My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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Goodreads Review of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

 My first book review in over a year is bound to be rough and this thing feels rough. Got to start from somewhere, I guess. 

Happy New Year.

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Been a minute since I have done any type of real serious reading, but here I am.

This year is the last year of the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent. For the last 10 years that I have been on here I have been saving a bookshelf of books by or about people of African descent here on Goodreads if you wish to check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

This book was on my radar from the time it came out, but I needed it in a reasonable price-range before I decided to read it given it's length. It is the second-to-last book published during Toni Morrison's lifetime and it is an edited publishing of her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. As the title suggests, she uses the idea of the other or othering and how in the U.S. context slavery and it's afterlife helped to create "the other" as we have it in America today.

"One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example."

She spends the book using various examples from literature like Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to show how whites "other" black people, but she also uses people like Harriet Jacobs, Camara Laye, and most noticeably herself to show how Black writers push back against the attempts to dehumanize them. This book also reminded me that I need to read Paradise ASAP.

"I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy."

This book is like a career-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and a lot of what she brings up here will be familiar to those who have read that book or The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. I confess, with this being the first book that I had to sit and think on in some time, I had a time trying to say something here that was different from the other non-fiction books of her that I have read, but the fact is that this book is transcript of a lecture she gave so it was no surprise that there would be little surprise here if you are familiar with her non-fiction writing. I will say that if you only know Toni Morrison from her novels, this is the perfect place to start for seeing what her thought-process is in condensed form.

I wish I could feel like this review was up-to-snuff with how I usually do, but this is what I have in the tank at the moment.

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My Ideal Method of Teaching Myself Through Reading and Research (I'll think of a better title later)

 With all the excitement and talk going around about Isabel Wilkerson's new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I thought I would use my preparation to read the book and share how I ideally want to go about preparing to read this book. Now from reading the synopsis, checking-out a review or two, and watching the many promotional interviews about this book I realize that this book is looking at the concept of caste and how it is used in the United States in the formation of racial hierarchy compared to how the Nazi's would use American racism in their regime and how caste has been used in India. Now in these cases I like to apply something I will call for the sake of this blog post "the single story test." This test is to see if any knowledge I have attained over time has been left to violate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's single-story trap that she laid-out in her lecture "The Danger of A Single Story." I ask myself:

1. Does the information or "story" I have come from one source or multiple? 
2. Does the information I have take itself as correct uncritically without any mention of any counter-narrative existing?
3. But seriously, how reliable is the place I am getting my knowledge from?

 So my thought process is like that. If I know in my heart that my information on something is very simplistic (especially if I learned it all in the school system without checking to see if it is really true) and came from a source that may have an agenda or a bias, I need to fact-check and do more research into the thing I am interested in. As an aside, The YouTube channel Crash Course as a good program related to this about Navigating Digital Information that I will recommend. But back to the subject at hand.

When I heard of this book I was very excited to read it, but I realized that though I felt comfortable in my knowledge about the American and Nazi racial hierarchy systems, I was not so sure on my knowledge of the caste system in India. So that means for me that before I start on this one book that may give me info I need, but may not, I want to study up on this myself so that I won't need to worry about if what Wilkerson is saying is correct or not because I'll already know at least the basics. At the very start I begin with books I have, podcasts I listen to that talk about it or Wikipedia (don't cringe, I'm about to address that) to start me off--basically any resource freely-available to me that talks about the Hindu caste system. Now, I have a book called The Illustrated World's Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions by Huston Smith, I listened to a podcast on the history of philosophy in Ancient India and I've seen the the Attenborough Gandhi movie like 6 times. This isn't enough to learn about this subject...not at all. Thankfully, I have the internet. Still, I need to know how to use it correctly for the info I need (which I do). 

So now let's get this out of the way: Wikipedia is not the devil. This may be hard for folks older than me to understand, but if you know how to use Wikipedia right than it can be a crucial resource of information or at least point you in the right direction. I think of it as a map to the destination rather than the destination itself. So when reading-up on the caste system in India, I am not actually looking for the information on the page, but at the sources where that information comes from as that is where any actual research begins. I'll try to narrow down what exactly about the caste system I am trying to learn beyond how it came about and then I can go from there. Just from a cursory glance, I know that I should look at the Manusmṛiti and parts of the Mahabharata (which I own a copy of!) for primary ancient sources (I always try to get a primary source over when I can, don't care how "complicated" or "long" it is).  I can also look at other sites beyond Wikipedia and if I know where to go (I don't).

