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February 1, 2008

His Illegal Self

Che Selkirk is a boy whose parents, members of the increasingly violent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), have both disappeared, leaving him with his very rich grandmother. At the age of eight, a woman that Che recognises as his mother suddenly arrives and kidnaps him, taking him from New York to a remote town in Australia. This is how Illegal Self begins, and Che’s adventure through hunger, love and loss becomes a coming of age tale as he starts to understand who he is and where his future lies.

On the simplest of levels, the book is a fast-paced race across the globe as Che and the mother figure known to Che as "Dial" attempt to hide from the police and carve an existence for themselves. The plot is propelled by the readers' sense of dislocation in the distortions between the two narrative voices. Both Che and Dial are presented as equals – joint narrators in this story, but their stories aren’t identical. The reader is put in the uncomfortable position of being between them, unable to discount either the intensity of Che’s needs, or the combination of confusion and desire which motivates Dial. Both need one another, and continue to work together at avoiding the truth and avoiding the law, at the same time they find themselves removed from their usual lives and co-opted for causes they don’t believe in.

As in so many of Peter Carey’s novels, real love and visual artifice become the two forces that move the narrative along. It’s a search for a truth that isn’t nearly as obvious as one might think. It’s about the way love crisscrosses us – marks us, makes us whole, and hurts us at the same time. It isn’t just the love — both real and imagined — between Che and Dial, but also the odd love circulating uncomfortably between Dial, Che’s father, and the self-sufficient "hippy" Trevor who they meet in Australia. Dial's growing sense of love, and the confusion that causes her pervades the story, as in this passage:

Oh Christ, she thought, what have I done? This had been an unblemished boy and the most remarkable thing about him had not been his handsome father’s face but his perfect trust, the way he put his hand in hers and sat beside her on the bus, so close, resting his cheek against her arm. His eyes had been limped, grey, in some lights, a lovely sulphur blue. His hair had been tousled, curly. It was hard not to touch him all the time. And here he was, his soul all curled up and fearful of attack. (24)

Carey handles it all very subtly, weaving privilege, pain and damage together into a beautiful tapestry. Nothing seems stable, and yet there’s something solid growing -- that “sharp searing pain that didn’t hurt” -- something real, absolutely true, and physical that stays through life’s changes.

There are no fireworks in His Illegal Self. The prose is light and smooth, but looking closely, each sentence is wrought with meaning and intensity. Che is “gooseflesh, head to toes” as he realizes how helpless he is. When Dial hears a girl calling for the lost Che, she recognizes this “dreadful sympathy.” The hippy landscape of Nambour, from the home grown vegetables to the scruffy undergrowth, is lovingly depicted in spite of Dial's disdain.

Like even the blackest of Carey’s novels (and for me, it’s tempting to almost see this novel as an antidote to The Tax Inspector), there’s a strong undercurrent of humour. Dial is subsumed in the small-mindedness of Australia, and yet she holds on desperately to her status: “Her mother would have died to see her genius in a dump like this.” (36) She was an “SDS goddess”, the Alice May Twitchell Fellow at Vassar College, stuck in the backwoods of Australia where, as with any commune, the pettiness is all pervasive. She puts up shelving for lentils, lines the house with crooked boards, and tries to procure the services of a Zoot-suited lawyer to argue her case back in America so Che can go home, but her ignorance is obvious enough to the hippies whose commune she joins. Right from the start of Dial's journey, Carey pokes a hole in American myopia as he displays Dial's lack of knowledge about the world outside of the US:

She had no idea of what Australia even was. She would not have imagined a tomato would grow in Australia. Or a cucumber. She could not have named a single work of Australian literature or music. Why would she? (79)

Trevor tells her at one point “You’re American. You wouldn’t know if you were up yourself” (70). She begins to know whether she’s “up herself” as His Illegal Self progresses, however. Dial’s painful learning curve is part of what makes this novel work. In an act of remarkable self-control, Carey leaves the story open, suggesting a long and complex history which the reader isn’t privy to. This last sentence so changes the story, that this reader at least, went back and re-read it in its entirety, seeing everything in a different light. I enjoyed it the first time, but found much to reflect on the second - the hallmark of a good novel. Che is believable, both as the eight-year old boy struggling to find himself, and as the older, wiser narrator he becomes by the end of the book. One can imagine many other landscapes, or books growing out of this boy. But for now, there’s only the reader’s imagination, which Carey has kickstarted with this poignant novel.

