Migritude by Shailja Patel

    Let’s, for a moment, consider collage as a medium. Collage draws together pieces of various disparate sources to compile a new image. The histories of its components cling to the final product’s skin, become part of it, and yet something new has formed that, in the best cases, surpasses the sum of its parts. This is where we land with Shailja Patel’s Migritude, which is a cross-medium amalgam that proves the perfect creative outlet for a cross-generational, cross-continental storytelling.

    Migritude entered the world as a stage production in which Patel unpacks eighteen saris her mother passed onto her and weaves them into a narrative of migration. Having been born in Kenya, Patel offers an insightful perspective of her family history alongside broader global events (like Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda), tracing their journey to the United States. The explorations are varied and incisive, and, while I would have loved to see the performance, Migritude in book form does everything in its power to replicate the multimodal experience of a live show.

    The very design of the book is an assemblage. There’s a foreword by Vijay Prashad, Migritude itself, and a poetic account of the saris in the suitcase (think: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons for eighteen fashion items). Following those elements there is what is called the “Shadow Book”, which includes drafts and cut material from Migritude, followed by a collection of poems, and finally a book called “The Journey” that provides a timeline of Migritude’s production and a few interviews and reflections following the performances. Like Patel’s collage-like identity, Migritude draws from different elements. Moreover, even within Migritude there are a series of different components that come together for a cohesive whole: poems, photographs, drawings, letters written in the voices of different family members, and historical data. The pieces of the work speak to one another to tell the full story.

    In at least a few ways, Shailja Patel’s play script reminds me of Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia. Verdecchia is more comedic and abrasive and Patel is more emotive and affectionate, but both draw on historical data to criticize the colonial enterprise. While Verdecchia’s incendiary commentary on U.S. imperialism in Argentina and Latin America draws on historical factotum for its vehemence, Patel’s usage is more sobering in its critique. There’s a dark irony in her presentation:

“We were the model the rest of Africa was supposed to look to! A happy, multiracial nation where Whites, Asians, and Africans all lived in harmony. // In Kenya’s war of independence, fewer than 100 whites and over 25, 000 Africans died. Half of the Africans who died were children under ten. // Sixty thousand white settlers lived in Kenya at independence in 1963. The new Kenyan government was required to take loans of 12.5 million pounds from its ex-colonial master, the British government. To buy back stolen land from settlers who wished to leave” (19).

The use of facts is so wonderfully strategic; the last two sentences of that passage alone serve as a scathing indictment of colonialism. It’s illuminating to see its far-reaching effects and ongoing influence running parallel to Patel’s family’s personal history. The Western ethos falls under broader critique. One of the most memorable moments—since it seems so far removed from the other cultural touchstones of the text—is actually a reference to Metallica:

Here’s how Empire congratulates itself:

Favourite American torture technique: blast Metallica music at victims until they scream, weep, lose bladder and bowel control. Metallica’s James Hetfield is proud that my music is culturally offensive. If they’re not used to freedom, I’m glad to be a part of the exposure. (37-38).

The notion of freedom, as seen from a Western point of view, takes on horrific connotations in this reframing. “Freedom” by force: as if bombarding them with unwelcome heavy metal is a gift. There’s a directness in Patel’s presentation that requires little commentary: the facts sprinkled throughout speak for themselves.

    The irony in the imperial project is that those subjected to it do, in fact, take on the qualities of their oppressors. For more information, I highly recommend reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which explores the double-consciousness of colonial subjects, We see that reflected in Patel’s account of her schooling and their creative writing projects:

    We set them in European or US cities and schools and inserted ourselves into those landscapes. Or we stole freely from US sitcoms and soaps – Good Times, Dallas. One of my classmates, in an essay on “The Dangers of Hitchhiking,” reproduced, blow by blow, an episode of Diff’rent Strokes that had run the previous night on Kenyan TV. Didn’t even change the names of the characters—just cast herself in the starring role. The English teacher commented, You should use your own ideas in future! And gave her a mark of 75%. // In all those years, there was only one teacher who ever challenged this erasure of our own lives. Ironically, he was a British expatriate. He asked my Standard Seven class why we used English names and places in our compositions instead of Kenyan ones. We stared at him, confused: a classroom of 11 year olds, who had never imagined that our reality had any place in literature. Finally, one girl raised her hand: That’s what is in the books we read. (83)

What makes Patel’s critique refreshing is how it highlights the inner contradictions in the logic of cultural imperialism. The fact that a British expatriate is the one to challenge the cultural consciousness of the Kenyan children is a detail destabilizing in its irony, assuring no easy resolution for global conflict.

