I just finished reading Abani's latest work, "The Virgin of Flames". This book is a lot different from his previous works, although it is embedded with many of his familiar themes of religion, haunting, identity, and overt sexuality. It takes place in Los Angeles, where I live, and revolves around a young adult visual artist named Black who is struggling to find his identity in a city that seems to be a land of transplants, maintaining no true identity of its own. Black is lost. His father is Igbo from Nigeria, and his mother is Salvadoran. He struggles with his mixed-race and mixed-culture background. He also struggles with abandonment and devlopmental issues because his father left to fight and died in the civil war in Nigeria, and his mother died of cancer after abusing him for a long time. All he has left of them are skewed and haunting memories. His father was an alcoholic scientist who claimed to believe in nothing but reason, and on the other side of the spectrum his mother was a deeply religious Catholic who imposed guilt-ridden rituals on Black throughout his childhood. Black's friend Iggy tells him he is haunted by the ghost of his mother, and that he can never find himself if he does not address this ghost and thus cause it to go away.
These are not the only issues complicating Black's sense of self. When he was younger, he was forced to wear dresses until he was six years old. A letter from his father explains this by saying that there is a curse on their family that calls for all males under the age of seven to die, so they have to hide the males by disguising them as females. After all this, Black grew to enjoy dressing as a woman, although he hides this fact from most people. He even steals women's clothing to dress up in private. During his childhood Black experiences confusing sexual experiences, such as the rape by a male gangster, the sprinkling of votive wax on his penis by his mother as a means of "penance", the watching of his dying mother masturbating in front of him. Now in his adulthood Black is obsessed with a transsexual stripper he calls Sweet Girl, and eventually he starts a sort of relationship with her. Black suffers greatly at his confusion over his sexual identity. Is he gay? A cross-dresser? A straight guy who dresses up solely to inspire his art? He also feels confusion over his race, culture, and religion? Is he black? Igbo? Catholic? Atheist? Salvadoran? It seems his only true source of solace is in his art, mostly murals that he creates on sides of walls in East Los Angeles or inside of builidings.
This book was a lot more narrative-based than Abani's last two novellas that I read, and less poetic. It reminded me much more of "Graceland", especially with the whole theme of dressing up to assume other identities, a form of "masking". I was both drawn to and away from this book simulatenously, if that contradiction makes any sense. Its strangeness intrigued me, as it is unlike any book I ever read, and it was hard to put down. At times, it even made me slightly uncomfortable, which is hard to do. I think this has something to do with the rawness and truth at the heart of Abani's novel. He is not afraid to be graphic and upfront, and I think I could see myself in Black at many moments. I guess I have always struggled with my sense of being, and coming to terms with my strange childhood. Many times I have felt "lesser than", and unable to escape the ghosts of my parents and my past. Although my struggle with identity is not the same as Black's, I definetely relate to his lack of internal peace, and his way of turning to art as means of expression and a sort of self-therapy. We all have our ghosts, and maybe that is why this book is at times very haunting.
Speaking of ghosts, and angels, and demons, that is a huge running theme in this novel. Not only is Black haunted by his mother's ghost, but he is also haunted by the Virgin Mary, who he becomes obsessed with, and the angel Gabriel, who constantly follows him around in different forms. He is both haunted and comforted by the Los Angeles River, which he seems to never be able to leave behind. I really enjoyed this focus on both real and imagined ghosts. Following from that, as you can probably tell from the title, there is a huge emphasis on religion, especially Catholicism, and the Virgin Mary. There is a sort of recurrent "good girl" (Virgin)/"bad girl" (Sweet Girl) dichotomy throughout the book. There is a lot on guilt, and ritual, and belief. Very interesting for my Jew-ness.
Funny enough, I am left thinking of this novel. I can't escape the chills it gave me for some reason. At times I wanted to stop reading, but I couldn't stop. I was searching for an end, for Black's internal peace, just like he was. Of course there can be no peace. Maybe I was truly searching for my own peace. Maybe I am still searching. Maybe this book reminded me of that. It is a strange, "fun-house" type ride throughout this book, and I highly recommend it for all the haunted souls out there. Be prepared to be uncomfortable, as you may just see yourself reflected on a way you never have before.
