William S. Burroughs

Burroughs and his "cut-up" style in Naked Lunch are fascinating. Although I am speechless when confronted with a work like Naked Lunch, I plan to read more of his novels, which bring to mind the better postmodern fiction from some of my favorite writers. Moreover, Burroughs always has something interesting to say about narcotics and his interest in anthropology and ideas of science fiction are clever, horrifying, and intriguing. At times, Naked Lunch reminded me of Lovecraft because of the author's cleverly constructed universe that blends fact and fiction with occult allusions. 

Tired and Merry Christmas

I am currently reading The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Of the multiple poems in this collection that spoke to me, these two below were the most meaningful. The anger of Hughes in the 1930s and his internationalist outlook are especially interesting considering how we tend to limit writers along national lines.

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren't you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

Merry Christmas 

Merry Christmas, China,

From the gun-boats in the river,

Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,

And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,

To Gandhi in his cell,

From righteous Christian England,

Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,

From Cairo to the Cape!

Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!

(For murder and for rape.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!

(And drown the voodoo drums--

We'll rob you to the Christian hymns

Until the next Christ comes.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!

(While Yankee domination 

Keeps a nice fat president

In a little half-starved nation.)

And to you down-and-outers,

("Due to economic laws")

Oh, eat, drink, and be merry

With a bread-line Santa Claus--

While all the world hails Christmas,

While all the church bells sway!

While, better still, the Christian guns

Proclaim this joyous day!

While holy steel that makes us strong

Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:

SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!

Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!

The Sirens of Titan

"If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers."

Vonneget's The Sirens of Titan is the first Vonnegut novel I ever read. I read it for a high school science fiction course several years ago and, at the time, did not care for Vonnegut. I was perhaps too young and put off by the dense, philosophical debates contained in the novel. All I recall from the high school period was the plot and how confused this novel left me. It was also my first and only Vonnegut novel until last month, so I was unaccustomed and unfamiliar with Vonnegut's style, humor, and themes.

Now, after returning to The Sirens of Titan multiple years later, I have a greater appreciation for this novel, which is far more entrenched in the genre of science fiction than other works of Vonnegut. Vonnegut manages to comment on human existence, the purpose of said existence, religion, science, free will, family, and war. These aforementioned themes appear in several of Vonnegut's works. War, for example, in the inevitably doomed Martian invasion plotted by Rumfoord, was ultimately planned at great profits and sacrifice to bring about a "Brotherhood of Man." Organized religion, military conflict, exploitation of others, our favorite aliens (Tralfamadorians, machines from another galaxy), and just about anything you might expect Vonnegut to satirize humorously happens here.

Ultimately, my take on the novel is one of a compatibilist understanding of human existence and the purpose of life. There is more than one purpose of life hinted at by the text, and even when one accepts the proposition that all of human history on Earth has been orchestrated by Tralfamadorians and, more recently, Winston Niles Rumfoord (himself also a 'tool' being used by somebody), there is still highly personalized ways in which humans carry out their 'fate.' There seems to be a willingness on the part of Vonnegut to allow for more than one meaning of life, and even the Tralfamadorian machines were created by someone else, and, in the case of Salo, achieve human-like qualities of a highly personalized way of completing their destiny. Perhaps that is the arguably the main thrust of the work, that there may be some sort of God or Creator, someone who likes us above, but we still have agency in this world, regardless of the various religions we create to explain the why of our existence.

Below are some of my favorite quotations from the text, particularly those pertaining to the purpose of life.

"The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren't everything."

"All persons, places, and events in this book are real. Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine."

"These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth--a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

"If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management--but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced."

"At the hospital they had said the most important rule of all was this one: Always obey a direct order without a moment's hesitation."

"When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been."

"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It had made him his own hero in very trying times."

"His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness,--that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness."

"But Boaz had decided that he needed a buddy far more than he needed a means of making people do exactly what he wanted them to do. During the night, he had become very unsure of what he wanted people to do, anyway."

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."

"The concessionaires knew all to well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play,  he used nothing but real people in real hells.

"As a machine, he had to do what he was supposed to do."

"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody," she said, "would be to not be used for anything by anybody."

 "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

Slaughterhouse Five

"So it goes."

After meeting a German a few years ago whose family survived Dresden, Slaughterhouse Five has been on my list of novels to read for quite some time. This person's great-grandfather and grandparent witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, experienced the senselessness, and destruction as an entire city was reduced to ashes. They had lost family like so many. In addition, the metafictional aspects of the story remind me of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, one of my favorite books.

