Read Homegoing

We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture. - Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

If you're new here, (Hi! Thanks for coming! Please stay for longer than the average amount of time a new visitor stays, which according to the data, is less than 5 seconds! Please? Just, like, open my blog and then do your work and stuff in other tabs so that I at least think you're reading) you might be surprised that for someone who has attempted over the last few years to create an identity rooted in books, how little patience I have with the obsession over attaining said books.

I have read, at this point, countless justifications for the "unread library," which feels more to me like a justification for rampant capitalism than a real reverence for books. Tell me if there's a German word for this phenomenon.

For (hypothetical) example, you have a hobby, but rarely get to spend time pursuing this hobby. Let's say your hobby is playing the video games of your youth (again, this is hypothetical), but you rarely play these games. There's still that desire, though, but you get it while you're at work or when you're sitting in the waiting room or whatever. You can't play the games, so you spend your time looking at classified ads and eBay and you buy them. Buying the game fills that bucket a little, the one you want to fill by playing them. You get home and there are classic games waiting for you in a satisfying manila package and your bucket fills a bit more. You take it out and admire it and put it on a shelf and then go back to watching endless swimming races because it's the Olympics and there's something hypnotic about watching white, hairless people bobbing up and down in the water.

The existence of the (hypothetical) copy of Zelda II in a near-mint box on your shelf brings you a little bit of pleasure every time you pass it because it triggers a pleasant feeling of when you were a kid looking at Nintendo boxes and imagining the potential within. That kid is still in you, because every version of you for your whole life is in there somewhere. You know, though, that Zelda II is actually obtuse and bizarre and almost impossible. You are very aware that you will never, ever play this game longer than the few minutes you did when you first got it just to make sure the save worked. But you'll be danged if that shiny gold cartridge doesn't remind you of hanging out at your friend's house and seeing an NES for the first time, and saying, as Wesley does in the Princess Bride, "Dear God, what is that thing?"

Reminder: hypothetical

Whoa. That went somewhere, didn't it? Hmm.

Anyway, here's what we have learned about ourselves: as an unplayed Zelda II is but a piece of plastic surrounding a wafer-thin board of outdated electronics, a book on the shelf is but paper. It may be beautifully packaged. It may have a really rad cover. And holding it may bring you pleasure. Those are all things. Those are things that might tap into something deep within you and remind you of book fairs and old bookstores and birthdays and possibilities. There's something there. But guys, there's words in there.

And this was a long rambling introduction to get to the actual introduction to the actual point I want to make before I talk about Homegoing, which is a book by Yaa Gyasi that just killed me. I'll get to it in a sec, you guys.

Words seem, sometimes, to be not enough. When we get into Facebook arguments (you guys, I mean, not me. I'm pretty much above that stuff) we search for the perfect combination of words that will finally change someone's mind. Maybe they haven't seen this meme, we think. Like, do they know about Bengazi? Lemme tell them about Bengazi. But words seem to fail every time. We look back on the thread and we wonder how a calm discussion about Blendtec vs. Vitamix turned into a personal attack about what our kids were wearing in a picture on our Facebook from three years ago.

Here is a thought: maybe the way we are communicating is broken. When we struggle to find the right words, it might be worth considering that the words we are are using, while apt, do more harm than good. There are two versions of this: using words that you learned at school that you assume everyone understands, and using words or phrases that have been used so much as to lose their meaning, or have taken on a whole new meaning.

An example of the first is something I struggle with. I majored in ecology and kind of minored in economics (kind of means that I needed to graduate real bad and was going to lose financial aid, so I was one class short of an actual minor), so I use words and phrases like megafauna, carrying capacity, satisficing, and fungible way more than I should. I assume people know what an opportunity cost is, because I learned what it meant ten years ago and you should have, too, I guess?

So rule one of discussing something with someone who doesn't have your background? Just explain those terms without using them. For example, if someone is complaining about how there aren't as many deer where they hunt as there was when they were kids, you don't tell them that deer in that area have reached their carrying capacity. You say, "The quantity of deer that can successfully survive depends on how much food and space they have. Because of housing development they have less space and food now. So the range can support less deer. Sorry about that. Tell me about the new house your building on the hill, though."