I can also ask people who are knowledgeable on this subject or who indeed live in India (the internet is convenient in that way). Sometimes folks will point you in the right direction sometimes they will refuse to help you--you have to accept both options. I had one person who did steer me into the right direction long before I even knew I was going to be interested in this subject and recommended that I read Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand and Annihilation of Caste by B. R. Ambedkar during conversations unrelated to this subject & Wilkerson's book. 

Using all of this information, I can gather what I want to use into how much they correspond to the subject I am interested in which is currently the origin and function of the caste system in India and how it relates to the white supremacist/anti-black hierarchy of the United States of America. As I become more knowledgeable in this subject, I can add or subtract from my informal syllabus as I go along. And when I think I have learned enough on this subject, I can dive into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents with more confidence on what is handled within it. This is, ideally, how I do any sort-of autodidacticism on a subject of interest. I say ideally because I am pretty sure that in practice, I may will not do that much prior-reading before reading Wilkerson's book. Still, this is the best way I can articulate my social sciences-oriented method of examining things that are presented before me. I can't stand being dumb and not knowing something before-hand.

My Review of The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I wrote this review in March of 2019, about six months before Toni Morrison's death. It would be the first of two books I would read before their author's death. This books importance to me has only grown since I first read it (as a library book, no less). I hope to own it one day, but I do at least have access to the two essays that have affected the way I think of fiction the most-deeply.

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One thing that can be said about Toni Morrison is that she has no time for modesty and all the time for hubris. She's the athlete that trash-talks, but can back it up with skill: a literary Muhammad Ali (whose autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story she edited). As interesting as it was to read her views on literature and her literary criticism, I was fascinated at how she configured her own personae. That added a very unusual dynamic to this book since most of this book was transcripts of speeches rather than actual essays.

Some of these selections were amazing. I was intrigued by her thoughts on the so-called "canon wars" of the late 1980s-early 1990s, because she (or rather her work) was one of the big topics of it. One quote by her that caught my attention was "Canon building is empire building, canon defense is national defense." Lines and passages like that gave me food for thought, especially given how out-dated that controversy is now. That same section had a very powerful examination of Moby-Dick, or, the Whale, which has prepared me even more to read it.

Her use of the Cinderella fable, Sula, and Beowulf to explain her own theory of feminism was very well-done. I know that Morrison does not identify as a card-carrying feminist (or at least she has said in interviews that she has problems with the term as we know it), but she seems to outline ideas and a philosophy that can easily be called feminism. For her, showing the importance how women relate to each other is very important. At the very least, it would be interesting to compare her ideas with that of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie--another Black woman novelist who very much identifies as a feminist (though not a womanist).

In another passage Morrison says, "When I hear someone say, 'Truth is stranger than fiction,' I think that old chestnut is truer than we know, because it doesn't say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it's stranger, meaning that it's odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the important thing is that it's random--and fiction is not random." (-- Both bold texts are mine.) This was like the key piece of thought that I'd been looking for for awhile now. This is something so profound, but not appreciated enough by writers or readers now-a-days. This fact is what separates myth from history. The site of memory in this book is something you really appreciate as you go deeper into your self as a reader. Lines like this quotation are found throughout the book.

The only parts of this book I skipped over are the parts that reference books by her that I have not read yet. Morrison is her biggest fan so her primary reference for her literary criticism is her own work. This obvious means we get expert commentary by the author, but we also get spoiled or a very "guided" interpretation of the work. I wanted more examinations of her own contemporaries or works she liked (or hated), but one has to settle. I was fascinated by her ideas on writing, even though I don't think I agreed with half of it. It is always interesting to see the psyche of a particular writer, especially one who is this knowledgeable and...we'll say confident. Some of these speeches I'd already heard like her Nobel Lecture and eulogy of James Baldwin, but most of these were definitely "archive/lost tapes" material.

I wish I could go in further, but I will have to reread the book with more time (and after reading more novels by Toni Morrison).

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