Vonnegut inserting himself into the story, the intertextuality with specific characters, books, alien races, photographs, and themes in his body of work is an impressive example of his ability to weave together people and themes in elaborate worlds. This is certainly one of the most interesting and creative works to tackle WWII, really all wars, in its grotesque, brutality. If any story merits the use of science fiction, certainly a bit of fantasy and freedom are required. Undoubtedly, the comparison to the Children's Crusade was warranted.

Like Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Deadeye Dick, there are similar themes about human existence and war. But Slaughterhouse Five, like Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, takes it up a notch: Vonnegut uses pictures within the text as well as an overarching metanarrative with himself as narrator. Anyway, below are some of my favorite quotes that highlight the novel's themes, its black humor, and general darkness.

"Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity."

"The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought."

"So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thoughts wars were partly encouraged by books and movies."

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times." 

"The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State."

"Rosewater was twice as smart as BIlly, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes."

"So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

"That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

"Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery."

"Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease."

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater remains as relevant today on the question of class relations. Through his satirical look at the American elite, such as the Rosewaters and their ilk in Rhoe Island, one is reminded of the class war rhetoric and anti-poor beliefs of the Mitt Romneys of the world. Or even the way conservatives and even some moderate Democrats disparage the less fortunate, espouse the 'free enterprise,' or defend corporations. Taking it to absurd levels for the purpose of satire, Vonnegut even has the poor thanking the wealthy for the ocean, the moon. 

If this book was relevant to the changing times of the 1960s, an age of civil rights activism, sexual liberation, Cold War fears, cultural and ideological warfare, not much has changed in US discourse regarding poverty. We still blame the poor for their condition, while praising the 1 percent, defending capitalism, and refusing to dismantle the ways in which we have created 'excess' or 'useless' people trapped in poverty. Perhaps we can learn something from Eliot Rosewater after all on uncritical love and kindness toward others? 

More amazingly, Vonnegut's world is full of intertextuality. He alludes to characters, themes, pictures (the woman and the Shetland pony), and similar themes throughout his oeuvre, particularly on human nature, the meaning of existence, and man's inhumanity to man. Though not science fiction, this novel valiantly defends both the literary merit and universal message of science fiction as a concern for the future of humanity. In this case, it seems like a socialist message, but one that can be construed as Christian or religious too, though Vonnegut warns us not to construe any coincidental parallels. Like Deadeye Dick, the question of identity and roots is omnipresent here. Several characters, whether Rosewaters or not, are influenced by their roots or family tree in interesting ways that intersect with ironic or humorous consequences. 

Ultimately, both liberals, or leftists, and conservatives misunderstand the wretched of the earth, who, in this novel, are centered on the poor of Rosewater County, Indiana, who are romanticized by Eliot and criminalized by Eliot's father, Senator Rosewater. Nonetheless, here are some favorited quotations from the text highlighting the main themes:

"And he was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout's books were very dirty books, since they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn't understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world."

 "I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.

"The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all."

"He would argue that the people he was trying to help were the same sorts of people who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the bridges, people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry in time of war--and so on. The people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that--and dumber, too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable."

"God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"Lila Buntline pedalled her bicycle through the muffled beauty of Pisquontuit's Utopian lanes. Every house she passed was a very expensive dream come true. The owners of the houses did not have to work at all. Neither would their children have to work, nor want for a thing, unless somebody revolted. Nobody seemed about to."

"I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution."

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Dinaw Mengestu's brilliant novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, provides the reader with a window through which African Washington, D.C. is visible. The novel is centered on Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant who fled political violence during the Communist takeover, while also including the parallels between immigration and internal displacement in the US (gentrification), other African immigrants (Kenneth from Kenya and Joseph from Congo) and the problems of modern Africa, interracial relationships, and solitude. Mengestu's prose breathes life into his descriptions of Logan Circle, a gentrifying but impoverished African-American community in Washington that he joins because, "...in Logan Circle, though, I didn’t have to be anything greater than what I already was. I was poor, black, and wore the anonymity that came with that as a shield against all of the early ambitions of the immigrant, which had long since abandoned me, assuming they had ever really been mine to begin with” (41). Already, one can see the novel's confrontation with issues of race, class, immigration, the African diaspora, and the struggle for identity and peace that haunts Sepha Stephanos, who runs a corner store in the impoverished African-American community, lives alone, only has two friends (Kenneth and Joseph, with whom he discusses and longs for their African homelands as well as memorizing and quizing each other on Africa's numerous dictatorships and political unrest), and has cut himself off from the Ethiopian-American community in metropolitan D.C., who, like his uncle, still residing in an apartment complex almost solely inhabited by Ethiopians in Silver Rock, MD, seem more interested in pretending they never left Ethiopia.

