Reading revolution

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The precise date the Bolsheviks took power is November 7. In the lead-up to the anniversary of this glorious landmark of world history, I'm doing a little reading.

First, I'm reading The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky (which, by the way, is available in a free e-book version here). Actually I think I'm rereading it, but the truth is that I have little specific memory of most of the great Marxist works I read in my early 20s as my aging brain seems to no longer retain that kind of detail. So now, 40 years later, even if it weren't the centenary, it'd be time to read them again. Especially now. To refresh and re-arm. None of us could have predicted even a year ago the way the class struggle in this country would so swiftly and sharply re-ignite. It has, though, and is heating up daily, and as I read Trotsky's superlative, thrilling, incisive, commanding narrative I come across passage after passage that is stunningly apposite. Much as I'd like to, I don't know that I'll remember these fantastically on-target formulations (see above re aging brain), but I do believe they'll have a cumulative impact and I'll come away from this book with a deepened, renewed understanding of how revolution is accomplished.

It is a long book, and I'm reading it slowly as pretty much every sentence is a gem requiring concentration and consideration, so who knows whether I'll finish before the 100th anniversary arrives. Whenever I do, though, I'll be moving on to two others that I'm embarrassed to say I have not read before but am eager to begin.

One is The Black Jacobins by the brilliant Marxist historian CLR James, who by the way called Trotsky's book "the greatest history of an event that I know." James' book, subtitled Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, is the history of the Haitian Revolution, the world's first successful slave revolution. The other is A Socialist History of the French Revolution by Jean Jaures, of whom Trotsky said, "Every revolutionary party, every oppressed working class can claim Jaures, his memory, his example, for our own."

Meanwhile, fiction obsessive that I am, I'm also reading a novel or two here and there, most of them trending in the revolutionary direction as well. One I just finished and do, to my own surprise, recommend is The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton. This book is set in the aftermath of, the ensuing two to three years after, the unfinished Egyptian revolution of 2011, the mass uprisings centered in Cairo's Tahrir Square that were the central events of what came to be known as the Arab Spring. I nearly didn't read this one. Basically because it was so widely praised by the bourgeois literary establishment that I assumed it couldn't be any good politically. I decided to give it a try. Then I nearly stopped within the first few pages because I saw that the story (1) is not about the actual 2011 uprising as I'd mistakenly thought it would be but rather takes place in the following years, and (2) is not a narrative about or from the point of view of the oppressed masses but rather is about and from the point of view of several middle-class artsy types--filmmakers, photographers, audio engineers--who undertake to record, bear witness to, the struggle. I kept going, though, and was soon won over, in fact swept up in the narrative. What is winning about this novel? For one thing, it's honest about point of view and achieves what felt to me like real authenticity. Also, the main characters may not be starving proletarians, but they are genuine partisans of the revolutionary insurgence who've assessed that their highest contribution will be to bring the news of it to the world. They're propagandists in the best sense of the word. As such, as partisans and propagandists, they do not stand outside the course of events. They don't just tell the story, they become part of the story. They are sincere, they are dedicated, they are in the thick of it. They sacrifice. They suffer. Ultimately, as the counter-revolution (armed and funded by U.S. imperialism which I wish Hamilton had touched on a bit more) retains and tightens its grip on the state, they are defeated. But only temporarily, as Egypt and the Arab masses, above all the Palestinian nation, will rise again, and at the novel's perfect end it's clear that the surviving characters are still in the fight.

Oh, and by the way, don't hold the literary establishment's praise of this novel against it. I suspect the critics felt free to laud it because they believe the story it tells is well and buried. They're wrong. As all will see.

I still buy books & other secrets

I'm popping in here for the weirdly contrarian purpose of sharing a secret or two. Secret number one is that I do still buy physical books sometimes. In the early years of this blog I wrote several times about my book-gathering compulsions--store-buying and library-borrowing--which tended to build to irresistible levels at certain periods. Namely, approaching holidays or vacations. It seems I had, and indeed still have, a horror of finding myself with plenty of time to read and an insufficient supply of choices. Just heard about, been reading to mean forever, and every category in between, there's no clear pattern to how and why I zoom around grabbing up books in the lead-up to leisure time. Older, tireder, but if anything more compulsive a reader than ever, the pattern still applies. And so, as my summer month off work draws near, I've been scouring my to-read list, other people's to-read lists, reviews, and so on, and cross-checking same with: the three library systems I use, the two e-library systems I use, online booksellers, and the Strand. And then, variously, borrowing library books physical and virtual, and, yes, when I find one or seventeen on the Strand's cheap shelves, buying them. I'm about to head up there on today's lunch hour, having put together a list of half a dozen I think I can afford. Meanwhile, I've got another three already on e-book library loan, and a dozen or so more on e-library hold. As to the Strand excursion and likely purchases, cheap though they'll be, sssh--please don't tell my wife. She's been on a get-rid-of-books kick for some time, and finds my resistance exasperating. She's got reason on her side. In a few years when I retire we'll be moving, and no doubt our next place will be smaller than the outrageously big Queens floor-through where we've lived for many years. Teresa figures we might as well start downsizing now, and in fact we have given away or sold plenty of books over the last few years, but yes I admit I've negated any progress by continuing to buy--not nearly at the rate I used to but still. Well. While the great majority of my reading is library books, some books I just want to have forever on our shelves. So, yeah, don't tell her, but a few more are coming home with me shortly.