I will leave you with one part that left me thinking. Black is conversing with his friend Iggy, and she starts off:
""Look, let's not talk about it anymore. Origins aren't important, what happened, who did what to whom,, that whole postmortem crap. Matter of fact, even the change away from it isn't important. What's important is committing to the new life, whatever it is. Some things you just put in the ground and leave alone.'
The phrase about origins not being important echoed in his brain like a Ping-Pong ball richocheting off the insides of his skull. The fact of the matter was that he was obsessed with origins , and he believed that in his case, origins held the key to self-discovery. It seemed, though, that those with a clear sense of the past, of identity, were always so eager to bury it and move on , to reinvent themselves. What a luxury, he thought, what a thing, to choose your own obsession, to choose your own suffering. Him, he was trying to reinvent an origin to bury so he could finally come into this thing he wanted to be, and he knew that if he didn't find it soon, it would destroy him, burn him up."
I hope all of you check out Abani's novels and novellas. He also has poetry I would love to read, but it wasn't in the bookstore I am using for this project, though I'm sure i'll get my hands on it somehow. Seriously, he is one of my new favorite authors, and I would never have known about him without this project. I found out that he is now a professor at UC Riverside, so I am going to try to contact him to see if I can possinly meet him. I'll let you know how that goes.
And now, I think this is the last Abani book in the bookstore, so sadly, and happily, on to the next author. I'm not sure who that is yet, but I shall report back soon once I stop by there. Until then--
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Identity, Isolation, and the Igbo
So, I have not posted in awhile, mainly because my internet has been in and out. However, I have read two books during that time! Both are books by Chris Abani, and I have to say, I think I found one of my new favorite books, and it is rare for me to label a book a favorite.
First up was "Becoming Abigail". I was truly surprised at how different the style of writing was in this novella as compared to "Graceland". There is much less pure narrative going on, and a lot more poetry. Which is to say, I loved it, because I love poetic language. Yet many of the themes Abani touched on in "Graceland" are still present in this work--loss of a mother figure, conflicts with father, isolation, culture clashes, sexuality, temporal jumps back and forth. This particular novella focuses heavily on identity and the body. It centers around Abigail, an Igbo girl from Nigeria whose mother (also named Abigail) dies after giving birth to her. She always feels a bit of resentment from her father as if she killed his wife and her mother, and the fact that she appears almost physically identical to the Abigail of her namesake further complicates her issues of identity. In this story her cousin takes her to live in England, apparently as a kind gesture to "save" her, but in reality he sells her into prostitution and sexual slavery. Along the way she falls in love with her white married social worker, and they have a brief affair before being found out. Abigail often burns her own skin and this self-mutilation serves as a means to escape her body, but also as a way to demarcate physical differences between her and the mother whose ghost she struggles to break free from--and so simultaneously it is a means to accept her own body for what it is and make it palpable. There is also a lot in this story about memory, and how much is truth, and how much is made up. Do we ever have purely "true" memories? Along those lines, do authors have the responsibility to tell "truth" in memoir? Is this even possible?
I think the only way to give justice to this beautiful novella is to quote some of my favorite parts and let you see for yourself.
"Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this. This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten. Yet not left over. She knew this. As she smoked. She knew this. This. This. This. And what now?"
"Why did these people know nothing of this? Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday's. Not as beautiful as yesterday's. Only as beautiful as today's. Even the dead knew this."
"None of the men who had taken her in her short lifetime had seen her. ...They never weighed the heft of her breast the way she did, had, from the moment of her first bump. Sitting in her room, the darkness softened by a tired moon straining through dirty windows, she had rolled her growing breast between her palms like dough being shaped for a lover's bread. This wasn't an erotic exercise, though it became that, inevitably. At first it was a curiosity, a genuine wonder at the burgeoning of a self, a self that was still Abigail, yet still her. With the tip of a wax crayon she would write 'me' over and over on the brown rise of them. And when she washed in the shower the next day, the color would bleed, but the wax left a sheen, the memory of night and her reclamation. But not the men in her life; they hadn't really stopped long enough. She was a foreign country to them. One they wanted to pass through as quickly as possible."
There is so much more beautiful prose in this novella. I love the way Abani uses metaphor, and repetition. The way he can write from the mind of an adolescent woman so convincingly. His focus on memory and the body.
