best just to say what happened, not to probe people’s inner thoughts and feelings, … [165-166]

Blindness :

In fact, a blind ophthalmologist is not much good to anyone, but it was up to him to inform the health authorities, to warn them of this situation which might turn into a national catastrophe, nothing more nor less, of a form of blindness hitherto unknown, with every appearance of being highly contagious, and which, to all appearances, manifested itself without the previous existence of earlier pathological symptoms of an inflammatory, infectious or degenerative nature, as he was able to verify in the blind man who had come to consult him in his surgery, or as had been confirmed in his own case, a touch of myopia, a slight astigmatism, all so mild that he had decided, in the meantime, not to use corrective lenses. Eyes that had stopped seeing, eyes that were totally blind, yet meanwhile were in perfect condition, without any lesions, recent or old, acquired or innate. He recalled the detailed examination he had carried out on the blind man, how the various parts of the eye accessible to the ophthalmoscope appeared to be perfectly healthy, without any trace of morbid changes, a most rare situation in a man who claimed to be thirty-eight years old, and even in anyone younger. [28]

Light:

He hoped the night would never end rather than have to announce, he whose profession was to cure ailments in the eyes of others, I’m blind, but, at the same time, he was anxiously waiting for the light of day, and these are the exact words that came into his mind, The light of day, knowing that he would not see it. [28]

At the top of the steps leading to the forecourt, the 
daylight dazzled his wife, and not because it was too intense, there were dark clouds passing across the sky, and it looked as if it might rain, In such a short time I’ve become unused to bright light, she thought. [60]

The hours passed, one by one, the blind internees had fallen asleep. Some had covered their heads with a blanket, as if anxious that a pitch-black darkness, a real one, might extinguish once and for all the dim suns that their eyes had become. The three lamps suspended from the high ceiling, out of arm’s reach, cast a dull, yellowish light over the beds, a light incapable of even creating shadows. [68]

Now, with all the beds occupied, all two hundred and forty, not counting the blind inmates who have to sleep on the floor, no imagination, however fertile and creative in making comparisons, images and metaphors, could aptly describe the filth here. It is not just the state to which the lavatories were soon reduced, fetid caverns such as the gutters in hell full of condemned souls must be, but also the lack of respect shown by some of the inmates or the sudden urgency of others that turned the corridors and other passageways into latrines at first, only occasionally but now as a matter of habit. [125]

…under the murky yellowish light of the dim lamps… [144]

The first blind man was therefore wide awake, if any other proof were needed it would be the dazzling whiteness before his eyes, which probably only sleep would darken, but one could not even be sure of that, since nobody can be asleep and awake at the same time. The first blind man thought that he had finally cleared up this doubt when suddenly the inside of his eyelids turned dark, I’ve fallen asleep, he thought, but no, he had not fallen asleep, he continued hearing the voice of the doctor’s wife, the boy with the squint coughed, then a great fear entered his soul, he thought he had passed from one blindness to another, that having lived in the blindness of light, he would now pass into a blindness of darkness, the fear made him tremble,… [305]

Saramago in a speech given in Paris in 2002:
“Unless we intervene in time, and that time is now—the cat of globalization will inevitably devour the mouse of human rights.”
“As citizens, we have a right to intervene and become involved—it’s the citizen who changes things.”

Saramago from his Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1998:
“The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.”

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

The Underground Railroad THOUGHTS

We know from the title that it will be question of escape. The first three chapters, the chapter heads (2-4-6-8-10-12 ) throughout the book with wanted notices for escaped slaves we've encountered, the harrowing description in chapter two of Big Anthony's torture and execution, all of these prove that escape is practically impossible, reckless, useless, bloody, mortal. Thereafter, we live under a suspense, long-drawn and subterranean. Respite in South Carolina and Indiana? Only illusions. Nevertheless, I think there's a distinct lowering of intensity and imagination after Chapters 1 and 2.
Book construction: 
- odd numbered chapters (short): characters
Note: character names often have symbolic implications.
- even numbered chapters (long): places
Chapters and characters
1. Ajarry  Cora's grandmother, Mabel's mother
2. Georgia   Cora, Caesar, Lovey, Fletcher, Connelly (overseer), Randall brothers: Terrence north ("stingy," violent)  James  south: simply the "security of a fashionable crop", others etc. etc. 
3. Ridgeway  the slave hunter Note: Ridgeway =  the world of the Western.
4. South Carolina   Mrs. Anderson, Cora (Bessie Carpenter), Sam (warns of medical experiments), Mr. Fields (museum director), Dr. Stevens
5. Stevens  doctor, body snatcher, research on syphilis and sterilization using former slaves as guinea pigs 
6. North Carolina  Martin (protector, analyzes the system of slavery), Cora
7. Ethel
8. Tennesee  Cora, Ridgeway, Homer (liberated slave and sort of secretary for Ridgeway), Boseman, Jasper (slightly deranged, always singing, murdered by Ridgeway)
9. Caesar  Cora's guide for the escape from Randall Plantation, Cora
10.  Indiana  Royal (slave liberator), Cora (reads Almanaks), Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, etc. etc. 
Valentine farm
11. Mabel  Cora's mother, fatal escape (snake bite): Cora will never know that she wanted to go back to her
12.The North  Cora, Ridgeway, Homer

The first two chapters are the heart of the whole book. They describe different aspects of slave life on the plantation. Chapter 1 concentrates on Ajarry, Cora's grandmother, whose philosophy was survival under grueling conditions. 
Note Whitehead's elegant yet direct and succinct writing. These are the best pages in the whole book.

1. Ajarry  
p.4  on the ship: …chained head to toe, in exponential misery
p.5  For the rest of her life she imagined her cousins worked for kind and generous masters up north, engaged in more forgiving trades than her own, weaving and spinning, nothing in the fields.    …fantasies
	= positive thoughts  that may have been transmitted to Mabel
- she was sold many times as hers owners went broke or died
p.6  When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned quickly to adjust to the new plantations, sorting nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers. Masters and mistresses in degrees of wickedness, estates of disparate means and disposition.
p.7  Ajarry made a science of her own black body and accumulated observations. Each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also.
p.8  her children: Teach them to obey her and maybe they'll obey all the masters to come and they will survive.
p.9  The child that lived past the age of ten (Mabel, Cora's mother)
Ajarry: Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.
It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no.
Three weeks later she said yes.
This time it was her mother talking.

2. Georgia
p.13  Cora sat by the edge of her plot on her block of sugar maple and worked dirt from under her fingernails.
p.15  …this was where Cora ended up every Sunday when their half  day of work was done: perched on her seat, looking for things to fix. She owned herself for a few hours every week was how she looked at it, to tug weeds, pluck caterpillars, thin out the sour greens, and glare at anyone planning incursions on her territory. Tending to her bed was necessary maintenance but also a message that she had not lost her resolve since the day of the hatchet. (At age ten when her mother had escaped leaving her behind alone, she had defended her plot with the hatchet. Just as slavers defended their plantations using violence.)
The dirt at her feet had a story, the oldest story Cora knew.
…”But my mother wouldn't let them touch her field,”Mabel told her daughter.

p.16  Field in jest, as Ajarry's stake was scarcely three square yards.She said she'd dig a hammer in they heads if they so much as looked at it.

Note a form of parallelism between Ajarry's stake and father Randal's expansion of the plantation.

p.17  Cora:
When Mabel vanished Cora became a stray. Eleven years old, ten years, thereabouts—there was no one to tell for sure. In Cora's shock, the world drained to gray impressions. The first color to return was the simmering brown-red of the soil in her family's plot. It reawaked to people or things, and she decided to hold on to her stake, even though she was young and small and had nobody to look after her anymore. Mabel was too quiet and stubborn to be popular but people had respected Ajarry.

Note: Materializing the railroad permits skipping details of the escape process. But it's also a sort of publicity stunt to make Whitehead's novel more “novel.” 
Note:  In the later chapters, much of Whitehead's writing becomes more discursive: one of the book's fundamental ideas: slavery and racism at the base of American society in general, not just of the South. (Not very original.)

p.83  Lumbly:  “If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.”

p.19 the cabin: Hob where they banished the wretched.
p.25  Cora child defends her plot with a hatchet against Blake's gang.
p.29  Cora now 16 or 17 years old
p. 30  Connelly the overseer: every Sunday, sleeps with a slave he selects, arranges marriages between slaves, banished his bastards to the north part of the plantation because he can't stand the sight of them 
p.40  Chester accidentally bumps Terrence who starts beating him with his cane: Cora protects Terrence and gets a brutal beating
- whippings by Connelly
- hounds for slave catching
- Mabel's escape
- Ridgeway's arrival
- James dies, Terrance takes over the southern half
- Big Anthony's torture and death
p.53 Caesar unflinching before Big Anthony's torture: It was customary for slaves to witness the abuse of their brethren as moral instruction.
- Caesar can read
- the escape
- Fletcher transports them in his cart
-the station
Note: Materializing the railroad permits skipping details of the escape process. But it's also a sort of publicity stunt to make Whitehead's novel more “novel.” 
Note:  In the later chapters, much of Whitehead's writing becomes more discursive: one of the book's fundamental ideas: slavery and racism at the base of American society in general, not just of the South. (Not very original.)
p.83  Lumbly:
p.84  Cora looked through the slats. There was only darkness, mile after mile.
p.95  Ridgeway: 
Here was the true Great Spirit; the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

p.107  Cora's new name in South Carolina: Bessie Carpenter
Note: the name change indicates that she's still in danger, not really free. 
p.129  Museum of Natural Wonders: 3 pantomimes, 3 rooms: Scenes from Darkest Africa, Life on the Slave Ship (Cora plays a boy on deck), Typical Day on the Plantation (spinning wheel)
Note: the museum scenes are pretty literal metaphor (not very imaginative).
p.137  The whites were made of plaster, wire, and paint.
p.138  Cora acting behind the window in the museum, talking to the dummy captain:
“Is this the truth of our historic encounter?” …The white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora's three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained below decks, swabbing his body with his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach.

p.139  Cora's thoughts:  The whites come to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others…The land they tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib.
Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop; its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest... Torture them as much as you can, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better.

p.16  In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.

p.169  Martin:  “Before I came back to North Carolina, I'd never seen a mob rip a man limb from limb. See that, you stop saying what folks will do and what they won't.” Note: his and Ethel's fate: stoned to death.

p.182  … Cora sees the country road, so-called “Freedom Trail”:
Corpses hung from trees as rotting ornaments, some of them were naked, others partially clothed, the trousers black where bowels emptied when necks snapped.

p.193  Martin:  As with everything in the south, it started with cotton. The ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel in African bodies.

p.206  Fear drove these people even more than cotton money.
p.215  What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven.

p.277  Ethel:  In the end she had not gone to Africa, Africa had come to her. She went upstairs to confront the stranger who lived in her house as family.

p.266  (Manifest Destiny): Ridgeway:
“My father liked the Indian talk about the Great Spirit…I prefer the American spirit; the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up; subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription—the American imperative.”
	“I need to visit the outhouse,” Cora said.

p.300  Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

p.313  Lumbly's words returned to her: If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.

p.318  Cora:“I'm just a passenger.”

p.340  Lander:  “Valentine farm is a delusion…And America…too, is a delusion…”

p.360  She spun and locked her arms around him [Ridgeway] like a chain of iron…she held him close like a lover and the pair tumbled down the stone steps into the darkness. Note: This is a metaphor for the whole novel.

p.362  Ridgeway's last words: 
“The American imperative is a splendid thing…a beacon…a shining beacon.”

p.366  Cora accepts to go on the wagon of the older negro man:
She wondered where he escaped from, how bad it was and how far he traveled before he put it behind him.

Cora's search for freedom=search for survival=search for truth

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Where the Crawdads Sing THOUGHTS Delia Owens JPPutnam’s Sons / Corsair 2018

	I admire the poetic and deep human elements of this novel. The crime novel aspect, with its investigation and trial, seems to me more conventional. However, if you want to look at the book as a crime novel first and foremost, then on the contrary you might consider it very original.
	Detail: I find difficult to accept that, after Kya and Chase’s serious row, Chase would want to meet Kya on the Fire Tower in the middle of the night (clearly specified at the trial as after 11:00). Oh well!...


INTERESTING QUOTES:

	“What d'ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that." Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: "Go as far as you can --- way out yonder where the crawdads sing."
	Tate said, "Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.” [111]

Kya’s stratagem, evoked two or three times (once might have been enough).

	Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he’d found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.
	Kya watched others. The females got what they wanted—first a mate, then a meal—just by changing their signals.
	Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. [141]

On the last page, we learn that the “lesser-known poet” quoted in the book, Amanda Hamilton, Kya’s favorite poet, is actually herself.

A nice description of Einstein space-time.

...time is no more fixed than the stars. Time speeds and bends around planets and suns, is different in the mountains than in the valleys, and is part of the same fabric as space, which curves and swells as does the sea. (p.186)

Time ensures children never know their parents young. 

Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness?

The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep.

The fog turned stubborn and lingered, twisting its tendrils around tree snags and low-lying limbs. The air was still; even the birds were quiet as she eased forwards through the channel. Nearby, a clonk, clonk sounded as a slow-moving oar tapped a gunwale, and then a boat emerged ghoul-like from the haze.
	Colors, which had been muted by the dimness, formed into shapes as they moved into light. Golden hair beneath a red cap. As if coming from a dream, Tate stood in the stern of his old fishing boat poling through the channel. [248]

Sand keeps secrets better than mud. [71]

Kya discovering the countryside outside of the marsh for the first time:

Then abruptly, at a line drawn across the earth, the marsh meadows ended, and dusty ground—hacked raw, fenced into squares, and furrowed into rows—spread before them. Fields of paraplegic snags stood in felled forests. Poles, strung with wires, trudged toward the horizon. Of course, she knew coastal marsh didn’t cover the globe, but she’d never been beyond it. What had people done to the land? Every house, the same box shape, squatted on sheared lawn. A flock of pink flamingos fed across a yard, but when Kya whirled in surprise, she saw they were plastic. The deer, cement. The only ducks flew painted on mailboxes. [191]

Lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections. [242]

PLOT: (Barkley Cove North Carolina)

p.3 Prologue 1969: Discovery of Chase Andrews body in the mud at the foot of the Fire Tower
Periodically, throughout the book, there are short chapters concerning the progression of the investigation conducted by the sheriff and his deputy up to the trial, the latter then becomes the main subject for the last quarter of the story.
p.5 1952: Kya, 6 years old, sees her Ma go down the road from the shack: she’s wearing a dress and her fake alligator skin high heals and white scarf and carries a blue suitcase, the color so wrong for the woods.
p.12 After Ma left, over the next few weeks, Kya’s oldest brother and two sisters drifted away too, as if by example. They had endured Pa’s red-faced rages, which started as shouts, then escalated into fist-slugs, or backhanded punches, until one by one, they disappeared. They were nearly grown anyway. And later, just as she forgot their ages, she couldn’t remember their real names, only that they were called Missy, Murph, and Mandy. On her porch mattress, Kya found a small pile of socks left by her sisters.
p.13 After being beaten by her Pa, Jodie her other brother says: “I hafta go, Kya. Can’t live here no longer.” As she watches him leave through the trees, Kya says: “This little piggy stayed home.”
p.15 Kya watches Pa burn Ma’s clothes and paintings and her battery-operated radio.
p.16 Over the next few days, Kya learned from the mistakes of the others, and perhaps more from the minnows, how to live with him. Just keep out of his way, don’t let him see you, dart from sunspots to shadows. Up and out of the house before he rose, she lived in the woods and water, then padded into the house to sleep in her bed on the porch as close to the marsh as she could get.
After her father leaves her a small sum for food and disappears, Kia buys food for the first time in town. She doesn’t know how to count the change.
p.20 Ma had always said the autumn moon showed up for Kya’s birthday. So even though she couldn’t remember the date of birth, one evening when the moon rose swollen and golden from the lagoon, Kya said to herself, “I reckon I’m seven.” Pa never mentioned it; certainly there was no cake. He didn’t say anything about her going to school either, and she, not knowing much about it, was too afraid to bring it up.
p.26 Kya is required to go to school. After one day in class, she never returns and hides in the bush when people come to find her.
p.34 Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother. 
p.41 Kya secretly takes Pa’s boat, but gets lost in the marsh. She sees an older boy fishing, who guides her home. His name is Tate.
p.53 Her Pa back home, Kya has cooked a meal for her father, who then takes her fishing.
p.56 Every warmish day of winter and every day of spring, Pa and Kya went out, far up and down the coast, trolling, casting, and reeling...Pa knew the marsh the way a hawk knows his meadow: how to hunt, how to hide, how to terrorize intruders. And Kya’s wide-eyed questions spurred him to explain goose seasons, fish habits, how to read weather in the clouds and riptides in the waves.
p.63 Kia goes with her father in the boat to get gas: her first encounter with Jumpin’.
p.66 Pa still disappeared some, not coming back for several days, but not as often as before. And when he did show up, he didn’t collapse in a stupor but ate a meal and talked some. One night they played gin rummy, he guffawing when she won, and she giggling with her hands over her mouth like a regular girl.
p.68 September: A letter from Ma (which Kya can’t read) makes Pa furious. He burns it. He comes home drunk and never takes her out fishing again.
p.72 Winter 1956 (Kya 10): Pa comes back less and less, always drunk. Then no longer comes back at all.
p.75 In order get some money, Kya decides to collect mussels and proposes them to Jumpin’. They make a deal: she has to bring them to him before the others.
p.81 Kya sells smoked fish to Jumpin’. A few days later, Mabel gives Kya some old dresses she’s collected just for her and some seeds for vegetable gardening.
p.87 1960 (Kya 14): Rare feathers on the tree stump (from Tate). They meet and talk for the first time. Tate teaches her to read during the summer. When she starts to become more proficient, she discovers the real names and birth dates of her brothers and sisters in a Bible in the house. She labels her samples. To avoid social services, she and Tate continue lessons in an abandoned shack.
p.113 They read the Sand County Almanac, and Kya acquires wonders and real-life knowledge she would’ve never learned in school. Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.
p.114 Tate introduces Kya to poetry, and she discovers a book of poetry her mother had annotated.
p.118 More clothes and a bra from Mable.
p.119 Kya has her first period and sees Mable for explanations.
p.123 Tate explains how his mother and sister died in a car accident when he was young.
p.125 Tate and Kya kiss for the first time.

“Am I your girlfriend now?” she asked.
He smiled. “Do you want to be?”
“Yes.”
“You might be too young,” he said.
“But I know feathers. I bet the other girls don’t know feathers.”                                                          	“All right, then.” And he kissed her again. This time she tilted her head to the side and her lips softened. And for the first time in her life, her heart was full.

p.125 Tate wishes Kya a happy birthday (Kya 15). Gifts: magnifying glass, plastic clasp, water colors.
p. 135 Christmas: gift of Webster’s Dictionary.
May: Tate announces his departure for college. A week later, he says goodbye.
p.141 July 4 1961: Kya studies fireflies [see above] Tate doesn’t come. She falls into a deep depression. [see above]
p.149 1965 (Kya 19) She develops an affair with Chase.
p.165 Chase takes Kya up to the top platform of the Fire Tower.
p.190 Chase pretends he’ll marry her.
p.193 Chase and Kya make love for the first time.
p.196 Tate comes to see Kya. (after four years absence). She’s furious that he hadn’t contacted her. He sees her watercolors and collections: says he’ll try to find her a publisher.
p.207 Kya sees Chase with another girl in town.
p.211 Furor and sadness: the sandbar [see above]
p.216 1968 (Kya 22) Year after reading of Chase’s engagement to Pearl. Kya receives a copy of her book The Sea Shells of the Eastern Seaboard.
p.219 Kya buys a deed to her land.
p.228 Winter 1968: Jodi’s visit. They haven’t seen  each since she was six. Some family history from Jodi.
p.235 Jodie explains that Ma died two years ago, after having practically lost her mind. He gives Kya some family photos.
p.239 Kya to Jodie: “Jumpin’ has been my best friend, for years my only friend. My only family unless you count herring gulls.” 
p.242 Jodie gives Kya Ma’s paintings before leaving (after three days).
p.254 1969 just before Christmas: Kya is arrested.
p.255 1970 The trial starts.
p. 265 Flashback to August 1969: Chase tries to rape Kya, who fights him off and kicks him in the groin. Two fishermen see the scene, then her boating off.
p.273 She’d brought this on herself. Consorting unchaperoned. A natural wanting had led her unmarried to a cheap motel, but still unsatisfied. Sex under flashing neon lights, marked only by blood smudged across the sheets like animal tracks. 

...”Ma, Ma,” she whispered. I see. Finally I understand why you had to leave and never come back. I’m sorry I didn’t know, that I couldn’t help you.” Kya dropped her head and sobbed. Then jerked her head up and said, “I will never live like that—a life wondering when and where the next fist will fall.”

p.283 She walked to the water’s edge. Chase would not let this go. Being isolated was one thing; living in fear, quite another.
p.310 Flashback October 28, 1969: The bus to Greenville (to establish her alibi).
p.347 Acquittal. 
p.358 Kya and Tate decide to live together.
p.364 Tate discovers Kya dead in her boat. She was 64.
p.368 Tate discovers the poem The Firefly, which is in fact a confession, and Chase’s shell necklace she had taken off his body.

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***

The Blind Assassin THOUGHTS Margaret Atwood 2000 Virago Press 2009 Booker Prize 2000

       Atwood’s writing is richly detailed, supple, and alert. The narrative and the narrative structure as described in the OVERVIEW stimulate the reader’s interest. Personalities and events evolve by progressive touches, each illuminating what has preceded.  However, for an active reader, much of the mystery—despite Atwood’s attempt to get the reader on the wrong track—dissipates fairly early on (at least so it was for me), and the book might have gained force being shorter. With the exception of Iris and her sister in their childhood, characters are fairly conventional or bordering on caricature, which conforms to the narrator’s personality (annoying for me nevertheless). Corresponding to this subjective, often judgmental view of things, Iris has a quasi-clinical vision of her present and past, that of the writer she is (with an absence of emotion?).
       The descriptions of Iris’s childhood ring true. Passages about her present-day old-age, despite—or is it via?—their detachment and frequent irony, are extremely life-like. And there are those passages rich in poetic description, a form of prose poetry in the simplest of words:

       At night the house was more than ever like a stranger’s. I wandered through the front rooms, the dining room, the parlour, hand on the wall for balance. My various possessions were floating in their own pools of shadow, detached from me, denying my ownership of them. I looked them over with a burglar’s eye. Deciding what might be worth the risk of stealing, what on the other hand I would leave behind.    ...
...The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, the lone mother-of-pearl cuff link, the tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth. The broken silver lighter, the saucerless cup, the cruet stand minus the vinegar. The scattered bones of home, the rags, the relics. Shards washed ashore after shipwreck. [71]
       
       It’s almost dusk now. There’s no wind; the sound of the rapids washing through the garden is like one long breath. The blue flowers blend into the air, the red ones are black, the white ones shine, phosphorescent. The tulips have shed their petals, leaving pistils bare—black, snout-like, sexual. The peonies are almost finished, bedraggled and limp as damp tissue, but the lilies have come out; also the phlox. The last of the mock oranges have dropped their blossoms, leaving the grass strewn with white confetti. [82]

       This morning the tornado warnings were out, on the weather channel, and by mid-afternoon the sky had turned a baleful shade of green and the branches of the trees had begun to thrash around as if some huge, enraged animal was fighting its way through. The storm passed directly overhead: flicked snakes’ tongues of white light, stacks of tin pie plates tumbling.   …
...In the faint light all was monochrome. The air was moist and still. The chrysanthemums on the front lawn sparkled with shining drops; a battalion of slugs was no doubt munching away at the few remaining leaves of the lupins. [165]

…I would climb down out of the bed and tiptoe across the floor, and hoist myself up to look out the bedroom window. When there was a moon the flower gardens would be silvery grey, as if all the colours had been sucked out of them. I could see the stone nymph, foreshortened; the moon was reflected in her lily pond, and she was dipping her toes into its cold light. Shivering, I would get back into bed, and lie watching the moving shadows of the curtains and listening to the gurglings and crackings of the house as it shifted itself. Wondering what I’d done wrong. [169]

       At the bottom of the Louvteau’s rapids, jagged chunks of ice had piled up against one another. The ice was white at noon, light green at twilight, the smaller pieces made a tinkling sound, like bells. In the centre of the river the water ran open and black. Children called from the hill on the other side, hidden by trees, their voices high and thin and happy in the cold air. [172)]…

       Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. The season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
       Season of chrysanthemums, the funeral flower; white ones, that is. The dead must get tired of them. [233]

       The winter we’d been waiting for arrived on New Year’s Eve—a hard freeze, followed by an enormous fall of snow the next day. Outside the window it swirled down, bucket after bucket of it, as if God were dumping laundry flakes in the finale of a children’s pageant. I turned on the weather channel to get the full panorama—roads closed, cars buried, power lines down, merchandising brought to a standstill, workmen in bulky suits waddling around like outsized children bundled up for play. Throughout their presentation of what they euphemistically termed “current conditions,” the young anchorfolk kept their perky optimism, as they habitually do through every disaster imaginable. They have the footloose insouciance of troubadours or fun-fair gypsies, or insurance salesmen, or stock-market gurus—making overblown predictions in the full knowledge that none of what they’re telling us may actually come true. [378-379]

       It’s an affront, all of that. Weak knees, arthritic knuckles, varicose veins, infirmities, indignities—they aren’t ours, we never wanted them. Inside our heads we carry ourselves perfected—ourselves at the best age, and in the best light as well: never caught awkwardly, one leg out of a car, one still in, or picking our teeth, or slouching, or scratching our noses or bums. If naked, seen gracefully reclining through a gauzy mist, which is where movie stars come in: they assume such poses for us. They are our younger selves as they recede from us, glow, turn mythical.
	As a child, Laura would say: In heaven, what age will we be? [381]

       Today it’s raining, the thin, abstemious rain of early April. Already the blue scilla are beginning to flower, the daffodils have their snouts above ground, the self-seeded forget-me-nots are creeping up, getting ready to hog the light. Here it comes—another year of vegetative hustling and jostling. They never seem to get tired of it: plants have no memories, that’s why. They can’t remember how many times they’ve done all this before.
	I must admit it’s a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn’t: I’m saying nothing, you’re hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.
	The winter’s ice in the Louveteau Gorge is almost gone, even in the shaded crevasses of the cliffs. The water, black and then white, hurtles down through the limestone chasms and over the boulders, effortlessly as ever. A violent sound, but soothing; alluring, almost. You can see how people are drawn to it. To waterfalls, to high places, to deserts and deep lakes—places of no return. [577]

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***

The New Jim Crow OVERVIEW Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander 2010, 2012

OVERVIEW continued...
Between 1980 and 2000, the number prisoners in the US went from under 350,000 to 2 million, the highest number in the world. [60] [more than 2.4 million in 2008.  In 2021, over five million people were under supervision by the criminal justice system,[2][3] with nearly two million people incarcerated in state or federal prisons and local jails. [MY NOTE: The United States has the largest known prison population in the world. It has 5% of the world’s population while having 20% of the world’s incarcerated persons. slightly less in 2022. Wikipedia Incarceration in the United States...Drug offenses account for the incarceration of about 1 in 5 people in U.S. prisons.] This is all the more surprising considering the National Advisory Commission of Criminal Justice Standards and Goals conclusion in 1973 that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.” [8]

Ronald Reagan announced his War on Drugs in 1982. But “...an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug war was declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline.” [6]

Note: Between 2000 and 2007, the number of adults “behind bars, on probation, or on parole” in the US went from 2 million to 7 million [60], ie. 1 adult for every 31 adults in the US. [271]: Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts 2009)

Chapter 1 The Rebirth of Caste

Striking figures:

“Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that period, DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million. By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention,and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984; and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.” [49-50]

Because of globalization in manufacturing, the number of jobless workers increased considerably end of the 1970’s and early 80’s. Crack arrived only in 1985. The response was punitive legislation.

