My favorite books over at Reading Angel…
Today, it’s a review of This Thing Called the Future over at Books From Bleh to Basically Amazing.
Check out J.L. Powers’s teenage years at Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile.
My 2 week blog tour begins today. To find out what I think about this or that, go to Books Complete Me.
Scheduled to be released next May!
That Mad Game: Growing Up in a Warzone
On the 17thof April, 1980, at Zimbabwe’s independence celebration, Bob Marley sang his famous song for Africa’s independence: “Every man got a right to decide his own destiny, And in this judgment there is no partiality.”
Out of the Shadows
Part of the problem, of course, was that in Zimbabwe until 1980, blacks were denied the right to vote, were offered inferior education by the white minority in power, and were unable to own land, which had been appropriated by white settlers a century earlier. Black Africans in then Rhodesia were not masters of their own destiny. But, after a decade long war for independence, they now hoped that Zimbabwe could become a symbol of African pride and democracy.
By now, we all know what happened. Robert Mugabe, the prime minister who shone like a bright beacon of hope and promise in 1980, became a despot as early as the 1980s—terrorizing and killing the Ndebele peoples. In 2000, he began appropriating white farm land for his thug cronies and expanded his brutalization of the population to include all ethnicities, black and white, in order to remain in power.
Jason Wallace’s Out of Shadows bravely navigates this shifting terrain of power politics, deeply embedded in the problem of race that has plagued southern Africa for centuries. In 1983, Robert Jacklin moves from England to Zimbabwe with his family and attends an elite boarding school. Despite his father’s allegiance to the liberal party line—or perhaps because of his father’s almost rote preaching about the virtues of the new black government and the evils of the former white government—Robert quickly falls under the sway of a charismatic young man, Ivan, whose palpable anger over the loss of white power and prestige makes him a dangerous friend.
Robert soon realizes that lines at the boarding school are drawn between those who are willing participants in bullying the black students and those who befriend them. Robert absorbs his new friends’ racism and rage, rejecting his father’s beliefs and embracing the distorted but compelling world view of disaffected white Rhodesians. Ironically, his new-found racism and his alliance with young men whose terrifying values lead them to engage in questionable activities probably saves his life, a part of the plot I won’t divulge.
Though Robert never quite emerges from the philosophical and moral racial quagmire he’s sunk himself in, he does eventually jeopardize his own life when he comes to understand Ivan’s commitment to a radical and shocking plan of action to restore Zimbabwe to its former glory under white power. An epilogue with an adult Robert, who returns to the boarding school a couple decades later, demonstrates that though he’s managed to leave Zimbabwe and the virulent racism he encountered there, its impact reverberates, leaving him still confused about some of the moral issues raised by the book.
In Out of Shadows, Wallace has waded into a confusing political situation with admirable honesty. At times I longed for a strong black character to clarify the issues and effectively demonstrate, to the reader if not to Robert, that though Robert Mugabe turned out to be evil, African independence itself was both just and necessary. At the same time, moral realities are almost never black and white and are often gray. I appreciated Wallace’s ability to hold back and let the reader experience the reality of obfuscated moral realities, such as the one unfolding in Zimbabwe for the last two decades.
Ever since I became a mother, I’ve been referring to myself in the third person. “Mommy loves you,” I tell Nesta, or “You can’t bite Mommy!” even as I think, How weird. It’s like “I” don’t exist. Only “mommy” exists. And who the hell is she?
There is a certain amount of truth to the thought that “I” ceased to exist when “Mommy” came into being. Your identity collapses for your child into one thing, and that happens a little bit for yourself as well, at least for awhile. Humans spend time with the things, events, people, and activities that define them, that make up their identity, and a new mother spends more time with her child than she does anything else. Or at least, this new mother does. (Here I go again, referring to myself in the third person.) In the past 10 1/2 months since my son was born, I’ve probably spent an average of twelve to thirteen hours a day with him. This is more time than I think I’ve spent with anybody else, ever, except my own mother. Naturally, my identity at the moment reeks of motherhood, is saturated with the daily grind of it, soaked in those juices.
Who am I now? How did I get here? And will I ever be able to get my creative life back?
My blog and my writing life have suffered the most. Bill-paying work always gets done because it has to. The writing that does get done is mostly because of deadlines and public appearances, not because it brings in a lot of money. It’s been hard to work on my next book. I feel a little lost, swimming around in this sea of nursing, diapers, and lack of sleep. Though I didn’t exactly get what many people might refer to as “mommy brain,” I have discovered that I have very little patience for some things that absorbed me in the past, and my conversation is dominated by parenting talk, a trend I hope will pass as my baby grows and I have more freedom to become the “old” Jessica again. Or, not exactly the “old” Jessica, but a new (and certainly improved) Jessica.
I am making a commitment to try blogging here again regularly, that is, once a week. So I hope you’ll drop by and spend some time with me as I muddle my way through this new period where my identity as wife, mother, writer, teacher, and editor/publicist are being shuffled around and re-mixed. Not entirely sure what will come of the re-mix but I know it’ll be an interesting process. Thanks for being here for the ride!
This afternoon, as I was thinking about what I wanted to read next, I thought I’d check to see if Andrew Brown had written any new books since the last one I read and loved (Street Blues: The Experirences of a Reluctant Policeman). Andrew Brown is a South African writer, published by South African publishers, and unfortunately, that does mean his work is unavailable in the U.S. except for two books on the Kindle. But for those of you who have a Kindle, and who are interested in Africa, I would strongly recommend both of those books–the one I already mentioned and Inynezi, a love story set during the Rwandan genocide. Good stuff.
How I did research in Africa: Guest Post on Cynsations, Cynthia Leitich Smith’s blog.
Yesterday, Nesta and I returned from 3 weeks of traveling in Texas and Louisiana to promote This Thing Called the Future. And before that, we spent some time in New York and Austin, Texas and Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California. Traveling alone with a baby is hard. Traveling alone with a baby when doing booksignings is even harder.
I was lucky to have kind hands to help me along the way. In New York City, Chris’s cousin Katrina watched Nesta (and her own baby) in my hotel room. In Houston, my aunt babysat during my events. In Austin, friend and fellow writer Lindsey Lane watched Nesta during my reading at Bookwoman–he mostly slept in her arms. In Grand Coteau, my friend Jason Saracino took care of Nesta during a performance, soothing him to sleep outside in the muggy night air. And in New Orleans, during the ALA, I was fortunate that another good friend Holly McGee stayed with us at the hotel room and took care of Nesta whenever I needed to be gone. Holly thoroughly enjoyed taking Nesta around the city to see street performers, listen to music, and eat beignets at Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter. Holly is African-American; Nesta has an olive tone to his skin (probably from his Cherokee heritage–dad’s side–or his Black Irish heritage–my side) but he doesn’t look black. Nevertheless, people kept stopping her and saying, “Your baby is soooo cute.” She responded, “Why, thank you,” with a gracious smile, each and every time.
I’m glad she was able to enjoy some of the beneficience bestowed towards folks with babies. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Having a baby has restored my hope in humankind. Holly told me that people who would never have spoken to her stopped to coo at the baby. “I got on the elevator once,” she told me, “and some straight up thugs, I kid you not, were making gaga faces at him.” This has been my experience. People get doors. They carry luggage. And they all smile at Nesta. He’s never met a stranger. I hope he never does.
