Mind Picking : Happy Halloween X

 

In what could be considered a continuation of last year's theme — messages sent from the other side — I find myself with more true tales on the subject that I want to share, or at any rate, to write down for my own remembrance. As we keep getting these messages, I have to wonder: Is this a spooky Halloween story, or just how life, how afterlife, works? Read on and decide for yourself.

A bit of background: In the summer of 2020, we bought the holiday home that my husband grew up with: a beach property that his grandparents had originally owned, that Dave spent every summer of his young life at, that his aunt sold out of the family in the 1980s; a bitter family tragedy that we were delighted to be able to make right again. Dave's parents both passed away last year, and it was some consolation that they both knew and appreciated that Dave had brought the property back into the family before they were gone. As it is a summer property and we live over two hours away (from what is now a four bedroom, four season house), we rented it out over the winter season of 2020-21 (which went very well) and followed up with other tenants in the winter of 2021-22 (an absolute nightmare.)

After not paying the full rent in January, Dave drove up and gave the tenants a notice of eviction at the end of the month. Knowing that all of the tenancy laws are tilted in their favour, these tenants scoffed at the idea that we'd be able to get them out, and as time went on and no money was coming to us in February either, Dave's sister, Rudy, kept getting angrier on our behalf and would frequently ask me for updates. At one point she said, "I couldn't sleep last night and I just put it out into the universe: Mom and Dad, couldn't you haunt them out? Rattle the doors? Make their dogs bark at empty corners until they leave?"

When I responded with a lacklustre, "If only," Rudy said: "They could do it, too. Didn't I tell you about when Dad was bugging me last fall? I would be at my office, turn off the lights when I'd go to leave, but once I was in the parking lot, I'd notice through the window that my lights were still on. I'd have to go back in and flip the switch again. This happened a few times, and I couldn't see anything wrong with the switch, couldn't figure out a normal explanation for why it was happening, so I just said into the air one day, 'Okay, Dad. You're really pissing me off now. I got the message. Hello. But you have to stop.' And it did stop. Never happened again. And I figure if Dad could do that, he could help us out here, you know, just so long as he hasn't fully moved on."

Calling that Plan B, I contacted a law firm at the end of February (the date that our eviction notice was supposed to go into effect, which the tenants continued to laugh at), and had them file the next step in the eviction process - with our paralegal explaining that the courts are so backlogged that it could take until May to even get a hearing, which isn't even the final step in the process to forcing unpaying tenants to leave.

Again, tempers here were strained — Dave and Rudy taking the situation very personally because of their nostalgic connection to the property; this is not simply an income stream, this is our recovered home — and as we neared the end of March, I asked the paralegal how else we could put pressure on the tenants to vacate. He said he could drive out there the next day and ask them to sign a form that commits them to a move out date, and he then asked if we had given thought to a monetary incentive we could offer them to leave even sooner. That really rubbed me wrong — thousands behind in rent, the property is filthy, they've racked up astronomical utility bills that I have paid — and the advice is to give them "cash for keys"? Desperate, Dave told the paralegal that he'd offer them a thousand dollars, payable on move out, but they would have to look him in the eye and take it directly from his hand.

The next morning, the tenant texted Dave, "The internet is out — as if YOU don't know?! — and I have a new at-home job that NEEDS the internet and if I don't HAVE the internet I can't get YOU any money, genius!!" Dave didn't respond — there had been a storm the evening before and we could only assume that wires were down somewhere because we hadn't cut it off; but we did recognise leverage when we saw it — and soon she was texting again, "I NEED the internet, my JOB is at stake. I promise if you turn it on I'll be out on May 1st."

The paralegal (after a bunch of other drama) drove out and got her to sign the form that promised a May 1st move out (without mention of a monetary incentive), and without any other action on our part, she texted Dave a bit later to say, "Internet is back on. Thank you."

That's admittedly a long story to get to the good bit: When I got home from work that evening, Dave was pacing between the kitchen and the family room, filling me in on all the details of his day. He had talked at length with the paralegal, and in outlining next steps, Dave said, "Oh and he said that I can call the Landlord and Tenant Board myself and let them know..."

And at that moment, Dave's phone — which was on the couch beside me in the family room — piped up, "Okay, calling Dad...Dad is not in your contacts." Dave came in from the kitchen and stared at the black screen of his phone and said quietly, "What time is it?" We both looked to the clock and saw that it was exactly eight o'clock. Dave said, "I always called Dad at eight every night."

I said, "And 'Dad' isn't in your contacts in your new phone?"

And Dave said, "He's there. My parents were just always under 'Granny and Grandpa.'" Which they always were.

Trying to duplicate what happened, Dave picked up his phone and said directly at it, "Call the Landlord and Tenant Board." And nothing happened. He swallowed and said, "Call Dad." And, of course, nothing happened. That's not how the phone works; especially when it's off and the screen is black. (We know it's always listening, but it never responded before.) Dave looked at me, glassy-eyed, and said, "I couldn't sleep last night, and as I laid there staring at the ceiling, I just kept saying, 'Help. I need help.' I don't know if I was talking to my Dad or just putting it out to the universe. But I think something, someone, was listening." (We might all hope the universe is listening, but it's never responded like this before.)

I don't know what happened that night, but it felt like a message from the other side. I'll go further and say that if my husband's late father was able to flip light switches, he was also able to mess with an internet connection. Being a decent person, he even turned it on again for someone who didn't deserve any favours (but who could have made life even more difficult for us by complaining to the Landlord and Tenant Board that we had turned off an included service, even while they declined to pay rent. What a broken system.)

Thank you Granny and Grandpa; the nightmare tenants were out at the beginning of May. Make of it what you will, but as for us, we know what we experienced.