Chapter 2 The Lockdown, reveals how “the absence of significant restraints on the exercise of police discretion is a key feature of the drug war’s design.” [61]

A reminder of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. [61]

A series of Supreme Court decisions has practically gutted this Fourth Amendment.

Terry vs Ohio (1968): Stop-and-frisk rule: “so long as a police officer has ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ that someone is engaged in criminal activity and dangerous, it is constitutionally permissible to stop, question, and frisk him or her—even in the absence of probable cause.” In sum, this authorizes “warantless searches.” [63]

With Florida vs Bostick, police were authorized to do random questioning and searches of people as long as they didn’t refuse to answer, i.e. gave their consent. But most people don’t know they can refuse or simply don’t have the courage to say no.

“In Schnekloth v. Bustamonte, decided in 1973, the Court admitted that if the waiver of one’s right to refuse consent were truly ‘knowing, intelligent, and voluntary,’ it would ‘in practice create serious doubt whether consent searches would continue to be conducted.’ In other words, consent searches are valuable tools for the police only because hardly anyone dares say no.” [66]

In another decision, “the Court ruled that the police are free to use a minor traffic violation as a pretext to conduct drug investigations, even when there is no evidence of illegal drug activity.” (p68)

In still another decision, even informing people of their right to refuse a search was deemed by the court as ‘unrealistic’ and therefore unnecessary. 

These police freedoms (my expression) were institutionalized by the Drug Enforcement Agency police training program called Operation Pipeline launched by the Reagan administration in 1984. [70] 

The increase in SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams for paramilitary drug raids: 1972: a few hundred raids per year; early 1980’s: three thousand; 1996: thirty thousand; 2001: forty thousand. “The transformation from ‘community policing’ to ‘military policing,’ began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, intelligence, research, weaponry, and other equipment for drug interdiction.” [76-77]

A series of drug-war forfeiture laws: 1984 : “Property or cash could be seized based on mere suspicion of illegal drug activity, and seizure could occur without notice or hearing, upon an ex parte showing of mere probable cause to believe that the property had somehow been ‘involved’ in a crime. The probable cause showing could be based on nothing more than hearsay, innuendo, or even paid, self-serving testimony of someone with interests clearly adverse to the property owner. Neither the owner of the property nor anyone else need be charged with a crime, much less found guilty of one.” [79] “...[S]o long as law enforcement is free to seize assets allegedly associated with illegal drug activity—without ever charging anyone with a crime—local police departments, as well as state and federal law enforcement agencies, will continue to have a direct pecuniary interest in the profitability and longevity of the drug war.” [83] Barrack Obama reinforced this tendency: “The Economic Recovery Act of 2009 included more than $2 billion in new Byrne funding and an additional $600 million to increase state and local law enforcement across the country.” [84]
So these “legal rules governing the drug war ensure that extraordinary numbers of people will be swept into the criminal justice system—arrested on drug charges, often for very minor offenses. But what happens after arrest?”  [84]

“More than forty years ago, in Gideon vs Wainwright, the Supreme Court ruled that poor people accused of serious crimes were entitled to counsel...[It] left it to state and local governments to decide how legal services should be funded. However, in the midst of a drug war, when politicians compete with each other to prove how “tough” they can be on crime and criminals, funding public defender offices and paying private attorneys to represent those accused of crimes has been a low priority.” [85]

“Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer. Yet our nation’s public defender system is woefully inadequate.”  [85] [See certain scenes from the television series The Good Wife to get an idea of this situation.] Extract from a 2004 American Bar Association report: ‘All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring. Sometimes the proceedings reflect little or no recognition that the accused is mentally ill or does not adequately understand English. The fundamental right to a lawyer that Americans assume applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the United States.’”  [85-86]

“The pressure to plead guilty to crimes has increased exponentially since the advent of the War on Drugs. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with extremely long mandatory minimum prison terms for low-level drug dealing and possession of crack cocaine. The typical mandatory sentence for first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years. State legislatures were eager to jump on the ‘get tough’ bandwagon, passing harsh drug laws, as well as ‘three strikes’ laws mandating a life sentence for those convicted of any third offense. These mandatory minimum statutory schemes have transferred an enormous amount of power from judges to prosecutors. Now, simply by charging someone with an offense carrying a mandatory  sentence of ten to fifteen years or life, prosecutors are able to force people to plead guilty rather than risk a decade or more in prison. Prosecutors admit that they routinely charge people with crimes for which technically they have probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could win in court. They ‘load up’ defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and—here’s the kicker—to obtain testimony for a related case. Harsh sentencing laws encourage people to snitch.” [87-88]... “Mandatory drug sentencing laws strip judges of their traditional role of considering all relevant circumstances in an effort to do justice in the individual case.” [90] Such harsh mandatory minimum sentences have been, upheld by the Supreme Court. But a number of judges have expressed reservations concerning their obligation to apply such sentences, particularly to low-level offenders. ([92-93]

“As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under ‘community correctional supervision’ —i.e., on probation or parole. Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority—the felony record—that relegates people for their entire lives, to second class status. As described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to ‘check the box’ indicating felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy—permanently.”  [94]

[Reading: Loïc Wacquant: The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto, Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377-89]


Chapter 3 The Color of Justice

This is one of the most shocking chapters in the book. My personal title for this chapter might be When the United States Supreme Court Makes Racism Legal.

First some statistics: “Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted ,to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men. In fact, nationwide, the rate of incarceration of African American drug offenders dwarfs the rate of white...Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino. [Yet] people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.” [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2000] [94] 

The criminal justice system is formally colorblind, but its results are racially discriminatory. Causes: 1 - “grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses” under the control of “conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes.” 2 – “Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination…” [103]

Between 1980 and 1985 there was a radical development of “racially charged political rhetoric and media imagery associated with the drug war.” [106]

Whren vs United States concluded that traffic stops for drug investigations are not unconstitutional and “whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race when making traffic stops is irrelevant to a consideration of whether their conduct is ‘reasonable’ under the Fourth Amendment.”  [109]

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees ‘equal treatment under the laws.’ But in McCleskey v. Kemp, where Georgia's capital sentencing was questioned, even if there is overwhelming statistical evidence that court procedures result in race discrimination, thus unequal treatment under the law, jurors and prosecutors are to be shielded from public scrutiny, thus precluding all claims of racial bias in sentencing. [108-111] This decision was used to reverse a lower court decision which had recognized that the punishment for crack cocaine offenses—which were one hundred times more severe than powder cocaine—are racially discriminatory [crack use was predominant in black communities].  [112-114] In 1996, the same decision was used in another case concerning biased prosecution, where “the Court would not allow any inquiry into the reasons for or causes of apparent racial disparities in prosecutorial decision making,” unless proof of “conscious, intentional bias on the part of the prosecutor could be produced.” [117] In Swain v. Alabama, it was decided that both prosecutors and defense attorneys are permitted to strike ‘peremptorily’ jurors they don’t like, for whatever the reason, thus promoting (my term) all-white juries. In Purkett v. Elm (1995), the Supreme Court held that “when a pattern of race-based strikes has been identified, the prosecutor need not provide ‘an explanation that is persuasive or even plausible.’”  [122-123]

And now, what I would call legalized racism: “In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the Court concluded it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for police to use race as a factor in decisions about which motorists to stop and search,”  [131] as long as it isn’t the sole factor. Racial profiling is used by police on highways and on the streets, as different studies using police department statistics have shown. [133-137] Finally, Alexander v. Sandoval (2001): Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “does not provide a ‘private right of action’ to ordinary citizens and civil rights groups; meaning that victims of discrimination can no longer sue under law.” (!!!) [137] 

(Let us hope that there will not be a military dictatorship in the U.S.)

Chapter 4 The Cruel Hand

This chapter covers the (tragic) consequences of a felony conviction. “Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living ‘free’ in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow...[141] ... [J]udges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys may not even be aware of the full range of collateral consequences for a felony conviction. Yet these civil penalties, although not considered punishment by our courts, often make it virtually impossible for ex-offenders to integrate into the mainstream society and economy upon release. Far from collateral, these sanctions can be the most damaging and painful aspect of a criminal conviction.” [143]

- Housing: President Clinton’s ‘One Strike and You’re Out’ legislation (1998) “not only authorized public housing agencies to exclude automatically (and evict) drug offenders and other felons; it also allowed agencies to bar applicants believed to be using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol—whether or not they have been convicted of a crime.” (p145) Following a Supreme Court decision in 2002, “public housing tenants can be evicted regardless of whether they had knowledge of or participated in alleged criminal activity.”  (p147) “As a result, many families are reluctant to allow their relatives—particularly those who are released from prison—to stay with them, even temporarily.”  [147] Note: “More than 650,000 people are released from prison each year.” [148]

- Employment: Checking the box on job applications. “Nearly every state allows private employers to discriminate on the basis of past criminal convictions. In fact, employers in most states can deny jobs to people who were arrested but never convicted of any crime...Employers in a growing number of professions are barred by state licensing agencies from hiring people with a wide range of criminal convictions, even convictions unrelated to the job or license sought.”  [149] Black offenders are particularly disadvantaged on the job market.

- Debt upon release from prison: “Examples of preconviction service fees imposed throughout the United States today include jail book-in fees levied at the time of arrest, jail per diems assessed to cover the cost of pretrial detention, public defender application fees charged when someone applies for court-appointed counsel, and the bail investigation fee imposed when the court determines the likelihood of the accused appearing at trial. Postconviction fees include presentence report fees, public defender recoupment fees, and fees levied on convicted persons placed in residential or work-release programs. Upon release, even more fees may attach, including parole or probation service fees...[even] ‘poverty penalties’—piling up on additional late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when individuals are unable to pay all their debts at once…”  [155] Paychecks can been garnished with other fees such as 65% for child support or other probation fees.

- Voting rights denied: Only Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote. Most states refuse voting rights on parole. Some impose delays from some years to the rest of one’s life after the end of punishment. [158] “...[T]he United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that the U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.”  [158]

- Shame and stigma: “social exile.”  [163] “Imprisonment is considered so shameful that many people avoid talking about it, even within their own families.”  [166]

“...[W]hat is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of prison against all the odds.” [167]


Chapter 5 The New Jim Crow

“[I]f you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug war is still going on. Most high school and college students today have no recollection of the political and media frenzy surrounding the drug war in the early years. They were young children when the war was declared, or not even born yet. Crack is out; terrorism is in.
	“Today the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has been normalized, and all the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party.” [181]

Then, there is the general state of “denial”  [181] “[I]t is relatively easy to understand how Americans have come to deny the evils of mass incarceration. Denial is facilitated by persistent racial segregation in housing and schools, by political demagoguery, by racialized media imagery, and by the ease of changing one’s perception of reality simply by changing television channels...Those confined to prisons are out of sight and out of mind... [182] ...The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial.” [183]

Michelle Alexander draws a series of parallels between Jim Crow and the present mass incarceration, but the analogy has its limits. It would be a mistake to “suggest or imply that supporters of the current system are racist in the way Americans have come to understand that term. Race plays a major role—indeed, a defining role—in the current system, but not because of the what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility…”  [203]

“If 100 percent of the people arrested and convicted for drug offenses were African American, the situation would provoke outrage among the majority of Americans who consider themselves nonracist and who know very well that Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites also commit drug crimes. We, as a nation, seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted in some states being African American, but if the figure were 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost. We could no longer tell ourselves stories about why 90 percent might be a reasonable figure; nor could we continue to assume that good reasons exist for extreme racial disparities in the drug war, even if we are unable to think of such reasons ourselves. In short, the inclusion of some whites in the system of control is essential to preserving the image of a colorblind criminal justice system and maintaining our self-image as fair and unbiased people. Because most Americans, including those within law enforcement, want to believe they are non-racist, the suffering in the drug war crosses the color line.” [204-205]

Around the year 1990, “the number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk driving...White men comprised 78 percent of the arrests for...[drunk driving] in 1990 when new mandatory minimums governing drunken driving were adopted. They are generally charged with misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license suspension, and community service. Although drunk driving carries a far greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the social response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous behavior through treatment and counseling. People charged with drug offenses, though, are disproportionately poor people of color. They are typically charged with felonies and sentenced to prison.” [206-207]

“...[D]uring the late 1970s, jobs had suddenly disappeared from urban areas across American and unemployment rates had skyrocketed. In 1954, black and white youth unemployment rates in America were equal, with blacks actually having a slightly higher rate of employment in the age group sixteen to nineteen. By 1984, however, the black unemployment rate had nearly quadrupled, while the white rate had increased only marginally. This was not due to a major change in black values, behavior, or culture; this dramatic shift was the result of deindustrialization, globalization, and technological advancement. Urban factories shut down as our nation transitioned to a service economy. Suddenly African Americans were trapped in jobless ghettos, desperate for work.
	“The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new war on Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs? Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded poor and working-class communities, in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead we declared a War on Drugs.
	“The collapse of inner-city economies coincided with the conservative backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, resulting in the perfect storm. Almost overnight, black men found themselves unnecessary to the American economy and demonized by mainstream society. No longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories, lower-class black men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the media and condemned for their condition as a part of a well-orchestrated political campaign to build a new white, Republican majority in the South. Decades later, curious onlookers in the grips of denial would wonder aloud, ‘Where have all the black men gone?’” [218-219]

Chapter  6 The Fire This Time

Michelle Alexander addresses the problem of action against the system of  mass incarceration. Traditional civil-rights-type litigation isn’t the solution. “Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals…Outside of the death penalty arena, civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to leap to the defense of accused criminals.” [226]

“Young African American men were the only group to experience a steep increase in joblessness between 1980 and 2000, a development directly traceable to the increase in the penal population. During the much heralded economic boom of the 1990s, the true jobless rate among noncollege black men was a staggering 42 percent (65 percent among black male dropouts).
	“Despite these inconvenient truths, though, we can press on. We can continue to ignore those labeled criminals in our litigation and media advocacy and focus public attention on more attractive plaintiffs...We can continue on this well-worn path. But if we do so, we should labor under no illusions that we will end mass incarceration or shake the foundations of the current racial order.” [229]

“If we hope to return to the rate of incarceration of the 1970s—a time when civil rights activists believed rates of imprisonment were egregiously high—we would need to release approximately four out of five people currently behind bars today. Prisons would have to be closed across America...According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent a record $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. Adjusting for inflation, these figures reflect a tripling of justice expenditures since 1982. The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003–58 percent of them at the local level and 31 percent at the state level. If four out of five people were released from prisons, far more than a million people could lose their jobs.
	“There is also the private-sector investment to consider. Prisons are big business and have become deeply entrenched in America’s economic and political system… ” [230]
	“Even beyond private prison companies, a whole range of prison profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration must be undone, including phone companies that gouge families of prisoners by charging exorbitant rates to communicate with their loved ones; gun manufacturers that sell Taser guns, rifles, and pistols to prison guards and police; private health care providers contracted by the state to provide (typically abysmal) health care to prisoners; the U.S military, which relies on prison labor to provide military gear to soldiers in Iraq; corporations that use prison labor to avoid paying decent wages; and politicians, lawyers, and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons often in predominately white rural communities—deals that often promise far more to local communities than they deliver. All of these corporate and political interests have a stake in the expansion—not the elimination—of the system of mass incarceration.” [231-232]

	“If we hope to end this system of control, we cannot be satisfied with a handful of reforms. All of the financial incentives granted to law enforcement to arrest poor black and brown people for drug offenses must be revoked. Federal grant money for drug enforcement must end; drug forfeiture laws must be stripped from the books; racial profiling must be eradicated; the concentration of drug busts in poor communities of color must cease; and the transfer of military equipment and aid to local law enforcement agencies waging the drug war must come to screeching halt. And that’s just for starters.
	“Equally important, there must be a change within the culture of law enforcement. Black and brown people in ghetto communities must no longer be viewed as the designed enemy, and ghetto communities must no longer be treated like occupied zones. Law enforcement must adopt a compassionate, humane approach to the problems of the urban poor—an approach that goes beyond the rhetoric of  ‘community policing’ to a method of engagement that promotes trust, healing, and genuine partnership. Data collection for police and prosecutors should be mandated nationwide to ensure that selective enforcement is no longer taking place. Racial impact statements that assess the racial and ethnic impact of criminal justice legislation must be adopted. Public defender offices should be funded at the same level as prosecutor’s offices to eliminate the unfair advantage afforded the incarceration machine. The list goes on: Mandatory drug sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized (and perhaps other drugs as well). Meaningful re-entry programs must be adopted—programs that provide a pathway not just to dead-end, minimum-wage jobs, but also training and education so those labeled criminals can realistically reach for high-paying jobs and viable, rewarding career paths. Prison workers should be retrained for jobs and careers that do not involve caging human beings. Drug treatment on demand must be provided for all Americans, a far better investment of taxpayer money than prison cells for drug offenders. Barriers to re-entry, specifically the myriad of laws that operate to discriminate against drug offenders for the rest of their lives in every aspect of their social, economic, and political life, must be eliminated.
“The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made…” [232-233]

“...[I]n the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact…” [234] 

Michelle Alexander now attacks a number of accepted ideas.
“...[T]he public consensus supporting mass incarceration is officially colorblind. It purports to see black and brown men not as black and brown, but simply as men—raceless men—who have failed miserably to play the rules the rest of us follow quite naturally. The fact that so many black and brown men are rounded up for drug crimes that go largely ignored when committed by whites is unseen. Our collective colorblindness prevents us from seeing this basic fact. Our racial blindness also prevents us from seeing the racial and structural divisions that persist in society: the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated, jobless ghettos, and the segregated, unequal public discourse—a public conversation that excludes the current pariah caste. Our commitment to colorblindness extends beyond individuals to institutions and social arrangements. We have become blind, not so much to race, but to the existence of racial caste in America.”  [241]

“For conservatives, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to a commitment to individualism. In their view, society should be concerned with the individual, not groups. Gross racial disparities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity should be of no interest to our government, and racial identity should be a private matter, something kept to ourselves. For liberals, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to the dream of racial equality. The hope is that one day we will no longer see race because race will lose all of its significance. In this fantasy, eventually race will no longer be a factor in mortality rates, the spread of disease, educational and economic opportunity, or the distribution of wealth. Race will correlate to nothing; we won’t even notice it anymore. Those who are less idealistic embrace colorblindness simply because they find it difficult to imagine a society in which we see race and racial differences yet consistently act in a positive, constructive way. It is easier to imagine a world in which we tolerate racial differences by being blind to them.
	“The uncomfortable truth, however, is that...[for] the foreseeable future, racial and ethnic inequality will be a feature of American life.” [243]

Michelle Alexander criticizes traditional views on affirmative action. “We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve ‘cosmetic’ racial diversity—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness...(p244)...[R]acial justice advocates should reconsider the traditional approach to affirmative action because (a) it has helped to render a new caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a ‘trickle down theory of racial justice’; (d) it has greatly facilitated the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now wrongly assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations...(p245)...There is a fundamental disconnect today between the world of civil rights advocacy and the reality facing those trapped in the new racial undercaste.” [247]

The example of “cosmetic diversity” in police forces shows that they are all obliged to simply “follow the rules” [250] in the War on Drugs.

Obama is a catastrophe: he and his administration (including Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel) have considerably reinforced War on Drugs financing.

“...[I]f the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial cast in America...[W]e must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.” [258]

Quoting Martin Luther King (May 1967): ‘It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.’ [259]  He insisted on a ‘radical restructuring of our society.’ (p260)

Please continue reading >>The New Jim Crow THOUGHTS
back to >>THE BOOKS

***

The New Jim Crow THOUGHTS Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander 2010, 2012

       Contrary to the other books in my RRRReviews, this read dates back a number of years, but I believe that it remains important. I suppose the issues broached in the book are better-known to those who live in the U.S. than for long-term expatriates like myself. The limited research I have been able to do since reading it, confirms its central idea: the prison system is stacked against people of color because of their race.
(See my z-miscellaneous... files on incarceration: the more recent statistics I had when I read it went up to 2016 and are still close to the 2010 figures presented in the book. More recent statistics on Wikipedia.)

       I will limit my remarks to one point:

       The system created by the War on Drugs was constructed on racist grounds and permeated by racism. It is particularly shocking to see that it was created, we might say, artificially for base political motives. The following quotes are from the National Academy of Sciences report on the growth of incarceration
(z-miscellaneous-extract-NatAcadSc-report-on-incarceration-2014.doc)

[116] ‘Nixon and his political strategists recognized that as the civil rights movement took root, so did more overt and seemingly universally accepted norms of racial equality. In this new political context, overtly racial appeals like those wielded by Goldwater’s supporters in the 1964 campaign would be counterproductive to the forging of a new winning majority. Effectively politicizing crime and other wedge issues—such as welfare—would require the use of a form of racial coding that did not appear on its face to be at odds with the new norms of racial equality. As top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman explained, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to. [emphasis in original]” (Haldeman, 1994, p. 53).’

       John Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, was interviewed by Harper’s Magazine journalist Dan Baum in 1994, but the quote below was only published in 2016:

‘“You want to know what this was really all about?...The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”’
	(https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ )

       Another quote from the National Academy of Sciences report:

[120] ‘The Reagan Administration dramatically escalated the war on drugs even though drug use had been falling for most illicit substances since 1979.
	‘After President Reagan launched his own version of the war on drugs in 1982 and renewed the call to arms 4 years later, public opinion surveys in 1986 indicated that fewer than 2 percent of the American public considered illegal drugs to be the most important problem facing the country (Beckett, 1997, p. 25). Surveys conducted 2 years later, however, showed that a majority of the public now identified drug abuse as a leading problem (Roberts et al., 2003). The shift in public opinion was partly a consequence of the enactment of tough new federal drug laws in 1986 and 1988, spurred by reports that crack cocaine had been introduced into urban drug markets. These new drug laws resulted in historically unprecedented rates of imprisonment for drug use and possession (Reuters, 1992; Thompson, 2010).’