The second is tougher. And here's where if we're going to be able to communicate better we're going to do it by kind of being sneaky. I grew up learning that feminists were bad. Like, inherently evil. One of the church leaders I grew up listening to identified the following groups as the biggest threat to the church: "homosexuals, feminists, and intellectuals."

That's one way of looking at it. Here's another:

A lioness. She mates with her lion and he thinks the moment is about him when it is really about her, her children, her posterity. Her trick is to make him think that he is king of the bush, but what he does a king matter? Really, she is king and queen and everything in between.

So even though as I grew up I became more and more sympathetic to the feminist movement, I had a hard time adopting the word. It wasn't until I saw other people struggle with it that I thought I needed to call myself a feminist in order to take the stigma out of the word for people who value my opinion (I'm taking a big leap here in assuming that anyone values my opinion). The amazing Instagram account @doyouconsideryourselffeminist demonstrates the verbal gymnastics guys go through to show that while they care about equality, they don't want to claim the f word.

There are lots of words and phrases like this, it turns out. Some that are a combination of both. Calling something "rape culture" carries with it an assumption that everyone knows what that means, along with a lot of baggage. Same with "triggering." Some terms are common words that we think we all understand, like "consent," or "patriot," but carry a massive amount of built-in assumptions based on who is using it. "Politically correct" is one. "Social justice warrior" is another. Both of those sound like kind of good things, but have taken on a meaning that is generally derisive and have become insults. Here's a bad one: "blog."

I'm not saying not to use these words proudly, if that's how you define yourself. But just understand that each one of them may have unintended consequences. By trying to reclaim the word feminist, we are making it easier for other people to self-identify that way, which for me is a good thing. But we're also going to give the people we probably most want to reach an excuse to do the metaphorical version of what my grandpa does when he's finished with a conversation and turn down their hearing aid.

It's funny, because I was going to say that this works "on both sides" of the spectrum, which is hilarious. There aren't just two sides to anything, and it doesn't matter how many times that phrase gets repeated. It isn't even a spectrum. A spectrum implies that there is a left and a right way to look at everything when in fact there's four dimensions to every issue. Part of the problem we're dealing with is that we're being convinced that whatever the problem or issue or discussion, that there is a republican way to look at it and a democrat way to look at it and that's it. And that's wrong. DO YOU SEE WHAT WE'RE DEALING WITH HERE.

I got into an argument with a stranger not too long ago which went poorly from the get go. I used the phrase "white privilege." This made said stranger very angry and led to the common response to this phrase of "I work very hard and have never gotten anything in my life because I was white." Very quickly we were no longer talking about the issue at hand and instead I was asked if I was glad that police officers were being killed. How did this go so bad so quickly? Oh. Words. I drop the privilege bomb and on the other side of the computer someone says to themselves, "Oh, I'm dealing with one of these people," before cracking his or her hairy knuckles, taking a giant swig of moonshine, and pounding out a diatribe about rap music and thugs.

But guys, privilege is a thing. It's been quantified. Just like climate change is a thing that has been quantified. But you know what a lot of scientists do in Utah when they're trying to tell wildlife managers ways in which to try to prevent the mass extinction of our wildlife? They call it "extended drought." In order to get actual natural resource professionals to stop from turning down their (literal and metaphorical) hearing aids, they have to avoid loaded words. It feels like cowardice sometimes, but in the end what's better? That I took a stand and used the right words, or that seed mixes for restoration are better for wildlife habitat? I don't know, honestly, but the resiliency of our ecosystem isn't defined by what words we use. I imagine there are a lot of topics like that.

Here's the beautiful thing about Yaa Gyasi: she doesn't use any of the liberal education buzzwords, but man, does the message come out clear:

A little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn't name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness. Beulah ran in her sleep, ran like she'd stolen something, when really she had done nothing other than expect the peace, the clarity, that came with dreaming. Yes, Jo thought, this was where it started, but when, where, did it end?