Besides telling the story of an Ethiopian immigrant in D.C., a city with substantial Ethiopian, Nigerian, and other sub-Saharan African immigrants, Mengestu's short novel (only 228 pages) speaks to the universal feelings of loneliness through his interactions with Judith, a white academic, and her biracial daughter, Naomi, who quickly becomes a daughter-like figure for him, accompanying him in the store, reading The Brothers Karamazov, and helping him clean up his run-down store that will soon no longer belong in the future gentrified Logan Circle. Only when he begins to form a relationship with Judith and Naomi, who purchase a dilapidated mansion in the home and then convert it into their home, in the process beautifying the street and symbolizing future gentrification, does Sepha open his heart and mind to the realization that he cannot continue living as he has, alone, only two friends, and commiserating with Joseph and Kenneth on their lost lives in Africa. Unfortunately, Sepha and Judith, coming from vastly different worlds, realize the unbridgeable gap between them, her coming from education and higher status, whereas Sepha lives in a small apartment in a bad part of D.C. without ever attaining the "American dream" of middle-class status and lifestyles so obvious in Judith. Judith's success and family, so distant from Sepha's solitary, caught in between two worlds life, serves as a constant reminder to Sepha that "Our insecurities run far too deep and wide to be easily dismissed, and Judith, without knowing it, had hit that central nerve whose existence I was reluctant to admit, but that when tapped, sent a sudden shock of shame and humiliation beneath which everything else crumbled” (135).

 Moreover, the title of the novel, an allusion to Dante, expresses the intermediary position Sepha and his Congolese and Kenyan friend find themselves trapped in, just escaping Inferno (political violence in Ethiopia and Congo/Zaire, poverty in Kenya) and trying to find some aspect of the "Paradise" of liberty and new identities in America. Unlke Sepha and Joseph, however, Kenneth came to the US primarily to make money to support his relatives in Nairobi, working hard to become an engineer and attain some success while Joseph labors as a waiter at an elite restaurant and Sepha runs a dying store in a rough neighborhood, showing one the diversity of African immigration as well as its parallels with gentrification and internal discplacement in Logan Circle as rent increases and evictions lead to racial conflict with Judith. Overall, a fascinating novel and one well worth the short read. Mengestu's tale is one of the few examples of Ethiopian-American literature out there and shows another side of Washington, D.C. and gentrification. Sepha Stephanos's tale, though ending somewhat bleakly, is a riveting account of an under-acknowledged immigrant group, Ethiopians and Africans in D.C., as well as the immigrant struggle for home, community and identity instead of the limbo of being and not being included. Several fascinating themes abound in the novel that deserve further exploration, perhaps in a future post, such as the image of Africa and Ethiopia, gentrification, gentrification and immigrant intersections (of which Ethiopians in D.C. have already been part of in the case of Shaw), literary allusions to The Brothers Karamazov, Emily Dickinson, and even Naipaul, interracial love and relationships, and even the search for identity not suspended between two dichotomous worlds.

My Favorite Quotations and Moments from the novel with brief commentary

(29) “Naomi was eleven years old, and she took pride in being able to shake her head at the world. She was convinced that American foreign policy in the Middle East was a failure, that a two-state solution in Israel was inevitable, and that enough wasn’t being done about the global AIDS crisis.”

(39) V.S. Naipaul reference to novel with Saleem, storeowner, an Indian Muslim merchant who moves to an interior African nation (perhaps Congo under Mobutu, or even modelled on Uganda under Idi Amin) from A Bend in the River. This is clearly an important reference since Joe, Sepha’s friend, is from the Congo and all three of the Africans (Sepha Stephanos, Joe, and the Kenyan) are from Eastern/Central Africa and had to flee their respective homelands due to the failure of post-colonial African states, resonating with Naipaul’s “neo-colonialist” perception of postcolonial Africa in A Bend in the River 

(40) No one tells you this at the beginning, but the days of a shopkeeper are empty. There are hours of silence punctuated briefly with bursts of customers who come and go within the span of a few minutes.”

“Left alone behind the counter, I was hit with the sudden terrible and frightening realization that everything I had cared for and loved was either lost or living on without me seven thousand miles away, and that what I had here was not a life, but a poorly constructed substitution made up of one uncle, two friends, a grim store, and a cheap apartment.”

(41) “Here in Logan Circle, though, I didn’t have to be anything greater than what I already was. I was poor, black, and wore the anonymity that came with that as a shield against all of the early ambitions of the immigrant, which had long since abandoned me, assuming they had ever really been mine to begin with.”