       Interesting footnote in this document:

[122] ‘For much of the 1970s, New York’s new drug laws had only a modest impact on the state’s incarceration rate, thanks to “selective pragmatic enforcement” by local criminal justice 
authorities (Weiman and Weiss, 2009, p. 95). That situation changed in the 1980s and 1990s as incoming mayor Ed Koch of New York City sought to “retake the streets” and made a highly publicized shift toward “quality-of-life” policing in 1979, and Governor Hugh Cary promised significant additional support for prison construction, state prosecutors, local law enforcement, and a new joint state-local initiative to target drug trafficking. As a result, the proportion of all inmates serving time in New York State prisons for felony drug convictions soared as the Rockefeller laws belatedly became a major driver of the state’s prison population (Weiman and Weiss, 2009).’

[Suggested must reads: Kim Phillips-Fein Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan      and      Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics]

       Concerning the possible manipulation of public opinion (quote from the National Academy of Sciences report) :

[122] ‘[T]he role of public opinion in penal policy is complex, and public concern about crime and support for punitive crime control policy does not necessarily rise and fall in tandem with fluctuations in the crime rate (Beckett, 1997). Important intervening variables include the kind of crime-related initiatives that are promoted by politicians, the nature and amount of media coverage of crime, and the interplay of racial and ethnic conflict and concerns. Consequently, crime-related public opinion can be volatile…. Perhaps because people in the United States and elsewhere possess limited knowledge of how the criminal justice system actually works, they generally believe the system is far more lenient toward lawbreakers than it actually is (Roberts, 1997; Roberts and Stalans, 2000; Roberts et al., 2003).’
[National Academy of Sciences: The Growth of Incarceration in the United States:  Exploring Causes and Consequences]

       Let me recall the passage quoted above from Michelle Alexander’s book:

“Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that period, DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million. By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention,and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984; and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.” [49-50]

       It’s impossible not be terrified by the fact that such a monstrous machine—political, judicial, economic—, with dramatic long-term consequences for America’s black and brown minorities throughout the United States up to the present day, was created for petty political motives.

       Michel Alexander’s list of what needs to be done to dismantle the monster is daunting to say the least (above all in a world dominated by a neoliberal thought frame). Her plea for “an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality” should be in our hearts every day. Reading this book is a step in that direction.

>>z-doc-incarceration-usa

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Between the World and Me OVERVIEW
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau
2015

OVERVIEW continued...

Later, in his late teens, becoming “politically conscious,” he will understand that 

“the violence that undergirded the country...this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.”[34]

“Malcolm [X] never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers.” [36]

“Perhaps I too might wield the same old power that animated the ancestors, that lived in Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Cudjoe, Mamcolm X, and speak—no act—as though my body were my own.” [37]

In Howard University, “The Mecca, the crossroads of the black diaspora,” [40] he discovers that

“the world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white...[It was] a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range...The black diaspora, was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself.” [42-43]

“My working theory then held all black people as kings, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture.” [46]

But in delving more deeply through his studies at Howard, he develops a more critical perspective.

“I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. I had forgotten my own self-interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I had not yet apprehended their deeper, lifelong meaning. I was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger—I didn’t yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.” [50]

He also refines his language and thought:

“...the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thought...Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life...These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture...It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own special Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness.” [51-52] 

His interest in women also opened his horizons. One was from India, returning there regularly. Another had a Jewish mother and had lived in a nearly all-white town. She taught him that family did not have to be

ruled with the fearsome rod...that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.” [60-61]

At this time his friends

“saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured...[T]he same softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.” [61]

His career as a journalist was born.

“Journalism gave me another tool of exploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body. It was beginning to come together—even if I could not yet see what ‘it’ was.” [62-63]

In the Mecca “we are without fear.” [57] Yes. But an event brings Coates back to the hard reality: a college friend, Prince Jones, handsome, respected, generous, religious is assassinated off campus by a policeman. 

“There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.” [64]

The murder of Prince Jones is a turning point in the book. From this moment on,  Coates’ letter becomes more and more diatribe. The fear has become a “wound,” it festers into bitterness.

When his son, to whom he is addressing his letter, is born, he will be named Samori after a man who had died struggling against the French colonizers. Harking back to the streets, he exhorts his son:

“What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of friends...And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning...That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past...You are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know...You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.” [70-71]

After Prince Jones’ funeral, Coates ruminates on how the system of repression which murdered his friend is the result of the “will” of the majority, who are only preoccupied with their personal comfort:

“The truth is that police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled people to think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.” [79] 

Coates investigates the killing of Prince Jones. The police officer had shot Prince five times. The officer was a known liar. He had been involved in a number cases that weren’t clear. He had been demoted and restored before. “He was charged with nothing. He was punished by no one. He was returned to his work.” [80] Coates writes a story about the police department in question.

“Here is what I knew at the outset: The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black.” [83]

They move to Brooklyn, but the old reflexes are there.

“So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be ‘twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much.’..This is how we lose our softness...It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spend readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.” [90-91]

“New York was another spectrum unto itself, and the great diversity I’d seen at Howard, solely among black people, now spread across a metropolis. Something different awaited around every corner...But when I got off the train and came back to my hood, to my Flatbush Avenue, or my Harlem, the fear still held...And so I found myself, on any given day, traveling through several New Yorks at once—dynamic, brutal, moneyed, sometimes all of those at once.” [92-93] 

“...[T]he foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good work...The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged over night. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.” [98-99]

The “horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body” is confirmed by Michel Alexander’s findings. But how many people really know the facts?

A visit to Petersburg:

“I was obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And yet I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what happened to us in those years struck me as having some import. But whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.” [99] …
“...American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and elan. This lie of the civil war is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream…” [102]

Coates does not want his son to share the dream.

“...I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
	“I am speaking to you as I always have—as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable...The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” [107-108] 

After the battlefields in the South, Coates goes to the North, to Chicago, to report a story “about the history of segregation in the urban North and how it was engineered by government policy.” [108] And he concludes:

 “...I knew that there were children born in these same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was as planned as any subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity, of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives.” [110] …

“To yell ‘black-on-black crime’ is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields—the reduction of the black body—is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie…” [111]

His wife having fallen in love with Paris, Coates makes a trip to Paris on his own. Sitting in the Jardin du Luxembourg, he discovers

“that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation...But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known sooner. I remember, that night, watching the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you.” [124-125]

“I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next...My eyes were made in Baltimore,...my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
	“What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.” [126]

“Your hopes—your dreams, if you will—leave me with an array of warring emotions. I am so proud of you—your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom…What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.” [130]

And a warning in the form of an evidence:

“...[T]oday, with the sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world’s prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.” [131-132]

Coate’s language here is less metaphoric, more direct. His conclusion is the same as Michelle Alexander’s.
       In the last chapter, Coates describes his interview of Dr Mable Jones, mother of Prince Jones. He concludes: 

“After I left, I sat in the car, idle for a few minutes. I thought of all that Prince’s mother had invested in him, and all that was lost.” (p146)

He addresses his son again with a profound pessimism:

“We are captured brother by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
	“But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.” [146]

Continue reading Between the World and Me THOUGHTS
back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Between the World and Me THOUGHTS
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau
2015

       This book, with its flowing metaphoric language and profound emotion gushes out like a long prose poem. Its literary merit is real, and the emotions it communicates are profound.
       In writing his open letter to his son and presenting an autobiographical evolution of his thoughts, Ta-Nehisi Coates is clearly addressing a public vaster than “all black people.” [29] What he expresses will be received differently by those who identify as “black people” and those who don’t. The latter will perhaps empathize with Coates and the “black people,” vicariously feeling guilt or surprise or shock or sadness or...outrage. In light of Michelle Alexander’s exposure of the American carceral and judicial system and its blatant racism, we must agree with Coate’s denunciation of the “horror of our prison system,... police forces transformed into armies,...the long war against the black body” [29]
       His tendency toward hyperbole, extended metaphor, and mingling of concepts can be annoying, but must be put into the development of an argumentation within his letter to his son.

Some examples:

“...the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body...The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations…
	“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. But all our phrasing—racial relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it disloges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressons all land, with great violence, upon the body.” [10]

“The law does not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to further assault your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.” [18]

“...a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country  authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. ‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.” [33]

“The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” [50]

“We are captured, brother, by the majoritarian bandits of America.” [146]

A special mention for Coates’ use of the word “white,” which is usually directly associated with “the Dream out there, the unworried boys,... pie and pot roast,...white fences and green lawns beamed nightly into our television sets.” [29]

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” [42]

 “white claims to civilization” [50]

“dreamers of today would rather live white than live free” [143]

“...perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.” [55]

This last phrase reminds us Michelle Alexander’s “racial caste.”

Is Coates’ voluntarily aggressive use of  “white” is meant to provoke a form of guilt? Is it too encompassing? We can adhere to his overall argument, if at least we accept the more restrictive meaning of “white” as racist or as so obsessed with “the Dream” to the point of excluding any understanding of the racist dimension of American politics when it is clearly exposed.
       On the one hand, in the light of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Coates’ is right:

“The police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” [6]

       The “country’s criminal justice policy” [79] is racist.

       On another hand, in the broader social view:

“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world…”  [146]

Not all of us feel that we are “beyond the design flaws of humanity,” thank goodness. And we respect the humanity in others...white or not white or whatever.

back to >>THE BOOKS

***

Girl, Woman, Other THOUGHTS
Bernardine Evaristo Penguin 2019 Booker Prize 2019

       Implicit in the lives of each personage is the necessity to address more or less directly the issues of her skin colour and eventually her sexual preference, in the context of a society dominantly white and heterosexual. This may be the principle “subject” of the novel. However, there’s more.	
       Consider The Last Amazon of Dahomey: The comic here is fairly heavy-handed, yet it masks, even underlines something more serious. Morgan posts their first comment on the play:

	Just seen #TheLastAmazonofDahomey @NationalTheatre.
O M G women kicking ass on stage! Pure African Amazon blackness. Feeeeerce! Heart-breaking & ball-breaking! All hail #AmmaBonsu #allblackhistory matters Book now or cry later, peepalls!!! @RogueNation

Yes: but the play is about the last Amazon.
Yazz, addressing her mother, Amma, earlier in the novel:

feminism is so herd-like, Yazz told her, to be honest, even being a woman is passé these days, we had a non-binary activist at uni called Morgan Malenga who opened my eyes, I reckon we’re all going to be non-binary in the future, neither male nor female, which are gendered performances anyway, which means your women’s politics, Mumsy, will become redundant, and by the way, I’m humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than feminism.

Morgan is non-binary, Bibi is transsexual, practically all of the characters of the book are “mixed” in some way, even Penelope, apparently white, is “mixed”, women and men can be both heterosexual and gay, black and white: pure...blackness, pure whiteness, pure gender identities aren’t essential. What is essential is being...together in a common humanity.

Amma:	-created the Bush Women Theatre Company with her friend Dominique
-her play The Last Amazon of Dahomey is opening at the National Theatre
-her father was from Ghana, journalist obliged to leave his country for political reasons, holding on to left-wing ideals till he died
-her mother was a half-cast, born in Aberdeen in 1935, fathered by a Nigerian student who returned to Nigeria
-has three brothers: two are lawyers and one a doctor
-felt the necessity of motherhood after her parents died: had Yazz, fathered (artificial insemination) by Roland, a homosexual, who also wanted a child:

       Yazz was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist
       Yazz was going to be her countercultural experiment

-Amma is an Afro activist and equally a same-sex oriented activist, who prefers multiple short-term relationships

Yazz:  -daughter of Amma and of Roland, who is professor 
of “Modern Life” at the University of London
-she’s a real city lover and is present in the theatre for the opening of her mother’s play
-studying literature at university
-her mother put her into personal development courses, which has resulted in an active intellect and a rather sophisticated manner of speaking
-she tries to get the maximum (financial and material) profit from her multiple godfathers and godmothers whom Amma recruited so she could be looked after as a child while Amma pursued her professional career in theatre
-she’s heterosexual and worries she’ll never find the right guy
-her best friends at university are Waris (originally from Mogadishu, never been on a farm, wears a head-scarf for cultural and political reasons), Nenet (father former Egyptian diplomat, she went to a boarding school in Suffolk) and Courtney (uncultivated blond from a Suffolk farm, from a working class milieu, but reading a lot to become more world-wise)

Dominique -co-founder with Amma of the Bush Women Theatre Company
-born of an Afro-Guyanese mother and an Indo-Guayanese father	
-became infatuated with Nzinga (from Texas, who had known a violent childhood), moved with her to a female gay community in the U.S., in which she lived for three years. Nzinga became domineering and violent and Dominique had great difficulties getting free of her
-Dominique became a producer in Los Angeles
-formed a couple with an African American woman Lavern, adopted and raised two children together, and later married Lavern when it became possible
-has lived thirty years in America, which is now her home

Carole  -born in London
-daughter of Bummi
-Carole is vice president of a bank in London near Hammersmith Bridge
-her husband, Freddy, is from a rich white family in Richmond
-Carole was mentored and pushed by her high-school teacher Shirley (Mrs. King) at the Peckham School for Boys and Girls
-her first serious relationship was with Marcus, a white Kenyian, who finally returned to Kenya
-was a close friend in High School of La Tisha

Bummi	-Carole’s mother
-is shocked that Carole would marry a white Englishman and not a Nigerian, contrary to her hopes
-when Bummi’s father, a simple fisherman, died, her relatives in Nigeria took the farm and left her mother and Bummi with nothing
-Bummi’s mother took Bummi and abandoned their home so that Bummi would not be forced into marriage at age 16
-Bummi’s mother had worked in hard labor and always insisted that Bummi go to school every day 
-Bummi has a diploma in mathematics from the University of Ibadan and gave her daughter, Carole, the taste for mental calculation
-Bummi’s husband Augustine had a PHD in economics, but after their moving to England had to become a cab driver, working nights, and ending up dying of a heart attack while driving over Westminster Bridge
-though not religious she found solace in the local church
-after being a cleaning woman in office buildings, she conceived the project of creating a cleaning company, an Equal Opportunities Employer (like almost all cleaning companies)
-to get some money to start her company, she had sex with the greedy church Pastor, the richest person in her neighborhood, who gave her a loan
-Bummi became Chief Executive of her company, B W Cleaning Services
-her first job was in the home of Penelope
Penelope had been a school teacher at Carole’s school, Bummi noticed a framed farewell in the hallway

	she wanted to mention this to Penelope, to develop a friendly working relationship with her because if people like you they are more likely to keep employing you
	but the lady told her, you’re here to work, not to indulge in social discourse, she then instructed her never to open any drawers, cupboards or wardrobes
	or go into any pockets or bags
	Bummi wanted to bite the woman’s head off, but bit her tongue instead

-finally, after going through a training program, she took on several employees
-to her own surprise, she had a deep sexual relationship with Omofe, a woman from her church, but Omofe moved on to someone else after a while
-Bummi married one her staff, Kofi, a Ghanian and widower with several children
-she now lives in a house with a garden in Herne Hill

La Tisha: -La Tisha KaNisha Jones, high school friend of Carole, also student of Mrs. King (Shirley, who students nick-named “Fuck Face”) 
-father from Montserrat (the Caribbean), a bodybuilder, extremely agreeable: disappeared from one day to the next, abandoning La Tisha’s mother, La Tisha, and her sister and has returned home only recently
-her mother is from St Lucia (the Caribbean)
-La Tisha has had three children before the age of 20, each father abandoning her when they learned she was pregnant
-the children are being raised by la Tisha’s mother and sister Jayla
-after going to evening school and getting an online retail management degree, La Tisha has become a supermarket supervisor

Shirley: -best friend of Amma since they were age 11 at New Cross Grammar School for Girls
-daughter of Winsome and Clovis
-teacher at Peckham School for Boys and Girls, she’ll

be remembered by generations of working class children as the person who made them capable of achieving anything in life

-mentor of Carole and of La Tisha and others
-frequent babysitter for Yazz when she was small
-married Lennox, who does the cooking and shopping, while she does the cleaning and ironing
-Lennox’s parents were Guyanese settling in Leeds, but Lennox was raised in Harlem by his Great Aunt Myrtle, a magazine journalist, who pushed Lennox to work hard at school
-when he was young, Lennox was often stopped and frisked by the police, which was also true for Shirley’s brothers:

all black men had to learn to live with it, all black men had to be tough
	and when police killed or beat someone, they were allowed to investigate themselves, and exonerated the accused

-Lennox became a barrister
-Shirley and Lennox have raised two girls
-Shirley was highly opposed to Thatcher’s Master Plan for Education with its National Curriculum, which

left no room for responding to the fluctuating needs of a classroom of living, breathing, individualized children

-Shirley had been annoyed that Penelope (older than she) would dominate staff meetings at school, but they became friends and both deplored the degradation of the educational system
-Shirley regretted when Penelope retired, and despite the depressing teaching conditions, she has decided to continue in public education
-she considers Carole her major success, but Carole has never contacted her since




Winsome: -Shirley’s mother, now retired in Barbados
-Shirley, Lennox, their daughter Rachel and her daughter Madison come on vacation and stay with Winsome and her husband Clovis in Barbados. Winsome’s other children will arrive on vacation shortly: Tony, Errol, Karen and their families
-Winsome had worked all her professional life on the platform of a Routemaster bus selling bus tickets
-she and Clovis are now in their eighties
-they met shortly after Winsome arrived in England: Clovis had been there for two years already
-after moving around they settled in Plymouth, where Winsome and the children suffered from racism, so they decided to return to London
-some years later, in her middle-age, Winsome had a brief sex affair with her son-in-law Lennox, who initiated it and ended it after a while without a word

Penelope: -her father was born and raised in York
-her mother was born in South Africa after her grandfather

took advantage of the Natives Land Act of 1913
	which allocated over 80% of land ownership to the only people capable of looking after it, her mother told her
	the white race
	us

-unfortunately, her grandfather couldn’t discipline the hands and had to come back to England, where Penelope’s mother was raised
-when she was 16, Penelope’s father announced to her that she wasn’t their biological child: she had been discovered as a newborn on church steps. They couldn’t have children themselves, and they found Penelope in an orphanage
-Penelope realized she really didn’t resemble her parents: she was tall, had hazel eyes, curly strawberry blond hair
-after teachers’ training college, she met and married Giles, a civil engineer and moved into a big house in a poor area of London
-with two small children she stayed home, but felt she was losing her brain cells: after reading Betty Frieden’s The Feminine Mysique,

she realized then that what she’d hitherto thought personal to her was, in fact, applicable to many women, masses of them, women whose husbands forced them to stay at home when they were more than willing to put their intellect to good use in the skilled workforce, women, such as herself, who were going bonkers with boredom and banality

-Giles didn’t want her to work and they divorced when Penelope insisted on getting a job
-she started to work at the local comprehensive school Peckham School for Boys and Girls
-later, she married Phillip, a psychologist, but their relation soured progressively in particular after the birth of their first child and when he found her less sexually attractive
-the children grown up and gone, she lived alone in the house after retirement and got a wonderful African cleaner called “Boomi” (!)
-at school, Penelope had learned progressively to stand up to the male chauvinist pig teachers: she brought petitions to the school for the Equal Pay Act and for the Sex Discrimination Act
-when Shirley arrived, Penelope was annoyed to receive critiques from Shirley at staff meetings, but they eventually became work friends
-she developed a nice relation with her adult daughter Sarah, who became an actor’s agent in Australia
-her grandchildren are rambunctious, when they come to England


Megan/Morgan: -great grand daughter of Hattie (GG)
-her mother Julie

looks almost white in a family that’s proudly got lighter with every generation

but she married an African from Malawi

	Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian and part English
	which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being

-she had always been a tomboy, totally anti-Barbie, and after puberty never felt right with a female body, started dressing as a man
-she dropped out of school, and at 18 she got tattooed
-she discovered Bibi by written communication on-line: Bibi was a transsexual, former male medically transitioned to female:
Bibi:

	you see, Megan, I learnt first hand how women are discriminated against, which is why I became a feminist, because it’s not just about gender but race, sexuality, class and other intersections which we mostly unthinkingly live anyway

-Megan has become gender-free for six years, is now Morgan, and lives with Bibi in Yorkshire: they are avid nature lovers, don’t appreciate London and Londoners and visit GG for long weekends helping out on the farm
-GG has changed her will to let Morgan inherit it as long as it stays in the family

-	Morgan recently arranged an Ancestry DNA test for GG, which links people with blood relatives who’ve had it done
	GG had talked a lot recently about her own mother, Grace, who’d not known her father, a seaman called Wolde from Ethiopia, it bugged her right until her death
	it was the big mystery of Ma’s life, she said, and GG felt sad that Wolde would forever remain a mystery

-Morgan and Bibi have created a lifestyle magazine called Rogue Nation, and they have a Twitter following of over a million followers: they’re in London briefly to review the play at the National The Last Amazon of Dahomey
-at her first university talk, Morgan met Yazz, who was one of the students present and daughter of the author of the play The Last Amazon

Hattie (GG) :   -Hattie can’t understand Morgan’s stance as being neither male nor female, but she accepts it
-now 93 years old: birthday celebration with her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren:

	her grandchildren all look more white than black because Sonny and Ada Mae (her children) married white people
	none of them identifies as black and she suspects they pass as white, which would sadden Slim (her husband) if he was still around
	she doesn’t mind, whatever works for them and if they can get away with it, good luck to them, why bear the burden of colour to hold you back? 

But she didn’t appreciate their reaction when Julie (one of her grand daughters and mother of Megan) married the Malawian Chimango
-when Ada Mae and Sonny were young, they had suffered from racial prejudice. Slim wanted them to toughen up rather than sob about it.  He reminded Hatti that his younger brother had been soaked in oil and burned alive before a cheering mob:

	...he said the Negro had reason to be angry, having spent four hundred years in America enslaved, victimized and kept downtrodden…
	she said they were million miles from America and it’s different here, Slim, not perfect but better
	he said his little brother Sonny was the children’s uncle and they needed to know what happened to him and about the history of a country that allowed him to be murdered, and it’s your duty to face up to racial issues, Hattie, because our children are darker than you and aren’t going to have it easy
	they had these conversations until she was able to see things from his point of view…
	Hattie saw that neither of her children liked being coloured and she didn’t know what to do about it

-when Ada Mae and Sonny were 16 and 17 they left the farm from one day to the next, and after different difficulties finally both settled in New Castle
-Hattie met Slim in 1945 after he was demobilized from the American Army: he was from a sharecropping family in Georgia

-	for his part, Slim didn’t like the English weather, but he liked the people, said he felt more respected here, he hadn’t been called boy once and when he rode his bicycle thereabouts, he wasn’t worried folks were gonna don white hoods, burn crosses and lynch him
	it’s why I’m never going home, Hattie

-Hattie and Slim lived together for forty years, and after he died she continued the farming with up to thirty farmhands at one point: only stopped in the last ten years and became an avid hiker
-when the children were small Hattie and Slim worked the farm with her father and mother
-after her mother died and before her father, Joseph, passed away,

one of the last things he said to her was, you belong here Harriet Jackson née Rydendale
	you are my daughter and in your hands rests the future of this family

-Hattie’s ancestor Captain Linneaus Rydendale returned to the district with his wife Eudoré whom he had brought back from Port Royal in Jamaica and established the estate in 1806
-after Hattie’s father died, Hattie and Slim opened an old cabinet that was supposed to stay locked: they discovered that Linneaus Rydendale had done business in the slave trade. Slim was furious.

	Hattie calmed Slim down, they talked it through
	it’s not me or my Pa who’s personally responsible, Slim, she said, trying to mollify her husband, now you co-own the spoils with me…
	it’s come full circle, hasn’t it?

-Hattie has never told anyone that, after flirting with a local boy who was tall with a head of white hair, she became pregnant gave birth at age 14 to a little girl she named Barbara. But her father took the baby away and told her never to speak about it to anyone. She kept her word. But could never forget the baby and liked to imagine that

Barbara had been taken in by aristocrats, become one of those debutantes, married a lord and lived in a castle

Grace: -Hattie’s grandmother, Daisy, was born in South Shields in 1895, fathered by an Abyssinian sailor named Wolde who sailed away a few days after her mother’s encounter with him
-Daisy left her parents’ home, found a job and

carried (her daughter, Hattie’s mother) Grace everywhere in a sling because there was nobody to leave her with, nobody she trusted, enough	after her entire family had cut her off

-Daisy contracted tuberculosis and died, and a factory friend Mary brought Grace to where she herself had been raised in the countryside The Northern Association’s Home for Girls
-Grace told the other girls

	my Pa’s from Abyssinia, she said proudly, pretending she’d known him
	don’t you ever feel ashamed of where he’s from, her Ma had told her, one day we’re going to find him, if he’s alive…

-Grace learned sewing, cooking, vegetable gardening, mental arithmetic, reading and writing, balancing books
-once when Grace was naughty, Mrs. Langley, the head of the home, told her:

well may you cry, Grace, and let this be a lesson to you, you are not like the other girls here, you have to be on your best behaviour at all times because life will be hard enough for you as it is, you will suffer much rejection by people less enlightened than we ladies who generously run this establishment

-later, Grace wanted to work as a salesperson in the local department store, but the manager rejected her candidature saying outright that she’d put his customers off. She kept a deep resentment of the manager’s attitude
-she became a maid in a country estate
-Joseph Rydendale, tall, ginger haired, blue eyes, courted her formerly: she was his “Lady of the Nile”
-he had come back from the war having

fought in the Egyptian desert and in Gallipoli, had known Ottoman beauties of the Orient (she daren’t ask him how)

and had put his father’s farm, Greenfields, in order
-after his father died, he married her:

	...when he took her to the farm, he took her there via the only route through the bustling village in his horse and cart on a Saturday morning
	past the shops lining the main street, past people out shopping who stopped and stared at this strange creature
	most had never seen a Negro before, certainly not one capable of stealing one of the most eligible men in the district, as she was made to feel once she began taking the horse and cart into the village on her own.