Homegoing is just a uniquely powerful book. I'm floored that it exists and works as well as it does. Each chapter is essentially a short story, yet each story continues the lineage of two Asante sisters in Ghana. One is kidnapped in a battle and sold to slavery, the other marries an Englishman and stays in Ghana. From that point we watch as seven generations spiral out. We see the impacts of British colonialism on the homeland, and the results of importing human beings to be sold and traded like property in the United States.

What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see the evil in the world began as evil in your own home. I'm sorry you have suffered. I'm sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have... When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.

I want to tell you everything that happens in this book. The stories of the beautiful, flawed, extremely human characters that we meet so briefly before being moved along to the next. Each chapter is a different person, and somehow Gyasi makes us love that person. We want a whole book just about him or her. But there is so much more to tell. Everyone's story is entwined with everyone else's. Throughout is a story of a people who were subjugated, and who are trying to live their life anyway. It's astonishing. Oh my gosh, you guys. This book.

Have you heard about neoslavery? I hadn't. For 80 years after the emancipation of slaves, free people were accused of things like refusing to cross the road when a white woman was approaching, or for vagrancy, then sentenced to decades in prison. But they didn't go to prison, instead they were leased to corporate mines. They were whipped. Many died.

You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.

Then there was Reverend George Lee, who was murdered because he registered to vote. Emmet Louis Till, who was accused of flirting with a white woman. He was taken from his bed and shot. The all-white jury found his killers innocent. He was 14 years old. Corporal Roman Ducksworth Jr., a military police officer, was ordered by a police officer off a bus that he was traveling in to visit his sick wife and then shot because he was believed to be a "freedom rider." These are all true stories.

“But the girl shook her head, clucked her tongue in distaste. 'If I marry him, my children will be ugly,' she declared.

That night, lying next to Edward in his room, Yaw listened as his best friend told him that he had explained to the girl that you could not inherit a scar. 

Now, nearing his fiftieth birthday, Yaw no longer knew if he believed this was true.”

Just because things are better does not mean they are fixed. Physical scars don't get passed down, but we're learning that emotional ones do. Even into the 3rd generation. From the article: "The metabolism of the offspring of stressed mice was also impaired: their insulin and blood-sugar levels were lower than in the offspring of non-traumatized parents. "We were able to demonstrate for the first time that traumatic experiences affect metabolism in the long-term and that these changes are hereditary," says Mansuy. The effects on metabolism and behaviour even persisted in the third generation."

That's just one aspect of this whole social, economical, political issue. I've talked about it a bunch. But the more I read, the more I think I need to. I know life is hard for everybody. That's why privilege is such a loaded word. White people: Yes, we all work hard. Most of us have dealt with some crazy hardship. We've faced losing our homes, lost our jobs, had to ask for help even though asking for help tears out a little bit of our souls every time. We've had to go to work with an uninsured car and we were real nervous when a police officer pulled up behind us and we prayed to make it to payday. We've watched our children suffer, or held a loved one's hand as they succumbed to cancer. It sucks. All of that sucks.

But imagine having to suffer through all of that, but also worry that if you have a broken taillight, there's a not insignificant chance you won't make it home. Did you read that link, by the way? Poor guy had been stopped by police officers FORTY-SIX TIMES. Of those, do you know how many of the violations were visible from outside of the car? Six. What's the reason for the other 40? An elementary school cafeteria worker had to pay the city $6,000 dollars in fines, and he was paying it. 

Think for a minute. Since you were 19 (when Philando Castile got his first traffic violation) to now, how many times have you been given an actual fine? Not how many times you've been pulled over, but when you had to go to the courthouse and pay. Is it 46? Not me. Have you been guilty of an actual violation (speeding, illegal u-turn, no proof of insurance, parked in the wrong place), and been given a warning? If you're me, it's a lot. Guys, that's all privilege is. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I didn't know that I had kidney disease and I've had it for at least 18 years. When my doctor found it, did I shake my head and say "all organs matter?" I did not. Doy, you guys. Of course my heart matters, too, or lungs, or pancreas or whatever. But my heart wasn't under attack and my kidney was getting frickin hosed. I needed to start listening to my kidney.