The other secret concerns my current writing project. My second novel. Or should I say my third? After slowly plowing forward on a novel for eight or nine years, about a year ago I found myself much more excited about an altogether different idea. After bouncing back and forth between the two for the last year or so, I've now fully committed to the newer project and officially set aside what I'd long thought would end up as my second novel. So idea #3 will, if all goes well, end up as novel #2, and I couldn't be happier and, in a way, more relieved, because it represents a breaking out in a new direction for me, a refresh, which I hope the writing will reflect. I don't want to say much about this project--never a good idea with creative endeavors since who knows what might happen--but I will say this without getting specific about content. If I manage to make the book I'm trying to make, this novel will be a new take, a different angle, on dystopian fiction. Actually, and I guess this will sound either foolishly ambitious or, I don't know, pompous, this novel will be a rejoinder to the hopelessly tired, unoriginal, and deeply uncreative glut of dystopian novels with which we're endlessly bombarded nowadays. (By the way, I've aired this complaint before on Read Red. Here and here and here.) What do I mean when I dis these books, yeah why not say it, this whole genre, in this way? Without a single exception as far as I know--and no of course I haven't read them all, but I've read quite a few, and I've read about most of the rest--all these dystopias posit a future in which nothing really has changed. Yes, everything has gotten worse, much worse. But nothing basic, by which I mean the organizing principles and the human relations of the the fictive society portrayed, has shifted in any way. To put it plainly: capitalism continues. Racism rules, sexism triumphs, the rich are richer and control everything even more than they do now. And so on. There is not a single one of these dystopias--if I'm wrong please point me to it--that imagines a future in which human beings have gotten together and reorganized society in an egalitarian way. Not one novel in which, even though capitalism has wrought untold horrors, people have decided to dump the horrible system that's created such devastation (wars, plagues, ecological disaster, you name it) and cobble together a new one with which, unfettered by the one percent's destructive drive for profits, they can begin to rebuild and renew life on Earth. So yeah, that's my modest proposal: to write an alternative narrative that dares to imagine what apparently is unimaginable to most writers, locked in to bourgeois consciousness as they all seem to be. A future in which, after the horrors have ensued--because the horrors have ensued--humanity joins together to fashion a new world. I won't mention the working title of my novel, but I will say that its subtitle is: "A Dys/Utopia." Because while my version won't skip the death and destruction, it will depict the new day that follows. Yes, this will be a novel of hope.

So I read with interest Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker piece about dystopian fiction. Naturally I disagree with her basic political thrust, equating left and right, and lamenting the new dystopians' giving up on the "the liberal state." As if bourgeois democracy in this age of late-stage capitalism in decline, bourgeois democracy with all its intrinsically undemocratic features, its very basis in structural racism, its reliance on imperialist war and occupation, as if the capitalist state which exists to facilitate the theft of surplus value and to repress the working class and oppressed nations--as if the very structures created by and upholding the stinking murderous racist capitalist system--as if all this somehow constitutes a shining beacon of hope and light. Which, apparently, futurist fiction ought to be building up rather than abandoning. I'd counter that all these imagination-impaired (on this we agree) dystopians in fact do accept the status quo, completely, unquestioningly. In fact, they portray it as going on and on. They're certainly right that things will get worse and worse if it does. But because their fiction is imbued with bourgeois ideology they can't imagine a different turn in the future. A whole new way of structuring society, humanity taking on the revolutionary socialist project of reconstruction and renewal, is beyond their creative capacity. They can only see things getting worse, because they can't imagine that humanity is capable of something better.

Lepore does make some good points about dystopian novels, especially toward the end of her piece:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. [my bold] It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.

In my view, the alternative to despair is indeed imagining a better future. We'll make one by tearing down this system that's driven the planet, and 99% of its people, to the brink of destruction. My book will be fiction. I can only do my best to imagine how it all will happen, and no doubt most of what I imagine won't turn out to even resemble how it actually goes down. But go down it will. I aspire to contribute my modest bit to a literature of hope as we head forward.

Juliet Takes a Breath

Gabby Rivera makes it look easy.

Which is the hardest thing a writer can do.

With her debut novel Juliet Takes a Breath, Rivera sucks the reader in on the first page and there's no escape until the final sentence from a headlong plunge into the life, loves, longings, the rages, thrills, confusions, epiphanies, the utterly original and thoroughly convincing consciousness of first-person protagonist Juliet Milagros Palante. This is one winning sweetheart of a character--but real, honest, multi-faceted, beautifully crafted, not saccharine or fake.This novel is one humdinger of a contribution to queer literature. And this is one fine writer, Gabby Rivera, whose narrative skill and literary art announce her as a bright new star on the LGBT lit scene.

If Juliet Takes a Breath is not a finalist for next year's Lambda Literary Award I'll be shocked. And mad!

I used the word humdinger a few sentences back. Which marks me as old. Which I am. I'm of the generation that came of age and came out of the closet in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall Rebellion. Much has changed since then, including the language of our movement, of our communities, and one of the things I love about Rivera's novel is how it's a headlong plunge into all that. It takes up hot topics. It takes on tough questions about words and their import, community and its challenges, division and unity. Racism. Solidarity. It does all this without sacrificing story. Contrary to the reactionary rules promulgated by the literary establishment in this country, you can indeed portray characters grappling with these vital issues, you can indeed write dialogue that directly engages with these issues, this is indeed what real people are doing in their real lives and a really good writer can convey this all organically within the flow of the characters' story and plot development. That is exactly what Rivera has done, for which I admire her a great deal. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: this book is damned funny too! The depictions of the Portland scene are scathing and hilarious.

Fun Home on Broadway

Yesterday, one week before the Broadway run closes for good, and thanks to the sweet generosity of a dear friend, I saw the musical Fun Home at Circle in the Square. It. Blew. Me. Away. By which I mean, to be more specific, it left me a sodden soggy wrung-out distraught overwrought wreck. How great is that? This is what art ought to do. Shake us. Make us think.