But they finally accepted her
-Grace progressively put the farmhouse interior in order
-several children died shortly after birth, which affected Grace deeply, and Joseph wanted absolutely to have a successor
-when Harriet (Hattie) was born, Joseph said

this one will survive, Gracie, I can feel it, she’s a fighter, it doesn’t matter she’s a girl

-for the first 30 months of Harriet’s existence, Grace went through a deep depression, from which she finally emerged to become a perfect mother to Harriet, whom she named Hattie
-Grace imagines talking to her own mother:

	Everything changed, Ma, once me and my Hattie found each other, it was like I came out of the darkness and into the light and could love her as I should
	I wish you’d seen me spoil her, Ma, let her get her own way with everything because I couldn’t say no to anything she wanted, until Joseph stepped in and said I was ruining her
	I wish you’d seen how Joseph and Hattie adored each other, how he made no concessions for her being a girl, how she followed him around copying everything he did
	I wish you’d seen Hattie grow strong, tough and tall, Ma, seen her learn to plough, sow, thresh, drive bales of hay on the tractor from the fields to the barns

The After-party of Amma’s play The Last Amazon of Dahomey: present at the party: Roland (Jazz’s father) (intellectual lucubration on Amazons etc.), Sylvester (a transsexual, friend of Amma’s from drama school),  Kenny (Roland’s partner), Yazz, Carole and her husband Freddy, Shirley and husband Lennox, Dominique (in from the U.S: great reunion with Amma), etc. 

Epilogue: - Penelope approaching her 80th birthday: on a train going north (First Class), reads in the Telegraph a five-star review of The Last Amazon of Dahomey.

Rave review or not, she’ll be giving that one a miss

-after many years alone, she’d snared Jeremy:

	Penelope turned herself into a Fun Person, nothing was ever too much trouble where Jeremy was concerned, in truth most things had been too much trouble before she met him
	with Jeremy, she became an attentive listener, offered soothing assurances, especially when he described his ex-marriage to Anne
	who’d gone from a well-behaved mother and wife in the fifties and sixties to a manhating feminist in the eighties who picked fights with him and disappeared to Greenham Common with women who tried very hard not to look like they were…
	he’s had relationships since, will never marry again
	well, feminism has a lot to answer for, Penelope said in commiseration, quite prepared to betray the cause if it meant finding personal happiness

-Penelope has become stereo-typically upper middle class and somewhat racially prejudiced
-her son lives in Dallas and her daughter, Sarah, lives in Australia: she rarely sees them and regrets not knowing her grand children better
-Sarah suggested that her mother do a DNA ancestry test so that she could eventually see from which part Britain her true parents came from
-when Penelope got the results, she was taken aback: Scandinavia 22%, Ireland 25%, Great Britain 17%, European Jewish 17%, etc. And a total of 13% Africa:

	her African ancestors were probably nomads roaming over the continent killing each other before the British demarcated regions into proper countries and thereby imposed discipline and control
	if she was 13% African did it mean one of her parents was 26% African? Or was it divided between both of them?
	as she didn’t know who her birth parents were, she couldn’t even begin to work out which strand belonged to which one

-finally Sarah, looking at the report, concluded that Penelope’s birth mother or father had had the test done: she obtained an email, which was Morgan’s, and inquired. Morgan announced the news to Hattie, who revealed to Morgan that at age 14 she’d given birth to a girl she named Barbara etc.:

Hattie had kept it a secret all her life, thought of Barbara every day, and couldn’t believe she was alive

-Penelope takes a long taxi ride from the train station and discovers an old broken down farmhouse: Hattie comes out:

	she walks towards her, she’s old, bony, looks robust, is tall without being hunched, quite fierce, is this where Penelope gets it from? her imperiousness, as she’s been accused of in the past?
	the woman is unmistakably, ambiguously a light brown, the sort of colour that could place her in many countries
	this metal-haired wild creature from the bush the with the piercingly feral eyes
	is her mother
	this is she
	this is her
	who cares about her colour? Why on earth did Penelope ever think it mattered?
	in this moment she’s feeling something so pure and primal it’s overwhelming
	they are mother and daughter and their whole sense of themselves is recalibrating
	her mother is now close enough to touch
	Penelope had worried she would feel nothing, or that her mother would show no love for her, no feelings, no affection
	how wrong she was, both of them are welling up and it’s like the years are swiftly regressing until the lifetimes between them no longer exist
	this is not about feeling something or about speaking words
	this is about being
	together

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***

An Equal Music THOUGHTS
Vikram Seth Weidenfeld Nicolson 1999

	I appreciate the writing and conception of this book. It is really unique. I do, however, have several quibbles.
	I’m not a fan of love stories. The major part of the book is a love story. Others will certainly appreciate this aspect.
	I believe that the “tourist” part of the novel is precisely too much that: you have the feeling that Vikram Seth has been to these places and taken notes for the book. The pretext of the concerts is logical enough. Still, there’s something too easy, not sufficiently imaginative. And this “tourist” part is way too long.
	Finally, the question of a half-deaf pianist. From my experience playing the piano and being deaf in one ear, I know you don’t need to look at the keys and, in fact, you feel them, and the music is in your head. For a professional pianist, this is true, and she/he can adjust the sound largely through touch. But pianos have extreme differences in touch and volume, and the control of the nuances does require feedback to the ear. I cannot imagine that Julia can do what she does, that she can really perform in public, particularly in an ensemble. Perhaps, Seth sees it as a fable, something symbolic, music incarnate. The epigraph from John Donne, from which the title of the book is drawn, is evocative: music beyond the world, music in heaven:

And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no cloud nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession, no fuss nor friends, but one equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings but one equal eternity.

The ideal of the string quartet.

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***

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman THOUGHTS Eve Harris Sandstone Press 2013

Vocabulary: niddah = when a woman is menstruating or bleeding due to miscarriage or birth and is forbidden to a man.

       Below extracts from one of the most important scenes in the novel situated near the beginning. The scene shows to what degree the ultra-Orthodox world is outside normal society and how Rabbi Silberman cannot reason beyond his religious dictates. The sequence is exemplary of Harris’ writing technique: the vocabulary is simple, direct; but notice how she uses the imagery of liquid, of flowing outward, of exposure. We remark near the end, the contrast between the Rebbetzin’s hair (and the fact of its being exposed) and her husband’s:

Something was wrong. The bed was wet. The Rebbetzin sat up. A spasm. The pain came again as a dull ache.
	‘Chaim? Chaim!’
	‘Whatisit?’ grumbled Rabbi Zilberman.
‘Something’s wrong—the baby—I can feel wet—’
	The Rabbi snapped on the light and kicked back the covers. A crimson stain had spread from between his wife’s legs. They were lying in it.
	He leapt from the bed and stared down at his pajamas. The liquid had soaked through the thin material gluing to his flesh. He trembled. Her blood was niddah and therefore so was she. Surely all laws would be suspended? He was torn. One law forbade him from touching her and another law ruled that everything must be done in order to save another’s life. He didn’t know what to do. This had never happened before. This was women’s business.
	‘Wha—what should we do? ‘ he stammered.
	Her baby was leaking out of her and Chaim was asking her what to do. Such a husband she had. She heaved herself onto all fours, her hands scrabbling at the sheets. Where was it? Her fingers tangled with gloop.
	‘Ring for an ambulance!’ she snapped. No. No. Please HaShem. But she knew the baby was lost.
	Rabbi Silberman couldn’t move. Which law must he obey? He felt faint sickened by all the blood. He had to help her but his limbs had rebelled. He remained where he was…
...
	...The paramedics spoke in low, kind voices and lifted each limb carefully as if she were a china doll. And indeed she had broken, broken open, the life was still flowing out of her. Her heartbeat had slowed, reverberating in time with the pain. The voices seemed to swim near and far.
	They touched her. The Rebbetzin had always tried to avoid any man’s touch but her husband’s. But these strangers, these goyim had carried her and spoken to her with a compassion that she had desperately needed. And here she was, her flesh exposed. She no longer cared…
...
	...More neighbors appeared peering at the stretcher. ‘The Rebbetzin...the Rebbetzin…’ they muttered.
	And there she lay, her hair dangling over the edges of the stretcher.
	A small crowd gathered and the paramedics found themselves surrounded by an audience. They were used to rubbernecks as long as they did not get too close. The men worked quickly and efficiently ignoring the onlookers but this crowd was different. It whispered, it spoke, it wailed and worse; it gave advice:
	‘Pray for the Rebbetzin Rivka Silberman! HaShem will save her!’
	‘I am a doctor and I am telling you, she needs oxygen—’
	‘My son Simcha—he is a doctor—I’ll call him—’
	‘Her hair—what about her hair? For shame that a married woman should appear like this!’
	It was this last comment that spurred the Rabbi into action. He knew he should have done something before they brought her out. If a woman’s glory was her hair then the Rebbetzin had been crowned with greater glory than most. Her hair was long, lustrous and had remained conker brown marred only by a grey streak here and there. From the day of their wedding, she had covered it as the Torah dictated. He had run his fingers through it so many times in the privacy of their bedroom, that even now his hands retained the memory of its smooth, glossy weight. Long snaky locks brushed the tarmac.
	‘Cover her up!’ he cried. He moved next to the burly Irishman and shook his shoulder. The senior paramedic had been kneeling next to the Rebbetzin as the stretcher was being lifted into the back of the ambulance. He turned to gaze at the Rabbi over his shoulder. The Rabbi’s hair formed a whispy halo as the streetlights shone down on him. His eyes were pools of terror.
	‘Sir, Rabbi—she is covered—we put a blanket on her to keep warm—please just let us get on with our job.’
	‘No—you don’t understand—her hair, you see—just pull the sheet over all of her—’
	‘Sir—she isn’t a corpse.’ The senior paramedic was losing patience.
	‘Yes—yes—I know that—but her hair, it’s uncovered—’ Rabbi Zilberman was gabbling…   … [30-37]

       The following extract concerns love and marriage for the ultra-Orthodox:

	...Chani knew one thing for certain. She didn’t want her marriage to become a replica of her parents’, nor did she want to emulate her mother’s example.  Not every mother had eight children. However the majority of the women in her kehilla fulfilled their spiritual quota by producing at least one girl and one boy. Most went beyond the call of duty and had four or six children. Ten was an exaggeration but was not unheard of. The pressure to ensure the continuation of the Nation was ever present...
...
	...In her world, people did not fall in love. They were chaperoned into marriage. They met, they married and then had children. And somewhere along the line, they got to know each other. They became a team, husband and wife, bringing more babies into the world, as HaShem smiled upon them and gradually they learned to love each other. Slowly but surely, two strangers became a neat, snug unit carrying out mitzvahs in His Name. Falling in love was for the goyim. [106-107]

       Rabbi Silberman’s progressive rigidity and his concern for his image in society:

	...The changes began shortly after they had left Israel when the children were still young, and had continued ever since. Most of them the Rebbetzin had accommodated willingly. She had little choice—Golders Green was not Nachla’ot.
	Chaim had had to knuckle down, study and work hard to become an accepted rabbi. He had to forgo the knitted white skullcap and loose, light-coloured clothes he had favoured in Jeruslem. Here, the congregation did not dance and sing feverishly to welcome in Shabbes and, consequently, proceedings tended to be much more staid.
	Everything slowly became more rigid and conservative, including her husband. He threw out all their old pop records, replacing Elvis Costello and The Jam with the sound of famous cantors singing psalms and liturgy...
...
	...On the outside, she became the model rabbi’s wife, a paragon of virtue modesty and kindness. She visited the sick, she attended Rosh Chodesh meetings, she prayed and baked and cleaned and welcomed and brought up her children in the approved Yiddisher way. She smiled even though her cheeks ached from the effort…[193-194]

       Rabbi Silberman refuses that the Rebbetzin have a bike. He eliminates their secret television and refuses that his wife watch television outside the house in a cafe.

       In the extract below, again, the rigidity of the ultra-Orthodow mores. Avroni’s girlfriend, Shola comes to the Silberman’s house the day after Avroni told her they had to stop their relationship. Shola and the Rebbetzin are alone in the living room. Note how Harris presents the surroundings and the whole scene through Shola’s eyes:

	...Shola sat on the ancient sofa in the living room. She folded her long legs beneath her, tucking herself up as neatly as possible, and sat very still, taking in her surroundings. She strained at every sound, hoping for Avroni’s arrival but all that could be heard was the roar of an electric kettle and the tinkling of teaspoons.
	The room was shabby and bare. Shola noted the absence of pictures or ornaments, walls stained by saint handprints and, here and there, the scribbled evidence of a felt-tip pen. The room needed a lick of paint. A glass book cabinet took up an entire wall to her left. The books were heavy, bound in leather, and had gilt Hebrew lettering embossed across their spines. They filled every inch of each of the cabinet’s five shelves. There were few in English, mostly religious reference books.
	Next to the cabinet a small antique dresser. Family photographs were crammed on its dusty surface. She searched for Avromi and found him with his arm around a smaller and more sombre version of himself. Must be Moishe. Both boys were dressed in the customary black and white. Avromi looked happy, buoyant, his smile wide and genuine. He had not been smiling the last time they had met.
	The Rebbetzin entered the room carrying a tea tray and Shola, embarrassed to be caught gawping at the photos, rushed to help her. An awkward silence fell. The two women sipped their tea, their heads full of unasked questions.
	‘So Sho-la,’ said the Rebbetzin eventually, trying out the girl’s name. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’
	Shola tensed. The woman was a complete stranger and although she had the opportunity to unburden herself to the person who probably knew Avromi best, the situation felt very strange. The Rebbetzin stared at her. Shola squirmed beneath her dark, penetrating gaze.
	‘Shola, my son has been behaving rather strangely recently. He’s been returning home very late, sometimes in the early hours of the morning. Sneaking in and out like a thief. He has been irritable and withdrawn and when I ask him what’s wrong, he won’t tell me. And now you’ve turned up on my doorstep looking for him. I may be a religious Jew but I’m not naive.’
	Avromi’s mother had spoken in a soft, gentle voice. The woman was looking kindly at her. Shola suddenly felt exhausted and tilted her head back to fight back the tears. The Rebbetzin laid a warm hand on her forearm. ‘Take your time,’ she said. I don’t mean to sound condescending but I think it might help us both if we talked.’
	‘All right. Avromi and I are more than just friends. But he ended it yesterday, because he said there is no future in it. It ended so suddenly. I didn’t see it coming and there are questions I wanted to ask him. I just need to see him one last time. I’m sorry.’ The tears threatened to fall.
	‘It’s ok, Shola. Look, I know it hurts, and perhaps I’m biased, but I genuinely think that Avromi did the right thing. Look at me. Are you prepared to live like me? To swap your mini skirts for floor sweepers and wear a wig once you are married?’ The Rebbetzin gestured at her sheitel.
	‘I don’t understand,’ Shola said. She had not realized the woman was wearing a wig. ‘Why does it have to be so black and white?’
	‘Because Avromi lives in a world where there are very firm rules and ways of doing things. If you want a future with Avromi, you would have to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Conversion can take anything from three to seven years of hard study. You would have to live with a Jewish family, to ensure you keep kosher and learn our customs. You would not be able to have any physical contact with Avromi until you become his wife. The rabbis would turn you away several times, testing whether your wish to become an Orthodox Jew stemmed from something other than a romantic relationship. They hold little faith in those who convert for someone else. The motivation needs to be pure and holy and yours alone.’
	Shola had known it all along. Avromi had told her, but she had not taken it seriously. She had laughed, saying she was far too young to marry.
	The Rebbetzin waited patiently.
	‘I guess Avromi did mention conversion and marriage,’ she said. But it all seemed so unbelievable, so strict and far away from what was happening between us.’
	‘I can imagine. But are you prepared to go that far for him, Shola?’
	Shola paused. She did not have to think for long. ‘No, I guess not. I’m only twenty, and I don’t want to get married yet. I don’t even know if I believe in God. My parents brought me up as a Catholic and I went to mass at school, but that’s as far as it went.’
	‘For Avroni, God is part of everything he does, even down to what he can and can’t eat. He needs someone with whom he can share that life.’
	‘I know. I just wanted to seen him one last time.’
	‘Is there any point in prolonging the agony? I think a clean break is best for both of you. If it’s any consolation, I’ve never seen Avroni so down before. He must really care about you.’
	‘It does—at least I know I’m not the only one moping about.’
	‘No, you’re not. Shola, I don’t want to sound patronising, but when you’re ready, you’ll find someone else, more suitable and from your own world.’
	‘Maybe, but he won’t be Avromi.’ How would she find a boy as unique and fascinating as him? Or as considerate and gentle? She wished she could throw her arms around him, pull him close and dissolve against him, just one last time.
	‘No, he won’t be. But I hope he will allow you to stay as you are.’
	Shola looked around the drab, austere room. There was not even a television. ‘You’re right,’ she said. [275-279]

       Below is a long passage from the most hilarious chapter of the novel. The scene is burlesque and unique in the novel. But it illustrates admirably Harris’ writing technique. She shuffles around in the minds of the characters. She applies specific attributes to each character. She also uses specific imagery in the form of leitmotifs throughout the scene.

	...Chani rolled her eyes. Her mother was puffing and blowing like a sperm whale. Her father’s shabby jacket and creased shirt made her sink. He hadn’t even combed his beard and now it resembled tangled vermicelli.
	Her mother waddled across the gravel with purpose as the front door came into view. The house loomed ahead making even Mrs Kaufman feel small. Suddenly white light blazed down on them. Rabbi Kaufman looked around him in the hope of divine visitation. The door opened and there stood the Levys, immaculate in their Shabbes best although it was only Wednesday. Baruch towered over his parents, an Orthodox giraffe in black and white. He beamed at Chani but she could only see his silhouette.
	The Kaufmans blinked stupidly like rabbits in headlights. Mrs Kaufman shuffled closer to Chani for comfort. Her father shook hands with Mr Levy.
	‘Ah, welcome. Come in,’ cried Mr Levy heartily pumping Rabbi Kaufman’s hand. Rabbi Kaufman winced.
	Mrs Levy’s painted lips were stretched into a wide smile.
	‘Hello Mrs Kaufman. Hello Chani. How wonderful to meet you at last,’ she cooed. As her eyes met Chani’s, she quickly looked away.
	‘Baruch HaShem, yes thank you, Mrs. Levy,’ gasped Mrs Kaufman.
	‘Ah so this must be Baruch. You’re very tall, aren’t you?’ said Rabbi Kaufman.
	‘Yes Sir. Sorry about that,’ grinned Baruch amiably.
	Her parents touched and kissed the chunky gold mezuzah as they crossed the threshold. Chani did likewise, for now more than ever she needed HaShem’s protection. Baruch hung back to hover at her side. They exchanged shy little grimaces.
	The Levys led them through the glossy hall into the lounge. Mrs Kaufman paused in the doorway to gaze at the oceans of cream carpet and white leather furniture set before her. Chani gave her mother a nudge. Mrs Kaufman moved on.
	Once they were all comfortably seated, drinks were offered.
	‘A sherry would be lovely, thank you, Mr Levy,’ said Mrs Kaufman. Chani eyed her mother warily. Mrs Kaufman was known to get tiddly easily but she was too busy scrutinising Mrs Levy’s sheitel and stilettos to remember to take a sip. Mrs Levy was trying to estimate how much Mrs Kaufman weighed. It was a miracle that such a large woman had produced such a shnippsy daughter. But perhaps this meant that Chani would balloon in later life?
	Mr Levy was worried that Rabbi Kaufman had noticed that he had taken a swig of whisky before blessing it. But Rabbi Kaufman was in a world of his own, chattering inanely in a nervous attempt to be sociable. Chani groaned inwardly.
	‘This is most pleasant. What a lovely room. Where did you say this whisky comes from, Mr Levy?’
	There seemed to be nothing to talk about. The obvious topic of conversation was being clumsily side stepped. Mrs Levy twitched. Her husband growled jovially. Baruch was perched on the wing of his parents’ sofa and tried not to stare at Chani. The Kaufmans sat squashed together on the opposite sofa. Then to Mrs Kaufman’s enormous relief, the home help announced that dinner was ready....

       The vast dining room table was covered in peach cloth. Matching napkins sprouted from wine glasses. A gilded chandelier cast a pearlescent glow on proceedings. Chani felt as if she had been trapped in blancmange. Her mother’s maroon jacket resembled an ominous bloodstain.
	‘Oh how lovely,’ breathed Mrs Kaufman, sinking into a chair pulled out for her by the home help. She noted the girl’s tight jeans, low cut top and large gold cross that swung between her tanned bosoms and wondered what Mrs Levy must be thinking allowing such impropriety in her house. In front of Baruch too!
	Noting her guest’s look of disapproval Mr Levy felt the need to clarify: ‘Oh yes, this is Ava—our wonderful Polish help. What would we do without her, I just don’t know. The right help is indispensable one finds these days—wouldn’t you agree, Mrs Kaufman?’
	‘That is, if one finds that one needs help. Generally we manage just fine, Mrs Levy,’ retorted Mrs Kaufman. She would not be cowed by Mrs Levy’s ostentatiousness. The woman had a nerve.
	An uneasy silence fell. Baruch and Chani stared at their plates in desperation. Their parents were making a hash of things already. Two aproned minions arrived and began to place steaming dishes on the table. Mrs Kaufman raised an eyebrow as Mrs Levy ordered them about.
	‘Usually I use Hermolis when I need caterers but they were fully booked, so I had to use Esti Finkelbaum’s people today instead—such a shame because Hermolis does exquisite chopped liver.’
	Rabbi Kaufman blessed the food and they tucked in. For a while all that could be heard was the squelch and clamp of masticating jaws and clinking cutlery. Baruch pushed his food around his plate and Chani did the same.
	‘So it seems our son has taken a shine to your lovely daughter,’ boomed Mr Levy suddenly. His wife simpered and reached for her wine glass. Baruch bowed his head and wished his parents’ triple pile carpet would swallow him up.
	‘Yes—we are delighted! And he’s an Or Yerushaliyim student to boot. Marvelous, just marvelous. He starts next year, if I am correct?’ enthused Rabbi Kaufman.
	‘And Chani appears to be a fine, healthy young lady—a good haimisher girl it seems.’
	‘Oh indeed, Mr Levy. My Chani-leh is as fit as a fiddle. Hardly ever ill.’
	And so the grown-ups proceeded to discuss their children as if they were not there. The dishes came and went and Mrs Kaufman’s eyes bulged with every passing delicacy. Carrot and coriander soup was followed by lamb with chopped apricots and prunes served with heaps of hot, fluffy couscous. As Mrs Kaufman reached for her third helping of honey-glazed parsnips her daughter asked to be excused.
	‘If you head up the stairs on your right, you’ll find the guest bathroom,’ trilled Mrs Levy. Her husband momentarily wondered why his wife had not directed Chani to the downstairs lavatory but his doubt was quelled by the arrival of dessert, a splendid lokshen pudding—his favourite.
	‘And if they were to marry, we would prefer the reception to take place at the Waldorf Hilton—obviously if you have no preference of your own, Rabbi Kaufman,’ declared Mr Levy as a mound of glistening noodles was dumped on his plate.
	‘Dad,’ groaned Baruch. ‘Please—not now.’ His ears glowed crimson. He hadn’t even proposed yet and here they were blithely discussing wedding venues. Mrs Levy had half risen, making as if to leave the table but tarried to hear the Rabbi’s response. Rabbi Kaufman blotted his perspiring brow and carefully considered his answer. The Hilton. He would be ruined. He glanced at his wife and saw that she had stopped chewing in shock. Oh hurry up you dithering old fool, willed Mrs Levy. Chani would be at the top of the stairs by now.
	‘We—er—my wife and I that is, have always found the Gateway Inn on the North Circular perfectly adequate for our daughers’ London-based, er, nuptials.”
	‘Oh no, no, noo, that just won’t do—I mean, we would prefer the meal and dancing to take place somewhere a little more upmarket—’  shrilled Mrs Levy. The Gateway was a shabby little motorway motel. Never in a hundred years would she deem to set foot in such a hovel.
	Mrs Kaufman choked gently into her peach napkin. Rabbi Kaufman reached for the sparkling water and poured himself a glass, completely unaware of his wife’s discomfort.
	‘Don’t worry, Rabbi Kaufman. I will ease things considerably for you,’ gloated Mr Levy, patting his pocket where he kept his wallet. ‘Our children deserve the very best, don’t they?’
	Rabbi Kaufman nodded glumly. He couldn’t face his pudding. In need of sugary comfort, Mrs Kaufman launched her spoon into his plate. Matters resolved, Mrs Levy jumped up and making her excuses, fled upstairs. [242-247]