(42) “Countries all across the globe are negotiating deals, hammering out truces, while their leaders shake hands on the cover of the Washington Post under headlines of restored hope and promises of cooperation. Even Africa has done well for itself today.”

(62) “As a young man, he had been one of the better chess players in Kinshasa, known for his quiet, restrained demeanor even in the face of certain defeat.”

-Mobutu caused the fall of Joseph’s family

(68) “I have learned to be a modest man, and never to exceed my means, but even poor men are allowed dreams from time to time.”

(75) On gentrification in his neighbourhood and the eradication of the former vestiges of a former Chinese take-out restaurant in the poor, black community: “Yum’s or “Yus,” as the sign now reads, is gone, and so is the liquor store. They have obediently made way for newer and better things, whatever they may eventually be. I can’t say that I particularly liked either of them, but that’s beside the point. Now that they are gone I can begin to miss them with a sentimental fondness I would have never mustered otherwise.”

Dupont Circle, gentrification, urban vs. suburban are other themes in the novel

(94) “When I reminded him that the emperor had been killed and buried under a toilet, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “These things happen. We all make mistakes.”

Sepha’s uncle, Berhane Selassie, his father was murdered while he, his mother and younger brother watched as the coup’s henchman beat him to a pulp before allowing him to walk outside their home and face death. Sepha’s uncle Berhane was not really related by blood, but he eventually joins his uncle when first escaping to the US (via Kenya). Anyway, Sepha Stephano’s family was by no means poor, and connected in some ways to Haile Selassie (the Derg was being established and supporters of Selassie or opponents of the new regime were victims of politically-motivated killings, such as Sepha’s father).

(106) On a homeless man in the neighbourhood after Naomi, the precocious half-white, half Mauritanian girl who becomes like a daughter to Sepha, tells him to take a bath: “The man, who I knew only as Mr. Clark, paused just slightly at the door when she said that. Like all of the other men, he was old enough to have been her father or grandfather. He wore thick glasses taped together in the center, and the same pair of rumpled brown pants that hit his ankles just an inch too high. His hair had gone mostly gray, and on warmer days he passed his afternoons sleeping on one of the benches surrounding General Logan. I didn’t know him to be a good, or bad, man. I knew only that every day he chose to lose himself in as many bottles of alcohol as he could afford rather than waste his energy facing his life head on. When he turned his head toward her, there was a resigned sadness to his expression that neither Naomi nor I could bear to look at. His face seemed to say that if given half a chance, he would have done anything not to be judged by this eleven-year-old girl who wore pink cashmere.”

(115-116) Describing the apartment complex in suburban D.C. where his uncle Berhane Selassie lives, an apartment block dominated by Ethiopians: “There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied solely by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. Within this building there is an entire world made up of old lives and relationships transported perfectly intact from Ethiopia. To call the building insular is to miss the point entirely. Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left. Hardly a word of English is spoken inside of these doors. The hallways on every floor smell of wat, coffee, and incense. The older women still travel from apartment to apartment dressed in slippers and white blankets that they keep wrapped around their heads, just as if they were still walking through the crowded streets of Addis. The children keep only the friendships sanctioned by their parents. There are a few families who occupy entire floors. They run them like minor villages with children, grandchildren, grandparents, and in-laws all living within shouting distance of one another. There is a beauty and a terror to those floors. Only once did I ever step onto them and see it firsthand. When I got off the elevator, I was met by a row of open apartment doors, each one guarded by a young woman who stepped into the doorway and stared at me with more apprehension and fear than I’ve ever been greeted by. I turned back to the elevator immediately, feeling as if I had intruded onto something sacred, something that I had no right to witness or speak of again.”

(116-117) “My uncle stands out from the rest of the building. That he is only one man, with no wife, mother, or children, gives him an independence and peculiarity that no one here is comfortable with. He is respected because of the money and power he once had in Ethiopia, because his name was once associated with the cabinet members and princes of the old empire. He is also mocked now by some for exactly the same reason. Berhane Selassie. It’s a beautiful name. Translated into English, it means Light of the Holy Trinity. He no longer has his money or his prestige, but he has his reserve, and his corner apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. For Silver Rock, it’s a beautiful apartment. 