I'd of course read Alison Bechdel's acclaimed book Fun Home soon after it was published in 2007. Strangely, though I liked it I didn't love it. It's strange because I never did manage to put my finger on what I didn't-love about it when just about the whole world was loving on it so hard, and when I've always loved, adored, her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For, read and loved every installment, every collection, since DTWOF first started running in the 1980s. I still can't account for why I was relatively unmoved by Fun Home the book; I'd even say I've felt vaguely ashamed of myself for what must be a readerly failure on my part.

Well, never mind all that. I was swept away by Fun Home the innovative, exquisite, gut-wrenching masterpiece of musical theater. It is at once a very fine piece of political art--deeply relevant social commentary of the sort you rarely see in the theater anymore, certainly not on Broadway where the big-money profit-takers' lock on things is now pretty much complete--and a powerhouse of a tragic, gut-wrenching personal story. All presented by a brilliantly talented cast performing a stunningly written book and score by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori.

Tesori was also the composer for another breathtakingly creative, howlingly painful, and cracklingly political Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, which had a criminally short run on Broadway in 2004. I lucked into free tickets for this show and can never forget its devastating impact, or that of its unbelievable powerhouse of a star, Tonya Pinkins. As it did for Caroline whose book and lyrics were by Tony Kushner, Tesori's music for Fun Home meshes soaringly with the sometimes startling, sometimes funny, sometimes sardonic, mostly searing, profoundly affecting lyrics. You know I'm a words gal, but even more than that I'm a sucker for words when they're sung straight into my heart. Caroline, or Change's did that, shatteringly. Now Fun Home's have too.

The Jaguar's Children

I just read an extrarodinarily good book, and I had to head right over here to Read Red to offer a heads-up: read it!

The book is The Jaguar's Children, a novel by John Vaillant. It gripped me from the first sentence, and as is so rarely the case (you'd be amazed how many books I start and stop, deeply disappointed, initial pages' promise betrayed soon enough), it never let go. So yes, this is a page turner, a very fine one, and purely in terms of its writerly quality it deserves praise. But it is much more than a well-written, well crafted story.

It is in a sense a horror story, the most horrifying kind, rooted in reality. Most important, and the reason my reaction lands here on Read Red rather than meriting just a five-star rating in my Goodreads account, The Jaguar's Children is a political novel that takes on a very important issue, or really two important issues.

•  The plight of undocumented Central American migrants trying to reach the United States

• The conditions at home that drive them to the desperate decision to migrate

With the first, Vaillant makes a needed contribution. At this moment in the U.S. presidential election campaign season, the leading Republican has made anti-immigrant demagoguery, specifically anti-Mexican racist demagoguery, the centerpiece of his candidacy. The leading Democrat mouths soothing platitudes but her record as secretary of state bulges with crimes including support of the right-wing coup in Honduras and subsequent death-squad reign of terror, invasion and virtual destruction of Libya, endless drone-bomb murders in Pakistan and the region, and of course working hand in hand with the chief executive deporter-in-chief in vicious, cruel, racist mass deportations of adults and children to Central America in unprecedented numbers.

The way Vaillant depicts the situation is simple and devastating. He takes us inside a truck, a sealed water tanker, that has driven across the border from Mexico into the U.S. The truck blows a tire in the Arizona desert. The truck's driver and the coyote who has charged exorbitant fees to the dozens of people hidden and sealed in the empty water tank abandon the vehicle along with the human beings trapped within. We are inside with them via the voice of one of them: Hector, who uses his friend Cesar's phone to dial the only U.S. number on the phone and leaves a series of voicemail messages to seek help, to narrate the experience in the truck as hour by hour hope trickles away, and to tell how he and Cesar came to be there.

It's this last, the back story, that provides the novel's political heft. In fact it's a beautiful example of the way fiction can, by telling one or two characters' individual tales, explicate and illuminate large, broad swaths of history, of political developments, of the class struggle, of the national question, of imperialism. Vaillant does so here, with great skill and sensitivity, and with full depth of feeling, full dimension allotted to the characters. The reader learns much about Mexico over the last century and more, and about what has happened to the lives of the Indigenous peoples in that country. Finally, and this for me is the key to how beautifully this novel accomplishes what I always yearn for a novel to do, the story comes full circle as the flashbacks build to a climax and we learn why Cesar had to flee. The villains: NAFTA, U.S.-based agribusiness, and their Mexican comprador-bourgeois accomplices. There's a lot packed in here, and, miraculously, it works.

If you google the phrase "Mexican immigrants die in truck" you'll come up with roughly 16 million results. The heart breaks. As it will reading this book. Which is good, for the world's workers--especially the tens of millions on the move, forced to migrate by U.S.-imperialist bombs and invasions and wars and occupations, U.S.-imperialist trade and agricultural wars, and the worldwide U.S. and other imperialist exploitation of resources and labor--need and deserve the fellow feeling of those of us who live in the U.S. and other imperialist centers. But it's nowhere near good enough if you close a book like this, your heart broken, and that's that. The ultimate worth of this kind of novel is measured by the action it arouses. In this case, it's a call to stand in solidarity with migrant workers, to fight the fascist Trump movement, to act against the deportations.

How? It's a no-brainer. May Day is coming up, and May Day 2016 is the tenth anniversary of the great national uprising that was May Day 2006, a.k.a. A Day Without Immigrants, when much of this country was virtually shut down by an immigrant workers' general strike. Here's the poster for this year's action in New York City. New Yorkers, I'll see you there. Everyone else, check out your city's event.