The rest of the scene in the upstairs hallway (when Mrs Levy puts her foot to prevent Chani from closing the bathroom door) continues in a sardonic vein.
       An interesting extract. With just a few words, Harris places fleeting thoughts and gestures that give life to the scene, which is also highly cinematographic (the door swung open and an elegant stockinged foot encased in a beige patent stiletto reached for the pavement etc.):

	...A large black car was parked at the kerb outside her house. Suddenly the door swung open and an elegant stockinged foot encased in a beige patent stiletto reached for the pavement. A glossy copper sheitel emerged as its owner slid gracefully out of the car and blocked Chani’s path. The woman wore huge sunglasses, which she lifted a fraction to peer under.
	‘Chani?’ said the woman.
	‘Yes?’
	‘I am Mrs Levy, Baruch’s mother.’
	Startled, Chani dropped her bag and its content scattered over the pavement. She fell to her knees and made a grab for her possessions. Mrs Levy looked coolly on.
	Perhaps this was just a bad dream. She blinked, but no, Mrs Levy was all too solid.
	Mustering the last remnants of her dignity, Chani straightened up and forced her lips into a smile. She looked Mrs Levy in the eye.
	‘How nice to meet you, Mrs Levy. This is rather a surprise.’
	‘As I knew it would be, Chani. But I think it’s high time we met, don’t you?’
	Chani was not convinced but managed to conceal her misgivings through some eager nodding.
	‘Would you like to come in, Mrs Levy? I’m sure my mother would be very pleased to meet you,’ she replied.
	‘No, not this time, Chani, if you don’t mind, I was hoping we could have a little chat on our own first. How about going for coffee somewhere?’ Mrs Levy added.
	All Chani wanted to do was go home and jump in the shower but she dared not refuse Mrs Levy’s invitation. Something was obviously up. Curiosity and good manners compelled her to accept....
...
Cream and red wicker chairs and matching tables spilled over onto the crowded pavement cafe. A matching awning provided ample shade. Although the cafe was deserted, Mrs Levy ducked inside and chose a private nook at the back.
	‘So what would you like to drink?’
Chani glanced at the menu and noted cheese and ham toastie.
	‘A Diet Coke please.’
	The waiter came and took their order. Alone again, they faced each other. Mrs Levy fiddled with her pearls. Chani stared at the condiments. To her chagrin, Mrs Levy found her very attractive, though a little on the skinny side. Her son had good taste, she would grant him that.
	‘Why are we here?’ ventured Chani.
	‘Well, I was hoping you would ask. Chani, this is not easy for me and I realise it won’t be easy for you but I felt what needs to be said must be said.’
	Chani’s heart began to pound.
	‘I realise Baruch is rather keen on you,’ continued Mrs Levy, feeling her way.
	Chani did not react. She stared at Mrs Levy, barely breathing, waiting for the death knell to toll.
	‘What I am trying to say is that I think Baruch would like to marry you.’
	A small smile hovered at the edges of Chani’s mouth. She knew it! The waiter arrived with their drinks providing a moment’s respite.
	‘And I imagine you are going to accept.’ This was a statement not a question but faced with the reality of the situation, confusion hit Chani once more.
	‘I think I will accept. I mean I do like him a lot—at least I think I do. I just wish there was more time to decide. To get to know each other.’ She could not lie.
	Mrs Levy looked visibly relieved. She suddenly realised how thirsty she was. She took a gulp of her soda water. ‘Ah, so you’re not sure. Well, maybe that’s a good thing.’ Mrs Levy’s smile reminded Chani of a barracuda.
	‘Why’s that?’ She asked. Beneath the table her slippery fingers pulled at her tights. She had forgotten all about her Diet Coke.
	‘How shall I put this? You and Baruch are very different. You come very different families, both frum and proper—but different. And different is not necessarily a good thing.’
	The girl was staring at her again and Mrs Levy sensed the challenge in Chani’s light brown eyes.
	‘What do you mean by different exactly, Mrs Levy? I don’t sense that difference. We get on well enough.’
	‘Yes, but Baruch is not necessarily the best judge of what is right for him. You come from a respectable, traditional Hasiddisher family, your father is a local rabbi of a small shul. All this is well and good but there are things missing that I would like present in a daughter-in-law—’
	‘Such as money?’ It wasn’t hard to guess.
	Mrs Levy looked thoroughly uncomfortable. ‘Yes. But not only money—’
	‘What else then?’ snapped Chani.
	‘You haven’t been to sem. The right sort of girl for Baruch would be one that has attended. He needs someone on his level to assist him in his rabbinical duties, for as you know we have plans for him to become a rabbi.’
	‘I am well aware of those plans, Mrs Levy and so is he. Unfortunately.’
	Mrs Levy frowned. This was not going the way she had planned.
	‘For your information, Mrs Levy, I didn’t go to sem because I didn’t want to. Not because I couldn’t get in. I went and had an interview and was accepted on the spot. My grades are excellent—’
	‘Yes, I know but—’
	‘Excuse me, Mrs Levy, I was talking.’
	Mrs Levy opened her mouth and then closed it.
	‘As I was saying, I chose not to go because I realised it was not for me. I wanted the real world. I believe you can be frum and still live in it. Well, as close to it as I can get it at any rate. I wanted a small job—maybe in child-care or as a secretary—and some independence whilst I waited to get married. But jobs are hard to come by if you don’t have any training, so I’m stuck helping out at Queen Esther. So I have come to a decision. If I don’t get married soon, I will take my savings and use them to fund my studies at a local college where I will learn art and eventually become a proper art teacher.’
	The speech may have been entirely improvised, but it had tripped as slightly off her tongue as if it had been fermenting in her mind for months. She was rather proud of it and indeed the idea seemed possible should things with Baruch fall through. It was at this moment that she knew she didn’t want things to fall through. She would not let Mrs Levy get in the way. This was her chance of escape and suddenly Baruch—even with his spots—had become precious. She would fight...[231-235]

z-doc >>aricle in the The Jewish Chronicle https://www.thejc.com/judaism/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-strictly-orthodox-qj6x5fxn
back to >>THE BOOKS

***

The Tiger Queens OVERVIEW Stephanie Thornton New American Library 2014

       Four first-person narratives, where the reader enters into the person’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings with acute detail about the way people (may have) lived and reasoned:

...“Borte Ujin.” My mother, the famed seer Chotan, called from the carved door of our ger, her gray hair tied back and a chipped wooden cooking spoon in her hand. I hated that spoon−my backside had met it more times than I could count on my fingers and toes.
       I was a twilight child, planted in my mother’s belly like an errant seed long after her monthly bloods had ceased. After being childless for so long, my parents welcomed even a mere girl-child, someone to help my mother churn butter and corral the herds with my father. And so I grew up their only daughter, indulged by my elderly father while my mother harangued me to sit straighter and pay more attention to the calls of geese and other messages from all the spirits.
       My mother was by far the shortest woman in our village, but the look she gave me now would have scattered a pack of starving wolves. “Pull your head from the clouds, Borte,” she said. “The marmot won’t roast itself.”
       I lugged the skin bucket of milk inside, ducking into the the heavy scents of animal hides, earth, and burning dung. The thick haze of smoke made my throat and eyes burn. The felt ceiling was stained black from years of soot, and the smoke hole was open to the Eternal Blue Sky, the traditional rope that represented the umbilical cord of the universe dangling from the cloud-filled circle. A dead marmot lay by the fire, the size of a small dog, with prickly fur like tiny porcupine quills. Our meat usually came from one of the Five Snouts−horses, goats, sheep, camels, and cattle−but my father’s eyes sparkled when we could indulge my mother’s taste for wild marmot. The oily meat was a pleasant change.
       “There’s a visitor on the path.” I hacked off the marmot’s head with a dull blade and yanked out the purple entrails. My father’s mottled dog pushed at my hip with her muzzle, but I swatted her away, daring to toss her the gizzards only when my mother wasn’t looking.
       My mother sighed and rubbed her temples, squinting as if staring through the felt walls at something far away. “I knew about the visitor before he stepped over the horizon,” she said, the beads that dangled from her sleeves clattering with her every movement. Each was a reminder of a successful prophesy breathed to life by her lips, bits of bone and clay gathered from the spine of the Earth Mother to adorn her blue seer’s robes. [6]

       Writing dense, yet crystal clear. In these few short paragraphs, we have intimations of everything that will follow, details that will take their full significance as the story develops: “mere girl-child” “mother churn butter and corral the herds” “skin bucket of milk” “heavy scents of animal hides, earth, and burning dung” “felt ceiling” “eternal Blue Sky” “umbilical cord of the universe” “meat from...horses, goats, sheep, camels and cattle” “hacked off the marmot’s head” “purple entrails” “prophesy breathed to life by her lips” “ the spine of the Earth Mother”... 
A form of animist religion is present, but it isn’t the dominant characteristic of the society Thornton describes.
       It’s a world dominated by military conquest for pillage, above all, for acquisition of slaves and women. A world dominated by men who have a phenomenal mastery of horse-back and arms. A rigid hierarchy of combatants, with a strict loyalty to the chief. There are very few battle scenes, however: these are in the background, in the distance, we might say, because Thornton concentrates on the life in the camp. Drinking, carousing, eating. Preparation of food, clothing, felt-skin walls for the gers (big tents). Also sex, birthing, child rearing. All without which the continuous expansion of the Khan’s empire would have been impossible.
       How could the four women central to Thornton’s narrative have saved the Khan’s empire? It wasn’t only through their domestic and political ingenuity, but via the preservation of the social structure. A strict hierarchy based upon mariage and upon descendance from the Khan permitted the Khan’s wife and female descendants to acquire the power of governance.
       I won’t elaborate on the developments and intrigues of the story, which are remarkably developed. What I find particularly stimulating and enriching in this book is precisely two things the quote above illustrates: the infinite subtleties in the thought processes of each of the four narrators as they interact with their interlocutors, on the one hand; and, on the other, the rich descriptions of the physical environment, smell, sound, sight, all beautifully intertwined and poetically developed.
       A regret: such excellent writing inspired by a history of  “brutal conquest” (p.459 Author’s Note). How sad to think that the largest contiguous empire that ever existed, covering Asia and Europe, was the product of brutality.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao THOUGHTS Juno Diaz 2007

	After the introductory pages, the book is divided into three untitled sections of unequal lengths, numbered I to III: the first two represent over 90% of the book, I being 1½ times longer than II; III is only 20 pages long and is followed by the concluding pages and an epilogue The Final Letter. There are signs illustrating the title pages of these sections, clearly symbolic: I = atom (heart of the story? science-fiction fascination of the hero, Oscar?); II = raised fist (revolt of the characters in general? revolt against the fukú?); III = circle with three projecting prongs (rounding off of the whole story? Yunior, Lola, and Oscar’s finding their own, finding their place outside Santo Domingo, exorcizing the fukú? Zafa?).
	There are eight chapters crossing these sections. The chapters correspond to the narrative in non-chronological order, with periods of years indicated in their respective titles. All of the chapters except number 2 are written by Yunior (these are the ones containing footnotes). Chapter 2 is written by Oscar’s sister, Lola, who is Yunior’s girlfriend for a time in the story. She is also the author of a few pages at the beginning of section II, preceding chapter 5. Lola’s first-person writings may be comments added after the fact to Yunior’s narrative. Finally, there are a few pages by Yunior introducing section III, before chapter 7. 
       Despite the flashbacks, the chronology is very clear and the reader is never lost.
Chapters 1, 4, 6, 7 are centered on Oscar and are in the chronological order of his life.
Chapter 2 is by Lola, about herself and her brother for a period inside that of chapter 1.
Chapter 3 is very long and concerns the childhood of Oscar’s mother (Beli) up to her departure from Santo Domingo and before Oscar’s birth. In this chapter, we discover a very important secondary character, who will appear in chapters thereafter, in the person of Oscar’s Aunt, La Inca, who raised Beli from age nine till Beli’s departure from Santo Domingo at age16.
Chapter 6 describes the tragedy of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, whose life was destroyed by the whims of the dictator.
Chapter 8 is the narrator concluding in the present and revealing how Oscar and his family’s history have been formative in his own life and how it has—perhaps—helped him exorcise the fukú after Oscar’s death (through writing his story).
       The epilogue brings in a final discovery and a note of humanity.
        Junot Diaz has created an antihero in the person of Oscar and an anti-stereotype (exaggeratedly so?). Oscar is an American-born Dominican, but dark black, particularly obese, lover of women but not phallocentric, devoid of seduction and ever virgin, and a fat sci-fi-reading nerd, obsessed with that literature to the point of writing some himself.

Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers’ cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents’ eyes, he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Buroughs… [21]

	Diaz will try to make us understand this anti-hero and even have some sympathy for him. I’m not certain he has succeeded in doing the latter, though. Oscar’s mother is described as extremely tough and hard-willed, but the description of her past permits us to understand her character, even if we can’t condone her actions per-se. Oscar’s sister is also very tough and unsympathetic. His abuela La Inca is more endearing, a woman of strong character, dynamic, yet profoundly human. Finally, his grandfather, destroyed by prolonged torture and imprisonment, is a sort of Dominican holocaust victim, a tragedy of metaphysical proportions via its absurd cruelty and injustice. For me, these two latter characters give a real human dimension to the novel—made possible, no doubt, through the contrast with the other characters.
        Diaz’s writing has a lively latino orality, with myriads of interspersed Spanish. Dialogs seem quite natural. The language is simple overall, and often fairly heavy, corresponding to the nature of the narrator (hopefully, rather than to that of the writer). Example:

The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more. [253]

Is the book a fair illustration of latino-American mentality or, more specifically, Dominican-American? Be that or not, it does bring home the horrors of the Trujillo dictatorship and the psychological-social consequences for many Domican-Americans.


Note: wordplay on names:
Wao = Spanish expression? or Wow! ?
Oscar = Spanish something? or award? or scar? letter O in communications?
Oscar Wao = Oscar Wilde?
Abelard = he, who out of idealized human respect and human love, cannot accept an absurd system or is inapt to live in it?
La Inca = original inhabitant, native? royal blood?
Yunior = younger brother (who learns from the older)

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Piranese THOUGHTS
Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury 2020

If we take seriously the two quotes in epigraph to the novel, we’ll be missing its essence. 

‘I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on.’		 The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis

‘People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.’		Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in
		The Secret Garden,  May 1976

       Ordinary fantasy? No. This is tongue-in-cheek: it’s obviously fake, and simply part of the logic of the story.
       It’s only progressively that we become aware of being in the mind of a schizophrenic. The imagined world in which the narrator is enclosed is inspired by the real Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a great 18th century etcher, inventor of vedute ideate (imaginary scenes) of Roman architecture and of Le Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). You must look at these engravings on the internet. Since the narrator uses the name, he must have had knowledge of these engravings. Clarke uses these images to make us enter the inner world of her narrator and, finally, help the us get a feeling for the workings of a schizophrenic mind. We learn how the narrator, with the help of a talented woman psychiatrist, will be able to move out of his closed world and to adapt to the real world. He will never be cured, but he will be able to adapt.
       Amusing to dig back into the novel to figure out who’s who, who is a psychiatrist, a former collegue or friend, those who have died or disappeared or simply moved away. In the end, our “Piranesi” is no longer the poor lost person, the psychotic bum living alone in a cave on a beach. He is able to walk in the street and to control his instinct to address every passerby who he thinks was part of his former world, the world he no longer inhabits, but which he continues to believe was real.

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Old God’s Time OVERVIEW
Sebastian Barry Faber 2023

Overview continued...
...Every thought, every observation, every feeling, every dream is his. And the reader has to be careful, because Tom has a tendency to doze off in the middle of the day or simply day-dream. Also to dream at night. The past then becomes, surreptitiously, the present, and the general chronology is distorted.

       Of course his story continued as he lay there sleeping, and his brain continued to tell a story disconnected from his waking self. [45]

       If he wasn’t exactly sleepless – he kept nodding off and waking abruptly – he couldn’t sleep properly. [69] 

...    He sort of came back to himself then, standing there in the kitchen, with a cloth in one hand, and Winnie’s cup in the other, dry as bones. [100]

...    Tom was waking – well he assumed he was [114] waking, but was it normal waking? – he was engaged in some activity, let us say, kin to waking. On one of the benches in St Stephen’s Green… [115]

       And he was thinking all this, and before he knew it he was waking, not really registering the boundary between thought and sleep, waking groggily, like he had drunk a barrel of whiskey, not that he ever had, nor even a glass. It was still very much night… [144]

       A person might be forgiven for not sleeping after thinking of these things, but Tom felt himself dropping away into a shallow slumber. That deepened into a dark pool of dreams. That seemed so real they were real…. [150]

       Surreptitious weaving in and out between past and present, sometimes between real and imaginary. It’s in the moments of dream and reverie that we discover Tom’s past and delve into his feelings, and, into, finally, his humanity.

       The knock on the door and the visitors will plunge Tom into the depths of his past, where he has, with a sort of meticulous unconsciousness, if we can use such formula, sunk memories which he hadn’t wanted to bring back to the surface.

...    Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible; receding way into old God’s time, like walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn’t mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that… [166]

...    He was longing for sleep, he was longing – for what, peace? But there was no peace now and maybe rightly. The nine months alone had been like a pregnancy, and it had given birth to new thought, and new light on old thoughts, and this time now was going to be the time when he reared those thoughts. Wiped their arses, stuck plasters on their grazes, and sent them to school. He felt there was a great reckoning coming but he didn’t know what it was exactly… [141]

God’s Old Time is an existential debate like that between Job and God:

Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee?
			Book of Job

Epigraph to the novel: God helping Job accept the limits of the human condition, accept the fundamental tragedy of his existence, accept the limits of human responsibility.

...he was a pensioned ghost from the strange past, a pointless survivor, an old soldier of forgotten wars. A remnant, with a torn gansey for a soul. [188]

...    This was the interest of ongoing life. The arrow was going higher, higher. Soon it would catch [189] its breath at the apex, halt gracefully, truly, and begin the fabled descent. Like an arrow of old. In the old stories. In the old wars. In time already lived, whose inhabitants were gone to their reward. Whose troubles were no more. Whose journeys were done. [190]

Existential...and also concrete: aging, depression, sexual violence, suspense, injustice, justice, atonement, and, simply, the infinite play of light. It’s all there. With one powerful constant from beginning to end of the novel: Tom’s unshaken love for his wife June.

Continue reading Old God's Time THOUGHTS
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***

Old God’s Time THOUGHTS Sebastian Barry Faber 2023

       Here is the complete passage from The Book of Job from which the Epigraph is drawn:

Job 39:9-12	King James version
9 Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?
10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
11 Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him?
12 Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?

       The unicorn was an animal (probably not mythical in the Bible: perhaps a rhinoceros): an animal which could not be subjected to the service of tilling the soil.

       The Book of Job is a philosophical debate between God and Job: God reveals the limits to human being’s control of the world. Job must accept the human condition, finally the human existential tragedy, which encompasses also the limits of human understanding.

-Whale at the Natural History Museum = Jonas = Job [22]
-Perhaps the epigraph also evokes an analogy between unicorn and knife.

       Old God’s Time is a story of doubt and tragedy, and finally, of the human predicament: live when you are aging, live with loss, live in the world as it is and cherish the memory of your love. Tom has lived nine months without thinking of the past, nine months, like a pregnancy. The novel describes a parturition.

Did they know how privileged they were to be young? No need. And no one ever knows that, at the time. That thought brought another feeling. By Christ, he was on the cusp of sudden tears. This was all private to him, he hoped. The feeling seemed to drop through him fluidly, like an otter into a stream. A sort of sympathy for them, these hard, young, certain men, with their priorities in order, no doubt. Right and wrong. Catch the villains. Oh, get the convictions at all costs. Go home to their wives and their babies. Life never ending. Everything in order. And nothing, nothing. Bleak destination. No, no, that was his own stupidity. He had loved her well enough, as much as he was able. Who would be a policeman’s wife? But oh, the queer sorrow of it – the lovely lightness of these young men, in their betraying suits. No, but he wanted them gone, he wanted his bit of ease back. Nine months, like a pregnancy. Never so happy. Oh, Jesus, he yearned for it now – for these two boyos to rise to their feet, and with a few last pleasantries and even cajolements regain Mr Tomelty’s fussed-over gravel outside, and be quietly gone. [15]

     The rain that had drenched the branches of the trees had lost heart, but the wind still pulled greedily at what was already there, making the drops fly at him, fly at everything, the sunlight inserting gleams and glimmers into them, like a million silver sprat. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure. He was briefly enraged, as if he were someone only in charge of himself, and not himself. The fucking Brother from Tipperary. Like he was a patient, a lunatic out for a constitutional. Then he was despondent, his boots growing heavier. His soul weighted, like a handicap of lead weights on a [29] racehorse. Oh the good Jesus. Was he happy or wretched? Was he ruined or saved? He had no idea. What was he to Winnie or Joseph, what use to suffering man? Then he stopped on the drenched pavement, and put his hands to his face, and cried again, with sobs, and shudders, in the diluted sunlight.
     His unknown neighbours gazing out at him, as may be, a lump of a creature in a black coat. Somewhere in there was a famous food writer, somewhere in there the ‘architect of modern Ireland’. So he had been told by the postmistress in the village. Had he not been a competent detective, had he not been appreciated for his detective skill, his intuition, his sudden inspirations? [30] 

...Their coming had unmoored  him, unsettled him, terrified him, yes, terrified. Their coming out was an act of terror, but how could they know that, their intentions were so good they deserved a bloody medal for them...[31]

       At one point, we see the first signs of going into labor, if I may use the metaphor,: 

...He was clearly going mad. But he had read somewhere that the truly mad would never know they were mad. He knew he was mad. Was that a proof of sanity? [115]
     Talk to yourself, Tom, talk to yourself, calm your heart. Hold on by your fingernails. Something was coming, but not yet. He was king over time in the wicker chair. Preserving the benefice of the present… [154]

       In the early pages, we learn that Tom has lost his wife and children: the reader will have to wait to get the explanations. But we can understand why he is in a state of depression:

       He stood there in his living room, dripping. It was as if he were standing there for the first time. Alien somehow, unknown. Animal-like. His bits and pieces refusing to talk [31] to him. Communicate any sense of home. He didn’t know what to do. He wished Winnie – But Winnie was dead. Joseph murdered in Albuquerque. His wife June dead, dead. What was wrong with him, that he couldn’t acknowledge his dead ones. [32]

       He will acknowledge them completely – tell their story – by the end of the novel.

       Sebastian Barry, the poet: surroundings translate into feelings.

…    Each time he went back to bed still mindful of the feelings of the things around him that had no feelings. He had given them feelings, the grace of feelings – it was the least he could do. They had been his companions now all these Dalkey months, they had conspired to please him, content him, recompense him for whatever he had lost. [48]

...    He was just an old policeman with a buckled heart, but if he had known how, he would have sucked the whole vista into himself, every grain of salt and sand and sea, swallowed it whole, like one of those old whales in the loved museum, like a monster in an ancient story. All this blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers and acres of the after-rain. He knew, he knew he was in trouble, he could sense the trouble with his copper’s instinct and didn’t yet know its shape, but the bay also released him somehow, let him go for a blessed minute into some wild freedom, so that his heart and soul were both shaken and renewed, in the same moment, in the same breath. If he stayed on this train, if the bay would only stretch to the distance between the earth and Andromeda, if it would only so oblige him, thank you, thank you, he would never die. [105]

       A central theme in the book: the tragic psychological consequences of the sexual abuse and violence inflicted upon orphans by Catholic priests in the so-called ‘mother and baby homes’ and the religious orphanages which existed in Ireland up to the late 90’s. These constitute crimes well beyond the abuses themselves, because of the long-term psychological devastation of the victims. See the film The Magdalene Sisters (2003) Peter Mullan.