(117-118) “I’m pressed into the back of the elevator with at least fifteen other people. There’s a joke waiting to be had here. How many Ethiopians can you fit into an elevator? All of them. What do you call an elevator full of Ethiopians? An oxymoron. Once the elevator begins to move, the gossip begins. It’s disguised as innocent conversation between two women. Speaking much louder than necessary, one woman claims to have seen Dr. Negatu’s daughter getting out of a cab by herself aft sunrise. To make matters worse, she was sitting in the front seat. The news is followed by the customary tsking of sound judgment being passed. It’s soon followed up with the other news of the day. Those who don’t join in on the conversation simply stand quietly like myself, complicit and greedy. In one protracted elevator ride there are rumors of infidelity, abuse, drugs, unemployment. It all amounts to one thing: proof of a vanishing culture. Time, distance, and nostalgia have convinced these women that back in Ethiopia, we were all moral and perfect, all of which is easier to believe when you consider the lives that most of us live now. With our menial jobs and cramped apartments, it’s impossible not to want to look back sometimes and pretend there was once a better world, one where husbands were faithful, children were obedient, and life was easy and wonderful. With enough time, one woman says in Amharic, there won’t be any Ethiopians. They’ll all become American.”

“I can’t help but smile whenever I hear that line. By even the most liberal standards, I would easily stand convicted of the same crime. I can count the number of Ethiopian friends still in my life with two fingers. I go out of my way to avoid the restaurants and bars frequented by other Ethiopians of my generation. My phone calls home are infrequent. I eat injera only on social occasions. I consider the old emperor to have been a tyrant, not a god. When I pray, it’s only to ask God to forgive me for not believing in Him in the first place. And of course there had been Judith and Naomi, who alone could have set every gossiping tongue on fire for months.”

(120) “I take a seat on the couch, slide off my shoes, and rest my tired feet on the coffee table. I’m not surprised to find that the springs have all held up, and that even the cushions are hardly any worse for wear. Preservation comes naturally to my uncle. It’s part of what made him so diligent and devoted a caretaker to me. When I came home from school or work in the evenings, I often found him sitting on the recliner facing the couch, mending a pair of my socks or removing the stains from one of the two white shirts I had to wear as part of my work uniform. He could have easily been someone’s grandmother with the way he rocked silently in that chair tending to the needs of his nephew.”

“His life was determined by cars, tips, and making change. For a man who before coming to America had rarely ever driven his own car, the role reversal was always noted with his customary irony. “Perhaps,” he would say, “if I went back to Ethiopia I could get a job driving the general now living in my house. Although I would kill the both of us on our first trip out.” 

(122) Berhane Selassie’s letters to presidents of the US

“One of these boxes contains only the letters he has written to the presidents of the United States. Those letters, unlike any of the others, are personal, although they grow increasingly distant with time. The ones written in the past five years are simply the letters of a concerned and active citizen (Berhane is not, in fact, a citizen—only a permanent resident, which he will remain until he dies, because in his heart, he will always be in Ethiopia). In tone and in content, they are no different from any of the other letters concerning policy that he has written to other government officials, great and small alike.”

(126) flyers with acronym, SFD (Students for Democracy) were in Sepha’s family’s house in Ethiopia, and his father claimed they were his and then beat/murder his father (the flyers were really Sepha’s…)

“As soon as the soldiers entered the house, my father had made a point of telling them that they lived there alone with their two sons, ages seven and twelve. I was small for my age back then. Small and skinny, without even a trace of facial hair, and a voice that still broke, especially when I was frightened. I had volunteered to pass out flyers to people I could trust. I was only sixteen at the time. I didn’t believe in consequences yet.”

(128) “Bedrooms are where people hide the things they want no one else to know of.”

(130) “The next day, at my mother’s insistence, I left home. I took nothing with me but a small red cloth sack stuffed with all of the gold and jewelry my parents owned. I pawned and traded each item in order to make my way south to Kenya. By the time I crossed the border, the only items I had left were my father’s cuff links.”

Sepha reading Dostoyevski with Naomi in his store during his break from school…

(135) Naomi’s father from Mauritania: “That’s how we met,” she said. “He was a visiting professor from Mauritania.”

“How many times would I have to stare into a mirror and compare myself against Judith I could go on second-guessing myself forever, and perhaps even find some consolation to the routine, but I saw now that all it would take was one fleeting moment of skepticism on her end to confirm all of my inadequacies, validate all of my doubts, and send me running back to the corner I came from. Our insecurities run far too deep and wide to be easily dismissed, and Judith, without knowing it, had hit that central nerve whose existence I was reluctant to admit, but that when tapped, sent a sudden shock of shame and humiliation beneath which everything else crumbled.”

-Judith made a joke pointing out vast class/educational/status differences between herself and Sepha during Christmas when he was visiting her nice home (she bought a formerly beautiful run down house, turned it into something beautiful for herself and her daughter when moving into Logan Circle and later becomes blamed for the gentrification of Logan Circle).