A reason to revive Read Red: Kia Corthron's magnificent novel

It's been just about a year since my novel Vera's Will was published by Hamilton Stone Editions. An interesting experience it's been, this business of a first novel put out by a small press, and I'll probably report on that some time soon. Much more important things are afoot, however. The Black Lives Matter movement has swept the country, energizing a new generation of young activists in the struggle against the epidemic of police killings of African Americans, with Black women and queer people prominent in the leadership. In counterpoint there are the presidential primary campaigns: the leading Republican candidate, a pus-oozing boil on the slimy rotting skin of capitalism, makes an outright fascist appeal to racist whites, while the leading Democrat reacts to a social-democratic challenge from her party's left flank by furiously trying to refashion herself as some kind of progressive despite her long history of, um, not-progressiveness.

But hey. None of that is why I've been moved to revive my blog Read Red. This is:

Earlier this month I finished reading Kia Corthron's magnificent first novel The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, and I haven't stopped thinking about it yet. I've been dying to talk to someone about it but no one I know has read it yet--it did after all just come out--so I'm going to talk about it a little bit here. On Read Red. Which I herewith declare reborn.

The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is, as any great work of art must be, several things at once. It is a book of amazing craft and innovative technique. The whole first third or so, all of which is written from the POV of four different children, is dazzling. The kind of writing that makes other writers shake our heads in wonder and wonder gee how in the world did she do that. But it's not the off-putting, fancy-but-unreadable kind of dazzling that in some quarters passes for laudable language manipulation, the kind of trickery for its own sake that accomplishes nothing except displaying the writer's self-regard. No. This is the pull-you-deep-inside-the-characters'-minds-and-spirits kind of literary magic that so many try but so few can pull off. I don't know how many times in the weeks since I finished the book I've heard little Elliot's full-of-wonder voice in my head saying 'I love Mom! I love pork and beans!' Which might sound like a minor silly example but is not, because these early passages that so thoroughly bring Elliot the young child to life have everything to do with how the reader is engaged with his story as it develops in his adulthood.

Well not everything. For the adult Elliot's story, who he becomes and what he does, speaks to another facet of what this book accomplishes. This is political art of the highest order. As we meet the four main characters--Elliot and his brother Dwight who are Black children growing up in Maryland, and white brothers B.J. and Randall in Alabama--it is 1941. Jim Crow is in full force. The U.S. is about to enter World War II. And we know that these two sets of brothers will come of age at the time of the start of the civil rights movement, and into full adulthood in the 1960s. What we don't know yet as the novel begins, what I didn't dare hope even as I was falling in love with it as literature, is that the story will open and deepen and tackle the big stuff. It does. And so as we read on, always engaged in a specific story about specific characters, we also engage with the history of the U.S.  in the 20th and 21st centuries. Racism and racist violence. Divisions and solidarity. War. Class. Poverty. LGBTQ oppression. Disability and disabled oppression. Palestine! And more.

Anyone who's ever read any of my posts on this blog during the years I kept it up--or anyone who now reads its title--or anyone who scrolls through and reads some of the archive as I now invite new visitors to do--will know from even my too-brief words here about this book that it meets every criterion for what I consider great literature. It is political art. On the side of the workers and oppressed. Full of passion, wit, charm and heart, this fine novel makes the case, and by doing so flies in the face of the U.S. literary establishment's anti-political-art rules, for what people's fiction can truly be.

I mentioned heart. Some paragraphs back I wrote that this book is several things at once, and of course I've failed to delineate what all those things are yet written too much already, so you'll just have to discover them all for yourself when you read The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter. But I do want to touch in closing on one facet that absolutely blew me away: the amazing, searing big-heartedness of this beautiful beautiful book. In the closing pages Corthron draws all the threads of the story together satisfyingly and effectively, with grace and skill--but more than that, with an unsentimental depth of emotion that shocked me into the kind of sobbing that makes it hard to read. I won't say anything specific that would be a spoiler, but I found myself feeling deep compassion for not only the characters I'd grown to love, the characters I could in one way or another identify or empathize with, but also for a character for whom I would never have thought I would or could or would ever want to weep. That Corthron made me cry for this character speaks, I think, not only to her deeply generous humanity, to her powerful insight into human beings, but, most important for a red reader, it speaks to her broad vision of the purpose of literature. She's making a case for change. For the possibility of change, and the necessity of change. For social change that can and does happen, brought about by people joining together and fighting for it, no matter how hard the sacrifice needed. For the future. And literature's place in forging it.

Hope, then. This is the abiding emotion you're left with when you close this book. You're left thinking about how hard it all is, but also how much better it's become, how far we have to go but also how fully capable we are of moving forward. What a gift.
 

I Hotel

I just read a hell of a book. I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. Although I've mostly abandoned Read Red (for good reasons now! I'll post about that separately, after this), I'm compelled to stop in here to recommend this very fine novel.

It's a panoramic, yes even kaleidoscopic with all the word's trippy connotations, recounting of the political organizing among and struggles of Asian Americans in San Francisco from the late 1960s to late 1970s. Which culminated in the battle to save the I Hotel. Such a big story, comprising so many individual stories, and how does Yamashita tackle it? By telescoping in and out, veering round and about, telling and retelling, circling, approaching, pulling back, zooming in. There are many characters, many communities, much overlapping; there are jumpcuts and slo-mos; love and rage and beauty and death; there are workers and students, revolutionaries and artists; thought and action. Theory and practice!

This is not a novel to read for deep characterizations. Although there are many stunning moments, evocations of emotion, relationship pivots, in a book this big with so many characters and so many angles from which to tell the various smaller stories that spin together to tell the overall big story, mostly there are character sketches, and that's okay. You have to get into the rhythm, you have to accept that just as you are pulled into one life you're going to be yanked away toward another, but have faith, stick with it, they're all linked, they're almost all told more than once from more than one vantage point, and they'll all come together by the end. At which point you'll be weeping and raving as the people band together to save the I Hotel and the state mobilizes to smash them.

