Reflections

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

Reflection: The Turner House

I promised myself to catch up on the books that I missed in 2015, in whatever meager way that I could, and I’m using the first few weeks of the new year to do just that. 2016, please be patient. I have five books on my catch up list, and I recently finished the first, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. The book was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, an impressive feat for a first-time author. My reading of The Turner House spanned countless locations, including the messy floor of an old apartment, the empty floor of a new home, on a plane flying south, under a weak light bulb in the early morning dark, and at Triste Cafe while drinking a $4 glass of red wine, where I was delighted to find the woman to my left engaged in similar activities (different book, same wine).
 
The Turner House is the story of Francis and Viola Turner and their 13 children, and continuously jumps between two eras. The first era stretches from 1944 to 1951, during which we learn of Francis and Viola’s Arkansas beginnings and their move to Detroit. The second era takes place in Spring 2008 and focuses on the children. While the eldest, Cha-Cha, is a baby in some pages of the book, in others he is 64 years old; the book stretches far and wide, in the way good ones do. At the center of the story is the house they grew up in, which now sits in a nearly abandoned East Side Detroit neighborhood. Francis is long dead and Viola is ill, so the children must debate what to do with the house. The book is described as “a major contribution to the literature on American families,” and it is a largely unromantic one, as in full of health problems and resentment and awkward moments and lost jobs. The book does not relieve readers of reality’s blemishes, but rather scatters them throughout its pages, creating a world that is recognizable, and thus meaningful beyond the dealings of one particular family.
 
The Turner House reminds me of the legacies that are behind each of us, of the infinitely nuanced lives that precede our own, yet how so much of it remains unknown; either forgotten or erroneously retold or simply never shared, sometimes with intention. I think of my own day-to-day, stories woven together from this and that, and I wonder if any of it will live on, how quickly details can lose their precision. And perhaps that is perfectly alright. But if that doesn’t sit well with you, The Turner House offers hope, as it suggests that in a myriad of ways, for better or for worse, the past is inherited by all of us, and even the details seem to work themselves in.