20030218 - Kindred: If All of Rochester Read the Same Book…

Writers & Books in Rochester, NY, has this neat concept: If All of Rochester Read the Same Book… They select a book to read and a couple months later the author comes through, there's panels and discussions, book clubs talk about it, local public radio promotes it, and in general they end up with 40,000 to 50,000 people in town all reading the same book.

And Octavia E. Butler rocks. I've read several of her later works--great science fiction storytelling in a J.G.Ballard "inner space rather than outer space" mode and a sharp focus on issues of domination, enslavement, forced cooperation with one's captors, Stockholm syndrome, body-politics, race, gender, and species.

But Kindred is brutal in a way that her other stuff isn't quite. A black woman travels back in time to a plantation in ante bellum Maryland to make sure her great-great-grandmother is born, by protecting the plantation owner's son who is her great-great-great-grandfather. The historical reality behind all of this gives this story have more immediacy, more pathos, to what happens to the protagonist than when aliens come and want to take parts of the protagonist's DNA. I was surprised that I found the book much harder to read than Samuel R. Delany's Hogg (a rapist-for-hire carouses about the town with a boy, shit-eating ensues) or The Mad Man (an experiment in desensitization and illustration of the important of context--sex with hobos, scat, and watersports all make sense by the end of the book). These are real people, not mere futuristic characters. The brutality was more raw and egregious.

I did see some parallels in the method of Kindred to The Mad Man. The latter begins with a scene of anarchy, corruption, danger and extreme perversion. As the book progresses we are 'desensitized' to things and at the end of the book, a reflected-refracted version of the opening plays out, and we accept it as comprehensible. Kindred starts with us at least somewhat understanding the 'base state' of American slavery, and takes a modern day character and forces her into that state. As the story progresses, the character is put into more and more morally ambiguous situations where she has less and less power, and we see how easy it is to have to work within the system instead of apart from it. We are slowly desensitized not to violence, but to acceptance and resignation. The powerlessness of the protagonist is also our powerlessness to change history.

Congratulations, Writers and Books for taking on such a tough one. And you, too, Ms. Butler. Antonin Artaud would be proud.
 

20030209 - Girls in Gangs

Listening to the second part of the NPR All Things Considered story From Rubies to Blossoms: A Portrait of American Girlhood: The New Gangs of New York it occured to me that the reality of the (white) male fantasy of female subjugation as described in such works as The Story of O (http://www.storyofo.co.uk/ or at Amazon.com) can be a reality. But it doesn't happen in upper-class drawing rooms where men discuss literature and politics over red wine and fine cigars while beautiful female creatures cater to their every whim, it happens in poor neighborhoods, people are fighting for survival, selling their bodies for money and self-esteem.