For perhaps the first one-third of the book I was a bit on edge because I was unsure whether the author was presenting these characters and these stories with the attitude that is prevalent in U.S. literature, that is, the distanced cynical 40-years-later attitude that looks upon the struggles of the 60s and 70s as misguided and overdone, the strugglers as naive and foolish. You know, I've ranted about it often enough here at Read Red: the "madness-of-the-60s" genre. But no, ultimately I relaxed and trusted Yamashita as a comradely guide presenting to the reader a lovingly rendered telling about people and a time and place that mattered if what matters to you is the struggle against oppression and racism, for liberation and justice. If you love that struggle, if you love your sisters and brothers who give themselves to it, you'll love this book.

A Tale for the Time Being

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki is one of my all-time favorite novels. I also liked (though didn't love) her second one, All Over Creation. Then there was a long dry spell. Some years back I googled her in hopes of finding out she was working on a new novel, only to learn instead that she was studying to become a Buddhist priest* and, I either read or inferred, had dropped novel writing. O woe is me, I lamented. Oh no, a great author lost to the ether. I must of course on principle respect anyone's religious views even though I, as a Marxist, am a thoroughgoing materialist. Respect her inward turn though I might, I was bummed. One of our finest novelists, one of our most politically engaged novelists, down for the count.

Shows how much I know. It seems you can be a Buddhist monk or priest or nun and also still be a wonderful and fully politically engaged novelist. Duh: once again the depths of my ignorance plumbed. Really I should have remembered this on my own, that Buddhist practice, at least some variants of it, doesn't automatically negate political engagement, having more than once during my teens watched on the TV news horrific film of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the U.S. war against their country. In fact in this newest novel Ozeki herself provides fascinating evidence of a stirring history of feminist and revolutionary nuns in Japan. One of the main characters here, a 104-year-old nun named Jiko, is based on one or more actual women, rebellious activists and/or writers. I'd be interested to try to find and read some of the real-life works mentioned in the course of this fictional Jiko's story.

Hers is only one of the lives examined. This is a book of stories within stories, layers opening onto newer deeper layers, all of it peeled back with an exquisite artistry that in my opinion exceeds anything Ozeki has accomplished before. I will note that there are magical elements, especially late in the book. I have no problem with such a literary technique if it works. Here, to my taste, it weakened rather than strengthened or deepened the book's overall power, but not to any marked degree. On balance, this is a terrific book, a beautiful story of human suffering and survival, as well as a meditation on the meaning and worth of fiction itself, or so it reads to me.

A Tale for the Time Being then, I'm happy to report, the first book I've read in 2014, starts my reading year on a high note. I started late, nearly two weeks in, because I spent the opening days of the new year along with the last weeks of 2013 horribly ill with shingles, so ill and in such pain that I couldn't read. Away with all that! Onward to a red reading year!

*In the original version of this post I erroneously referred to Ozeki studying to be a monk; she studied to be and in fact is a priest. More numbskullery on my part for which I humbly apologize.

The Wall

I'd hesitated to read TheWall by William Sutcliffe.

It's a story that, without directly saying so, is about the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, about Palestinian life in West Bank cities and villages torn asunder by the ever-encroaching settlements and the apartheid wall. The story is framed as a first-person narrative by an Israeli boy--it's seen through an Israeli child's eyes, not a Palestinian's. And it's not written by a Palestinian. For all these reasons I'd been leery. In a novel that fits this description there's so much that could go wrong, even with the best authorial intentions.

Then I read this review by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, whose wonderful novel Mornings inJenin I'm glad to have occasion to plug here again, as the international bestseller translated into 33 languages is beyond crucial reading for anyone who seeks to understand the Palestinian experience of the criminal racist Zionist project. Abulhawa opens her review, sure enough, by noting "that a Palestinian might have reason for pause when confronted with a novel that reflects life under Israeli occupation, written by a British Jewish author.

"Right or wrong," she writes, "the author's background is relevant to me in such circumstances. So I admit that I picked up Sutcliffe's latest novel, The Wall (Bloomsbury, 2013), holding my breath, because a people's narrative, their truth, their memories, and their very real pain, is not to be taken lightly in literature."

Given these caveats, Abulhawa's conclusion is stunning. She calls The Wall "the best work of fiction on Palestine written by a non-Palestinian."

Wow. Sutcliffe must be humbled by such strong praise from such an esteemed source. Please read Abulhawa's full review. And, if you care to, the following few thoughts of mine.

Sutcliffe subtitles the novel "A Modern Fable." Indeed, it's a fast read with few characters, a clear through line and, most important, an unambiguous moral center. This is a story about a young person discovering hidden truths, finding out he's been lied to, finding friends where he's been warned were his enemies, and finding the strength to do the right thing, ultimately at profound personal cost.

The last page had me weeping, as the protagonist tells us:

I tried to help and I failed, but I can try again, and I can keep trying, and if I fail again I can try once more. With this realization, I immediately feel renewed, fortified, blessed, knowing that even if I spend my whole life failing, I will be failing at something I believe in; I will be fully alive and fully me. If the alternative is to do nothing, to forget, there is no alternative at all. How can I possibly forget [phrase redacted to avert plot spoiler] … the soldiers and The Wall and the people who are supposed to be invisible?

His name is Joshua, clearly an allusion to the biblical story—only this Joshua, we're left hoping, will not be the leader of an army of invasion. This Joshua will do what he can as a supporter of an army of liberation led by the oppressed themselves, an army that will bring the racist occupiers' apartheid wall tumbling down. (Modern-day Jericho is itself in the West Bank, and has been occupied and attacked repeatedly by Israel not only in 1967 but repeatedly in the years since.)