    And yet, the critique of the West is clear. Patel highlights the difference in mindset between African and American thinking: “We calibrate hunger precisely. Define enough differently from you. Enough is what’s available, shared between everyone present. We are incapable of saying, as you can so easily: Sorry, there’s not enough for you” (33). Earlier, I compared Patel to Verdecchia but this passage highlights Patel’s poetic sensibilities. The idea of “calibrating hunger” is a beautifully apt phrase for encapsulating an entire mindset.  The construction of the sentences also provides a varied rhythm. The combination of short and long produces a tempo that empowers the sentiments, Point. Point. Full explanation. Reprise. It’s nicely developed.

    I recognize I’ve focused this review primarily on the political commentary of the work at the expense of the more personal and familial. Truth be told, those elements were somewhat less resonant for me. That said, the central premise that incites the narrative is endearing in its quiet rebellion. Patel’s mother gives her the box of saris preemptively, rather than waiting for her to be married. The tenderness of that understanding and the deviation from expectations is really wonderful to see. Elsewhere, Patel lists words that do not exist in English (Najjar, Garba, Arati) and words that do not exist in Gujarati, among which she lists “self-expression,” “individual,” and “lesbian.” Those few lines are so suggestive of Patel’s experience, though there’s an ambiguity that is not fully addressed in the interviews which follow the collection. Those intimations of experience, to me, were more powerful than the more fully fleshed out interactions with family.

    To return to the central metaphor of Migritude as a collage, we see pieces of Patel throughout: those pieces formed by family, by colonial experience, and those pieces which are, perhaps, innate. Blending fragments of experience and historical fact elevates the experience to more than a facile or unidimensional narrative. Certainly, Migritude is more than the sum of its parts. More than any one instrument, is an orchestra, and it is probably only multiple listens that will reveal its full range of nuances.

    

    Happy reading—and be ready to buy tickets to Migritude if there’s ever another live performance.

Hello, My Name Is Henry by Micah Schnabel

    Micah Schnabel is a musician that writes beautiful, tragic, happysad, funny, sincere, poetic songs and I adore him for it. He plays in punk bands like Two Cow Garage and Call Me Rita, but I am perpetually stunned by his work as a solo artist and it would break my heart to find out he wasn’t the radically authentic, kind, timid person I perceive him to be. I’ve provided an obscene amount of adjectives in these first sentences, but I want to emphasize how much I appreciate his musical endeavours [a playlist provided for you in the comments section while you read this review]. You can imagine how surprised I was to find out he had written a novel, a discovery which was promptly followed by a purchase.

    Hello, My Name Is Henry is a debut slice-of-life novel that expands upon the narrative recounted in Micah Schnabel’s song of the same name from his album Your New Norman Rockwell. The titular character in both is a 28 year old man working at a convenience store who feels that life is passing by around him but can’t seem to escape the cycle of poverty and mental illness that hovers around his past. The book is a pretty scathing critique of Americana—more on that shortly—and has a direct tone that reads like a progressive version of Bukowski.

    The novel retains the sincerity of Schnabel’s lyrics, though often presents itself as more prosaic than his musical work. I think of the way he builds scenes in “#33 Dryer” and “Emergency Room” as essentially perfect illustrations-in-words. The novel is somewhat more on-the-nose in tackling issues, with the central character often narrating exactly what the problems in America are: systemic poverty in small communities and the lack of responsiveness of politicians, the proliferation of harmful addictions and the shocking attempts to reduce the accessibility of naloxone (even among first responders!!), racism, toxic masculinity, and so on. I agree with essentially all of his views—and I appreciate that some of the minor conflicts in the book are Henry responding to homophobic and racial slurs; the way he strives to take action is an encouraging layer to a character who is often unmotivated and sedentary.