(136) “If what Judith wanted was another African substitute for the one who had left her, then she was right, she had chosen poorly. I was not that man.”

Sepha not an educated Mauritanian professor who was somebody, who attended academic conferences, etc. and felt his developing relationship with Judith could not work (despite them kissing once, spending so much time together, etc.)

Prostitutes at Logan Circle, Sepha had only found ‘intimacy’ with prostitutes every once in a while

(140) On first coming to America:

“For the first three weeks I was here in this apartment I didn’t speak to a single person besides my uncle, and even then our conversations were brief and strained. I rarely left the apartment, nor did I want to. Any connection, whether it was to a person, building or time of day, would have been deceitful, and so I avoided making eye contact with people I didn’t know, and tried to deny myself even the simplest of pleasures. I refused to acknowledge the charm of a sunset or the pleasure of a summer afternoon. If possible, I would have denied myself the right to breathe another country’s air, or walk on its ground.”

Kenneth, friend from Kenya, Joseph, Congolese friend, they discuss Africa, it’s failures, their former lives, and their experiences in the US while drinking, hanging out at Sepha’s store in Logan Circle (a dirty corner store that he begins to care less and less about…)

(145) “We were all guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope at that point. But how could we not have been? You should have seen us then. Joseph was right, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes. We were young, and we were skinny, and in our eyes beautiful. Joseph and Kenneth were both still working at the Capitol Hotel as waiters in the hotel’s main restaurant, and the opening of my store—“our store,” as we referred to it that night—was supposed to signal a departure from frustrating, underpaying jobs and unrealized ambitions. As that first night in the store wore on, our conversation grew increasingly grand, our ambitions and desires for the world limited only by imagination.”

Sepha tries and fails to ‘win’ Judith back, reads her academic writing on early American democracy and society, etc.

(167) “When I lived in Silver Rock with my uncle, I often spent my free Friday and Saturday nights hopping from one crowded bus to the next. I rode the buses until the crowds began to thin out, and then I would get off and take another crowded bus back in the same direction. Eventually, I came to know which buses were the busiest at which times of day, which buses could be counted on to always arrive on time or full to the brim, and which ones always left me wanting more. It was enough to feel that for twenty or thirty minutes I had locked myself into the same fate with dozens of people who, like myself, could barely move their hands out of their pocket or shift their weight from one foot to the other without pressing against someone else. To me, the buses were the benchmarks of civilization, although at the time I wouldn’t have known to describe them as such. Instead, I would have said that I felt safer on those buses than I did anywhere else in this city.”

(169) Joseph from the Congo, Dante’s Commedia, poetry, his own poems tracing the history of the Congo from King Leopold to the death of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko

(one of their favourite pastimes as a group of friends was to memorize coups and strife in Africa and dictators, etc.)

“Once, in his underfurnished and oversize studio, he read to me the last few lines of the first section, the one that ended with the departure of Belgium from the Congo and the rise of Lumumba as prime minister. The scene was his equivalent of Dante’s “Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears.”

Joseph from the Congo as a Congolese Dante, lover of poetry

Joseph working at the Colonial Grill as a waiter, where politicians and elites dined, etc.

(173-174) “There are fewer than twenty blocks now separating the Colonial Grill from my store in Logan Circle. I know these blocks as intimately as I know any other streets in this city. While so much has changed, these twenty blocks have remained obstinately the same. So, this is the city that I have made my life and home. It seems important now to think of it in that way. To consider it not in fragments or pieces, but as a unified whole. As a capital city, it doesn’t seem like much. Sixty-eight square miles, shaped roughly like a diamond, divided into four quadrants, erected out of what was once mainly swampland. Its resemblance to Addis, if not always in substance, then at least in form, has always been striking to me. As a city, Addis wasn’t much larger. Ninety square miles, most of which was a vast urban slum built around the fringes of a few important city centers. The two cities share a penchant for circular parks and long diagonal roads that meander and wind up in confusion along the edges. Even the late-afternoon light seems to hit D.C. the same way. Right now it’s a soft, startling pinkish hue folded into a few large clouds building up along the western horizon. In two more hours, it will dissolve into long, dark red tendrils of light that will stretch across the sky, and this day will have finally ended.”

(183) “There was a wistful tone to Joseph’s voice when he said that. Ah, Mauritania. The words had a certain rhythm to them, just like celebrating Christmas in Connecticut and the verts and gerts of German poetry that he claimed to find so beautiful.”