I'd also like to think that the novel's title The Wall is a nod to the great 1950 novel of the same name by John Hersey. That earlier book was a fictionalized account of life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the uprising against the Nazi occupiers there by the besieged starving Jews. Sutcliffe is suggesting a parallel, I think, between today's Palestinians—walled off from their land and squeezed into ever shrinking spaces, deprived of their livelihoods, malnourished, unable even to get aspirin as in one of the key plot elements here—and 1943's Warsaw Jews. You know what that makes Israel. And you know I agree.

I wish I could have heard Ethel sing

June 19, 2013, is the 60th anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes of the U.S. government, which has committed many many heinous crimes: the execution of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg, two communist workers who were the victims of a monstrous mendacious frame-up. They were wholly innocent of the concocted charge of providing the "secret of the atomic bomb" to the Soviet Union. But they were friends to the USSR, and to all people worldwide fighting for socialism, and they did what they could to aid in this fight. For that, their courageous acts of internationalist solidarity; for their lifelong devotion to the cause of justice, liberation, anti-racism, and working-class struggle; and of course for their noble refusal to submit and "confess," to betray their beliefs or their comrades, to lie, to sell out, even at the cost of their own lives—the Rosenbergs will always be remembered as true heroes. I believe that in the pantheon of heroes of the ages, heroes of the world's workers and oppressed, a pantheon made up not of imaginary supernatural beings but of merely human beings, people who did their best to their last breath, there will always be a place of honor for the Rosenbergs.

I was born a year after they were killed, and I can see now what I couldn't know then as a little kid in the 1950s. How along with the obvious anti-worker, anti-communist, anti-union, anti-struggle McCarthyite message it was meant to send, the Rosenbergs' execution also cast a specifically anti-Semitic chill that I believe partly explains the sense of siege, of threat, that my parents gave me to understand hovered over our Jewish household in suburban Detroit 10 years and more after the defeat of Nazism in Europe. I'll never know, but I wonder whether the fear engendered by the Rosenberg case didn't play a role in my mother's eventual rightward shift over the years. As for me, I didn't learn about the case until I was in high school, probably 1969 or 1970, a time of protest and rebellion that was bringing me to political consciousness. From then on I've always had a deep feeling of awe, love and respect for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For the sacrifice they made. For the good comrades they were. As millions of others worldwide felt, and feel, and will continue to feel.

And so this past Sunday evening I was thrilled to be at Town Hall for a wonderful event sponsored by the Rosenberg Fund for Children to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the execution, celebrate today's families of resistance, and raise funds (which I hope it did!) for the RFC's good work of supporting and aiding political activists, especially imprisoned activists, and their families. It was called Carry It Forward: Celebrate the Children of Resistance. I'd attended a similar event 10 years ago on the 50th anniversary. That night I was pretty weepy the whole time. This night not so much, hooray! Yes there were tearful moments, primarily when actors Eve Ensler and Cotter Smith read from Ethel and Julius's prison letters to their children Robby and Michael, letters full of love, full of life, full of hope not for themselves but for the world. But overall it was a joyous evening, an evening of affirmation, of defiance and solidarity and music, and I left feeling strengthened and buoyed.

If Ethel and Julius had lived, I might very well have known them, for I travel in the same circles they did. Perhaps I would have had the chance to hear Ethel sing--she was by all accounts a lovely singer--at some rally or movement program. Wouldn't that have been something.

The Town Hall program the other night ended with a rousing rendition of the great Bob Marley/Peter Tosh song "Get Up Stand Up," performed by Latino hip hoppers Rebel Diaz with folk duo Mike & Ruthy. Gathered onstage singing along were the evening's narrator Angela Davis, the Rosenberg sons Michael and Robby Meeropol, Carry It Forward writer Ellen Meeropol, Ethel and Julius's granddaughter Jenn Meeropol who's the new head of the RFC, and all the actors and performers who had brought the evening to life with their portrayals of activist targets of government repression who have been RFC beneficiaries. 
We the audience, including many elders who were the Rosenbergs' contemporaries, who marched for them, who wept at their deaths, who still know which side they're on, and the rest of us, we got up, we stood up, we sang too, and at the risk of sounding mawkish I think we all of us felt an echo of Ethel and Julius singing along with us, our martyrs whose voices have never been stilled.

The Paterson Silk Strike pageant

Today is the 100th anniversary of a great event in the history of political art in this country: the magnificent Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, organized by the workers and their supporters including, among others, John Reed.

I'd hoped to have time to write a substantive post here about this event, such a stirring and important moment, such a shining example of solidarity, such a beacon to artists who want to serve the class struggle. No surprise, nope don't have the time. So, in hopes this doesn't slip into solipsism, I'll just say that as such a person myself--a writer who aspires to create literature of and for the struggle of the workers and oppressed--I'm using the occasion of this anniversary as a wake-up call, a reminder, a renewal. To set aside the tasks and to-do lists, the applications and submissions that take up too much time and divert my mind from its imaginings, and dive back into the work of creation. That's my summer resolution. To write, and write well. Through a series of twists and turns--waitlisted at one, accepted at one but only for a longer period than I have vacation days available, accepted at another but not for free--it turns out that the idyllic writing residency at an arts colony I'd thought was on the horizon is not to be. So it's all up to me. To sit down at my desk, flip open my laptop, shut out the dirty stinky NYC summertime waft, and get this novel done.

And my muse? Let it be them, the women and men of the Paterson Silk Strike who took to the stage at Madison Square Garden 100 years ago today to tell the world the story of their struggle. That's the spirit to imbue in people's art.