     ‘I’m not even sure ‘twas an offense, in your days,’ said O’Casey…
     ‘What wasn’t?’ said Tom reluctantly.
     ‘We know that you had a right old time with the priests in the sixties. I mean in those days – ’
     O’Casey had been intending to press on, but Tom stopped him immediately.
     ‘Ah no, Jesus, no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.’ And he got up with surprising grace and agility. ‘No, no,’ he said.  [16] 
… ‘I don’t think God himself…’ said Tom, reluctantly, in a ‘queer small voice’, as O’Casey opined later. ‘The absolute suffering. There was no one to help me.’
     Now, he hadn’t meant to say that. What did he even mean? No one to help him. No, he hadn’t meant to say ‘me’, he’d meant to say ‘them’. Jesus go home, boys. You are bringing me back to I don’t know where. The wretchedness of things. The filthy dark, violence. Priests’ hands. The silence. That’s just Tom Kettle, don’t mind him, feels everything too much. Murder, you could murder, you could strike, you could stab, shoot, maim, cut, because of that silence. Better to do it, murder, kill. He felt it now. Burning. The fullest humiliation of it felt afresh. Still present and correct, after all the years. [17]

Passage dense with implications:
-bringing me back to I don’t know where: doesn’t want to recall: he wants peace, he’s tried to forget his personal tragedy which is linked to the crimes of the priests
- no one to help me=the me really is Tom, who witnessed the crimes of the priests as a child and who, helplessly, witnessed June’s murder of the priest and her turmoil over the years
-murder to revenge the silence
-silence, burning=June’s silent suffering never really vindicated because in the end she burned
-stab=June’s jest 
-knife=unicorn actually used=served=but to no avail to free June of her suffering, so in fact not served
-Tom’s Lee-Enfield rifle that he had used ‘to kill unsuspecting souls at a distance. Like death meted out by the very gods.’ [17] = like the actions of the priests against innocent children, actions which kill at a distance, also June’s act of murder as an act of God
-Collateral victims of the priests’ crimes: ex: Winnie never got over her mother’s death: ‘Law degree. His pride. She flamed through the first year, her mother died, she emptied out somehow, she pushed on emptily, she graduated dressed in finery, in her grief.’ [20] 

       Interesting to see how Barry introduces this sociological-historical issue: In Mr Pendergast’s store, when Mr Pendergast and the women present watch Tom buying house cleaning products, Tom recalls the old sexual stereotypes:

       He still felt the old instinct – professional distance. The curious aloofness he had perfected, especially in the vicinity of bloody crimes. When children were killed or even animals. When young girls were struck down, felled by fists, by shoes. In the old days, when wives were bloodied and beaten, you were not to go further than the front door. Ah yes. You could check if the person was still breathing, but no more. A child of the house could be lathered into a state of utter distress – you had to leave that alone too. You learned these things off the station sergeant, off the tough detectives. The lowliest of men were kings of women. Girls fleeing from laundries, children fleeing from orphanages, all had to be returned. There was no statute he knew of requiring him to do so. It was a matter beyond the law. It was what everyone wanted. That was a quare form of policing, but he had never done anything but buckle under. Never done anything, but just once. [when he covered up the murder] [54]

       From sexual stereotypes to sex crime to anger for being deprived of June, June a victim:

..she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her...And what had taken her away? What had taken her away? What has taken her away? Only the most perfidious dastardliness, only the most contemptible vileness. [60]

       First indication that June never got over her trauma:

..she carried in her head a whole universe of good things with the bad. [37]

       First indication that Tom had also been raised in an orphanage:

...The Brother had told him, if he brushed his teeth twice a day he would still have them at fifty – the only truthful thing that the man had ever said. [44]

       Tom’s visions of the little boy are a sort of recall of himself as a little boy:

    Then he saw the little boy who had arrived at Christmas with his mother… [33]
     It was only about six but he was surprised to see the little boy running through these different patches of light... [126]

       The little boy being pushed into the water by the little girl: a metaphor of Tom, as a little boy, being drowned through his experience as an orphan, but also being drowned by June’s murder of the priest.

       Water is a salvation, a purification, as in the last dream of the novel.

       The unsolved case of a murdered girl [71-72]: June had also been murdered in her childhood.

But who was she? Almost as unknown as the murdered girl. Was she in effect a murdered girl, a long-drawn-out murder like death by a thousand cuts? Yet there wasn’t a mark on June, for all the cuts she had endured. They were cuts of another kind, of course. [75]
Their whole lives seemed to him like crime scenes. [73]
The rapes, the bloody priests, the nuns, the hardship, the sorrow, the cruelty, the mess. [92]

       After the murder (a few years later?), June had fallen into a deep depression before her suicide, shortly after they had moved into a new house in Deansgrange:

In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was very often like someone you remembered that you had loved. [70] … He had no way to reach her sometimes, even when she was home. [71]

       The depression was a logical consequence of her trauma and of her murder of the priest.

In killing Matthews she had not gone free. [216]

       June had been systematically raped from age 6 to 12:

He could see it all perfectly, with awful, experienced eyes. He knew how small six was, and how small even twelve was. He thought of her there as a big girl, and that sweating, murderous priest. Murderous. Many a soul put out like a candlewick in the sea of lust. The ocean of lust pouring down on a little light, and never to travel again the bright breast of the earth, and come up again like a daisy, a bright yellow daisy of light, on the other side, as the gathering sunlight of a new morning. Quenched and obliterated. He had seen it with his own eyes, the boys the Brothers were raping, with the light in their eyes put out. Boys put to the sword of their lust. For ever. He had seen it. He had witnessed it when he didn’t even know the words for it, when he couldn’t have described to anyone what he had seen. The little wicks of their eyes put out. Eternally. [99]

       As mentioned in my Overview, one of the subtleties of the novel, also one of the difficulties for understanding its chronology and the reality of certain events, is Barry’s use of dreams and imaginary visions. At first reading, we may take these sequences literally. But we have to reflect back later in order to understand them. This is not an easy read.
       For example, we only realize in Chapter 14 that Chapter 4 was imaginary, peopled by ghosts. Note his encounter with Mr. Tomelty in Chapter 4:

His very footstep seemed to him less recognisable. Where he once had stridden forth, now he more or less was on a shorter rein, he had taken in his stride, tailored it, like the gansey of a famished man. The old Victorian buildings went straight up as always, but they also these days were inclined to sway about a bit, just at the tops where the flourishes were, the inspirations of architects, little Greek temples, dates marked on decorative tiling...Out of the doorway with its proud array of plaques and metal ribbons stepped Mr Tomelty...All the other actors seemed to have disappeared into invisible wings, so Mr Tomelty had no choice but to notice the rather bedraggled tenant of the annexe...Mr Tomelty...looked much trimer, younger…[57]
...Mrs Tomelty – well she is my guide in a matter like this... [60]
...Now Mr Tomelty inveighed upon Tom to follow him into his own quarters, through the main door of the castle no less...And coming down the steep stairs, treading firmly, was an unknown man, a smallish figure with white hair combed back, and a tweed jacket...The descending man was looking neither right no left, nor even up or down, he was in a private reverie of his own, and even as he passed Tom Kettle there was no greeting or other human sign… [62]
...A little woman came forth as if to bock his further progress and took his right hand. The gesture shocked him. Her dress was the same colour as the shadows. Again he could only think of ghosts. Her two hands that gripped his felt as if they had just been taken from being warmed at a fire, but he could see no fire… [63]
...Tom thought that it was a very rum world when people revealing themselves to be not at all what he had thought them, as if in refutation of his old inspired self as a Garda...[64]
…[Mrs Tomety] ‘Especially now we have children in the house. That lovely little girl, and her brother.’ She looked at her husband, as if not wanting to exclude him from this conversation. Tom had not seen any little girl. Did she mean the people in the Turret Flat? Mr Tomelty beamed, like a torch switched on. ‘These dark nights have seemed brighter for your possession of the annexe. The older you get, the thinner the arm.’ [65]

       He has imagined meeting Mrs. Tomelty, while Mr Tomelty confirms later page 219 that his wife had ‘died in ’88’, before Tom had moved into the flat. Also later, in Chapter 9, Miss McNulty confirms that her daughter is dead.

       Chapter 7 is largely a dream when Tom has fallen asleep on a bench in St Stephen’s Green, before going to the meeting in Fleming’s office.

       Chapter 8: Flemming confirms that DS Scally died: She had appeared in Chapter 7, the dream. [117]

       The dramatic events described in the last chapter are imaginary. 

       If we look back to the first paragraphs of the novel, we can note that Tom’s imagination had altered reality: Winnie and Joe were imagined alive, although they were not.

       Common to all these "dreams": Tom makes dead persons, real or imagined, alive. Let's not forget that he was a detective, a person capable of imaging possibilities:  

Had he not been a competant detective, had he not been appreciated for his deductive skill, his intuitions, his sudden inspirations? [30]

The dreams are part of the process by which Tom will finally be able to ‘acknowledge his dead ones’ [32] and become ‘king over time in the wicker chair’ [154]. 
       The final dream is a hymn to love. A final poem. 

       Love: His love for June, a woman named for the summer [153]. She will be his refuge in the end. He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. [50] Throughout the novel, never once will he forget his love for her.

...    By heavens it was it was a clement morning, almost a forgery of spring, and wasn’t it spring anyway, well past the first of February...
...    How he had loved June. He used to go ages without having that thought, and then suddenly, for no reason that he could remember, he would catch sight of her in some moment, some gesture, and be stricken all over again. Just for an hour, as the morning sunlight entered his room and bathed his face, he minded nothing and no one. He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. [49] 
       The sunlight stuck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparkled, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration. Alone, alone, he smiled and smiled. He closed his eyes. He opened them. The sea was still there. [50]
       The touch of her hand not obviously like fire but burning him all the same, burning his hand. [73]

       June had burned. In Tom’s last dream, her touch will be agreeably warm.

       The hand was delicate and dark, and he wondered, if he [261] extended his own left hand to meet it, would he be able to touch her? And if he could touch her, what did that mean? He was afraid to move in case it made her vanish but at the same time he was brave enough to risk it and he extended his arm a few inches and before he knew it he was touching her warm fingers. He wanted to say something to her now alright but in a way the touching of the hands said everything he needed to say. It was like he had just met her, that very same feeling of old in the vanished café, and yet of course in the very same moment he knew everything there was to know about her. The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it. [261]

      In the end, we might say – recalling the words of the first paragraphs – that Tom has circled back, washed up in his flat, untroubled, happy, and useless.

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***

>>doc-orthodox-hasidic-community-england

For reasons of copyright in this Website, you will have to check these out directly on line (copy the links below):

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13417502

BBC News
18/05/2011
       Inside Europe's biggest Hasidic community

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5195/leaving-the-hasidic-community

The New Humanist
Leaving the Hasidic community

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***

doc-japanese-koreans-and-pachinko-in-japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan 

Japanese Korea was the period when Korea was under Japanese rule, between 1910 and 1945. 

"Ball and chain: gambling's darker side" . The Japan Times. 24 May 2014.

Note for novel Pachinko:
Protestant Christian missionary efforts in Asia were quite successful in Korea. American Presbyterians and Methodists arrived in the 1880s and were well received. They served as medical and educational missionaries, establishing schools and hospitals in numerous cities. In the years when Korea was under Japanese control, some Koreans adopted Christianity as an expression of nationalism in opposition to the Japan's efforts to promote the Japanese language and the Shinto religion. In 1914 of 16 million Koreans, there were 86,000 Protestants and 79,000 Catholics. By 1934 the numbers were 168,000 and 147,000, respectively. Presbyterian missionaries were especially successful. Harmonizing with traditional practices became an issue. The Protestants developed a substitute for Confucian ancestral rites by merging Confucian-based and Christian death and funerary rituals.

PACHINKO
Business Insider interview of Min Jin Lee
Japan spends $200 billion on pachinko, a vertical pinball game, every year.

Pachinko (パチンコ) is a type of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device, filling a Japanese gambling niche comparable to that of the slot machine in Western gambling.

       Resume of Pachinko (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pachinko is the second novel by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee. Published in 2017, Pachinko is an epic historical novel following a Korean family who eventually migrates to Japan, The character-driven tale features a large ensemble of characters who become subjected to issues of racism and stereotypes, among other events with historical origins in the 20th-century Korean experiences with Japan.[1] 
Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. Apple Inc.'s streaming service Apple TV+ has purchased the rights for a television adaptation of the novel. 
           Overview
The novel takes place over the course of three books: Book I Gohyang/Hometown, Book II Motherland, and Book III Pachinko. 
    • Book I begins with the story of Sunja's father, Hoonie and ends with Noa's birth. 
    • Book II begins with Baek Isak's incarceration and ends with Sunja's search of Koh Hansu. 
    • Book III begins with Noa's new beginnings in Nagano and ends with Sunja's reflections upon everything that has happened to her.
Plot
In 1883, in the little island fishing village of Yeongdo, which is a ferry ride from Busan, an aging fisherman and his wife take in lodgers to make a little more money. They have three sons, but only one, Hoonie, with a cleft lip and twisted foot, survives to adulthood. Because of his deformities, Hoonie is considered ineligible for marriage. When he is 27, Japan annexes Korea and many families are left destitute and lacking food. Due to their prudent habits, Hoonie's family's situation is comparatively more stable, and a matchmaker arranges a marriage between Hoonie and Yangjin, the daughter of a poor farmer who had lost everything in the colonized land. Hoonie and Yangjin eventually take over the lodging house. 
In the mid 1910s, Yangjin and Hoonie have a daughter named Sunja. After her thirteenth birthday, she is raised solely by her mother Yangjin, her father Hoonie dying from tuberculosis. When Sunja is sixteen, she is pursued by a wealthy fishbroker, Koh Hansu. Sunja becomes pregnant, after which Hansu reveals that he is already married but intends to keep her as his mistress. Ashamed, Sunja reveals the truth to her mother, who eventually confesses it to one of their lodgers, a Christian minister suffering from tuberculosis. Baek Isak, the minister, believes he will die soon due to his many illnesses, and decides to marry Sunja to give her child a name and to give meaning to his life. Sunja agrees to the plan and marries Isak, traveling with him to Osaka to live with Isak's brother and his wife. In Osaka, Sunja is shocked to learn that Koreans are treated poorly and are forced to live in a small ghetto and are only hired for menial jobs. Sunja's brother-in-law, Yoseb, insists on supporting the entire household on his own salary, but Sunja and her sister-in-law Kyunghee come to learn he is in heavy debt due to paying for Sunja and Isak's passage to Osaka. To pay for the cost, Sunja sells a watch given to her by Hansu. 
As time goes on, Sunja gives birth to her son Noa and then to a second son she conceives with Isak, Mozasu. While Noa physically resembles Hansu, he is similar in personality to Isak, and seeks a quiet life of learning, reading and academia. Shortly after Mozasu is born, Isak is taken prisoner when a member of his church is caught reciting the Lord's Prayer when they were supposed to be worshiping the emperor. Despite Yoseb's resistance, Sunja begins to work in the market, selling kimchi that she and Kyunghee make. Their small business goes well, but as Japan enters the Second World War and ingredients grow scarce, they struggle to make money. Sunja is eventually approached by the owner of a restaurant, Kim Changho, who pays her and Kyunghee to make kimchi in his restaurant, providing them with financial security. A dying Isak is eventually released from prison, and he is able to briefly reunite with his family. 
A few years later, on the eve of the restaurant's closure, Sunja is approached by Hansu, who reveals that he is the actual owner of the restaurant and has been manipulating her family for years, having tracked Sunja down after she sold her watch. He arranges for her to spend the rest of the war in the countryside with Kyunghee and her children, and for Yoseb to wait the rest of the war out working at a factory in Nagasaki. During her time at the farm, Hansu also reunites Sunja with her mother, Yangjin, and eventually returns a permanently crippled Yoseb to the family after he is horrifically burned during the bombings. 
The Baek family eventually return to Osaka where Noa and Mozasu resume their studies. The family continues to struggle in spite of Hansu's help. Though they long to return to the North of Korea, where Kyunghee has family, Hansu warns them not to. Noa succeeds in passing the entrance exams for Waseda University. Despite Sunja's resistance, Hansu pays for Noa's entire university education, pretending it is simply because as an older Korean man he feels responsible for helping the younger generation. Meanwhile, Mozasu drops out of school and goes to work for Goro, a man who runs Pachinko parlors. Mozasu eventually meets and falls in love with a Korean seamstress, Yumi, who dreams of moving to America. The two marry and have a son, Solomon. Yumi later dies in a car accident, leaving Mozasu to raise their son on his own. 
Noa, who has continued his studies and looks up to Hansu as a mentor, accidentally discovers he is his father and learns of his ties to the yakuza. Ashamed of his true heritage and being linked to corrupt blood, he drops out of university and moves to Nagano, intending to work off his debt to Hansu and rid himself of his shameful heritage. He becomes a bookkeeper for a racist Pachinko owner who won't hire Koreans and lives undercover using his Japanese name, Nobuo, eventually marrying a Japanese woman and having four children. After having abandoned his family and living sixteen years under a false identity, Noa is tracked down by Hansu at the request of Sunja. Though Hansu warns Sunja not to immediately approach Noa, Sunja refuses to listen to his warnings and begs Noa to reunite with her and the rest of the family. After promising to do so, he commits suicide. 
In the meantime, Mozasu has become an extremely wealthy man, owning his own Pachinko parlors and taking on a Japanese girlfriend, Etsuko, who refuses to marry him. Hana, Etsuko's troubled teenage daughter from her previous marriage, arrives to stay with the family after learning she is pregnant, later having an abortion. Hana is drawn to Solomon's innocence and they begin a sexual relationship; he quickly falls in love with her, giving her large sums of money when asked, which she uses to run away to Tokyo. 
Years later, Solomon, now attending college in New York and dating a Korean-American woman named Phoebe, receives a call from a drunken Hana in Roppongi. He relays the information to Etsuko and Mozasu, who manage to locate her. After graduating college, Solomon takes a job at a British bank and moves back to Japan with Phoebe. His first major client project involves convincing an elderly Korean woman to sell her land in order to clear way for the construction of a golf resort, which he accomplishes by calling in a favor from his father's friend Goro. When the woman dies of natural causes soon after, Solomon's employers claim the deal will attract negative publicity and fire him, citing his father's connections to Pachinko and implying that the woman was murdered by a hit. 
With newfound resolve and a clearer outlook on life, Solomon breaks up with Phoebe, goes to work for his father's business, and makes amends with a dying Hana in the hospital. Now an elderly woman, Sunja visits Isak's grave and reflects on her life. She finds out from the cemetery groundskeeper that despite the shame Noa felt for his family, Noa had been visiting Isak's grave longer after Noa ceased contact with his family and started a new life in Japan. This gives Sunja the closure and reassurance she needs, and she buries a photo of Noa beside Isak's grave. 
           Characters
Hoonie — Hoonie is the first character to be introduced in the story, born with a twisted foot and a cleft palate. He meets his wife, Yangjin, on his wedding day and they have three children who die early in life before Sunja, their only surviving daughter, is born. Hoonie dies of tuberculosis when Sunja is thirteen years old.
Sunja — Sunja is the main protagonist of Pachinko, appearing all throughout the novel. Sunja is the daughter of Hoonie and Yangjin, born in Yeongdo, Busan, Korea. Sunja has two children. Sunja's first born, Noa, is fathered by Koh Hansu and her second born, Mozasu, is fathered by Baek Isak. 
Baek Isak — Baek Isak is a Protestant minister from Pyongyang, Korea. He is first introduced when he visits Yangjin's boardinghouse on his way to Osaka to move in with his brother, Yoseb. Sickly since birth, Baek Isak struggles with sickness until his death in Osaka. 
Kyunghee — Kyunghee is Yoseb's wife and Sunja's best friend and sister-in-law. She plays a large part in helping Sunja support their families in living, helping Sunja prepare Kimchi to sell. 
Yoseb — Yoseb is Baek Isak's brother who lives in Osaka, Japan. He works in a factory to support his family. He lives in Ikaino in Osaka, where most Koreans in Osaka are known to live. He receives a job opportunity in Nagasaki in 1945. He becomes very injured in the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki but lives thanks to Koh Hansu's support. 
Koh Hansu — Koh Hansu is a Korean man who was adopted into a rich, prominent family in Japan. Using his connections, Koh Hansu continually strives to earn money and control what he can. Hansu meets Sunja in Korea and falls in love, even though he has a wife in Japan. Throughout the novel, Hansu utilizes his influence to look after Sunja and her family, helping to keep them alive and well. Hansu is driven by his love for his only son, Noa. 
Noa — Noa is the only son of Koh Hansu and Sunja. He attends Waseda University in Tokyo before moving to Nagano in north Japan to start a new life, away from Hansu and Sunja. He struggles with identity issues stemming from his biological father's associations with the yakuza. 
Mozasu — Mozasu is the only son of Baek Isak and Sunja. He faces constant bullying in school and tends to retaliate with force. As a result, he is taken into an apprenticeship at a Pachinko parlor as a guard. Eventually, he moves up in the ranks and ends up as an owner of parlors himself. Mozasu marries a girl named Yumi and has one son, Solomon. 
Solomon — Solomon is the only son of Mozasu and Yumi. Growing up, Solomon does not face many of the same issues and his father or grandmother, since his father is very wealthy. Torn about what he wants to do with his life, he visits America and eventually decides that he wants to enter the Pachinko business like his father. 
           Themes
Themes in Pachinko include racism, stereotypes, power, and the game pachinko. One of Koh Hansu and Sunja's first interactions involves young Japanese boys making fun of Sunja for being Korean, speaking to the discrimination that Koreans experienced within their own borders. This is a recurring theme throughout the book, especially present in the treatment of Koreans in Japanese schools, such as Mozasu's experiences with bullying. 
Power is another main theme. Koh Hansu is the main exhibitor of power, using his influence to directly affect Sunja's life throughout the novel. Through this power, Sunja's family is able to survive and thrive while other Koreans around them struggle to support themselves, living in the same neighborhood but in much worse conditions. Through Hansu's influence, Sunja was deeply moved, but also conflictingly aggravated, as she thought she had successfully rid her life of Koh Hansu. 
Pachinko is one of the themes directly addressed in the novel. Many times, the novel states that Koreans in Japan are often associated with the pachinko business. Lee has said that the novel's title, which was originally set to be Motherland, was changed to Pachinko when, in her interviews, Koreans seemed to relate back to the pachinko business. 
           Historical Context
Pachinko takes place between the years of 1910 and 1989, a period that included the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II. As a historical novel, these events play a central role in Pachinko, influencing the characters' decisions like Sunja's moving to Japan. 
In an interview with Min Jin Lee, she references that the history of Korean-Japanese relationships are one of the most obvious displays of issues surrounding racism and exclusion outside the norms of the west.
           Reception and awards
The book received strong reviews including those from The Guardian, NPR, The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Irish Times, and Kirkus Reviews and is on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire, Chicago Review of Books, Amazon.com, Entertainment Weekly,[citation needed] the BBC, The Guardian,and Book Riot. In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017.The book was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.
Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.

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z-doc-incarceration-usa

https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human-toll-criminalizing-drug-use-united-states 

…
Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime. More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year. And despite officials’ claims that drug laws are meant to curb drug sales, four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as are arrested for selling them.
As a result of these arrests, on any given day at least 137,000 men and women are behind bars in the United States for drug possession, some 48,000 of them in state prisons and 89,000 in jails, most of the latter in pretrial detention. Each day, tens of thousands more are convicted, cycle through jails and prisons, and spend extended periods on probation and parole, often burdened with crippling debt from court-imposed fines and fees. Their criminal records lock them out of jobs, housing, education, welfare assistance, voting, and much more, and subject them to discrimination and stigma. The cost to them and to their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayer, is devastating. Those impacted are disproportionately communities of color and the poor.
…
Despite shifting public opinion, in 2015, nearly half of all drug possession arrests (over 574,000) were for marijuana possession. By comparison, there were 505,681 arrests for violent crimes (which the FBI defines as murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). This means that police made more arrests for simple marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined. 
…
Over the course of their lives, white people are more likely than Black people to use illicit drugs in general, as well as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and prescription drugs (for non-medical purposes) specifically. Data on more recent drug use (for example, in the past year) shows that Black and white adults use illicit drugs other than marijuana at the same rates and that they use marijuana at similar rates.
Yet around the country, Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession. In 2014, Black adults accounted for just 14 percent of those who used drugs in the previous year but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession. In the 39 states for which we have sufficient police data, Black adults were more than four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white adults.[2]
In every state for which we have sufficient data, Black adults were arrested for drug possession at higher rates than white adults, and in many states the disparities were substantially higher than the national rate—over 6 to 1 in Montana, Iowa, and Vermont. In Manhattan, Black people are nearly 11 times more likely than white people to be arrested for drug possession.
…
Data presented here for the first time suggests that in 2015, more than 78 percent of people sentenced to incarceration for felony drug possession in Texas possessed under a gram. Possibly thousands more were prosecuted and put on probation, potentially with felony convictions. 
…
At year-end 2014, over 25,000 people were serving sentences in local jails and another 48,000 were serving sentences in state prisons for drug possession nationwide. The number admitted to jails and prisons at some point over the course of the year was significantly higher. As with arrests, there were sharp racial disparities. In 2002 (the most recent year for which national jail data is available), Black people were over 10 times more likely than white people to be in jail for drug possession. In 2014, Black people were nearly six times more likely than white people to be in prison for drug possession. 
…
Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession in the US.[81] In 2014, Black people accounted for just 14 percent of people who used drugs in the previous year, but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession.[82] In the 39 states for which we have sufficient police data, Black adults were more than four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as white adults.[83] 
…
In every state for which we have sufficient police data, Black adults were arrested for drug possession at higher rates than white adults, and in many states the disparities were substantially higher than the national rate—over 6 to 1 in Montana, Iowa, and Vermont.[85] 
…
In New York, 60 of 62 counties arrested Black people for drug possession at higher rates than white people.[87] In Manhattan (New York County), there were 3,309 arrests per 100,000 Black people compared to 306 per 100,000 white people between 2010 and 2015. In other words, Black people in Manhattan were nearly 11 times more likely than white people to be arrested for drug possession. 