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Halloween VII

Halloween VIII

Halloween IX

I'm Glad My Mom Died

 

I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia-motivation cocktail and, finally, I have achieved Mom’s current goal weight for me. Eighty-nine pounds. I’m so sure this fact will work that I lean all the way back in my chair and pompously cross my legs. I wait for her to come to. And wait. And wait.

Although Jennette McCurdy might not be pleased to hear it, I picked up I’m Glad My Mom Died because 1) My kids were fans of iCarly and I was peripherally aware of who she is, and 2) I noted the hub-bub around this memoir and wanted to know what that was about. And I can see why this has caught fire: Contrary to her most famous character’s persona of a wise-cracking tough kid, young Jennette was a scared, manipulated, mentally abused child of the ultimate controlling Stage Mother; and to the extent that the details of her childhood were undeniably repelling, I can imagine that anyone who grew up watching Sam Puckett beat up bullies would have their minds blown to learn what was actually running through her tortured mind on set. As for me: I was shocked to learn the details of this unhappy childhood — if not shocked to read that it sucks to be a child actor, and especially if it is to live out someone else’s dream — but I was engaged by McCurdy’s voice and evolving tone (ie, when she writes of being a very young child, she reports how she viewed her mother at that time, not through the lens of later wisdom; as she ages, the tone becomes more knowing) and there was recognisable craft to that. So, while this doesn’t read like the most polished memoir, I applaud McCurdy’s strength and candour and hope that her (eventually happy) story can serve as inspiration to those who resonate with it. I’m happy to have read this, if only to join the cultural moment, and McCurdy can rest easier knowing that if I saw her on the street, I would never yell “fried chicken” at her or ask to see her buttersock (and never before knew that these were things that people do to her; what a stupid price for fame).

I’m more convinced than ever that I need to quit acting. That it doesn’t serve my mental or emotional health. That it’s been destructive to both. I think about what else has been destructive to my mental and emotional health…the eating disorders, of course, and the alcohol issues. And then I realize that, as much as I’m convinced that I need to quit these things — acting, bulimia, alcohol — I don’t think that I can. As much as I resent them, in a strange way they define me. They are my identity. Maybe that’s why I resent them.

From growing up in a hoarder house (Jennette and her three brothers slept on trifold mats in the living room because their bedrooms were stuffed with garbage), experiencing poverty (despite her father working two jobs and her live-in maternal grandparents both working, the McCurdys were always behind on bills), and living with a mother obsessed with having survived breast cancer (the kids were forced to weekly watch a video of their mother singing them lullabies when she thought that she was dying), young Jennette learned to tame the chaos of her homelife by monitoring her mother’s moods and trying to always keep her happy. So when her mom suggested that she should start acting when she was six — something her mom had wanted to do as a child but her own parents wouldn’t allow — Jennette couldn’t say no, despite crippling discomfort and anxiety. Every move that Jennette made from that point was aimed at satisfying her mother’s ambitions (and alleviating the family’s poverty), and despite creepy/abusive behaviours at home (her mother insisted on showering Jennette, sometimes with her teenaged brother, until she was seventeen; her mother taught her “calorie restriction” and encouraged anorexia; her mother disowned her when paparazzi caught Jennette with a boyfriend [while writing in the same email that they needed money to replace a broken fridge]), Jennette put so much pressure on herself to do the thing she hated most (play Sam on iCarly) that she ended up punishing herself with eating disorders, alcohol abuse, negative self-talk, and codependent relationships; punishments that continued even after her mother eventually did die of cancer. While the details of Jennette’s early life are the stuff of pathos (she includes many more details than I’ve listed here), it’s perhaps even sadder to watch her — outwardly living a life envied by millions — spend years trying to shed her dead mother’s impossible (and manipulative) expectations.

I had put her up on a pedestal, and I know how detrimental that pedestal was to my well-being and life. That pedestal kept me stuck, emotionally stunted, living in fear, dependent, in a near constant state of emotional pain and without the tools to even identify that pain let alone deal with it. My mom didn’t deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family. My mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.

Most of the cover blurbs call this memoir funny, but it’s more quietly snarky-ironic than comedic. (For instance, McCurdy writes: There’s something about inherently dramatic moments that makes eye contact during those moments feel even more weighty and dramatic. It’s a hat on a hat. There’s enough drama here as it is. We’re good.) The blurbs also call this honest and compassionate and that’s where the best stuff is: this is the story of a survivor and I wish Ms McCurdy all the best.

My mom didn't get better. But I will.

 

Our Share of Night

 

He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, you have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

I haven’t read Mariana Enríquez before, so I went into Our Share of Night with no knowledge beyond her reputation for literary weirdness. I knew that this was technically a horror story (that cover!), and while it is that — with some seriously sick characters and graphic violence — I didn’t know that it’s also a savvy metaphor for the tumultuous recent history of Enríquez’s Argentina — with some seriously sick characters and graphic violence — and while it did feel overlong (my kindle app puts it at a thirteen hour read), it also felt like that length was making commentary on the banality and omnipresence of evil. I winced and harrumphed and sighed my way through this — and then I winced again, sighed some more — and any read that makes me feel so much, even so much negative, is worth four stars in my opinion (and especially when those negative feelings gave me a sense of Enríquez’s truth). (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow, they recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.