Here's a terrific poem

by Jacob Rakovan, reprinted as permitted from the Split This Rock Poem of the Week site (see info after poem). Which site is worth checking, well, weekly. Split This Rock is a national network of socially engaged poets.

Hilt's Law 

 

The bones cast in the field like seed corn grow nothing,

grow briars in the boarded gas stations
brown stalks ready for the fire.
You do not hear our song,
earth thick in our throats, benzene, chromium
cadmium and arsenic

shuttered stores,

hosts of dead in cold-mill towns
the day that does not come though prayed for.

The trains of coal and corpses, the price of power
though wires are stretched like a mandolin on our backs
though the saints bob above us like car-lot balloons
You do not hear our singing.
In electric light the bubble gum machine is full of teeth
the babies' bottles with a slow sweet poison
the air thick with cancer, the rain with
teeth, without flowers, without cease.

This dream of sleep, in hunter's orange
over oil-black in cups, in the hollows under eyes.
The unborn sun in the darkest river, the hollow hills
unsong of un-place, Bloody Harlan, Centralia
the blessed fly over in air conditioned comfort.

    

Let the bone-fire of your city burn 'till your shadow stains the bricks 

Let the dark come spilling from the mine thick as molasses
Let the end come if it is coming,
Let the rich hang from their ankles,
a washtub full of black blood.
You do not hear.

 
Let the hills and stones fall on us and cover us
Let those curse us who curse the day, who are skillful
the smelters of iron, and armaments, the hilltop removers. 

 

Though we are dying, though we breath black dust
and blue powder, spit liquor and blood
the black drink, the earth's secret breath.
Though we are toothless, though we are blind
we hear this: 

 

Steady trundle of the train under storm clouds
loaded down with malediction,
the radio tower's Babel-bleat to heaven
with the black stone, with the dead for burning 

song of electric light, and sleeplessness.

 

Weariest river at the end of all things 

We follow you into the earth.

-Jacob Rakovan   

Used by permission.

Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian writer in diaspora. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The James Dickey Review, Anon, Thrush and Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism as well as anthologies by Salmon Poetry Press, MTV Books and The Arsenic Lobster. His manuscript The Devil's Radio was a finalist for the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the Gell poetry prize and is forthcoming on Small Doggies Press. He is co-curator of the Poetry & Pie Night reading series in Rochester, New York. 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

The colonizer's consciousness

I'm reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell. The novel tells the story of an 1857 uprising in India against the British occupiers. It's told entirely from the point of view, in the voice, of those British occupiers--but in a good way! That is, this is a deeply accomplished, subtly effected satire aimed dead-on against the colonialists, exposing their racism, ethnocentrism, and self-serving endless justifications for imperialism.

I may write more about it once I've finished reading the book. In the meantime I've got to give you this. It's from roughly the middle of the novel, a single paragraph with which Farrell manages to pretty much say it all about the brutality, callousness and deeply racist consciousness of the colonialists.

A few yards away, still in the shadow of the church, was another collection of dogs, uncivilized ones this time and dreadful to behold. In spite of the years he had spent in the East the Collector had never managed to get used to the appearance of the pariah dogs. Hideously thin, fur eaten away by mange to the raw skin, endlessly and uselessly scratching, timorous, vicious, and very often half crippled, they seemed like a parody of what Nature had intended. He had once, as it happened, on landing for the first time at Garden Reach in Calcutta, had the same thought about the human beggars who swarmed at the landing-stage; they, too, had seemed a parody. Yet when the Collector piously gave to the poor, it was to the English poor, by a fixed arrangement with his agent in London; he had accepted that the poverty of India was beyond redemption. The humans he had got used to, in time ... the dogs never.

What's fiction for? Art of suffering, art of struggle

We've got a brand new conversation freshly posted over at Politerature, the site focused on political fiction that I maintain with author Meredith Sue Willis. This one starts with our mutual praise for the novel The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis and ranges outward from there, eventually toward questions about what art is for and what literature should be about. Plus, we've even included links to two pieces of writing, mine and MSW's, as examples of fiction that brings the reader right into the heart of political action.

Check it out.

Alice Walker's poem for Hugo Chavez

The great and good Alice Walker has posted a beautiful poem on her website Alice Walker's Garden. The title is "The Good Ones, for Hugo Chavez, Presente."

The good ones
who listen
to women
to children and the poor
die too soon,
their lives bedeviled
by opposition:
our hearts grieve for them. ...

Read the entire poem here. I especially like the line "What a mighty ruckus Hugo Chavez made!"

Hugo Chavez presente! Gracias por todos!

For Black History Month

I want to say a few words about two books I read this month. It was pure coincidence that I read them during Black History Month but it is fitting to comment.

One was The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis. This book has received unusual attention for a first novel by an unknown author. It was selected as an Oprah's Book Club 2.0 pick, which guarantees sales. And well, I've got to say, Ms. Winfrey hit this one out of the ballpark. This is a seriously good book. One of those that likely augurs a seriously important future for its author.

The book is about the lives and struggles of a woman and her family from the time she arrives in Philadelphia from Georgia in the early 1920s on through the next 50 and more years. What a generic description for such a specific set of stories, but since I'm almost never about recounting plot here--it seems a pointless waste of time--instead let me say that these stories are etched in pain and suffering. There is hardship. There is bitterness. There is, shot through it all, love. And there is, ultimately, just a smidgen of hope, tenuous, tentative.