    You get a pretty good sense of Henry’s views and values throughout the book and the small town has a plethora of other characters. In some ways, the novel reads as a series of portraits and I find the characters to be pretty nicely developed. That said, Schnabel breaks a central rule of literary fiction: characters are introduced and shortly after are provided long monologues expressing their views, intentions, and life stories. There’s a transparency (or perhaps authenticity) to the characters that gives them a charm, even if the writer inside me keeps shouting to show not tell. It’s especially strange because, presumably, Henry has known these people for years and in a small town everyone knows each others’ business, but it just so happens to be the case that in the duration of the novel they pour their hearts out. Just suspend your disbelief a little bit, deal?

    Of Henry’s interactions with other characters, I find the most beautiful and compelling to be his friendship with Josh, who is an effective foil for Henry. Josh moved to “the city” years earlier to make a life for himself, but still maintains a correspondence with Henry. The two write letters back and forth, and Josh continually encourages Henry to come join him, but Henry is always held up by being too broke for a bus ticket. There’s a tragic bent to their friendship, where Josh seems to really want the best for Henry, but Henry is too stunted to make a move for himself. What really resonated for me, though, is that the two bond over a comic series called Memory Currency [a title which reappears as a song on Schnabel’s album The Teenage Years of the 21st Century]. The fictional (?) comic is described in a really compelling way, where the artist seems to perpetually shift. The two characters have been reading the comic for years but can’t make sense of it, though they come to some interpretive breakthroughs (the comic is the writer dreaming his audience? the continual changes of the central character’s design signal a shift in direction or a new concept being introduced?). I really liked the way they spoke about that and it rang so true in a way some of the dialogue does not.

    I am hesitant to spoil the ending of the book because it revolves around Henry’s friendship with Josh. There is some carefully placed foreshadowing around 40 pages before the climax of the book and while I had somewhat predicted what would happen, the delivery in the final pages of the book is fantastic. The devil’s in the details, but the tension of the final scene is very well-crafted and heartbreaking, with the novel’s final line being a nice encapsulation of the central theme of the book: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.”

    The book is laced with tragedy. Even moments that inspire rage are given a kind of pity that is hard to ignore; people often talk about how we need to be united in these divisive times, and the sympathy Henry (and Schnabel) extend to others seems a good model for how to start. There are some non-starters (when little white boys are play fighting, Henry extends sympathy for their small town lives, but when they use the N-word he says “fuck ‘em” and walks off), but in most cases Henry finds ways of being sympathetic to others (when a drug addict he knows tries to rob the convenience store he accidentally shoots a gun at Henry and Henry makes sure not to report the culprit to the police).

    There’s a powerful scene that I think encapsulates the tenderness of Henry’s character. One night, his grandfather has an episode and Henry’s mother and grandmother have to go out looking for him. When they find him, he has a shotgun and after they seem to calm him down, he walks up to his wife and daughter and kills himself in front of them. Henry doesn’t get the details of what happened until a few years later, but he knows something has happened. The tenderness and self-effacement he demonstrates in the morning is beautiful. Henry narrates that he had been up all night and “when [he] pretended to wake up that morning, [he] rose slowly, making noise to let my mother know that I was awake” (76). He shows such consideration for his mother where he does not want to take her off guard, and then he “walked slowly across the shag carpet. [He] gave [his] mother a short hug and said good morning” (76). There’s something touching about the way he mothers his mother in the scene, and it’s met with a beautiful and devastating reciprocity:

“She asked if I wanted a bowl of cereal.

I said I did.

The only other thing I remember is that we were out of milk” (76).

The scene is beautifully constructed with a devastating event, moments of tenderness, and it’s then undercut by a reminder of the poverty of the central characters. The structure of the novel is set up in a series of short chapters, which gives Schnabel the opportunity to deliver short gut punches strategically to punctuate the central points of the main story.

    When it comes to the main story, I suppose you could say that it’s about Henry wanting to leave town, though it’s a portrait of the town as much as anything. About halfway through the novel, there’s a central event that precipitates a number of changes. Henry witnesses a car accident where the driver runs a red light and runs over a little girl. The driver is a scumbag who keeps offering defences for why it’s the girl’s fault. Meanwhile, Henry moves the girl from under the car and cradles her in his arms, singing to her while she passes away. Schnabel returns to the idea several times that she gets heavier and that’s when Henry knows she has died, even before it’s confirmed. It’s a devastating touch.