The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences 2014 National Academy of Science

https://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/nrc/NAS_report_on_incarceration.pdf
( http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18613 )

Extract concerning the War on Drugs early 1980’s

p111The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968, near the end of the primary season, helped tip the balance in favor of the Safe Streets Act (Flamm, 2005, pp. 138-140; Simon, 2007, pp. 49-53).Two weeks after the assassination, Johnson signed the Safe Streets Act, though with considerable reluctance. He calculated that a veto might result in even harsher legislation and could irreparably harm Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign for the presidency (Flamm, 2005, p. 140). 

LAW AND ORDER AND THE RISING CRIME RATE
The national crime rates had started to turn upward in 1961, and they continued rising through 1981. The lack of political consensus at the time on the causes of the increase in violent crime and what to do about it served to increase public concern. Fear of crime continued to provide political opportunities for candidates and office-holders even after crime rates began to fall. The responses of politicians, policy makers, and other public figures to rising crime rates were political choices not determined by the direction in which the crime rate was moving. Certain features of the social, political, and institutional context at the time help explain why in the U.S. case, those choices ultimately entailed embracing harsher policies rather than emphasizing other remedies (such as greater public investment in addressing the root causes of crime and in developing alternatives to in-carceration), as well as stoking public fears of crime even after crime rates had ceased to increase. 

p112 Republican Party leaders were in an especially good position during these years to tap into public fears and anxieties about crime and to turn crime into a wedge issue between the two parties. As the Democratic Party split over civil rights issues, the south became politically competitive for the first time since the end of Reconstruction a century earlier. This develop-ment ushered in a major political realignment. Furthermore, key features of the political structure of the United States, which are discussed in greater detail below, made it especially vulnerable to politicians seeking to exploit public fears concerning crime and other law-and-order issues.Rates for most serious crimes counted in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), increased significantly after 1961. Between 1964 and 1974, the U.S. homicide rate nearly doubled to 9.8 per 100,000,7 and rates of other serious crimes also jumped. The homicide rate continued to oscillate around a relatively high rate of 8 to 10 per 100,000 until the early 1990s, before beginning a steady and significant drop that has since continued. Other Western countries have experienced strikingly similar patterns in their crime rates, although from smaller bases (Tonry, 2001). The rise in homicide rates was concentrated geographically and de-mographically. As far back as the 1930s, the homicide rate for blacks in northern cities was many times the rate for whites (Lane, 1989). The gap in black-white homicide rates widened further over the course of the Second Great Migration as millions of blacks moved to urban areas outside the south, and it continued to grow thereafter (Jacoby, 1980).8 The homicide rates in poor neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage often were many times higher than those in affluent urban neighborhoods. Before crime rates began their steep drop in the early 1990s, the homicide rate among young black men aged 18 to 24 was nearly 200 per 100,000, or about 10 times the rate for young white men and about 20 times the rate for the U.S. population as a whole (Western, 2006, p. 170). Unfortunately, historical data on homicides among Latinos have been largely missing or unreported in existing official sources such as the UCR. Still, homicide rates for Latinos in 2005 were 7.5 per 100,000, as compared with 2.7 for white non-Latinos (Vega et al., 2009). The disparities are more pronounced for young men aged 15 to 24, with 31 deaths per 100,000 for Latinos compared with 10.6 for white non-Latinos.Like the Great Migration, earlier waves of immigration from Ire-land and southern and central Europe that flowed into U.S. cities in the
7The national homicide rate stood at 5.1 in 1960 and fluctuated around that level until 1964, when it was at 4.9. 8Pre-1980 homicide data are from the Historical Violence Database, available: http://cjrc.osu.edu/researchprojects/hvd/ [February 2014]; post-1980 homicide data are from the annual volumes of the UCR. 

p113 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prompted “widespread fears and predictions of social deterioration,” including public alarm that crime would rise as the number of immigrants rose in U.S. cities (MacDonald and Sampson, 2012, p. 7). Yet in the early twentieth century, a “hopeful vision of white criminality” eventually took hold in the wake of waves of immigration from Europe (Muhammad, 2010, p. 98). This vision grew out of the view that white criminality in urban areas was rooted primarily in the strains of industrial capitalism and urban life. Thus, policy makers, legislators, and social activists in the Progressive era sought to ameliorate those strains by pressing for greater public and private investments in education, social services, social programs, and public infrastructure in urban areas with high concentrations of European immigrants. The empirical findings of leading sociologists of the early twentieth century (Sutherland, 1947; Sellin, 1938) bolstered claims in the public sphere that “it was not immigration per se that accounted for social ills” but the poor living conditions in those overcrowded, unhealthy urban areas that tended to be magnets for immigrants entering the United States (MacDonald and Sampson, 2012, p. 7). In contrast, the country responded to the rise in urban crime rates that followed the influx of many African Americans into U.S. cities and of many Mexicans into southwestern states by adopting increasingly punitive poli-cies. For example, the rise in Mexican immigration to communities in the southwest was associated with increases in arrests without cause, denial of legal counsel, and harsh tactics ranging from interrogation sessions to beatings (Grebler et al., 1970). Research also suggests that the federal anti-marijuana law of 1937 was directed primarily against Mexican Americans (Hoffman, 1977).

 POLITICAL AND ELECTORAL REALIGNMENT
Democrats were divided on how to respond to the increase in the crime rate. This split, together with deep differences over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and a series of controversial U.S. Supreme Court decisions that ex-tended the rights of defendants, created a ripe opportunity for the political ascent of the Republican Party in states and localities where the Democratic Party had long been dominant, notably in the south and the southwest and in the growing suburbs around northern cities. Many leading Republican candidates and office-holders began developing political strategies that used the crime issue to appeal to white racial anxieties in the wake of the bur-geoning black power movement and the gains of the civil rights movement.9 Some liberals interpreted the rise in the crime rate that occurred in the 1960s-1970s as a less serious threat to public safety than it was being
9 See Appendix A for a supplementary statement by Ricardo Hinojosa on this sentence and other similar committee findings in this chapter.

p114 depicted by conservative politicians and in the media. They viewed heightened public fears over crime as a by-product of political posturing and an artifact of inaccurate and misleading statistics. For example, Nicholas Katzenbach, who served as U.S. attorney general in the early years of the Johnson Administration, maintained that the crime figures were inconclusive and that false information about crime often intimidated or misled the general public (Flamm, 2005, p. 125). It does appear that the UCR data exaggerated the extent and duration of the crime increase for certain offense categories (Flamm, 2005, pp. 125-126; Ruth and Reitz, 2003).10 Prior to 1973, when the U.S. Department of Justice began its yearly household survey of crime victims (the National Crime Victimization Survey), the UCR were the major source of national-level crime statistics. These data, which were recorded and collated by local police departments and then reported to the FBI, were often systematically skewed in recording and reporting, due in part part to incentives to record more crime in order to receive more government funding to combat crime (Ruth and Reitz, 2003; Thompson, 2010).11Those liberals who did take the crime jump seriously often failed to challenge conservatives when they conflated riots, street crime, and political activism, especially on the part of African Americans and their supporters, and when they attributed the crime increase to the launch of the Great Society and to the mixing of the races due to the demise of segregation. Indeed, some key liberals contended that the “crime problem” was predominantly a race and civil rights problem, suggesting that entrenched segregation had created black cultural dysfunction and social disorder that, among other things, contributed to higher crime rates in urban areas (Murakawa, forthcoming). The rise in national crime rates beginning in the 1960s coincided with an exceptional period in which punishments for many crimes were easing. During this time, moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of landmark decisions that restricted the authority of the police, established protections for suspects and those in custody, and overturned criminal 10 Trends in UCR robbery rates correspond closely with the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) over the past 50 years, but trends in aggravated assault do not. The UCR aggravated assault series trended upward from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, while the NCVS aggravated assault series (which is defined similarly) was trending downward. The difference likely is due to an increase in the recording of assaults as “aggravated” by the police during that period. Since the early 1990s, the UCR and NCVS aggravated assault series have trended similarly (Rosenfeld, 2007).11 After 1965, for example, “thanks to a new federal commitment to fighting crime, local enforcement could net substantial infusions of money and equipment by demonstrating that crime was on the rise in their area. Significantly, when crime rates began to inch up in Detroit in the later 1960s, even the city’s mayor admitted that ‘new methods of counting crime’ had played an important role in ‘distorting the size of the increase’” (Thompson, 2010, p. 727) 

p115 in convictions that violated newly articulated constitutional principles. Con-servative critics of the Warren Court charged that these “soft on crime” rulings, together with misguided liberal social welfare policies, had contrib-uted to the increase in the crime rate. Taken together, these developments helped foster a receptive environment for political appeals for harsher criminal justice policies and laws. So, too, did the escalation of clashes between protesters and law enforcement authorities during the 1960s and 1970s. In many cases—most notably the police crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Conven-tion in Chicago, the shooting deaths of antiwar student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, and the bloody assault on New York’s Attica prison in 1971 that left dozens dead—a degree of public sympathy was fostered for protesters and prisoners, at least initially.12 That sympathy dissipated, however, as civil rights opponents continued to link concerns about crime with anxieties about racial disorder; the transformation of the racial status quo; and wider political turmoil, including the wave of urban riots in the 1960s and large-scale demonstrations against the Vietnam War (see, e.g., Beckett, 1997; Flamm, 2005; Weaver, 2007; Thompson, 2010). Internal Democratic Party divisions over civil rights and the law-and-order question created new opportunities for the Republican Party in the south and elsewhere. In the north, many urban white voters initially maintained a delicate balance on civil rights. Although personally concerned over and often opposed to residential integration at the local level, they supported national pro-civil rights candidates. This balance was under-mined as crime and disorder were depicted as racial and civil rights issues; together they “became the fulcrum points at which the local and national intersected” (Flamm, 2005, p.10; see also Thompson, 2010). In response to this altered political context, Republican Party strategists developed what has been termed the “southern strategy.”13 Centered in racially coded appeals to woo southern and working-class white voters, this strategy gradually transformed the landscape of American politics (see, e.g., Phillips, 1969; Tonry, 2011a). As historians make clear, the term “southern strategy” is somewhat misleading. At least some Republicans and even some Democrats had been associating crime with both “black-
12For example, the 1971 Attica uprising in New York State spurred a wellspring of public and scholarly interest in how to make prisons more humane and how to decrease the prison population. It also prompted numerous calls for a national moratorium on prison construction (Gottschalk, 2006, p. 181).
13Although Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968 involved a law-and-order mes-sage combined with a tacit racial appeal to white voters (Edsall and Edsall, 1992), George Wallace’s third-party run also contributed significantly to a climate in which issues of race, protest, and disorder were joined to build a conservative constituency in the south and across the country (Carter, 1995).

p116 ness” and civil disorder more broadly, in locations outside the south. They had done so, with some success, long before Nixon political operative Kevin Phillips popularized the idea of a southern strategy in the late 1960s (Shermer, 2013; McGirr, 2002; Schoenwald, 2002; Thompson, 2001; Kruse and Sugrue, 2006). The southern strategy was different in that it rested on politicizing the crime issue in a racially coded manner. Nixon and his political strategists recognized that as the civil rights movement took root, so did more overt and seemingly universally accepted norms of racial equality.14 In this new political context, overtly racial appeals like those wielded by Goldwater’s supporters in the 1964 campaign would be counterproductive to the forging of a new winning majority. Effectively politicizing crime and other wedge issues—such as welfare—would require the use of a form of racial coding that did not appear on its face to be at odds with the new norms of racial equality. As top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman explained, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to [emphasis in original]” (Haldeman, 1994, p. 53). The widespread loss of popular faith in liberalism’s ability to ensure public safety, declining confidence in elite- and expert-guided government policies, and deeply felt anxieties and insecurities related to rapid social change and the economic stagflation of the 1970s fostered a political en-vironment conducive to the southern strategy and populist law-and-order appeals (Flamm, 2005; Edsall and Edsall, 1992). Tough law-and-order agendas appealed to whites’ anxieties about the rising crime rate, which were entangled with other anxieties about their “loss of stature and priv-ileges as economic opportunities narrowed and traditionally marginalized groups gained new rights” (Kohler-Hausmann, 2010, p. 73; see also Rieder’s [1985] classic account of whites’ anxieties about crime in the 1960s and 1970s). Furthermore, the increase in the crime rate coincided with the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Although there were many factors contributing to the rise in crime, this coincidence created an opportunity for claims that greater investment in social and other programs did not reduce crime. Some commentators argued that social programs actually contributed to rising crime rates by fostering a host of personal pathologies they claimed were the “real” roots of crime (O’Connor, 2008). A number of politicians contended that a weak work ethic, poor parenting practices, and a culture of dependency had all been created or exacerbated
14 See Appendix A for a supplementary statement by Ricardo Hinojosa on the passage, which begins on the previous page beginning with “In the north . . .” and ends here, and other similar committee findings in this chapter.

p117 by expanded public assistance and other social programs, and that these personal and cultural shortcomings were the major sources of the rise in disorder and violence. 

OTHER POLITICAL FACTORS
Emerging research is helping to illuminate why the southern strategy was so effective in politicizing and further racializing the law-and-order issue, and why the war on drugs and other shifts toward harsher penal policies did not face more effective countervailing pressures and coherent counterarguments in opposition. The southern strategy was soon followed by the rise of a number of new social movements and interest groups whose messages and actions in some ways reinforced the punitive direction in which the nation was beginning to move. They included the victims’ rights movement,the women’s movement, the prisoners’ rights movement, and or-ganized opposition to the death penalty. Advocating for victims and against criminal defendants became a simple equation that helped knit together politically disparate groups.15 Unlike prisoners’ movements in other Western countries at the time, the movement in the United States was closely associated with broader issues involving race, class, and various struggles around injustice. As a consequence, criminal activity became associated in the public mind with controversial issues relating to race and rebellion, which fostered zero-sum politics that reduced public sympathy for people charged with crimes and thus was conducive to the promotion of harsher penal policies (Gottschalk, 2006, Chapter 7). Finally, legal battles over the death penalty “legitimized public opinion as a central, perhaps the central, consideration in the making of penal policy,” which further enshrined the zero-sum view of victims and defendants in capital and noncapital cases (Gottschalk, 2006, p. 12 and Chapters 8-9). Although African Americans experienced the largest absolute increases in incarceration rates, there is evidence that the black community was divided in its support for tough crime control policy. On the one hand, as discussed in further detail below, blacks have been generally less support-ive than whites of punitive criminal justice policies, and survey data from as early as 1977 and 1982 show that blacks are less likely than whites to support severe sentences for violent crimes (Blumstein and Cohen, 1980; Miller et al., 1986; Secret and Johnson, 1989; Bobo and Johnson, 2004; Western and Muller, 2013). And while the attitudes of both black and white Americans have become less punitive over the past few decades, whites are 
15For further discussion of how the political mobilizations against rape and domestic vio-lence contributed to a more punitive political atmosphere, see Gottschalk (2006, Chapters 4-6), Bumiller (2008), and Richie (2012). 

p118 consistently more likely than blacks to report that court sentences are not harsh enough (Blumstein and Cohen, 1980; Miller et al., 1986; National Center for State Courts, 2006; Secret and Johnson, 1989; Western and Muller, 2013). On the other hand, new research also finds that some black leaders supported tougher laws, most notably in the early years of the war on drugs, while others were fierce opponents. The growing concentration of violence, drug addiction, and open-air drug markets in poor urban neighborhoods; disillusionment with government efforts to stem these developments; and widening class divisions among blacks help explain why some African American community leaders endorsed a causal story of the urban crisis that focused on individual flaws, not structural problems, and that singled out addicts and drug pushers as part of the “undeserving poor” who posed the primary threat to working- and middle-class African Americans (Fortner, 2013; Barker, 2009, p. 151; Gottschalk, forthcoming; Cohen, 1999; Dawson, 2011).16Other black leaders endorsed what Forman (2012) describes as an “all-of-the-above” approach, calling for tougher sanctions and aggressive law enforcement but also for greater attention and resources to address underlying social and economic conditions. According to Forman, this helps explain why African American political, religious, and other leaders in Washington, DC, the only black-majority jurisdiction that controlled its sentencing policies (after home rule was granted in 1973), supported tougher crime policy. Opposition to these policies remained muted, even after their disproportionate toll on blacks, especially young black men, became apparent. Forman (2012) attributes this stance to the stigmatizing and marginalizing effects that contact with criminal justice had on former prisoners and their families, inhibiting them from taking public positions or engaging in political debates about these policies. Black leaders, politicians, and advocacy groups clearly were not the main instigators of the shift to harsh crime policy, but at least in some instances, their actions helped foster this turn, in many cases unwittingly. THE WAR ON DRUGSAs discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the war on drugs has disproportion-ately affected African Americans and Latinos and has been an important contributor to higher U.S. rates of incarceration. Researchers have related racial considerations to the war on drugs in much the same way that social
16 Similar attitudes often are seen among segments of the Latino community that favor stronger drug and anticrime laws. This is evident in how Latinos split their vote on Proposition 19—the State of California’s proposition to legalize marijuana—in 2010 (Hidalgo, 2010).

p119 and status conflicts between native Protestants and newly arrived Irish Catholics provided context for the temperance and prohibition movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Gusfield, 1963). In the war on drugs, politicians characterized addicts and pushers as “responsible not only for their own condition” but also for many of the problems plaguing inner-city neighborhoods where blacks predominated, including crime, eroding urban infrastructure, and widespread social and economic distress (Kohler-Hausmann, 2010, p. 74). President Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971 after initially having embraced greater investment in treatment, rehabilitation, and public health to combat substance abuse (Musto and Korsmeyer, 2002, Chapter 2). Two years later, Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who had authorized the assault on Attica and was trying to reposition himself politically in the face of the southern strategy and a possible run for the White House, led the state in enacting some of the nation’s toughest drug laws. These new laws mandated steep minimum sentences for the sale and use of controlled substances, notably heroin and cocaine.17 New York’s new drug laws also influenced other states that sought to enact tough lengthy sentences for drug offenses. These opening salvos in the war on drugs drew significant support from some leading black politicians and community leaders, as well as from some residents in poor urban areas (Kennedy, 1997, pp. 370-371; Barker, 2009; Fortner, 2013; Forman, 2012; Meares, 1997). For example, some black activists in Harlem supported the Rockefeller drug laws, as did the city’s leading black newspaper (Barker, 2009; Fortner, 2013). In New York City and elsewhere, black leaders called for tougher laws for drug and other of-fenses and demanded increased policing to address residents’ demands that something be done about rising crime rates and the scourge of drug abuse, especially the proliferation of open-air drug markets and the use of illegal drugs such as heroin and then crack cocaine (Barker, 2009; Fortner, 2013; Forman, 2012). The Reagan Administration dramatically escalated the war on drugs even though drug use had been falling for most illicit substances since 17For much of the 1970s, New York’s new drug laws had only a modest impact on the state’s incarceration rate, thanks to “selective pragmatic enforcement” by local criminal justice authorities (Weiman and Weiss, 2009, p. 95). That situation changed in the 1980s and 1990s as incoming mayor Ed Koch of New York City sought to “retake the streets” and made a highly publicized shift toward “quality-of-life” policing in 1979, and Governor Hugh Cary promised significant additional support for prison construction, state prosecutors, local law enforcement, and a new joint state-local initiative to target drug trafficking. As a result, the proportion of all inmates serving time in New York State prisons for felony drug convictions soared as the Rockefeller laws belatedly became a major driver of the state’s prison population (Weiman and Weiss, 2009).

p120 1979.18 After President Reagan launched his own version of the war on drugs in 1982 and renewed the call to arms 4 years later, public opinion surveys in 1986 indicated that fewer than 2 percent of the American public considered illegal drugs to be the most important problem facing the country (Beckett, 1997, p. 25). Surveys conducted 2 years later, however, showed that a majority of the public now identified drug abuse as a leading problem (Roberts et al., 2003). The shift in public opinion was partly a consequence of the enactment of tough new federal drug laws in 1986 and 1988, spurred by reports that crack cocaine had been introduced into urban drug markets. These new drug laws resulted in historically unprecedented rates of im-prisonment for drug use and possession (Reuter, 1992; Thompson, 2010). People convicted of drug offenses grew to make up about one-fifth of all state prison inmates and nearly two-thirds of all federal inmates by 1997 (Mumola and Karberg, 2006, p. 4). Since then, the portion of state prisoners serving time for drug offenses has stabilized at about the same rate, while the portion of federal inmates serving time for drug offenses has declined somewhat, to about one-half (Carson and Sabol, 2012, p. 1).In the 1980s, some Democratic politicians notably joined the war on drugs effort that had been initiated by the Republican administration in the 1970s. The two parties embarked on periodic “bidding wars” to ratchet up penalties for drugs and other offenses. Wresting control of the crime issue became a central tenet of up-and-coming leaders of the Democratic Party represented by the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, most notably “New Democrat” Bill Clinton (Stuntz, 2011, pp. 239-240; Murakawa, forthcoming, Chapter 5; Schlosser, 1998; Campbell, 2007).19Statistical analyses indicate that Republican Party control, especially at the state level, generally has been associated with larger expansions of the prison population (Western, 2006; Jacobs and Helms, 2001; Smith, 2004; Jacobs and Carmichael, 2001).20However, it is also the case that some leading Democrats—including Governor Mario Cuomo of New York in the 1980s and early 1990s (Schlosser, 1998), Governor Ann Richards of Texas in the early 1990s (Campbell, 2007), and President Clinton in the 1990s—presided over large increases in prison populations or the adoption of harsh sentences. As criminal justice policy in the United States continued to rely more heavily on incarceration, official party positions on crime control dif-fered less and less. For example, Murakawa (forthcoming) observes that the
18 Reported drug use reached its peak in the late 1970s and continued to fall until the early 1990s, when it turned upward but remained considerably below the late 1970s peak (Johnston et al., 2012, p. 167).
19 See Appendix A for a supplementary statement by Ricardo Hinojosa on this paragraph and other similar committee findings in this chapter.20However, Greenberg and West (2001, p. 634) found that “the party of the state’s governor was essentially irrelevant” in explaining prison growth from 1971 to 1991. 

p121Democratic Party platforms of the 1980s and 1990s invoked law-and-order rhetoric that differed little from what Richard Nixon had expressed two decades earlier, and extolled the long list of harsh penal policies the party had been instrumental in enacting. As shown above, the role of public opinion in penal policy is complex, and public concern about crime and support for punitive crime control policy does not necessarily rise and fall in tandem with fluctuations in the crime rate (Beckett, 1997). Important intervening variables include the kind of crime-related initiatives that are promoted by politicians, the nature and amount of media coverage of crime, and the interplay of racial and ethnic conflict and concerns. Consequently, crime-related public opinion can be volatile. Public opinion surveys and electoral outcomes demonstrate clear public support for certain hard-line policies, such as “three strikes” laws and increased use of incarceration (Cullen et al., 2000). But support for such punitive policies of-ten is soft and therefore highly malleable, partly because public knowledge about actual criminal justice practices and policies is so limited (Cullen et al., 2000; Roberts and Stalans, 1998). For example, the public consistently overestimates the level of violent crime and the recidivism rate (Gest, 2001). Perhaps because people in the United States and elsewhere possess limited knowledge of how the criminal justice system actually works, they generally believe the system is far more lenient toward lawbreakers than it actually is (Roberts, 1997; Roberts and Stalans, 2000; Roberts et al., 2003). Public opinion surveys that use simplistic approaches tend to reinforce the assumption that the U.S. public is unflinchingly punitive (Cullen et al., 2000). They also mask significant differences in the perspectives of certain demographic groups—especially African Americans and whites—on issues of crime and punishment. For example, African Americans are more likely than whites to perceive racial bias in the criminal justice system (Bobo and Thompson, 2006, 2010; Peffley and Hurwitz, 2010). And as noted above, African Americans also are traditionally less likely to support harsh pun-ishments for violent crime. Moreover, some evidence suggests that public officials and policy makers misperceive or oversimplify public opinion on crime, focusing on Americans’ punitive beliefs but deemphasizing or
21Although the Republican Party’s southern strategy promoted harsher crime policy and the Republican administrations of Presidents Nixon and Reagan encouraged tougher drug enforcement and sentencing, the committee members varied in their views of the role played by Democratic Party policy makers in this process.

p122 ignoring their support for rehabilitative goals (Gottfredson and Taylor, 1987; Cullen etal., 2000). The influence of race on public opinion about crime and punishment is particularly complex, as discussed in Chapter 3. Research on racial atti-tudes suggests a decline in overt racism—or what Unnever (2013) calls “Jim Crow racism”—founded in beliefs about the innate inferiority of blacks and in adamant support for racial segregation. Survey research also shows that people generally believe racial discrimination is wrong and that they almost universally endorse norms of racial equality (see, e.g., Tonry, 2009a; Thern-strom and Thernstrom, 1997; Mendelberg, 2001; Bobo, 2001). Nonethe-less, there are large and in some cases widening gaps in white, black, and Hispanic public opinion on racial issues. Nearly 50 percent of white Americans surveyed in 2008 said they believed blacks had achieved racial equality, compared with only 11percent of blacks. Nearly three-quarters of blacks surveyed agreed that racism is still a major problem, compared with more than half of Latinos and about one-third of whites (Dawson, 2011, pp. 12-13, 148). Racial bias often is revealed implicitly as well. As discussed in Chapter 3, results from the Implicit Association Test (IAT), designed to measure people’s implicit attitudes, demonstrate consistent bias against African Americans (Greenwald and Krieger, 2006). Although overt racial hostility is less pervasive than it was years ago, latent and often unconscious stereotypes and prejudices still influence politi-cal and policy choices in subtle but powerful ways. Such subtle but power-ful prejudice may play an important role in public policy preferences on crime and punishment. For example, results of both experimental and sur-vey research suggest that racial resentment is a strong predictor of whites’ support for capital punishment (Unnever et al., 2008; Bobo and Johnson, 2004) and that whites’ support for the death penalty is undiminished even when they are reminded of racial disproportionality and bias in its applica-tion (Peffley and Hurwitz, 2010; Bobo and Johnson, 2004). Research also shows that racial prejudice is associated with increased support for punitive penal policies (Johnson, 2008). Deeply held racial fears, anxieties, and animosities likely explain the resonance of coded racial appeals concerning crime-related issues, such as the infamous “Willie Horton ad” aired during the 1988 presidential election (see, e.g., Mendelberg, 2001). But racial indifference and insensitivity—as distinguished from outright racial hostility—may help explain the long-term public support for criminal justice policies that have had an adverse and disproportionate impact on blacks (and Latinos). For example, policing practices with large racially disparate impacts, such as the war on drugs and New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policies, are much more likely to be supported by whites than by blacks. In 2011, 85 percent of the approximately 685,000 stop-and-frisks conducted by the New York City 

123 police involved people who were black or Latino. In recent polling, whites approved of stop-and-frisk policies at more than twice the rate of blacks (57 percent versus 25 percent) (Quinnipiac University, 2012).22 
In short, a sizable body of research supports the thesis that public opinion about crime and punishment is highly racialized. Whites tend to associate crime and violence with being black and are more likely than blacks
to support harsh penal policies. Whites who harbor racial resentments are 
especially likely to endorse tougher penal policies and to reject claims that 
the criminal justice system discriminates against blacks. Blacks are much 
more likely than whites to say the criminal justice system is racially biased 
and much less likely to endorse capital punishment and other tougher sanc-
tions (Unnever, 2013). 