I attended an event at the Schomburg Center in Harlem last month where Ayana Mathis read from and discussed her book. She declined to characterize Hattie as a political novel, insisting on the particularity of its characters and their travails as she imagined them into being. Indeed, the characters live, I mean feel really alive, on the page. This is an exceedingly accomplished piece of literary art, written with the lightest hand yet imbued with considerable depth of feeling and meaning. Yet I, with greatest respect for the writer, do see this as a political work, for it takes on a large, important historic topic: the Great Migration. Yes of course the story is a particular one, imagined as only this author could imagine it, and the characters are people, individual people, not some sort of symbol or contrivance meant to stand for more than each individual character with her/his individual story. But there is a context, a serious political context, in which these imagined lives are lived.

The author of the other book I want to mention most assuredly saw the novel as political, indeed as didactic. Oh horrors--didactic fiction, story told in the service of teaching something, didactic that worst of curse words for the bourgeois literary establishment. It is no curse word to me, in fact is something to be aspired to, and I daresay the great Howard Fast felt the same way when he was writing Freedom Road, first published in 1944.

I thought hard about whether to include a book by a white writer in this post for Black History Month. But the foreword to the edition of Freedom Road currently in print was written by W.E.B. Du Bois. If the greatest historian of Reconstruction and the counter-revolution that overturned it, the author of Black Reconstruction in America, The Souls of Black Folk and so many other vitally important works, the founder of the NAACP, and a great communist to boot--if W.E.B. Du Bois, himself a towering figure in African-American history, commends this book to us, and he does in his foreword, I can do no less than commend it to you.

The story tells of Gideon Jackson, a man of African descent who was enslaved in South Carolina, who left the plantation where he'd been held in servitude and fought with the Union Army during the Civil War, and who, from 1868 to 1877, plays a pivotal role in the grand effort to bring democracy and equality to the South. This effort includes wresting the right to vote, writing a new state constitution, working to build a system of free public education, claiming land ownership and building homes and community with Black and poor white working together in common cause for the good of all. Jackson eventually serves in the U.S. House of Representatives; his son travels to Scotland to train as a doctor; he and his whole family learn to read and write, build a house, hold personal possessions; all these gains hard won but possible through unity and with the backing of the Union army of occupation holding back the forces of the old slaveocracy. Until it all comes crashing down when the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, looked to at that time as the safeguard of freedom, makes a deal, withdraws the troops that had been the safeguard of liberty and looks the other way while racist reaction organizes a terrorist armed force, the Ku Klux Klan, to wage war against Jackson, his family and community, and communities like them throughout the South, bringing on a bloody counter-revolution to end Reconstruction, shut down equal education, voting rights, land rights, and replace them with sharecropping, bitter poverty, no rights--the era of Jim Crow that would last nearly another hundred years.

All this is true. All this happened. Fast made it his job to tell the story, a story that was little known in the mid-20th century and is still little known today, the story of the war of racist terror that came after the brief flourishing of freedom after the Civil War. Jackson's character was based on one or several Black men who did indeed serve as leaders in the Reconstruction period, who accomplished much and would have accomplished much more had they not been sabotaged and left to the forces of murder and mayhem. Fast doesn't sugarcoat it. The final scene is a bitter battle, Jackson and his small community holed up in the old plantation house with guns and rifles, waging a furious defensive battle against an all-out assault by the Klan marauders who outnumber the freedom fighters and ultimately kill them all.

There are many lessons to this story, and the story itself, so true, so little known, bears telling and re-telling, and so for this alone Freedom Road is a book that matters. But please don't misunderstand: I recommend this book not merely for its political virtues. This is a fine work of literature. There are beautiful passages, stirring, touching; there is, as Du Bois noted, "profound psychological insight" and "lyrical charm"; there is above all the protagonist, Gideon Jackson, as finely wrought a character as I can remember ever encountering. It's a book to make you feel deeply, think hard--and rededicate yourself to the struggle.

Finally, I want to point anyone interested in resources for Black literature from African-American sources to a list we've posted at Politerature, the lefty lit site I collaborate on. And to add to it this from Saeed Jones at Buzzfeed on the Best Black Queer Books, Plays and Films. Lots to read, lots to learn.

Introducing POLITERATURE!

I'm involved in a new project that's just gone live: Politerature. I think it'll be of interest to anyone who follows Read Red, and I urge you to take a look.

The website, www.politerature.com, is dedicated to politically progressive literature. The idea is to seek out, share, promote and discuss fiction that embodies and expresses political ideas, fiction that takes sides with the workers and oppressed, that raises consciousness about racism or colonialism or women’s and LGBTQ oppression, about war and intervention, about destroying the Earth for corporate profit, about class and unions. To honor and develop a kind of literature that runs counter to the conventional wisdom that true art cannot be political.

We'll be posting book reviews, notes, news and commentary. And we'll be carrying on a conversation that ranges over our thoughts and ideas about politics and literature and where they meet. That conversation has now begun. In the first installment, we ponder plotlines--and whether we've had enough of family dysfunction stories.

Politerature is based on the belief that political fiction can open minds, inform, give insight, inspire, strengthen, and arm those fighting for a better world.
 

If that sounds familiar, similar to my slant here at Read Red, well yes, but what we'll be trying to do at Politerature is different. For one thing, Politerature is a collaboration, initially between one other person and me, and perhaps with more folks getting involved eventually. My partner at Politerature, author and teacher Meredith Sue Willis, is a leftist but not a revolutionist; we do come at this from different angles, which we're hoping will make for an interesting exchange of views. Politerature is in various other ways too something of a more formal endeavor than Read Red will ever be.

I will continue blogging here, and I hope you'll keep checking in at Read Red where I'll post my own individual unmediated rants, reviews and responses to literary news.
 
I hope you will also regularly check out Politerature. And spread the word! Like us on Facebook where there's now a Politerature page. Let your reader, writer, and activist friends know about POLITERATURE.com. If you want to read more political fiction, stick with us, follow this project as it develops, and let's see if we can't have some impact on building the literary left wing.