“They were French, too, you know,” Joseph continued. “I once had the pleasure of being told by a Mauritanian that he couldn’t understand my Negro French. That’s okay, I told him. Ce n’etait jamais a moi.”

Guessing history of coups/political unrest in Mauritania: Ahmed Taya, etc.

 (185-186) Kenneth and his anger toward Sepha and Joseph regarding the differences from which they came: “Exactly. That’s it. That’s all he ever was. A poor illiterate man who lived in a slum. And you know what that makes him in Africa? Nothing. That’s what Africa is right now. A continent full of poor illiterates dying in slums. What am I supposed to miss? Being sent into the street to beg white tourists for money? If I die today, my sister in Nairobi will get one hundred thousand dollars. Someone will have to come and move the furniture out of my apartment. My suits will be shipped back to Kenya for my cousins. You, Joseph, will get my car. The only thing my father owned when he died was a picture of Jomo Kenyatta. His great leader. From the day I was born, there have been only two leaders of Kenya. The first was terrible, and now the second is even worse. That’s why I’m here in this country. No revolution. No coup.”

Brothers Karamazov, reading with Naomi, etc.

(189) evictions becoming common as gentrification struck Logan Circle, rent increases hurting the poor and long established residents, such as Mrs. Davis, the lonely old woman who would sometimes be seen sweeping the sidewalk just for attention/companionship

(189-190) “I hadn’t forced anyone out, but I had never really been a part of Logan Circle either, at least not in the way Mrs. Davis and most of my customers were. I had snuck into the neighbourhood as well. I had used it for its cheap rent, and if others were now doing the same, then what right did I have to deny them? At first I had even believed that the steady stream of new, affluent faces moving into the neighbourhood would eventually more than make up for the loss. With the exception, though, of a few things here and there—trash bags, laundry detergent, candy bars, and of course, bottled water—most of these people wanted nothing to do with m y little run-down store.”

(192-93) crowds/mobs of poor black folks pissed about gentrification; one man throwing bricks into home of Judith, her car, and targeting gentrifiers; crowd angry with eviction of a poor family 

“Those three days were a boon for my little store. It was almost like old times, with  my register ringing and a buzz of numbers and voices constantly floating around in my head. I made enough each one of those days to walk home at the end of the night grateful and relieved. America was a beautiful place once again (193) 

-Sepha thinks this as business boomed during protests/community anger regarding evictions of families

(194-195) Old, lonely Mrs. Davis, widow, tries to start the Logan Circle Community Association and get a community meeting, asking Sepha to help promote it by passing out signs/notices at his store

(under-attended anti-gentrification community meeting held at AME Church) (197)

“Judith turned in response to Mrs. Davis’s scolding to see me sitting nervously in the back. I stood up. Judith moved her coat off the seat next to her. Mrs. Davis caught the gesture and followed me with her eyes to see where I was going to sit. It had become that type of meeting. I saw that now. Poor Judith. She didn’t know what she had walked in on. All she had seen was a chance to demonstrate her high-minded concern, her belief in participatory democracy and Emersonian ideals.”

(198) “Mrs. Davis began the meeting by thanking everyone for coming. She apologized for the missing councilman, who, according to her, had just phoned to say he had an important meeting with the mayor that was going to run late. She paused briefly after she finished that last sentence—a meeting with the mayor—so we could understand her proximity to the great powers of the city. One of the two things was inevitably true: either the councilman had actually called and said what Mrs. Davis had just told us, or he had never been asked to come in the first place. There was a rehearsed and scripted quality to Mrs. Davis’s speech that convinced me the latter was true.”

(200) community meeting ended with directing anger toward Judith for gentrification and chances in the neighbourhood causing rent increases and evictions

Bricks thrown at home and car of Judith, etc.

(207) meeting Ayad, Mauritanian father of Naomi, who Judith tried to get together with again but it fails miserably

(209) community imagines scope of anti-Judith brick-throwing: some claim it was a large group of young men, etc. and community exaggerates

(211) “We all essentially wanted the same thing, which was to feel that we had a stake in shaping and defining what little part of the world we could claim as our own. Boys even younger than the ones standing outside had fought and killed one another all over Addis for that exact reason, and they were at it again now throughout more of Africa than even Joseph, Kenneth, and I cared to acknowledge. At least, here in America, they had this corner to live their lives as they pleased, and if a few of them took to throwing bricks through windows, then we could not judge them.”

(214) Naomi sent to a boarding school in Connecticut, Judith preparing to move out of Logan Circle to Connecticut, etc.