    The little girl’s death catalyzes a number of deep conversations with people who are concerned for his well-being. The best, in my opinion, is the conversation Henry has with the owner of the convenience store. In that scene, the reactions in the conversation seem true and Schnabel uses one of the best examples of personification that comes to mind in my recent reading. The boss “stops talking for a beat, as if he’s waiting for me to stop him. I don’t say anything. The hum of the cooler seems to get louder for a moment, but I know it’s just the silence turning up the volume on us” (66). I love that line for two reasons: one, it just feels like an experience I’ve had where all of a sudden noise gets louder at an awkward moment. The second is that in the construction of the sentence, the silence is turning up the volume of the cooler—something that is soundless driving up the sound of something else is a compelling line, and I like that it can also be read as silence turning up its own volume. 

    This paragraph will spoil a key plot point, so skip ahead two paragraphs (or just listen to my playlist for a while and scroll). Following the little girl’s death, a revelation comes to light that seems to me to be too coincidental. The girl’s dad is a real scumbag who doesn’t care about his daughter dying because her mom cut him out of her life. He returns to town now in the hopes of ‘being there’ for his ex, but he’s an alcoholic that seems incapable of being there even for himself. There’s a sequence of events that seems improbable: Josh comes to town to check on Henry and they get into a fight with the girl’s dad, Rick. Rick later shows up at Henry’s apartment and robs and attacks him with a knife. At the end of the altercation, it’s revealed that Rick is Henry’s long lost dad.

    Beyond the coincidence, there’s a bit of a contradiction in the text. Henry judges Rick for being a terrible father to the girl and Rick says that even though he was bad, she was his blood and so he still has a claim to her as his daughter. The underlying message seems to be that blood is not so important as connection and actually doing the work of maintaining relationships, which I can endorse. After Henry realizes the girl was his half-sister, though, he starts referring to her as his sister pretty consistently. It’s an interesting contradiction, since he only met her a few moments before her death and yet now claims that bond. Initially I chalked up the inconsistency to some underlying biases that slipped into the text, but the more I think about it the more it seems like it’s another example of the final line’s aphorism: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.” He never wants to be like his deadbeat father, and yet despite his best efforts here he is replicating that same narrative that allows Rick to be a father without performing fatherhood. It’s a pretty clever spin, actually.

    Overall, Hello, My Name Is Henry is a touching novel that delivers all the genuine sincerity of Schnabel’s music, if sometimes more prosaic than necessary. That said, the more I think about the book the more I like it. Writing this review has forced me to process some of the things I overlooked or dismissed during my reading. The novel has that meandering quality that is the taste of many, encapsulating something like a complicated kindness by Miriam Toews or even a less problematic The Catcher in the Rye. There’s a lot of positives for Schnabel’s debut novel, and I’m confident that with a second novel we would see a continued refinement of his writing style, incorporating more of the poetic quality from his music.

    I recognize my own position here as a reviewer of books: I know that when I recommend a book to you, it could take days or weeks or months or years before you get around to it. I have the rare opportunity here to make a more immediate recommendation. Do yourself a favour and listen to some of Micah Schnabel’s music while you wait for your online independent bookstore order to arrive.

    Happy reading!

Listening Playlist:

#33 Dryer

Jazz and Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Emergency Room

How to Ride a Bike

The Interview

Cash 4 Gold

Hello, My Name Is Henry

Memory Currency

Coin$tar

Cincinnati, Ohio

Oh, What a Bummer

American Throwaway

Gentle Always

Remain Silent

A Celebration

Death Defying Feats

New Shoes

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong

“Upon hearing ‘Setsu’ released from his lips---an intimacy implied, an affection kindled, a heart so near to mine---I heard my true name for what it had been until then, an afterthought in the lives of men” (244).