As the novel begins, it is 1981, Juan’s wife has been dead for six months, and he is taking their six-year-old son to visit his inlaws at their estate in the country. Hints are given that this is not a normal father-son relationship, and when they finally reach the estate after a couple of side trips, we see the full horror of what young Gaspar is heir to (kind of The Master and Margarita meets Rosemary’s Baby). An interlude from 1983 follows, and then there is another long section — set in Buenos Aires from 1985-86 — that sees Juan treat his son with both tenderness and brutality as his own health begins to fail, and as this section is from Gaspar’s POV, and he has been shielded from the reality of his family situation, his spooky adventures with his friends feels like a cross between It and House of Leaves. The next long section rewinds to Juan’s childhood and covers the years from 1960-76,  introducing Gaspar’s mother and explaining how her relationship with Juan developed (and including some cool scenes set in Swinging London). There follows an interlude set in 1993 — in which a journalist is investigating a mass grave tied to a conflict between the Liberation Army and the Argentine army — and while this section ties the novel to its actual historical setting, the journalist will stumble upon some of the supernatural truths as well. Finally, the last long section — set in La Plata from 1987-97 — follows Gaspar as he grows from teenager to man, finding his place in the city’s art and punk scenes, discovering some of his own hidden talents, and watching as he retraces his childhood trip to his grandparents’ estate in search of answers (and while Gaspar and his family are not vampires in any sense, I got a real Interview with the Vampire vibe from this section.) Without wanting to give too much away, this is admittedly a lot of plot — this could easily have been sectioned off into a trilogy — but what really matters with Our Share of Night is how the supernatural events shine a light on Argentina’s actual history:

Florence didn’t tolerate that kind of rebellion. She had rocks tied to the woman’s feet, and she was thrown into the Paraná River. Let her join the many dead hidden along Argentine river bottoms. The dictatorship’s crimes were very useful to the Order, providing it with bodies, alibis, and currents of pain and fear — emotions that were easily manipulated.

It’s easy to imagine foreigners with hard cash becoming insanely rich with massive yerba mate plantations — essentially using slave and child labour to bring in the crops, cosying up to a corrupt government and using the army as personal security — so Enríquez’s tale of generations of one such family of powerbrokers, who use their riches in an occult quest for immortality (isn’t that what billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are up to anyway?), make for perfect boogeymen. The quest for power everlasting push humans to the most heinous acts: Is there a real difference between a government disappearing dissenters and a mysterious sect hiding imbunche in a collapsed tunnel? A box full of human eyelids is unsettling in fiction, but is it more unsettling than learning that former Argentine president Juan Perón’s hands were, in fact, severed and stolen from his dead body despite his being “the most surveilled cadaver in the country”? I totally get what Enríquez was going for here, and as a political metaphor, this was an excellent read.

Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.

And on the other hand, if you’re looking for a ghost story, this feels long and often dull; punctuated by incredibly horrific scenes; perhaps, if you’re unlucky, too much like real life. Now I’m looking forward to Enríquez’s short fiction.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society

 

On its surface the constancy of women’s place in society is depressing, but the thing about social constructs is that they are just that — constructs. Fundamentally if we have created these strictures, then we can deconstruct them and make new ones. Seeing the past and rejecting it allows us to imagine new futures and make the changes that are necessary to create a more equitable world. It’s time to start constructing that different future.

Medievalist Eleanor Janega (with an MA in Mediaeval Studies and a PhD in History) states that her intent is to look to the past in order to understand our present, and hopefully, to construct a future that sees more equality between the sexes. In The Once and Future Sex, Janega primarily focusses on how the people of power and influence in the Middle Ages regarded women in four broad categories — how their weird bodies worked, ideals of beauty, fears of their sexuality, what work they did outside the home — and while this book is loaded with frequent quotes and citations, it didn’t really add up to a cohesive thesis to me. I enjoyed the factoids, I liked the often ironic tone, I appreciate the intent, but I seem to be missing the throughline; I don’t know that these facts from the past explain women’s place in modern society. Certainly not a waste of my time — there is much of interest to be found here — I’m simply left wanting. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

One way or another, though, when we consider the way women are conceptualized in the global north, we can ultimately start laying the blame back to the ancient Athenians. They have a lot to answer for.

It’s always interesting to note that the Renaissance began with a few monarchs rediscovering the “Classics” and monasteries then teaching boys to read and write ancient Greek and Latin. This led to society taking as a given that the ancients (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates) had human biology figured out with their humours theory, “Men were seen as hot and dry, or naturally sanguine and socially useful. Women, in contrast, were cold and wet and therefore more likely to be phlegmatic, or placid.” This combined with the Judeo-Christian origin story — Adam was made in God’s image (ie. the standard model) and Eve was formed (with inside-out genitals) from Adam’s superfluous rib (making woman the less god-like variant) — were the two theories that underpinned the “science” of how women’s bodies work. As for how those bodies should look:

All in all, medieval society spent a long time concocting a beauty ideal for women that was possible only for wealthy women to live up to, and then furiously policing it when commoners tried to emulate it. At every opportunity women were told that they must be beautiful, and that that made them desirable, lovable, and holy. However, attempting to live up to this rigid standard, especially if one was poor, was called sinful and at times was illegal. The Church thrust women into an impossible quandary: If they were not born with looks that accorded with the beauty standard, should they lose status and perhaps remain single? Or should they use subterfuge to get closer to that exacting standard, even if it meant they might face an eternity in Hell?

Janega writes that the Classics — while noting the beauty of various goddesses, mythical creatures, even Helen of Troy — don’t actually describe what that beauty looks like. It isn’t until the sixth-century that elegiac poet Maximianus (who linked himself to the classical tradition through his Etruscan lineage) wrote the first such description, saying that the ideal woman had: Golden hair, downcast milky neck, ingenious features to make more of her face; black eyebrows, free forehead, bright skin and little swollen lips. Maximianus and his poetry were used to teach Latin in the mediaeval period, and his idea of beauty was reinforced by those who would later pen guides to composing poetry: Matthew of Vendôme (twelfth century) in his The Art of the Versemaker and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200) in Poetry Nova. And apparently this societal conditioning is the entire reason why gentlemen prefer blondes?