Words are important.

The words in Homegoing are especially important. It looks pretty on your bookshelf, but it's not going to do crap for you on the bookshelf.

Read Homegoing.

Summer Rerun: We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo

It's summertime, which means it's too hot to do anything during the day, so the kids play outside when it gets cool in the evening, which means that they stay up later and then I stay up later and my schedule gets all messed up and well here's the upshot: not as many blogs.

Also maybe blogs are done? It is definitely happening more often that I think that maybe my blog is done.

If you're on this page today looking for a new post, here's an old one instead. It's about NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names. As you should know by now, it's actually about something else. In this case it's the divisiveness of politics that sometimes I gleefully feed.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and Also A Soon-To-Be-DatedDiatribe About Protest Votes

Going back and forth between white people fiction and the stories of immigrants barely scraping by or beautiful stories of people living in huts in Africa is jarring. It's like when my friends and I used to go to Crystal Hot Springs near Brigham City during the winter. We'd sit in the hottest hot tub they had until we were pink, then jump into the freezing pool (sometimes with ice still floating in it) like we were some kind of crazy Finns. Then we'd run back to the hot tub to be scalded again. It's like these two extremes were the only way these jaded teenagers could feel anything. Like Trent Reznor at his most insufferable, we hurt ourselves that day, to see if we could feel.

In retrospect, this teen numbness didn't come from any kind of real trials, but rather the boredom of having everything taken care of for me. I worked, but spent all of the money on CDs and VHS tapes. And work was hanging out and goofing around in a movie theater with a bunch of attractive teenagers sprinkled with an occasional unpleasant task such as cleaning up the inevitable vomit that occurs when kids are loaded up with popcorn, soda, and candy and forced to watch Pauly Shore movies. If we're being honest, even cleaning up the barf wasn't that bad. We had a powder that turned it all into some kind of white solid that could be swept up like so many M&Ms spilled on the sticky theater floor.

It was a life of leisure. I did not often feel the soreness of a day's worth of labor, and rarely did I climb into bed physically exhausted. I was bullied, though, and generally not accepted among the majority of my peers until maybe my second year of high school. I worried about grades (not so much to do the work, but enough to stay up at night dreading the test the next day), and wanted a girlfriend, and knew that I did not know how to handle having a girlfriend at the time but thought it would be fun to at least fail at it. 

This cocktail of having little of substance to do and a building resentment of the world around me is a dangerous one. There's a lot of "it's not fair," swirling around your head. A lot of Rage Against the Machine. You go to local concerts and you learn about all the injustices in the world. You learn about the revolution in Chiapas, Mexico and you get some fliers and you sign up for a mailing list and these cheaply printed 'zines show up at your house for the next decade. You start to feel guilty that you aren't being oppressed, but deep down wonder if you could handle even a little more adversity than the barely any you're dealing with.

When I was 16 my friends and I worked at movie theaters and my other friend managed a Dominos. When did you peak?

It's easy, in these moments, to hope for some kind of downfall of society so that we can rebuild something better. Something where bullies are recognized by your peers as bullies, where you don't have to listen to a girl you had a crush on tell you what a "nice guy" the guy who cornered you in the gym locker room after everyone had left and repeatedly shoved you into the same locker until you had a deep bruise on the back of your neck is. And back there, vaguely, is the understanding that even though things seem bad for you, they're infinitely worse for someone else and maybe something should be done about them, too.

