So I decided to take the
50books_poc challenge, because well, shit, I read all kinds of things, so why not? Can't ever hurt to read outside the box.
However, I tweaked it a bit because I wanted to get started and couldn't afford to buy a new book. So, while I'll definitely be filling up my wishlist even more from the reviews over there, I instead picked up a book that I hadn't read in over ten years, the first book by a POC that I found while scouting around my immediate vicinity in my living room (no, really, I swear): Racism 101, by Nikki Giovanni.
My re-read of this book was a pure-dee delight, not least because it showed me that I had grown since senior year of high school in my understanding of a few things. I distinctly remember putting Nikki Giovanni in a box in my wee little twitterpated head as "angry" (in the "why is she so angry?" sense). Reading over it again I see less anger than I attributed before, and see where what I dismissed as "just angry" was more than that.
It's hard to review a series of essays; they're good essays, ranging from some funny stories to stuff about, well, racism, to even a bit of fandom talk as Giovanni is a self described "unrepentant Trekkie". The best review I can give them is just to point out bits that struck me, and tell y'all ahead of time that I think you need to just read the whole damn thing.
Something that I caught along the way, that tied into
the most recent explosion in the SF/F community leading to the Luke Jackson debacle in my head: Nikki, preparing to speak before the Annual Convention of Black & White Women In America and unsure what to say:
"'Should I mention', the poet continued, 'that we get tired of your impatience? That snappy white-girl way you have of saying something to us? That....well...debutante way you have of thinking what you have said is significant and important and must be responded to right away? Or is that too petty?'"
Oh, how my little soul raged at that at eighteen. At twenty-eight I have acquired sufficient education to know a little more what tone she's talking about, having facepalmed to see internet strangers taking it in demanding Racism 101 lessons from POC. Growing up is not always fun.
Later in that same essay I took some issue with Nikki; trying to think of white women she admired, she talks about frontier women and Little House on the Prairie, reminding me immediately of something else I read recently, namely
Oyate.org's
entry on Little House in their
Books to Avoid series. I had forgotten the "oooo scary savage brute Indians!" parts of those books with time. Of course it doesn't invalidate Giovanni's work that she likes a well-beloved series of books that have content some Native people find abhorrent. That's just ludicrous. What struck me was wondering if time dimmed Nikki's memory of that, too.
In a later essay, Campus Racism 101, she comes out with this gem:
"There is a bumper sticker that reads TOO BAD IGNORANCE ISN'T PAINFUL. I like that. But ignorance is. We just seldom attribute the pain to it or even recognize it when we see it."
That smacked me like a bullet between the eyes, because I had seen the same sentiment elsewhere recently, from another thinker y'all know I've got a fondness for...
Now there are two kinds of hardening, one of the understanding, the other of the sense of shame, when a man is resolved not to assent to what is manifest nor to desist from contradictions. Most of us are afraid of mortification of the body, and would contrive all means to avoid such a thing, but we care not about the soul's mortification. And indeed with regard to the soul, if a man be in such a state as not to apprehend anything, or understand at all, we think that he is in a bad condition: but if the sense of shame and modesty are deadened, this we call even power. - Epictetus,
Discourses, ch. 6My translation talks less about the soul and more about the mind, but the point is the same.
Epic Titties isn't talking about the mortification of the soul in the sense of "u r a sinner", he's talking about the pain and damage ultimately inflicted by failing to treat the mind with care as we treat the body.
Fill the brain with garbage, fail to exercise rational thought, and people will still hail you as a leader. Hmmm.
I also love Nikki when she gets her teeth into the subject of education and teaching and what's wrong with our classrooms. Check her out.
It is clear to me that if there is any one crying need in our educational system, it is for the humanities to assert themselves. The disgraceful legacy of racism has made the idealism of the humanities want to go hide itself under a bush. The humanities approaches itself with a fear and trembling, hiding under pseudoscientific methods and jargon. The result is that students do not know any of the ideas that inform our body politic; they do not have the context by which to judge either words or actions. Our young people, and we see it every day in the violence in our schools and neighborhoods, have no context by which to set their standards of personal behavior. They imitate what they see...violence, and a "might makes right" philosophy...imitating the ignorance and impotence around them. Only the humanities are qualified to carry us through this more difficult period of adjustment; only the humanities are capable of gentling the spirit of human beings, allowing a more serene patience to prevail.
I am only a poet and therefore have no training in educational theories. I know we like to blame television for the lack of reading skills and the lack of interest in books. Yet the stupid, insulting, dumb books that we give to students will turn them against reading on their own.
Students will read if there is a good story; if there is a hero to admire and a problem to overcome. Whether or not the protagonist wins, the journey through the tears is worthwhile. We have neutered books, censored teachers who have tried to present good, interesting books, quarreled in higher educatiton about which books students should be familiar with, and yet we continue to expect our students to be readers? I think not. In the universities we have seen white men declare time and time again that they cannot teach women, they cannot teach Blacks, they cannot teach Native Americans, because they do not have "experience" in this area. Yet we who are Black and women and not white males are expected to teach literature written by them because it is 'universal'? I think not. It is called education because it is learned. You do not have to have had an experience in order to sympathize or empathize with the subject. That is why books are written: so that we do not have to do the same things.
You tell 'em, Nikki Giovanni. Other highlights: Nikki on Toni Morrison's novels, Nikki raising her own particular brand of hell over Spike Lee's directorial choices in Malcom X, Nikki on Lt. Uhura, Nikki on her experience with the Kennedy assassination, the Black community as living museum, and Socrates. Read this book. It's good.
Nikki Giovanni, Racism 101. ISBN 0-688-04332.
EDITED TO ADD: Half.com thriftbooks (they have everything, it's fab) orgy. 8 fantasy novels, taken from
this POC in Fantasy roundtable's list of suggested books* (including a good rec for
yuki_onna 's The Orphan's Tales, which inspired the
s00j album of the same name) on their way to me. For $25. Awesome and win. You should check
all three parts of that roundtable out, by the way, it is chock-full of goodness.With those and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which I have not read and which is on my coffee table at this moment, there's ten of my fifty. This may end up the 100 books by POC challenge for me. I do read a lot...
*
sparkymonster notes, correctly, that the Roundtable linked here is on POC in Fantasy, not POC writers, and that not all the authors whose works are listed there are POC; however, there is a section at the beginning of part 3 which does focus on "POC written books", which is where I got confused. So I'm now not sure if I have eight books written by POC coming or not - although I know that some of them are POC authors - but I've got eight well-recommended books with POC characters n either case, so hell yeah. :D