Janega notes that the most damaging aspect of this beauty ideal is that it was impossible for poor women to attain (peasants working the fields are unlikely to have a “milky neck”), and for those who might turn to cosmetics to attain the standard, both the Church — who equated makeup with the Whore of Babylon riding the seven-headed beast into the Apocalypse — and the continuing belief in humour theory — it was apparently verboten for a woman to depilate because a whiskery chin signalled a poisoned womb to potential partners — made it clear that a woman was supposed to be naturally beautiful, but also modest and chaste. And speaking of sex:

To be honest, the likelihood that medieval women inserted live fish into their vaginas and then fed them to their husbands was probably low. It cannot be ruled out, but all in all it seems unlikely, no matter how lacking their sex lives might have been. However, actual practice mattered less than the fact that Burchard found such behavior plausible and enough of a worry that he advised clergy members to interrogate female parishioners about it. The idea that women were horny enough to suffocate a fish in their genitals if it meant more and better sex was one thing. It was another that they were willing to do occult magic and endanger their soul.

Thinking at the time was that women wanted sex more than their weary partners (for reasons relating to humour theory and Christian fear of women’s strange bodies) and this led to the Malleus Malificarum (Hammer of Witches) written by Church inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (ca. 1430– 1505): a guide for rooting out all the lusty witches consorting with the devil to sate their unnatural needs. Janega contrasts this to the tropes of today — the randy husband begging his frigid wife for sex — but she doesn’t really explain how this flip occurred. Her last section is on women’s work outside the home, and while she writes that we think of this as a recent phenomenon, she stresses that this was the case even in mediaeval times:

Women have always been a part of the world’s economy writ large. In fact, women’s work in the premodern world is generally ubiquitous. The idea that women largely existed in a domestic bubble wholly removed from the realities of labor and work would have seemed laughable to medieval people. In all classes of society, women worked and were expected to do so.

From peasants and other outdoor labourers to ladies-in-waiting; brewers and bakers and laundresses; from sex workers to those who took Holy Orders, Janega describes all of the roles that women played in the mediaeval economy…but this hardly felt like new information. While the information that Janega shares about these jobs was all interesting, I couldn’t really see how it relates to society today. And that is the point: “Society” hasn’t been made out of whole cloth — every belief about the differences in the sexes has been passed down from earlier times and a more equitable future begins with deconstructing those beliefs. I get that. I just didn’t really get that from this book. Still an interesting read overall.

Glory

 

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a better life, found it, and not only just found it, no, but found it in utter abundance and sent word back for kin and friends to come and see it for themselves — this promised land, this stunning Eldorado called Jidada, a proper jewel of Africa, yes, tholukuthi a land not only indescribably wealthy but so peaceful they could’ve made it up. His Excellency also saw himself in his dream as he’d been back then — beautiful and brimming with unquestioned majesty, a horse that stepped on the ground and the earth agreed and the heavens above agreed and even hell itself also agreed because how could it disagree? Tholukuthi lost now in Jidada’s past glory, the Old Horse nestled deeper in his seat and began to snore a sonorous tune that the Comrades around him identified as Jidada’s old revolutionary anthem from the Liberation War days.

Like many reviewers, I found Glory to have been a bit of a slog — too long, too circular, too committed to an allegorical conceit that seems unnecessary — but I also found myself entranced by the exotic language and rhythms and could recognise that this was not meant to be my story; it was not being told to me in a way that preferenced my own comfort and expectations and I grew to embrace the challenge. As a satirical allegory of Robert Mugabe’s last days as the dictator of Zimbabwe (and the out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire of what came next), this is an undeniably important act of witnessing and recording his abuses; and as a Zimbabwean author, NoViolet Bulawayo is reporting from inside the story, and making art of it. I may not have connected completely with the material because of the format and length, but I can recognise why this is an important novel and that’s enough for my four stars.

Don’t even be fooled by how things may appear right now — I mean the terrible roads that kill people, the potholes, the broken sewer systems, the decrepit hospitals, the decrepit schools, the decrepit industrial sector, the decrepit rail system, or should I say a generally decrepit infrastructure. Then of course there’s the poor standard of living, the millions who’ve crossed and still cross borders in search of better, the misery and such things that may look depressing at first glance, that’ll make you think you’re maybe looking at a ruin. All these things happen to countries, it’s a fact of countryness, but rest assured we were in top form once. Plus, the point is not to judge a book by its cover. Because what remains is that Jidada is still a jewel, Africa’s jewel. And that right there is the Father of the Nation’s God-given legacy, reigning over a real gem. And moreover, he liberated and has protected that jewel so that Jidada will never be a colony again!

Because the novel is allegorical — the characters are animals: the ruling class are horses, the army dogs, the commoners sheep and goats and chickens — I have seen many reviews comparing Glory to Animal Farm, but I wonder if Bulawayo wasn’t using the animal device to say something important about the lingering effects of colonisation on African countries: just as the novel form itself has its roots outside of Africa, perhaps Bulawayo purposefully chose a classic of British literature onto which she could graft the language and rhythms of oral Zimbabwean storytelling; a marriage that doesn’t feel totally successful, and that just may be the point. The donkey wife of the “Father of the Nation” even says, more than once, “this is not an animal farm” (and I couldn’t help but notice that characters namedrop classics of African/African American literature when they use the phrases “things fall apart”, “a raisin in the sun”, and even “we need new names”; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were others inserted that I didn’t twig to.) So, between the importance of what this novel actually memorialises (from Mugabe’s brutal dictatorial reign, through the Gukurahundi genocide of 1982-87, to the coup of 2017 which saw Mugabe replaced by his Vice President) and what the format has to say about the lingering effects of colonialism in Africa (and especially the ways in which the formerly oppressed are forced to communicate in the language of their oppressors), this truly did feel important, even if I wasn’t really enjoying it (and again, that might have been the point).