Posted by nbennett at 08:19 PM

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Something About the Blues

There is something about the blues that grabs hold of you and moves you, physically and emotionally, that transports you to places past, present and imagined, something that taps into the deepest elemental parts of you to soothe and sometimes heal. It's easy to lose yourself in the blues. Its history runs deep and its influence on other forms has been enormous. The blues, Al Young writes in the introduction to Something About the Blues: an unlikely collection of poetry, is "[b]eaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic." But the blues, like poetry, is difficult to describe, define, confine. "[T]he blues," he writes, "will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable," and "[e]ver resistant to classroom analysis," for the blues dwells largely "in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing."

Something About the Blues is blues poetry. Though I've often listened to and lost myself in the blues, and have immersed myself in various kinds of poetry, I must confess that I was largely ignorant of the blues in poetic form until I had the good fortune to read this collection. The first to popularize blues poetry was Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, and best "known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties" (learn more about Hughes at Poets.org). It is fitting, then, that Young opens his collection of blues poetry with Hughes' beautiful and haunting poem, "The Weary Blues." This poem, read by Hughes himself, also opens the accompanying CD. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the spirit of blues poetry and sets the mood perfectly.

Al Young, born in 1939 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, was raised first in Mississippi and then in Detroit, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan from 1957-1960, co-editing Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he settled in Berkeley, where he held a number of odd jobs -- folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, employment counselor -- before graduating with a degree in Spanish from U.C. Berkeley. He has taught creative writing and literature at various universities, has received numerous honours, including, inter alia, Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction. Young has written a number of poetry collections, several novels, three musicals, and numerous screenplays. He was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2005 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everything in Something About the Blues is to some extent a meditation on the blues. This collection attempts to say something about the blues - its origins, history, themes, essence and power. Whether through dedications, tributes, or other mention, many jazz and blues greats make it into this powerful collection - Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Lester "Pres" Young, Marian McPartland, Ella Fitzgerald, Lead Belly, Vernon Alley, Harry Connick, Jr., Lena Horn, the James Cotton Band, Gene Ammons, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday, John "Dizzy" Birks Gillespie, Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, James P. Johnson, Langston Hughes, and James Brown. Some poems allude to and play with poetry from the Western "white" Canon, while others address, more specifically, issues of racism and systemic discrimination, of exoticization, othering and hybridity, as well as of terrorism and environmental racism. Some of these topics go well beyond the traditional themes of the blues. And then some poems are of a more playful nature, more earthy and sensual.

The poetry in this collection, like the blues, is raw and elemental. It rarely indulges in complex symbols, extended metaphors, or florid language. It is less constrained by meter and rhyme, but characterized by the liberal use of alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, enjambment, repetition, and rhythm. It's language is, on the whole, clear, direct, hard-hitting.

There is one poem, just a little into the book, that captures so much of the often contradictory nature of the blues. Young's "The Blues Don't Change" addresses the blues directly:

The blues is characterized as a grudgefulhearted (neat word), table-turning demon who is also -- here begins another wonderful twist -- a sexy soulsucking gem, a "[b]lue diamond in the rough" who "can't be outfoxed don't care how they cut/and smuggle and shine you on." And, in a note to students and theorists, the blues is "too dumb and stubborn and necessary/to let them turn you into what you ain't/with color or theory or powder or paint." You can never, the poem suggests, fully capture or contain the blues. And it is its contradictory, shape-shifting nature that allows the blues to stay forever fresh and current.

The impossibility of capturing the blues completely is also addressed in "Detroit 1958." "Only parts of the pain of living/may be captured in a poem or/tale or song or in the image seen," goes the first stanza. In the blues, as in life, "[s]adness is the theme of existence;/joy its variations." The blues merely imitates the pain of life, but, in another apparent contradiction, it is, "as the man sings,/'The bitter note makes the song so sweet."

There is plenty of bitterness in Young's poetry, though it is not consumed by it. And sometimes that bitterness also comes out in poems alluding to and playing with poems from the Western canon. "The Lovesong of O.O.Gabugah" is a good example, an obvious allusion to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a lengthy, meandering, metaphorically dense poem about an aging, indecisive, isolated urban man walking along foggy half-deserted streets on his way to what sounds like a high society party in order to woo a particular woman. But he doesn't dare. His indecisiveness and insecurity are the focus of the poem, and the reader -- aren't we lucky? -- gets to accompany Prufrock and listen in on his inner dialogue.

