A sweet Southern sampling of a new generation of talented writers.
A collection of writers of color wrestling with the struggles and joys of living in a region rife with tension and possibility.
Edited by Barnes, a Charleston, South Carolina–based author who was raised in the Philippines, the book promises to document the American South “as big as it actually is,” refusing to engage with biased and flattened descriptions of the South that seek to portray a cultural homogeneity. The contributors, some emerging and some established, take on variations of the theme that readers may pull from Devi Laskar’s “Duos”: “I’m supposed to write about being a Southerner while simultaneously being a person of color. I’m somehow supposed to negotiate, on the page, how I have managed to be both at the same time for all of these years.” Fortunately, the roads taken by these authors are anything but rehearsed. In the wake of his critically acclaimed memoir, Heavy, Kiese Laymon digs into the complexity of race and class tension in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is a professor at the university. Soniah Kamal delivers a heartbreaking elegy for the loss of a child in Georgia. Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, Joy Priest remaps her childhood through male-dominated Southern rap anthems toward feminine self-possession and mental mobility. Natalia Sylvester walks us through a lifelong history of doctor visits due to dysplasia of the hip. “My case turned out to be different,” she writes, “in the way that all bodies are different, in the way that science can often explain how but not why.” Not all the contributors are from the South; however, as the title suggests, they all lay claim to the ways they have come to feel “a measure of belonging” there. Across the collection, the writers push against the limits of what we think we know about the South.
A sweet Southern sampling of a new generation of talented writers.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-71-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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