We heard and told stories of pain, stories of the Seat of Power’s violence so impossible sometimes animals simply tilted heads up and stared into the glowing Nehanda bones — reeling. Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power’s tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada’s great books of history. That the nation’s stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power’s truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.

Glory ends on a more hopeful note — with the populace recognising that the brutal oppression by the few is only possible with the compliance of the frightened multitudes — and it is my sincere wish that this hopefulness is alive in Bulawayo’s Zimbabwe. I am glad that this novel exists — even if I didn’t love the reading experience — and am also glad that it is being acclaimed; the true story of Zimbabwe deserves to be written down, artfully.

When those who know about things say there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn, tholukuthi what they mean is that there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn.

 The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

Culture: The Story of Us

 

It’s not always a pretty story, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but it’s the only one we’ve got: the history of humans as a culture-producing species. It’s the story of us.

In Culture: The Story of Us, literary critic and Harvard professor of Drama, English, and Comparative Literature Martin Puchner takes us on a tour through time and space to discover the strategies that humans have developed to understand our world: both through STEM-type discovery and mastery of the natural world (our know-how; only briefly referenced here) and our efforts at meaning-making (our know-why; the focus of this book). Throughout this overview of thousands of years of humanity’s quest for knowledge and meaning, Puchner seems to be stressing two main points: that the Humanities as an area of study are equally as important to improving the human experience as are the “hard” sciences; and that humans have always borrowed from and built on the culture of other communities — our current focus on gatekeeping against “cultural appropriation” is in direct opposition to the ways in which culture has always been diffused and preserved. That last point might be controversial — and as Puchner returns to it many times, it would seem that he understands he has a hard case to make — but through many, many examples (from the Chauvet cave paintings, to Pompeiian mosaics, to Aztec pictograms) he proves that knowledge can be literally carved in stone for future generations, but if a particular culture doesn’t survive into that future (and most will not), there will be no one around who can decipher what remains; culture needs to be adopted and adapted and carried forward in order to meaningfully survive. From the fascinating details to the overall message, I appreciated everything that I learned from this read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

All creators put their trust in the future by trusting that the future will not destroy their works despite the differences in value they know will inevitably arise. Culture: The Story of Us aims to offer its readers the breathtaking variety of cultural works that we as a species have wrought, in the hope that we will carry our shared human inheritance into the next generation, and beyond.

It feels appropriate that Puchner starts his overview with the Chauvet cave paintings: we humans seem to have always hearkened to the distant past in an effort to make meaning of our present. It is interesting to consider why, even today, a “Classical Education” includes learning Latin and Ancient Greek in order to read the “epics” in the original; honestly: why? Even more interesting is noting, in this context, that Plato wanted to give his Athens an even more ancient past, so he wrote Timaeus (in which an Egyptian priest tells the story of Athens once joining Egypt in its war against Atlantis). Along this line, we have Virgil writing The Aeneid (linking the founding of Rome to a refugee from the Trojan War); Nebure Id Ishaq’s Kebra Nagast (a 14th century Ethiopian work that tells the story of the Queen of Sheba carrying the Ark of the Covenant out of Jerusalem); and Louis de Camões’ 16th century The Lusiads (a heroic history of Portuguese seafaring, written in the style of a Greek epic). And in contrast to this history of people trying to link themselves to the so-called cultural “pinnacles” of ancient times, Puchner tells the story of Wole Soyinka’s 20th century masterpiece of Nigerian theatre, Death and the King’s Horseman (based on actual events from Nigeria’s colonial past that involved a conflict between Nigerian and British cultures) and I appreciated how Puchner describes Soyinka’s use of Western theatrical forms, overlaid with traditional Yoruba storytelling devices, and how by not preferring one form over the other (neither is considered a pinnacle or primitive), Soyinka achieves a “deep investigation into ritual, arguably humanity’s oldest form of meaning-making”.

In evaluating culture, we tend to overemphasize originality: when and where something was first invented. Claims of origin are often used to prop up dubious claims of superiority and ownership. Such claims conveniently forget that everything comes from somewhere, is dug up, borrowed, moved, purchased, stolen, recorded, copied, and often misunderstood. What matters much more than where something originally comes from is what we do with it. Culture is a huge recycling project, and we are simply the intermediaries that preserve its vestiges for yet another use. Nobody owns culture; we simply pass it down to the next generation.

In addition to stories of culture being borrowed across time are those of culture being carried across space. I enjoyed the story of the Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, who travelled to India in the 7th century in search of original source Buddhist writings and artefacts (and it was interesting to consider the transfer of Buddhism eastward as Hinduism regained its foothold in India). Similarly, it was interesting to learn of the 9th century Japanese Buddhist monk, Ennin, who travelled to China as part of an official diplomatic mission to bring back cultural objects and new knowledge (and to witness Japan becoming a primary seat of Buddhist practise as Confucianism regained its foothold in China). Going forward in time to the 19th century, it was fascinating to learn that wood-block printing was original to China but adopted by artists in Japan’s “floating world” (a place marked by pleasure, commerce, and hedonism), and that the most popular print to come out of this era was Hokusai’s The Great Wave in 1830; as it turns out, this most recognisable of Japanese artworks has very little in common with traditional Japanese art. (Puchner traces this commercialisation of borrowed culture in the East to modern times with the rise of K-pop in our own day, a rise that has “been accompanied by an anti-Korean backlash as well as by claims that it isn’t Korean at all.”)

Cultures thrive on the ready availability of different forms of expression and meaning-making, on possibilities and experiments, and to the extent that cultural contact increases those options, it stimulates cultural production and development. Those invested in purity, by contrast, tend to shut down alternatives, limit possibilities, and police experiments in cultural fusion. By doing so, they impoverish themselves while condoning or encouraging the neglect and destruction of those aspects of the past that do not conform to their own, narrow standards.