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURE
Trends in crime rates and public opinion had much larger effects on 
criminal justice policy in the United States, compared with other Western 
countries, because they interacted with and were filtered through specific 
institutional, cultural, and political contexts that facilitated the growth in 
incarceration. As discussed in detail in Chapter 3, during the decades-long 
rise in imprisonment, determination of sentencing and other penal policies 
increasingly became the domain of the legislative branches of government. 
Legislators gained power over sentences from the executive branch by, 
among other things, eliminating parole, limiting commutation powers, and 
reducing early release programs. They also gained power over the judicial 
branch by, among other things, eliminating indeterminate sentencing, set-
ting mandatory minimum sentences, and enacting truth-in-sentencing legis-
lation. These shifts allowed the more populist impulses in the United States 
to have direct impacts on sentencing and other criminal justice policies. The 
most vivid example of this—what some have called the “democratization of 
punishment”—is the direct enactment of more punitive measures through 
ballot initiatives, most notably the three strikes ballot initiative in California (Barker, 2009; Zimring et al., 2001; HoSang, 2010). Compared with the criminal justice systems of many other developed countries, the U.S. system is more susceptible to the influence of “short-term 
22 As noted above, studies show that blacks who are stopped and frisked are less likely than 
whites to be in possession of guns or other contraband and are no more likely to be arrested. 
Because so many more blacks than whites are stopped in the first place, however, many more 
blacks are taken into police custody as a result of being stopped (Center for Constitutional 
Rights, 2009). The racial gap in support of stop-and-frisk did not keep a federal judge from 
ruling in Floyd v. New York (2013) that the policy violated the constitutional rights of minori-
ties and from recommending a series of reforms (including a monitor) to oversee changes. This 
controversial ruling had been stayed and was under appellate review at the time this report 
was being written.

124 emotionalism” and partisan and interest group politics (Gottschalk, 2006; 
Tonry, 2011a; Garland, 2010). As Murakawa (forthcoming, Chapter 5) 
shows, the U.S. House and U.S. Senate have been far more likely to enact 
stiffer mandatory minimum sentence legislation in the weeks prior to an 
election. Because of the nation’s system of frequent legislative elections, 
dispersed governmental powers, and election of judges and prosecutors, 
policy makers tend to be susceptible to public alarms about crime and 
drugs and vulnerable to pressures from the public and political opponents 
to quickly enact tough legislation. Such actions serve an expressive purpose 
over the short run but may have negative long-term consequences (Tonry, 
2007b, p. 40).23 Incentives for supporting certain kinds of crime-related 
initiatives also tend to be misaligned across different levels of government. 
For example, it is relatively easy for local government officials to advocate 
increased sentence lengths and higher incarceration rates that state govern-
ment officials are typically responsible for funding (including the building 
and running of state penitentiaries). Yet, despite taking hard-line positions 
on crime control, local governments often hire too few police officers (since 
cities and counties are responsible for paying nearly all local police budgets) 
(Stuntz, 2011, p. 289; Lacey, 2010, p. 111). Lappi-Seppälä (2008) finds that democracies that are “consensual” (i.e., having a larger number of major political parties, proportional representation, and coalition governments) have lower rates of incarceration and have experienced smaller increases in incarceration since 1980 than winner-take-all, two-party democracies, such as the United States. Lacey (2008) and others (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; de Giorgi, 2006) find that countries (such as Germany) with consensual electoral systems and coordinated market economies tend to be less punitive and more conducive to inclusionary and welfarist policies than the United States and Britain, whose electoral systems are less consensual and whose market economies are relatively less regulated. 
In the United States, most prosecutors are elected, as are most judges 
(except those who are nominated through a political process). Therefore, 
they are typically mindful of the political environment in which they func-
tion. Judges in competitive electoral environments in the United States 
tend to mete out harsher sentences (Gordon and Huber, 2007; Huber 
and Gordon, 2004). In contrast, prosecutors and judges in many Euro-
pean countries are career civil servants who have evolved a distinctive 
23 It is also important to note, however, that in England and Wales, the concentration of 
political power rather than its dispersal has made it possible to adopt and implement a wide 
range of punitive policies. And although Switzerland shares many of the dispersed and populist 
features of the U.S. system, its penal policies generally have been stable over the past several 
decades (Tonry, 2007b).

125 occupational culture with a less punitive orientation, partly as a result of 
differences in legal training and career paths between the United States and 
European countries (Savelsberg, 1994). 
Cultural differences—in particular, the degree of social and political 
trust and cohesion—also help explain some of the variation in incarcera-
tion rates, both cross-nationally and within the United States. (Box 4-1 
provides some historical context for understanding regional variation in 

BOX 4-1 
Regional Variation in U.S. Incarceration: Historical Context
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nation’s northeastern 
cities tended to have large police forces, small and stable prison populations, and low rates of criminal violence. The south, in contrast, tended to have small police forces, larger but highly variable prison populations, and high crime rates.* The west mimicked the south for most of the nineteenth century but came to resemble the northeast by century’s end; as its police forces grew, crime rates shrank, and mob justice faded (Stuntz, 2011). 
Although the nature and operation of penal systems today vary among the 
states, there is no scholarly consensus on the extent to which regional identity, history, or culture may have led either the criminal justice system of a given state or that of the nation as a whole in a much more punitive direction over the past four decades. Some scholars make strong arguments that regional history and culture matter a great deal. For example, they suggest that the nation’s overall tough-on-crime policy should be seen as the eventual embrace of the south’s more punitive form of justice, originally created and maintained in a region not only marked by slavery but also with a criminal justice system that treated African Americans with notable brutality following the Civil War (Perkinson, 2010; Lichtenstein, 1996; Oshinsky, 1997; Blackmon, 2009; Butterfield, 1995). Other scholars, however, point to the long history of punitive justice policies that were directed as well at communities of color in the north and west; they see the nation’s embrace of unprecedented high rates of incarceration as an extension of policies and practices that were less narrowly regional in nature (Gross, 2006; 
Muhammad, 2010; Hicks, 2010; Chávez-Garcia, 2012, Chapter 1; Lynch, 2010). Recent research also suggests that any difference between the racial ethos of the south and the north became much less marked as African Americans moved in record numbers between 1880 and 1950 from the south to the north, where they were greeted by white northerners (particularly by European immigrants, who themselves were struggling for full rights of citizenship) with suspicion, hostility, and even violence (Muller, 2012).

*According to Gottschalk (2006, p. 48), “the association in the South of crime and race made it impossible to embrace rehabilitation, the raison d’être for the penitentiary. . . . The roots of the penitentiary were shallow in the South” and were uprooted by the Civil War. After the Civil War, the convict leasing system was widely adopted in the south as an alternative means of punishment and played an important role in the region’s economic life.

126 incarceration.) In cross-national comparisons, Lappi-Seppälä (2008) finds 
a negative relationship (which has grown stronger over time) between pu-
nitiveness and social and political trust, and a positive cross-sectional rela-
tionship between high levels of social and political trust and more generous 
welfare policies. Within the United States, incarceration rates generally have 
been lower in states with higher levels of social capital, voter participation, 
and other forms of complex civic engagement (Barker, 2009). 
In examining the underlying causes of high rates of incarceration, it is 
important to keep in mind that the factors that sparked the increase may 
not be the same as those that currently sustain it. Economic interests, for 
example, initially did not play a central role in the upward turn in incar-
ceration rates. Over time, however, the buildup created new economic inter-
ests and new political configurations. By the mid-1990s, the new economic 
interests—including private prison companies, prison guards’ unions, and 
the suppliers of everything from bonds for new prison construction to Taser 
stun guns—were playing an important role in maintaining and sustaining 
the incarceration increase. The influence of economic interests that profit 
from high rates of incarceration grew at all levels of government, due in 
part to a “revolving door” that emerged between the corrections industry 
and the public sector. Another factor was the establishment of powerful, 
effective, and well-funded lobbying groups to represent the interests of the 
growing corrections sector. The private prison industry and other compa-
nies that benefit from large prison populations have expended substantial 
effort and resources in lobbying for more punitive laws and for fewer 
restrictions on the use of prison labor and private prisons (Elk and Sloan, 
2011; Thompson, 2010, 2012; Gilmore, 2007; Hallinan, 2001; Herival and 
Wright, 2007; Gopnik, 2012; Abramsky, 2007). Many legislators and other 
public officials, especially in economically struggling rural areas, became 
strong advocates of prison and jail construction in the 1990s, seeing it as 
an important engine for economic development. The evidence suggests, 
however, that prisons generally have an insignificant, or sometimes nega-
tive, impact on the economic development of the rural communities where 
they are located (Whitfield, 2008).24 
24 Residents of rural counties, which have been the primary sites for new prison construction 
since the 1980s, are no less likely to be unemployed than people living in counties without 
prisons, nor do they have higher per capita incomes. New jobs created by prisons tend to be 
filled by people living outside the county where the prison is built. Prisons also fail to generate 
significant linkages to the local economy because local businesses often are unable to provide 
the goods and services needed to operate penal facilities. Furthermore, new prison construc-
tion often necessitates costly public investments in infrastructure and services, such as roads, 
sewers, and courts, where the prisons are sited (Gilmore, 2007; King et al., 2003). 

127 URBAN ECONOMIC DISTRESS 
While the political developments discussed above were marked by spe-
cific events—for example, elections, campaigns, and policy developments—
long-term structural changes in urban economies also formed part of the 
context for the growth in incarceration rates. In American cities, problems 
of violence, poverty, unemployment, and single parenthood came together 
in minority neighborhoods as a focus of debates on crime and social policy. 
The connections among crime, poverty, and criminal punishment have been 
a long-standing interest of social theorists. They have argued that the poor 
are punished most because their involvement in crime and life circum-
stances are seen as threatening to social order. (Rusche [1978] provides a 
classic statement of the connection between incarceration and unemploy-
ment; Garland [1991] reviews the literature on the political economy of 
punishment.) In this view, the scale and intensity of criminal punishment 
fluctuate with overall economic cycles.
The social and economic decline of American cities in the 1970s and 
1980s is well documented. William Julius Wilson (1987) provides a classic 
account in The Truly Disadvantaged. In Wilson’s view, the decline of manu-
facturing industry employment combined with the out-migration of many 
working- and middle-class families to the suburbs. These economic and de-
mographic changes left behind pockets of severe and spatially concentrated 
poverty (see also Jargowsky, 1997). It was in these poor communities that 
contact with the criminal justice system and incarceration rates climbed to 
extraordinary levels, particularly among young minority men with little 
schooling. Rates of joblessness, births to single or unmarried parents, and 
violent crime all increased in poor inner-city neighborhoods. These social 
and economic trends unfolded in the broader context of deteriorating eco-
nomic opportunities for men with low levels of education, especially those 
who had dropped out of high school (Goldin and Katz, 2008), and the de-
cline of organized labor and the contraction of well-paying manufacturing 
and other jobs in urban areas for low-skilled workers. 
Rising incarceration rates overall appear to be produced primarily by 
the increased imprisonment of uneducated young men, especially those 
lacking a college education (see Chapter 2). In the wake of the civil rights 
movement, improved educational and economic opportunities appeared to 
foreshadow a new era of prosperity for blacks in the 1960s. However, the 
decline of urban manufacturing undermined economic opportunities for 
those with no more than a high school education. Fundamental changes 
also were unfolding in urban labor markets as labor force participation 
declined among young, less educated black men (Smith and Welch, 1989; 
Offner and Holzer, 2002; Fairlie and Sundstrom, 1999). In a careful re-
view of labor market data from the 1970s and 1980s, Bound and Freeman 

128 (1992) found growing racial gaps in earnings and employment that ex-
tended from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s.
The connections among urban unemployment, crime, and incarcera-
tion have been found in ethnographic and quantitative studies. With fewer 
well-paying economic opportunities available, some young men in poor 
inner-city neighborhoods turned to drug dealing and other criminal activi-
ties as sources of income. Ethnographers have documented the proliferation 
of drug dealing and violence in high-unemployment urban neighborhoods 
in the 1980s and 1990s (Bourgois, 2002; Anderson, 1990; Levitt and 
Venkatesh, 2000; Black, 2009). Qualitative researchers also argue that in 
poor urban areas, drunkenness, domestic disturbances, and the purchase 
and consumption of illegal drugs are more likely to take place in public 
places, whereas in suburban and more affluent urban areas, these activities 
tend to transpire in private homes and other private spaces. Consequently, 
poor urban residents are more exposed to police scrutiny and are more 
likely to be arrested than people residing in the suburbs or in wealthier ur-
ban neighborhoods (Duneier, 1999, pp. 304-307; Anderson, 1990, pp. 193-
198). Field observation is consistent with the finding of quantitative studies 
that, controlling for crime, incarceration rates increased with joblessness 
among African American men with no college education (Western, 2006; 
Western et al., 2006).
In short, poor inner-city neighborhoods were increasingly plagued by 
higher rates of unemployment among young men, crime, and other social 
problems. These same neighborhoods were the focal points of debates 
over crime and social policy, and the places where incarceration became 
pervasive.

CONCLUSION
The policies and practices that gave rise to unprecedented high rates of 
incarceration were the result of a variety of converging historical, social, 
economic, and political forces. Although debates over crime policy have 
a long history in the United States, these various forces converged in the 
1960s, which served as an important historical turning point for prison 
policy. Crime rates also increased sharply beginning in the 1960s, with 
the national homicide rate nearly doubling between 1964 and 1974. The 
relationship between rising crime trends and increased incarceration rates 
unfolded within, and was very much affected by, the larger context in which 
debates about race, crime, and law and order were unfolding. 
The powerful institutional, cultural, political, economic, and racial 
forces discussed in this chapter helped propel the United States down a 
more punitive path. Yet the unprecedented rise in incarceration rates in the 
United States over this period was not an inevitable outcome of these forces. 

129 Rather, it was the result of the particular ways in which the political system chose to respond to the major postwar changes in U.S. society, particularly since the 1960s. Unlike many other Western countries, the United States responded to escalating crime rates by enacting highly punitive policies and laws and turning away from rehabilitation and reintegration. The broader context provides a set of important explanations for both the punitive path that many politicians, policy makers, and other public figures decided to 
pursue and, perhaps more important, why so many Americans were will-
ing to follow. 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/088626094009001007 
Increases in U.S. Violent Crime During the 1980s Following Four American Military Actions 
CHARLES C. BEBBER
First Published March 1, 1994 Other 
Abstract
During the 1980s, the United States conducted four major foreign military strikes. Across the same decade, violent crime in America rose dramatically. An increase in the rate of criminal violence greater than that of the previous year is seen to appear immediately after each of the four military episodes of the 1980s, but not at any other time. A point-biserial test of covariance indicates the relationship between the presence or absence of military actions in the 1980s and the rate of criminal violence is significant at the .01 level. The findings are held to support Archer and Gartner's contention that a legitimation of violence model provides the most credible explanation of the link between war and civil violence.

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Grace THOUGHTS Paul Lynch Oneworld Publications 2017

 1.    We know that Grace is 14 years old right at the beginning of the story:

...this girl pale-skinned, fourteen, still boy-chested… [4]

In the last pages:

How quickly a year goes out and now almost another. Already it is the autumn of 1849. Soon, she thinks, you will be nineteen. She has been a wanderer and has come to see this earth many-voiced and multitudinous and among its throng has come to believe there is not one earth but as many earths as there are people, and as many earths again to meet our changing lives. We are here under a hundred million suns and each sun dies out under the same limitless sun that burns in lasting mystery.
       She has spent much of the year in south Donegal. Has seen swaths of countryside abandoned, has seen madness in the eyes of those whose fate it is to remember. And yet the lazybeds serried on every hill keep coming to green and men and women and children walk free of their shadows. They idle the corners and fill the air with pipe smoke, banter and intrigue. [351]

...She saw in the new year holding the good hand of the coachman Jim Collins… [352]

       So, Grace’s wanderings have lasted from autumn 1845 to the beginning of 1849.

2.    How the peacefulness of the last pages contrasts with shock of the first passages of the novel! There, we were torn from our world of reader’s calm: we could only think, “Is she really going to be slaughtered?”

…From a place that is speechless comes the recognition that something in the making up of her world has been unfixed.

       She is drawn to the exit as if harnessed to her mother, her body bent like a buckling field implement, her feet blunt blades. A knife-cut of light by the door. Her eyes fight the gloom to get a fasten on her mother, see just a hand pale as bone vised upon her wrist. She swings her free fist, misses, swings at the dark, at the air complicit, digs her heals into the floor. Will against will she pits, though Sarah’s will now has become more like animal power, a secret strength, she thinks, like Nealy Ford’s ox before he killed it and left, and now her wrist burns in her mother’s grip. She rolls from heels to her toes as she is dragged out the door.

       What comes to meet them is a smacking cold as if it has lurked there just for them, an animal thing eager in the dawn, a morning that sits low and crude and grey. Not yet the true cold of winter though the trees huddle like old men stripped for punishment and the land is haggard just waiting. The trees here are mountain ash but bear not the [3] limbs of grace. They stand foreshortened and twisted as if they could find no succour in the shallow earth, were stunted by the sky’s ever-low. Beneath them pass Sarah and her daughter, this girl pale-skinned, fourteen, still boy-chested, her long hair set loose in her face so that all her mother can see of her are the girl’s teeth set to grimace.

       Her mother force-sits her on the killing stump. Sit you down on it, she says.
 
      It seems for a moment that a vast silence has opened, the wind a restless wanderer all time at this height is still. The rocks set into the mountain are great teeth clamped shut to listen. In the mud puddles the girl is witness to herself, sees the woman’s warp standing over her grey and grotesque. The spell of silence, wing-flap and whoosh of a dark bird that shoots overhead for the hill. She thinks, what has become of Mam while I slept? Who has taken her place? Of a sudden she sees what the heart fears most—pulled from out of her mother’s skirt, the dulled knife. And then out of her own dark comes her brother Colly’s story, his huge eyes all earnest, the story of a family so hard up they put the knife to the youngest. Or was it the eldest? she thinks. Colly, always with the stories, always yammering on, swearing on his life it was true. Quit your fooling, she said then. But now she knows that one thing leads to another and something has led to this. [4]

       Perhaps—I say, perhaps—just one outside view (the only one in the whole novel?):

Sarah and her daughter, this girl pale-skinned, fourteen, still boy-chested, her long hair set loose in her face so that all her mother can see of her are the girl’s teeth set to grimace.

3.     As I mentioned in the Overview, throughout the novel every description is through Grace’s eyes and thoughts. These first paragraphs embody in germ the thematic and stylistic traits of the novel.

Grace

-seeing: knife-cut of light by the door; her eyes fight the gloom, see just a hand pale as bone vised upon her wrist; the
woman’s warp standing over her grey and grotesque; she sees...pulled from out of her mother’s skirt, the dulled knife
-hearing: a place that is speechless; spell of silence; wing-flap and whoosh of a dark bird
-feeling physically: her body bent like a buckling field implement, her feet blunt blades; digs her heals into the floor; now her wrist burns in her mother’s grip; she rolls from her heels to her toes as she is
dragged out the door; a smacking cold...Not yet the true cold of winter; a hand pale as bone vised upon her wrist; the wind a restless wanderer all time at this height is still; in the mud puddles the girl is witness to herself
-feeling emotionally: Sarah’s will now has become more like animal power; it seems for a moment that a vast silence has opened; what the heart fears most
-reasoning: What has become of Mam while I slept? Who has taken her place?
-philosophizing, of sorts: But now she knows that one thing leads to another and something has led to this.
-thinking of her brother and his yammering—premonitions of the inner dialog with Colly which permeates the whole story: And then out of her own dark comes her brother Colly’s story...Colly always with the stories, always yammering on...Quit your fooling, she said then 

Surroundings

-mirroring Grace’s feelings metaphorically: 
a smacking cold as if it has lurked there just for them, an animal thing eager in the dawn, a morning that sits low and crude and grey. Not yet the true cold of winter though the trees huddle like old men stripped for punishment and the land is haggard just waiting. The trees here are mountain ash but bear not the [3] limbs of grace. They stand foreshortened and twisted as if they could find no succour in the shallow earth, were stunted by the sky’s ever-low; the rocks set into the mountain are great teeth clamped shut to listen.

       In a first-person narrative, the we know that what is described is pure subjectivity, and we can enter into that subjectivity and, hopefully, accept it. Or we can stand outside and observe it as an aesthetic object, more or less felicitously. In a third-person narrative, the author can make us weave in and out of the main character’s mind or of different characters’ minds. Grace is another alternative: can we call it pure third-person subjectivity?

4.       In my Overview, I insisted on the particularity of Paul Lynch’s language. I would like to underline again its metaphorical density and the richness of its imagery.

5.     And finally, the logic of Grace’s evolution throughout the novel—loss of her brother, solitude, adaptation and survival under the harshest conditions, nightmares and superstition even, role playing as a boy, experience of violence and direct contact with death and murder, hard physical labor, discovery of her identity as a woman and the injustice it implies, instinctive attachment to a protector, cold and hunger and delirium and dying and resurection, malaise and disillusion—her evolution is not only perfectly logical but rings true. Guilt and despair put her on the brink of schizophrenia. Only calm and hope can break her silence in the end:

…she begins to feel a shift inside her as if a great light were shining through her, a light reaching into dark, thought like rain washing through sky, like glass that holds the world without discolour, like sunlight passing beauty through water, like sunlight passing through wind beneath the rising wingbeat. The child soon due and these are the good blue days and she knows, yes, I will speak, the words will come and I will speak of what is now, of only this, and a blue morning arrives when Jim shakes her from dream and she wakes and he whispers, you must come, and they step out of house and it is then she sees it, the woodland held in fields of colour, a violet born of night and finding in day its fullest expression and how the trees stand hazed in the light of these bluebells and her hands go to her belly and it is then without thought the words rise and she speaks to him.
       This life is light. [354]

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