The tricky thing is that while our day-to-day struggles feel so real, the difficulties of marginalized groups seem to be a combination of horrible anecdotes, without realizing the daily, even hourly, crushing weight of oppression. And this is why we get in situations where we forget the stakes we're dealing with when it comes to the future. Gay youths get shot at in clubs, which is horrible, but they also endure daily, low-level anger and vitriol. They are glared at, they hear about what deviants they are on the news, they fall in love and are told that their love is evil, they are kids and being yelled at by red-faced adults because of what bathroom they're comfortable in. All of this on top of the everyday drag of bullying, crushes, grades, and confusion of just being a person. Mexican immigrants work two or three jobs, struggle to understand the complex culture around them, watch their kids try to negotiate the minefield of the American high school, and then turn on the news and hear a man who appears to have the alien from Men in Black struggling to burst from his skin at any time tell them that they are rapists.

So when you're a white teen you see this injustice and it gets you angry for a moment, but then it's back to the daily assemblage of tiny personal offenses and discomforts. You forget, and it's understandable, because whatever place we are in right now is normal and the only acceptable alternative is for it to be better. This is good when it means that we keep getting cooler video games and superhero movies and amusement park rides. It's bad when it means that we worry more about our little inconveniences at the expense of the people in our communities who are afraid for their lives.

So when I see white privileged people on the internet insisting that a vote for a third-party candidate is the only moral choice I see what they're saying. They're not happy with the options.  Here's the problem, though. This election isn't about you. That's a hard thing for us to wrap our heads around sometimes, but it's important. Not everything is about us. Even though we live in a world that is hell-bent on telling us that it is. Sometimes our needs and desires take a backseat because someone else is suffering so much worse.   

You might hate Donald Trump, but the fact is that if you're reading this and you're white, and/or Christian and/or male, then you stand to benefit from a Trump presidency. He's for you, whether you're for him. So when you get up on your pulpit and tell everyone how brave it is that you're going to vote for somebody else so that you can send a message? Maybe we need to think about what that message we're sending actually is.

It might look to you like you're saying that you want to stand up to a corrupt system. But to the racial minorities you claim to support, it looks like you're abandoning them when they need you most. Your posts about being an ally on Facebook are great, and hopefully they cheer people up, but man, your vote means so much more than a tweet.

In your space of safety created by nothing more than a societal preference for your skin color, sexual preference, or religion, you see the benefit in taking the long view. "By casting this vote, I'm influencing future politics," you say, proudly posting your "I Voted" sticker on Instagram. Your Muslim friends, or Mexican friends, or black, or gay friends don't see it that way. They don't have the benefit of the long view. They're less concerned about 4-8 years from now and more concerned about tomorrow. They're facing the real reality that the previously quiet racists on the bus are feeling emboldened by what they see at Trump rallies. They're finding notes on their doorstep threatening them. Telling them to go home. Telling them that their kids will "get what they deserve."

You guys. They can't afford to wait for this eventual revolution.

Here's the thing: Bernie supporters have already made their point. Obviously the Democratic party saw you. They see your passion, they recognize your youth, they acknowledge how rad your memes were. Even when you tried to trick them with pictures of Cuba, they still saw all the rallies and the crowds. The future of the Democratic party will be influenced by this for decades.

Summer fattened everybody up. The family buttered without reserve; pie seemed to be everywhere. They awoke and slept and awoke in the summerhouse on the island, ate all their meals on the porch while the sun moved across the sky. They looked out at the saltwater cove and watched the sailboats skim and tack across the blue towards the windward beach, littered with the outgrown shells of horseshoe crabs.Anyway, this all ties into the book I just read, I promise. It's Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel. The last time I went to the library I was very excited to pick up two hot new books, that one, and The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.  Not since Ready Player One have I been so immediately turned off by a book from the first two pages. There might be a good book in there, but I'll be danged if I'm going to find out. In both cases it's just pages and pages of exposition before a single thing happens. I didn't read that one. But try this opener:

Ooh.

In SADOEAP (I don't know how to do this, I don't want to type the name over and over but also the acronym is a lot of letters and I've easily wasted more characters on the explanation than I saved on the title), we meet Edgar and Fern. Both come from very wealthy families. Edgar's dad is a self-made steel tycoon who loves to spend. Fern's family got their money the old fashioned way: inherited from ancestors who at one point owned and profited immensely from slaves. Edgar is embarrassed by money and his parents' lavish spending. Fern just sees it as a constant. These are both very privileged people.

