Post-Reading

Reflection: Blackass

Lagos, Nigeria is my favorite character in Blackass (Graywolf Press, 2016) by A. Igoni Barrett. The book explores the cultural, social and physical landscape of Nigeria’s largest city, rather Africa’s largest city. I found myself referring to maps and looking up foods like egusi soup and eba. Lagos plays host to an ever-rising population, as evident in the city’s impossibly congested roads; traffic feels like a living, breathing character in and of itself. Cars crawl forward as engines rev, horns blare, smoke spews, temperatures rise, and radios roar, a hazy stasis endured by drivers hour after hour, day after day. The wealthy corners of Lagos are Ikoyi, Victoria Island and the Lekki Peninsula, where one is likely to find an oyibo, a white person, which is the bizarre fate of our protagonist.
 
This is a story of a black man who wakes up “alabaster”, of Furo Wariboko who becomes Frank Whyte. On the morning of his Kafka-like metamorphosis, Furo leaves home for a job interview, never to return, choosing instead to forge a new life as a newly minted oyibo. Blackass reflects a world that is far from colorblind, in fact it is a world obsessed with race. All that Furo experiences – job offers, bureaucracy, women, meals, conversations – centers on his newfound whiteness. Of course, a white man named Furo Wariboko wandering Nigeria is sure to inspire an exaggerated response. But rather than a distortion of how we observe race, the book reads more like a parable of its pervasiveness:
 
“No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any colour in between, and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world” (111).
 
The book is light, often funny, while addressing issues of race, class, and Nigeria, even social media: “To make money off selling us to ourselves, that’s the business model of social media” (80). The story is free to explore the far reaches of such issues due to its outlandish setup. I am far too unfamiliar with the works of contemporary African authors, but after the reverie of Blackass, I plan to change that.
 
Best, Yuri
@yuriroho

Reflection: The Light of the World

In a quest to read the books I missed last year, I prepared a list. On that list Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World is listed third and next to it in parentheses, “First Lady.” I unabashedly took note of her favorite book of the year and upon reading its first paragraph, felt the familiar excitement of knowing there is so much left to read. “Poetry logic is my logic,” the author explains, and the book is as close to poetry as prose can be. Here is the first paragraph:

“The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”

The Light of the World is a moving portrait of the author’s husband——an impressive man named Ficre Ghebreyesus——their love story, and how she copes with his sudden death. She discusses Africa, art, flowers, and food (there are recipes); she annotates poems on death; she recalls dreams; she introduces an endless stream of family and friends; she shares the most intimate details of marriage (“We shared days I can only call divine,” she writes).

As I neared the book’s end, I prolonged the inevitable by flipping back through the pages, revisiting scenes and scanning for marks I made. “Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights, her own memoir of loss. But perhaps in their very ability to awaken the past, memories alone are redemptive. Within his wife’s prose, there is still Ficre, his presence strong.

Reflections on death, especially ones written so beautifully, can be tricky to process. As a reader it can be tempting to romanticize heartache, to become lost in its reverie. But there is no such luxury in The Light of the World. Love and loss sit side-by-side only to emphasize each other, to draw out each other’s extremes. “Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere,” she writes, and the magnitude of that is felt on every page.

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The Light of the World
By Elizabeth Alexander
Published 2015 by Grand Central Publishing

Reflection: The Soul of an Octopus

As I continue to catch up on books missed in 2015, I recently finished The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. The book was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, though the award ultimately went to, of course, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates was seemingly everywhere in 2015, and while I do agree that his book is important and deeply moving, I am always taken aback as to how quickly we amplify a single voice. The Soul of an Octopus explores questions like what is the soul, what is consciousness, and are we alone in those tremendous feats or are animals like the octopus in our company? The author is sensitive and soulful, as seen in tidbits like this:
 
“While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. It’s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, and uplink to universal consciousness – the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life” (p. 90).
 
Much of the book takes place at the New England Aquarium, where the author forms bonds with people and octopuses alike. There are four octopuses – Athena, Octavia, Kali and Karma – and each exhibits a wholly unique personality and “sparkling mind,” as do the octopuses encountered in the wild. Octopus facts are scattered throughout (it has a beak like a parrot, a remarkable curiosity, an ability to change color and texture instantly), as if the most useful parts of a National Geographic documentary are woven into a much more relatable, nuanced narrative. We are often skeptical of animal intelligence or consciousness, and this book serves as a fascinating and eloquent defense of octopuses being in possession of both. Every turn of the page forces you to think bigger, to push aside the idea that everything non-human is “the Other.” The Soul of an Octopus inspires you to breach the supposed boundary between humans and, well, everything else, and when you do, the beauty of life on Earth astounds all the more. We are left, as we inevitably are, with the staggering truth of how little we know, and that reminder should make us feel all the more human.

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The Soul of an Octopus
By Sy Montgomery
Published 2015 by Atria Books