There are many more stories of cultural borrowing, adoption, and adaptation throughout the ages than it would be possible to put in a review, and I can only end by saying that I was fascinated by all of it. This is the story of all of us, and it’s a story we all ought to know and carry forward.

Further to what I recently learned about how language forms mindset when I read Laughing with the Trickster, I was intrigued by what Puchner wrote about the lost language of the Aztecs and what a "lost" language really means:

We know that the few, precious Aztec books that have escaped destruction harbor much of the way in which Aztecs made sense of the world, their assumptions about their place in the universe, the stories of creation and destruction, the meaning of their rituals and art. The process of reading and reconstruction is not simply a matter of deciphering a script; it is a matter of deciphering an entire world.

I'll also note that Culture, obviously, informed my thinking about Noviolet B's Glory, which I read next, but reviewed first.

 

ETA on 10/19/22: 

While I was reading this book and came across Death and the King's Horseman (which Puchner did a really good job of selling to me as an exemplar of his thesis), I was wondering, "Where have I heard that title recently?" And I realised that I had seen it advertised as part of this year's Stratford Festival, so Kennedy and I went to see the play last night; and what an incredible experience it was. As we drove to Stratford, I was able to tell Kennedy what I had read about the play — the storyline and its importance — and we had an interesting discussion about cultural appropriation and what makes adopting and adapting from other cultures and traditions okay, and not so okay (and while I may have spoiled a shocking moment in the play by giving too much detail, she did appreciate the irony of certain moments of dialogue between the Nigerian and British characters because she understood what was to come.) 

Somewhat related: a Goodreads friend recommended to me that I watch the movie Griefwalker on the NFB website the other day, and I did, and it is about Stephen Jenkinson; a soft-spoken Toronto-based  palliative care counsellor. Jenkinson has a Masters of Divinity from Harvard and a Masters of Social Work from the U of T, but despite presenting as a white man, his greatest learnings seem to involve deep wisdom from Canada's First Nations and his life's work is to share this traditional knowledge — and especially as it relates to making meaning out of one's own death. In Griefwalker, Jenkinson wears a long braid and a Hudson's Bay blanket coat; he paddles a traditionally made birch bark canoe, intoning a sunrise prayer to the four corners as he sprinkles an offering of tobacco on the lake's surface: if this was some Grey Owl pretendian, it might look hokey and contrived, but throughout Griefwalker, Jenkinson presents as wholly authentic as he stresses that he is trying to teach people to remember the old ways of knowing around living as though we understand we will die. This does not feel like commodified cultural appropriation (which is what Kennedy and I agreed was what made "borrowing" from other cultures feel more like "theft"), but presents as a sincere effort to remind Western peoples — we who have become so closed off from death that most of us have never even seen a dead body — how to create meaning at the end as though our lives depended on it, because it does.

And to tie it all together: Death and the King's Horseman boils down to a conflict between a traditional Nigerian community — who have age-old customs and rituals around death that provide deep meaning and stability for the community as a whole — and the British colonisers (cut off from death and meaning-making) who would prefer to impose their own sanitised (and hypocritical) values on the "primitives" they dominate by force. By discussing Culture with Kennedy first (noting that Puchner pointed out Wole Soyinka’s intent was not to write about a clash of cultures, but rather about the necessity for the two cultures to interact and recognise how they have impacted and influenced the other), and by also describing what I learned about finding meaning in death from Griefwalker, this was a totally elevated experience: of course there is great value to be found in the wisdom of other cultures, and particularly for we in the West who have cut ourselves off from what traditional peoples and our own ancestors once knew, we have much to learn — in many cases, to relearn — and carry forward.

Nearly Normal: Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself

 

Do you feel normal now? is the question I get most often from my readers. Almost, I say. Nearly normal.

After book tours and readings (and even a Tedx talk) in the wake of her bestselling memoir North of Normal, Cea Sunrise Person realised that her story was really connecting with readers; and especially with those readers who had survived challenging childhoods of their own. This realisation sparked Person to write a supplementary memoir, this time including the most painful stories from her past that she had omitted or only briefly referenced the first time around; Nearly Normal is meant to fill in the whole story of Person’s stranger-than-fiction life, and as supplementary material, I found it to be, once again, fascinating and thoughtful (I don’t know if it would stand on its own, and don’t think it should be read as a standalone). A had a few quibbles with the writing this time, but will happily round up to four stars again.

The hardest things to write about were the times in my life I felt I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t heard by my family, that I wasn’t allowed to feel shame or modesty or have an opinion that differed from my freedom-obsessed family. Trying to navigate my way through the minefield of Person beliefs — homeopathy, astrology, health food, artificial mood enhancers, freedom, nonconformity — and non-beliefs — religion, politics, consumerism, attachment, guilt, regret, expectation, obligation, education, authority, government, discipline — had left me with little room to form my own opinions other than “whatever’s the opposite of theirs.”

Nearly Normal doesn’t go deeply into the details of Person’s unconventional wilderness childhood (that’s in the first book), but she does add in some shocking stories of abuses she suffered (committed by non-family members, but tied to the neglectful environment she was raised in), she goes into the details of her two failed marriages and successful modelling career, and she outlines her inspiration for and process of writing her first memoir, along with the roadblocks she faced to having it published. The narrative jumps between these three timelines expertly, converging on her life in the present: happily married, with three healthy children, and a successful writing career; “nearly” normal, at last. This is an inspirational story of survival and I can appreciate how other survivors of abusive childhoods could find real value in reading Person’s additional unvarnished truths.