I thought I had read my favorite book by him. But then I read "Song for Night", another novella, and I was truly blown away. Wow. I didn't think I was going to enjoy this one because it is a war story and I'm not really one for "action" books. Instead I found a deeply moving, introspective, poetic novella about a young boy and his comrades who serve as mine diffusers in the civil war in Nigeria. It is about the war, and the situation in the country, but it isn't--underneath it all, it's a story about adolescence, love, betrayal, haunting, memory, pain, survival. However the boy's adolescence and coming of age is of course heavily colored by the fact that he is a child soldier, and that makes for a disturbing and melancholy storyline--just the type I enjoy, ha. The story opens with a discussion on silence. The opening line is, "What you hear is not my voice". This is foreshadowing for what is to come, but I won't discuss that so as not to be a plot spoiler. I will tell you that what the boy is literally talking about is the fact that he and his unit can no longer talk--their throats were cut by the army so that they had no more voices, rendering them unable to scream if they stepped on a mine and blew up--reminiscent of a certain scene in "Slumdog Millionaire". Consequently each chapter is titled with a different aspect of sign language that the children use to communicate, such as "Memory is a Pattern Cut into an Arm" and "Truth is Forefinger to Tongue Raised Skyward". I find this beautiful, and it really speaks to the themes of communication, language, and human connection found in the novella.
Again, this book speaks best for itself, so all I shall do now is quote some excerpts for you.
"There is a lot to be said for silence, especially when it comes to you young. The interiority of the head, whih is a misnomer-misnomer being one of those words silence brings you-but there is something about the mind's interiority no less that opens up your view of the world. It is a curious place to live and makes you deep beyond your years and familiar with death. But that is what this war has done."
"The next day, as one of us was blown up by a mine, we discovered why they had silenced us: so that we wouldn't scare eachother with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction. What they couldn't know was that in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices."
"I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breats--all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those."
"This is how we sign this: forefinger poniting to the sky while the whole body gyrates. For Ijeoma and me, play is a veiled thing, our own private language within a private language, sweeter for being secret. Rock, paper, scissors: one tap on our gun's stock, two taps, three. One tap. One. One tap. Two. A loss. Two taps. One. A win. Two taps. Two. A draw. Endlessly we play, never looking at eachother but smiling into the distance, hearts racing with the aniticpation. Then a steady hand, palm flat. Silence. Still we smile as we scan for the danger, our hearts beating. One. One. Two. Two. Two. Two. Three. Three. Three."
There are so many, many more amazing, quotable parts. Like the entire novella. Seriously. This is one the most physically grotesque books I have read, especially of Abani's, full of decapitated people and cannibalism and brute rape, and yet I find this to be one of the most poetic and beautiful novellas I have come across. Haunting. Now there's some foreshadowing for you. Read it.
Next up is what I think is Abani's last book at the bookstore (last time I was there)--"The Virgin of Flames". Just glancing at this novel (it is longer than the last two) tells me that it takes place in Los Angeles and it appears very different from any of his previous works. I am excited to read about my hometown, although I'm sad to leave the poetics of the last two novellas behind. I'll report back when I have something to say. Until then--
First up was "Becoming Abigail". I was truly surprised at how different the style of writing was in this novella as compared to "Graceland". There is much less pure narrative going on, and a lot more poetry. Which is to say, I loved it, because I love poetic language. Yet many of the themes Abani touched on in "Graceland" are still present in this work--loss of a mother figure, conflicts with father, isolation, culture clashes, sexuality, temporal jumps back and forth. This particular novella focuses heavily on identity and the body. It centers around Abigail, an Igbo girl from Nigeria whose mother (also named Abigail) dies after giving birth to her. She always feels a bit of resentment from her father as if she killed his wife and her mother, and the fact that she appears almost physically identical to the Abigail of her namesake further complicates her issues of identity. In this story her cousin takes her to live in England, apparently as a kind gesture to "save" her, but in reality he sells her into prostitution and sexual slavery. Along the way she falls in love with her white married social worker, and they have a brief affair before being found out. Abigail often burns her own skin and this self-mutilation serves as a means to escape her body, but also as a way to demarcate physical differences between her and the mother whose ghost she struggles to break free from--and so simultaneously it is a means to accept her own body for what it is and make it palpable. There is also a lot in this story about memory, and how much is truth, and how much is made up. Do we ever have purely "true" memories? Along those lines, do authors have the responsibility to tell "truth" in memoir? Is this even possible?
I think the only way to give justice to this beautiful novella is to quote some of my favorite parts and let you see for yourself.
"Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this. This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten. Yet not left over. She knew this. As she smoked. She knew this. This. This. This. And what now?"
"Why did these people know nothing of this? Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday's. Not as beautiful as yesterday's. Only as beautiful as today's. Even the dead knew this."
"None of the men who had taken her in her short lifetime had seen her. ...They never weighed the heft of her breast the way she did, had, from the moment of her first bump. Sitting in her room, the darkness softened by a tired moon straining through dirty windows, she had rolled her growing breast between her palms like dough being shaped for a lover's bread. This wasn't an erotic exercise, though it became that, inevitably. At first it was a curiosity, a genuine wonder at the burgeoning of a self, a self that was still Abigail, yet still her. With the tip of a wax crayon she would write 'me' over and over on the brown rise of them. And when she washed in the shower the next day, the color would bleed, but the wax left a sheen, the memory of night and her reclamation. But not the men in her life; they hadn't really stopped long enough. She was a foreign country to them. One they wanted to pass through as quickly as possible."
There is so much more beautiful prose in this novella. I love the way Abani uses metaphor, and repetition. The way he can write from the mind of an adolescent woman so convincingly. His focus on memory and the body.
I thought I had read my favorite book by him. But then I read "Song for Night", another novella, and I was truly blown away. Wow. I didn't think I was going to enjoy this one because it is a war story and I'm not really one for "action" books. Instead I found a deeply moving, introspective, poetic novella about a young boy and his comrades who serve as mine diffusers in the civil war in Nigeria. It is about the war, and the situation in the country, but it isn't--underneath it all, it's a story about adolescence, love, betrayal, haunting, memory, pain, survival. However the boy's adolescence and coming of age is of course heavily colored by the fact that he is a child soldier, and that makes for a disturbing and melancholy storyline--just the type I enjoy, ha. The story opens with a discussion on silence. The opening line is, "What you hear is not my voice". This is foreshadowing for what is to come, but I won't discuss that so as not to be a plot spoiler. I will tell you that what the boy is literally talking about is the fact that he and his unit can no longer talk--their throats were cut by the army so that they had no more voices, rendering them unable to scream if they stepped on a mine and blew up--reminiscent of a certain scene in "Slumdog Millionaire". Consequently each chapter is titled with a different aspect of sign language that the children use to communicate, such as "Memory is a Pattern Cut into an Arm" and "Truth is Forefinger to Tongue Raised Skyward". I find this beautiful, and it really speaks to the themes of communication, language, and human connection found in the novella.
Again, this book speaks best for itself, so all I shall do now is quote some excerpts for you.
"There is a lot to be said for silence, especially when it comes to you young. The interiority of the head, whih is a misnomer-misnomer being one of those words silence brings you-but there is something about the mind's interiority no less that opens up your view of the world. It is a curious place to live and makes you deep beyond your years and familiar with death. But that is what this war has done."
"The next day, as one of us was blown up by a mine, we discovered why they had silenced us: so that we wouldn't scare eachother with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction. What they couldn't know was that in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices."
"I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breats--all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those."
"This is how we sign this: forefinger poniting to the sky while the whole body gyrates. For Ijeoma and me, play is a veiled thing, our own private language within a private language, sweeter for being secret. Rock, paper, scissors: one tap on our gun's stock, two taps, three. One tap. One. One tap. Two. A loss. Two taps. One. A win. Two taps. Two. A draw. Endlessly we play, never looking at eachother but smiling into the distance, hearts racing with the aniticpation. Then a steady hand, palm flat. Silence. Still we smile as we scan for the danger, our hearts beating. One. One. Two. Two. Two. Two. Three. Three. Three."
There are so many, many more amazing, quotable parts. Like the entire novella. Seriously. This is one the most physically grotesque books I have read, especially of Abani's, full of decapitated people and cannibalism and brute rape, and yet I find this to be one of the most poetic and beautiful novellas I have come across. Haunting. Now there's some foreshadowing for you. Read it.
Next up is what I think is Abani's last book at the bookstore (last time I was there)--"The Virgin of Flames". Just glancing at this novel (it is longer than the last two) tells me that it takes place in Los Angeles and it appears very different from any of his previous works. I am excited to read about my hometown, although I'm sad to leave the poetics of the last two novellas behind. I'll report back when I have something to say. Until then--
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