    This line from Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits sums up what I view as the central project of Monique Truong’s third novel, which is accomplished for better and for worse. The subject of the novel is Lafcadio Hearn, and it is my own ignorance that I did know until I began this review that he truly was an actual historical figure. As such, I had no idea why I should be invested in this character and Truong is not forthcoming for his details. It’s a testament to her project of giving primacy to overlooked women that she gives, essentially, no in-text reasons for us to feel invested in the supposed genius of Lafcadio Hearn. By the same token, though, it means that I had little investment in the supposed central focus of the book, which maybe undermines some aspect of the goal of the text.

    The novel is a series of accounts from women affiliated with Lafcadio Hearn throughout his life—his mother in Greece and Ireland, his first wife in the United States, and his second wife in Japan. Ultimately, the organizational principle of the novel is via Elizabeth Bisland’s biography of Lafcadio Hearn, excerpts of which are interspersed between the accounts of the other women. Bisland, too, is a real person (who knew!) but I’m not sure if the excerpts are genuine or if fabricated for more dramatic effect.

    Each angle of the book has its own charm. I liked reading about his mother’s conservative upbringing in Greece and her being unable to learn to read or write. I found Alathea’s narrative pretty compelling, since she was a former slave whose ‘voice’ in the novel is quite flowery. I also found it interesting watching the dynamics of their interracial relationship; when Hearn’s newspaper finds out about his marriage he is fired from his job. Ultimately, thought, I failed to feel consistently invested for what I think are two key factors. One, when the sections of a book are so clearly delineated by narrator my brain decides “well, this person isn’t worth getting too invested in—they’ll be gone soon anyhow.” The other factor is that, while the book is focused on women’s experiences, I felt I didn’t get enough of their interactions with Hearn himself to see what made their bond realistically special.

    The sections were not explicitly connected except via the frame narrative and the fact that the human MacGuffin remains. In turn, it felt like not much really ‘happened’ in the book and the lack of progression felt more like an actual biographical account reframed through the personal stories of the women describing the man. It’s valuable to counteract the idea that the women are all “an afterthought in the lives of men” (244), but this particular novel felt a little flat to me.

    This is all the more surprising to me because I absolutely adored (underline, bold, italics) Truong’s debut, The Book of Salt. In many ways, the books are similar. Both focus on periphery figures to the supposed giants. In The Book of Salt, the main character is a gay Vietnamese man in France serving as a cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Both books have unacknowledged characters serving white writers, but The Book of Salt really capitalized on the petty betrayals and destroyed hopes of its central character while The Sweetest Fruits meanders its way towards the end. 

    Perhaps another reason that I failed to connect with the characters to the same level is, again, because they were so frequently switching, but perhaps too because their identities were more amorphous than one might expect. The Book of Salt had a more narrow timeframe, but when you’re dealing with complete lives it’s hard to make every moment feel meaningful. In addition, one motif in the novel is that of names; most characters are dually or triply named, which adds to some confusion when already trying to keep up with different places, times, and locations is discombobulating. That said, the motif does contribute beautifully to the idea that there are names we know and names we don’t and that when one acknowledges a name authentically it gives the person new life.

    In my post-read research I discovered that Monique Truong has a track record for writing food columns and her love of food is apparent throughout both her novels that I’ve read. The sensuousness with which she describes food is beyond any writer I’ve ever read. I don’t have a complex enough palate to fully appreciate her descriptions of food, but even for a complete food-philistine the words are delicious enough on their own right to be worth savouring. 

    The sensuous passages are intermingled with a sort of reportage style. I appreciated the interview-like tone of the first two accounts since they gave the narrators such a personal touch. The errors, misspeaking, and so on, so common to everyday speech are tastefully and artfully recorded to make the account feel more authentic. While at times dry, the overall tone is effective and Truong is most certainly a thoughtful, measured writer.

    I admit to feeling somewhat disappointed in this book. After The Book of Salt, my expectations were through the roof. I will, though, take some personal accountability for my lacklustre view of The Sweetest Fruits. For one, I split up my reading over nearly a month, which meant my immersion was repeatedly broken. As a result, I was not a very careful reader and did not do this book justice.

    My sincere hope is that I simply read this book at the wrong time. I hope that the day will come when I finish reading everything ever written and I can do some re-reading and find The Sweetest Fruits in a more favourable light.

    Until then, happy reading!