Despite the madness of my early years, there was no doubt that I’d learned some unique and valuable lessons. And if I were to acknowledge that my family had put me in danger because they were too selfish or lazy or crazy to care, it seemed even more important to me that I find the positive in those experiences. So maybe it all evened out. Maybe in some weird way, all the hardship had set me up to be the pattern-breaker of dysfunction in my family. Because I knew that those who continued their family’s patterns of destruction not only hurt themselves but also admitted defeat to those who had damaged them, intentionally or not.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that Person shared this time is her doctor’s suspicion that her mother, aunts, and uncle all suffered from Fragile X Syndrome — each had mental challenges that ranged from mild cognitive impairment (Cea’s mother) to bipolar (an aunt) to schizophrenia (her institutionalised uncle) — likely, according to the doctor, exacerbated by early and prolonged marijuana use. Cea herself tested negative for the genetic disorder in adulthood (and her children also appear unaffected), and as she also takes after her father in appearance (and apparently in intellect, temperament, and mannerisms, despite not knowing him until adulthood), she makes the provocative statement that she believes a person’s character is fixed at birth “and that environment had little to do with the person we ultimately become.” Adding, “Maybe the reason I’d endured so much as a child had less to do with creating my personality than creating my life’s purpose,” with her life’s purpose being the writing of her story “as though someone else’s life depended upon it”. That’s a provocative conclusion to have ended on, and I’m still mulling it over; happy to have read this, happy to have been provoked.

North of Normal: A Memoir of My Wilderness Childhood, My Unusual Family, and How I Survived Both

 

Looking back, I can see that it all started to fall apart with my first marriage. Until then, I had marveled to myself almost smugly about how unaffected I was by my crazy past and family. Even as my career took off in my late teens and early twenties, I fell into none of the typical pitfalls that many survivors of challenging childhoods did; I never did drugs, I had a healthy relationship with food, I didn’t engage in casual sex, and I only drank as much as my friends did. But for me, it was my craving for normal — that dangling carrot that seemed always just beyond my reach — that would be my undoing.

North of Normal holds its own against other memoirs of bizarre childhoods — The Glass Castle or Running with Scissors — and it’s always amazing to me when someone like Cea Sunrise Person (or Jeannette Walls or Augusten Burroughs) seems to turn out okay. Born into a family of nomadic, nudist, free-loving, pot-smoking hippies, Person could well have fallen through every crack — her childhood was one of no structure, no stability, no sexual discretion among the surrounding adults — but having had glimpses of “normal” throughout the years, she left home at thirteen to become a globe-trotting supermodel; in effect becoming the face of the consumerist society that her grandparents fled when they started their journey north. This is an incredible story, well told; a story of surviving an unconventional childhood, and then recognising and embracing the strengths that experience provided. (It is only by coincidence that I just learned a film based on this memoir is currently showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival; I hope it generates even more interest in this fine book.)

The idea that had been brewing in his mind since his teens was pulling at him stronger than ever now. He had heard talk about a movement up north in Canada, a land known for its harsh climate and gentle handling of disillusioned Americans. But a new country was only the start of my grandfather’s plan. He knew how to hunt, how to survive in the wild, and he had some exciting ideas about shelter. What his kids needed was fresh mountain air and dirt between their toes. If he could just get them away from the city and into nature, back to the basics of food, water, clothing and shelter, they might still stand a chance.

Cea’s grandfather — Papa Dick — first decided to find a piece of Canadian wilderness for his family when he realised that his four teenaged children were failing to thrive in California: all were dropouts who smoked weed all day (with their parents) and brought random strangers home at night; the oldest daughter regularly got beat up by her Hells Angels boyfriend; the only son routinely dropped acid and was teetering on schizophrenia; the mentally challenged youngest daughter (at 13) brought home new guys every night; and their fifteen-year-old daughter just found out she was pregnant. They eventually ended up in northern Alberta — gaining permission from a band of Cree to set up their homemade teepee on Native land — and for the next few years, the Person family lived off the land, with Papa Dick running wilderness survival camps to make a small income. Cea’s early childhood was one of running naked through the meadows, savouring bear meat, and turning her back to the sounds of her mother having sex with strangers in the small shelter they shared. Cea’s mother eventually took her on the road with a series of losers — always high, usually topless, generally having sex in front of her distressed daughter — and while Cea always dreamed of returning to the freedom of her grandparents’ camp, when they did return (now to the Yukon), she was forced to realise that the no-rules lifestyle existed because her grandparents didn’t really care about anyone else. Cea and her mother would next move to Calgary — existing just above the poverty line, more or less supported by the Mom’s married boyfriend — and it was while she was in high school there that Cea saw just enough "normal" to want her piece of it.

When I got back to my room, I stood gazing at the collage over my bed. I had found the frame in our back alley, and spent hours pasting into it pictures of models cut from magazines. I took a deep breath and stood up tall. The idea that had been in my head for so many years now suddenly seemed a lifeline. There was one way to escape my crazy family, and all I had to do was grab hold of it.

There are some of her early modelling photos among the pictures in this book — proving that Cea is undeniably photogenic — but what a way to escape, at thirteen. At that point in her life, Cea understood that her childhood had been more neglectful than idyllic — she held a lot of resentment towards her mother, her absent father, and her grandparents — but eventually, decades later, information is shared with Cea that allows her to gain a new understanding of her mother and she arrives at a place of peace; ultimately embracing the challenges that had formed her.

This review is just the barest of overviews — some of the details in the book could make your hair stand on end — but I hope it gives the sense that this is a worthwhile read. Cea has an engaging voice, her story is stranger-than-fiction, and having reached her forties before writing of her childhood, she had time to reflect and make sense of her experiences.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

 

Dr. Najjar saw tears gather at the corners of my eyes. I sat up and threw my arms around him. For him, it was another crucial moment in my case: he could sense that I was still in there, somewhere. But it was just a blip. After that outpouring, I lay back down and dozed off, exhausted by the brief display of emotion. But he knew I was there, and he would not give up on me. He motioned for my parents to follow him outside the room.