Though parts of Eliot's poem suggest a somewhat tongue-in-cheek nature, Young's "The Lovesong of O.O. Gabugah" lies in sharp contrast. The tone, right from the start, reflects a rougher context, a very different reality. Instead of "Let us go then, you and I," we get "Time to split now, you & me." The narrator of Young's poem, presumably a black male, also takes his reader along on a walk through an urban landscape, "past alleyways & neon signs/& people waitin in movie lines." But he has no time for lengthy reflection, comparing himself to this or that dramatic figure, to Hamlet, or even Polonius the Fool, or wrapping his emotional insecurities in fancy, drawn-out metaphors. He is physically in danger. If he so much as stops too long near the people waiting in movie lines, he fears getting zapped. What we witness here is something much more grim - "[t]he snowy line... whooshed up the chimney clean, burnt out a nose,/& sniffin all there was to know about July,/just blew its ownself out, forget the rose." Our guide here is not on his way to a high society party where well-dressed ladies discuss Michelangelo. He is headed to a place where he can forget his misery by blowing himself out with cocaine.

One piece in this collection, more short story than poem, addresses a form of oppression and source of misery one wouldn't necessarily expect in a blues collection. "Silent Parrot Blues" discusses environmental racism, a fairly new and academic concept that links racism, a common theme in the blues, to the environment, an uncommon one. It is prefaced by a quote from Myrla Baldanado, Statement Coordinator: People's Task Force for Base Clean Up, that explains what environmental racism is - forcing people of colour "to bear the brunt of the nation's pollution problem." The story begins with Young encountering a listless, raggedy, broken parrot kept in a dark supply closet by a building superintendent. As he walks back to his apartment, arms full of laundry and disturbed, he meets his intellectually curious hallway neighbor, Briscoe, a veteran of the American War in Vietnam.

Through the conversation with the well-read and socially-aware though rough around the edges Briscoe, a good amount of ground is covered on the topic of environmental racism. Briscoe wants him to take his parrot story straight to the mayor and city council, because, as he puts it, "white people don't like that shit. They hate it - mistreating birds and animals... They won't stand for it.... In fact, they're prepared to make your ass extinct in a minute before they'll let anybody fuck with a timber wolf." Young goes on to talk about Romanticism and its role in creating an industrial and post-Industrial society in which humans are seen as separate, apart from, and above nature. He then links that kind of thinking back to the "English Romantics -- Shelley, Byron, Keats, Thomas Gray, Samuel Coleridge, and William Blake, among others -- [who] did their part to exoticize nature." He goes on to mention Thoreau, and not very flatteringly either, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and the poetry of Poe and Whitman. Their kind of thinking has contributed to the dumping of all manner of dangerous waste, as Briscoe points out, "where black people and Mexicans and Indians live." While people of colour, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of the world's pollution problem, Young does point out that poor whites are also affected.

By including environmental racism in this collection, as well as cultural hybridity, terrorism and extraordinary rendition, Young updates the blues. If the subject matter, the inspiration that often gives rise to and feeds the blues is the highs, though more often the lows, of people oppressed, then these topics belong in the blues of an increasingly complex and globalised society.

In Something About the Blues," Al Young, as the title suggests, says something about the blues. In his "Statement on Poetics" at the end of the collection, Young says that "[a]fter 60 years of listening, I still feel as though I can't get started; as though I have so little to say about jazz and the roles all music continues to play in that curtainless sun-room in the mansion of my life, where thinking and telling take bloom." Though a force as elemental and dynamic as the blues can never be entirely captured and contained, Young does manage to say a great deal about the blues in this collection, and the spirit of the blues certainly moves within and through it. The inclusion of a CD with various live readings brings the poetry even closer, making it come to life. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the CD is not always consistent - the volume and clarity change from reading to reading, which is a bit disconcerting. It may be because they were recorded at different venues, without sufficient audio post-processing. And perhaps this is only a problem on the advance copy. Overall, the more time is spent with Something About the Blues, the more emerges that is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. This collection of blues poetry comes highly recommended.