(220) Joseph and Kenneth talking with Sepha on inevitable gentrification of Logan Circle, about nothing the people could do to prevent it:

“That there’s nothing these people can do. Look at this place. All of the marches in the world won’t change anything anymore. We were at our best in the sixties. Africa was free. America was free. Everyone was marching to something. And now look at us.” (Joseph says this, I believe)

(221-222) Sepha talking with Joseph and Kenneth on problems of Africa, child soldiers, etc.

“This is how it began, then, with the three of us sitting in my store on a Thursday night listing for the hundredth time the victims of a continent that at times seemed full of nothing else. We were always more comfortable with the world’s tragedies than our own. That night was no different. Coups, child soldiers, famines were all a part of our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and disappointments with life. It was only inevitable that the two would have to meet at some point.”

(222) Judith’s house set on fire

(223) “It was clear from the beginning that  my house was going to be spared, as were all of the other surrounding Judith’s. If there was a theme to the conversations I overheard, it was: Thank God it isn’t us. Grateful, once again, in the way only other people’s suffering can make us.”

(224) Franklin Henry Thomas, who was evicted and worked previously at odd jobs, burned Judith’s house

(225) Thomas actually closely resembles Sepha Stephanos, who, could be said, perhaps metaphorically ejected Judith from the neighbourhood by not taking the chances for a relationship while Thomas physically forced her out by burning her beautiful, restored home…

(226) “As for Judith’s house, boarded up now with yellow police tape across the front door, it had returned to a state similar to the one she had found it in. I noticed that no one stopped to look at the house anymore. It was no longer beautiful. It no longer shone. I wonder even now if most of the people who live here don’t miss it. There was something nice to living in the shadows of a house like Judith’s. There are still pieces from the roof’s molding lying on the ground around me, and though the house is now abandoned and desolate in its appearance, there is enough evidence to remember that it wasn’t always this way.”

Double-edged sword of gentrification: with evictions and rent increases and affluent white faces, came also beauty and restoration to blight

(228) “In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made. Right now, I’m convinced that my store looks more perfect than ever before. I can see it exactly as I have always wanted to see it. Through the canopy of trees that line the walkway cutting through the middle of the circle is a store, one that is neither broken or perfect, one that, regardless of everything, I’m happy to claim as entirely my own.”

Sepha Stephanos ends on a somewhat bright note, asserting his own  place and identity and member of a diaspora, caught between Ethiopia and the US, between immigrant aspirations and realities, as well as the complications of race and economics.

(228) “What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.”

The store of Sepha functions perhaps as a metaphor for is life and aspirations and his loyalty to the poor black community over his affection for Judith at the community meeting in the church indicates his identity, although he is not truly part of the neighbourhood, either.

Junot Diaz's Drown

The fact that I 

am writing to you

in English

already falsifies what I

wanted to tell you.

My subject:

how to explain to you that I don't belong to English

though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Perez Firmat

Drown, Junot Diaz's collection of short stories published in the 1990s, about a decade before his The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is an interesting early sample of his writing style. Fusing humor, tales of the Dominican homeland and diaspora in the New York/New Jersey area, and introducing Yunior, the narrator in Oscar Wao, Diaz's work reveals a great writer in development. Several of the short stories revolve around Yunior and his family in the campo, in la Capital, and in New Jersey, as well as addressing issues of immigration, race, and assimilation for the Dominican diaspora.

Diaz also introduces No Face, a character who appears twice in Oscar Wao, though only a child in the short stories here who survives verbal and physical harassment from children in the campo. No Face, if I remember correctly, is a villain whose appearance in the novel foreshadows doom for Oscar and his mother, Belicia. The mongoose also appears in one of the short stories here, just as it does when it saves the life of Oscar and his mother, who would have died in the sugar-cane fields without the 'sly mongoose.'

It's also interesting to see how Yunior's youth compares to college-aged Yunior and postcollege Yunior in Oscar Wao. In the novel, Yunior behaves much like his brother Rafa, which is in accordance with typical and expected Dominican male bravado, misogyny, and violent machismo. Yunior clearly picked this up from his brother Rafa and his father, who cheated on his mother with a Puerto Rican woman in Jersey and was not above using violence with his wife and children. The young Yunior was a dark-skinned, innocent child subjected to abuse from his brother, mother, and father, and he internalizes this in the way he interacts with Oscar and his sister, Lola, in Oscar Wao.

One day I shall revisit these short stories and Oscar Wao. Perhaps I'll write some long boring essay that nobody will care to read. Anyway, any fan of Diaz should check out these short stories. One in particular, "How to Date a Browngirl..." is quite hilarious.