“Her brain is on fire,” he repeated. They nodded, eyes wide. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”

Part memoir, part medical mystery, Brain on Fire recounts Susannah Cahalan’s sudden descent into mental illness (which presented as schizophrenia, paranoia, and catatonia), and the dedicated efforts made by her friends and family to force the medical community to find a physical cause for her swift decline and cure it. As a young journalist who had no memory of her time in hospital during her illness, Cahalan conducted interviews, read her medical reports, and perhaps most chillingly, watched surveillance videos of herself acting out from her hospital bed (which she had no memory of at all; this was like watching a deranged stranger); and while she was able to put together this comprehensive account of her experience, there is a detached journalistic tone that I found distancing. I’d give this book a 3.5 if I could, and while yesterday I might have rounded up to four stars for the important role Cahalan’s story seems to have played for others with her same condition, today I feel like rounding down to three for that detachment; I have definitely seen other investigative journalists bring their subjects more to life than Cahalan has done here for her own self, and I am feeling the lack. Still, a very interesting read.

From here on, I remember only very few bits and pieces, mostly hallucinatory, from the time in the hospital. Unlike before, there are now no glimmers of the reliable “I”, the Susannah I had been for the previous twenty-four years. Though I had been gradually losing more and more of myself over the past few weeks, the break between my consciousness and my physical body was now finally fully complete. In essence, I was gone. I wish I could understand my behaviors and motivations during this time, but there was no rational consciousness operating, nothing I could access anymore, then or now. This was the beginning of my lost month of madness.

In a new relationship, writing for the New York Post, living on her own in Hell’s Kitchen: everything seemed to be going right for Susannah Cahalan. But what started as a numbness in her left hand and progressed to mood swings and seizures, soon landed the twenty-four-year-old in the epilepsy wing of NYU Hospital. On the one hand, as a Canadian, I was gobsmacked by Cahalan’s swift access to medical care: She went to her doctor about the numbness and was sent to a noted neurologist the same day; and after a normal examination, he sent her for an MRI the same day. That simply couldn’t happen that quickly here. On the other hand, because Cahalan had told the neurologist that she did usually have a couple glasses of wine to unwind at the end of the day, he diagnosed her with stress and alcoholism and advised her to stop partying (in her medical file, this doctor apparently wrote that she admitted to drinking a couple of bottles of wine per day); she was sent home and her condition rapidly declined. So, despite a large team of specialists working her case in hospital — and despite what she reports as a million dollars worth of tests — it was a shot-in-the-dark cognitive test administered by a new neurologist that first identified what was happening to Cahalan. I will operate under the assumption that this book is old enough that the medical mystery aspect can no longer be considered a spoiler: After a couple of spinal taps, it was confirmed that Cahalan was suffering from an autoimmune disorder — antibodies were attacking her own brain and causing the mental symptoms — and she was cured by a course of steroids and blood transfusions. This type of disorder is usually caused by a “teratome” tumour on a young woman’s ovaries (this was not actually the case for Cahalan; her cause remains a mystery), and that type of tumour sounded so disturbing that I’ll include what she wrote about it:

When this type of tumor was identified in the late 1800s, a German doctor christened it “teratome” from the Greek teraton, which means monster. These twisted cysts were a source of fascination even when there was no name for them: the first description dates back to a Babylonian text from 600 B.C. These masses of tissue range in size from microscopic to fist sized (or even bigger) and contain hair, teeth, bone, and sometimes even eyes, limbs, and brain tissue. They are often located in the reproductive organs, brain, skull, tongue, and neck and resemble pus-soaked hairballs.

I enjoyed how Cahalan handled the medical writing (useful information without getting bogged down in the science) and how she approached her own experience as a mystery to be solved; as a tabloid journalist, she often ended her short chapters with propulsive foreshadowing, as in That would be the last interview I conducted for seven months or regarding her mother It was the first and last time she would allow herself to completely succumb to her emotions in the frightening months that followed. This was very readable, if lacking in a personal or philosophical response to Cahalan’s missing month.

If he found that I had anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, it would make me just the 217th person worldwide to have been diagnosed since 2007. It begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?

In the end, this was the most interesting question discussed: How many people suffering from this sort of disorder have been misdiagnosed over the years as autistic or schizophrenic, or even, as possessed by a demon; how many people have been locked up or lobotomised or burned at the stake? Cahalan first wrote about her experience in an article for the New York Post, and after appearing on the Today Show, she began to receive messages from people who wondered if their own loved ones could be suffering from the same condition. The book ends with a few of these interactions, and if Cahalan’s story led to other doctors testing for her rare condition, then I can’t deny that this is an important story to have told: Cahalan concludes, “When I was diagnosed, it was believed that 90 percent of cases went undiagnosed. Now many doctors know to test for it, and if it is found early and treated aggressively, 81 percent of patients recover fully.” (*With the caveat that there was still a 7% mortality rate; not everyone can be as lucky as the author.) Solid three and a half stars; I would need something more in order to round up.

Not interesting enough to put in my Goodreads review, but interesting to me: It was funny in a book on memory loss and confusion to come across a word like "wayworn" in the text and be pulled up short. I looked at that word and rolled it on my tongue and could not decide if I had ever seen it before. Wayworn. Wayworn. I Googled it and the definition is "wearied by travel", and while I guess that Cahalan's parents might have been "wayworn" from travelling into the city from their homes to sit at her hospital bedside, I wondered if she really meant "careworn" (her father was just coming from Brooklyn; would that make a person "wayworn"?), but decided to chalk it up the confusion to my own aging brain. But when Cahalan later describes herself as "obtuse" when I am certain she meant "obdurate", I decided right then that the writing wasn't of the highest level and my satisfaction began to drop from that point. I'm getting older but my brain still knows what I like; there's something missing here.