On the outset, we learn that the family's money, by way of Fern, is gone. "The long-ago earning of that money — slaves, cotton, rum — and the spending of it, were done. The money had lived its own life, like a relative." And in order for Edgar to cash in on his birthright, he'd have to take over the steel business and abandon his writing. Fern pushes a little too hard, and Edgar decides it's a good reason to have an affair. He goes off on a boat with some lady, and Fern finds herself on a road trip with a literal giant (think Shawn Bradley, not the B.F.G.) who is crossing the country to reunite with his son. Both parents think that the other is home and wants to punish the other with their absence, so the three kids live on their own, Lord of the Flies style.

What starts out as a pretty boilerplate dysfunctional family becomes a pretty sweet story of love and confusion and hopes and dreams and privilege and resourceful kids. I liked it quite a bit. I loved the writing. You guys. The writing is so good. But the real trick Ausubel performs is in making us care about these people at all.

It's hard to root for rich people, especially Edgar, whose biggest tragedy is that he's going to have to get a job. Yes, it would be a betrayal of his socialist values, but how many of us have the option of wealth in our back pockets in case Plan A doesn't work out? It makes every decision a little less risky, doesn't it? Many people who are reading this have faced poverty. Some of us have faced losing our houses. Or had to skip meals. Or told our kids that back-to-school shopping isn't in the cards this year. It makes it hard to understand the plight of a guy who is so discouraged that his bottomless pit of free money dried up that he decides to cheat on his wife.

Hey, that sounds sort of like what I was talking about! It's difficult to feel sorry about someone with more privilege than you when all they have to worry about is if they're excited about who to vote for. They have the Plan B of continued coddling in a world that would be tailored to some fantasy era in the 50's when (white) men drank at work and (white) women wore pretty dresses and worked as secretaries (until they got married of course) and never, ever, dared to become presidential candidates.

And hey, I know some of you are conservative and if you made it this far, congratulations. I know I probably annoy you but check this: I respect you and I really think we need rational conservatives out there, just like you hope that us liberal types are also rational. I hope I've been able to convince you that even if we disagree, at least I've thought my stances through.

If we're being completely honest here -- and hey, you guys, what else are we even doing here -- I want there to be a strong and vibrant Republican party. I want it to be filled with black republicans and latinx republicans and trans republicans and women of all types. Just not this year. Deep down I don't think that's a crazy idea. I know there's more to your party than fear of strangers and fear of the future. I get the idea that we need to spend a little less, and put a little more emphasis on self-sufficiency. I like the idea of letting states figure out the way to run themselves without a lot of input (aside from ensuring basic human rights) and seeing if it works and for other states to emulate it. I think fighter jets are cool (when they work), and love aircraft carriers (when they work).

Democrats get a little unrealistic sometimes. They get in their university classrooms with their guaranteed jobs and lose touch with the disenfranchised groups they're supposed to champion because I don't know, they don't understand which wine to pair with which main course.  They forget sometimes what it's like to watch a mining town dwindle, or the enjoyment to be had hunting with your dad and your dad's friends, who are way fouler-mouthed than they are at church. I'm not saying that's some kind of "real America" and that living in the city and arguing over if the chicken is locally sourced. I'm saying that's all America. The liberals and the conservatives and the libertarians and they non-voters and they goofballs and the wastoids and the sportos and the dweebies. I want you guys to have a voice, too.

But listen. That voice doesn't have to be Donald Trump. That's all I'm saying. I know you're scared that Hillary will do whatever it is that you're afraid democrats will do. But just take a minute and listen to the groups who stand to lose on the first day of a Trump presidency. The ones who because of some roll of the cosmic dice ended up with browner skin than you. Or are trying to flee a terrifying situation and find a safe place for their children. Or were born into a religion that has a very fractious and extreme and criminal wing to it that scares people, even though it represents a tiny percentage of the mainstream group. (Was that the right link?) It doesn't hurt anything to listen, right?