Whirlwind Publishing

The writing prompt for this week’s participants in the Literary Blog Hop over at the Blue Bookcase website is what is the most difficult literary work you’ve ever read? What made it so difficult? The question immediately to mind the book I’m currently reading, Cane by Jean Toomer – and the problems I’m having finishing it. 

I have tried; sincerely, honestly tried. To be honest, it’s not because the book is unreadable or because I don’t like it. I do like it and it is readable. However, I’m finding it difficult to read Cane like a regular novel. There are no main characters and/or narrators. Perhaps I’m being too linear but it seems as if the only thing holding the diverse set of characters together is Sparta, the early twentieth-century rural Georgia town they all inhabit. Toomer wrote the town in such a way that it seems hell bent on being the stage on which the stories and poems are presented and he did so with a clear mastery of language. Cane is undeniably visual and therein lies the reason I find it difficult to read it continuously. The short prose pieces are so packed with imagery I think of them more as vignettes; literary vignettes I can put down, ponder over and return to.

As I end part one, I find myself putting it down to ponder some of the characters, particularly Karintha. On the surface, the two page chapter on Karintha appears to deal with what today would be called pedophilia:

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child. Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripe a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

I found myself curious as to why Toomer, a Harlem Renaissance writer, would choose to start Cane with such a topic. Why have the opening gambit be a tale about how a young girl in the process of growing up became the town prostitute? In fact, the majority of the stories in the section I’ve read so far focus on women. So much so, that I found myself noticing similarities with some of Toomer’s literary descendants; particularly Alice Walker (setting) and Ntozake Shange (language).

I know Alice Walker read Toomer. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she wrote the following:

A few of us will realize that Cane was not only his finest work but that it is also in part based on the essence of stories told to Toomer by his grandmother, she of the ‘dark blood’ to whom the book is dedicated, and that many of the women in Cane are modled on the tragic indecisiveness and weakness of his mother’s life. I also wondered if he received flack for writing about the abuse some black women experience as Walker and Shange did. Cane was for Toomer a double ‘swan song.’ He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the ‘Negro’ he felt dying in himself. Cane then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go.

Well, as I said in the beginning, I am letting go of the book for now. What I term Cane’s vignette style, in my opinion, doesn’t support a straight through to the end type of reading. Nonetheless it is still highly valued literature for its written-with-love and extremely lyrical depictions of life in the town of Sparta, Georgia and I will definitely complete it.

If you were to ask who my favorite African woman writer is, my mind would immediately go to Ama Ata Aidoo and her novel Our Sister Killjoy. Detailing an African woman student’s journey throughout Europe, the main character, Sissie, is the novelistic equivalent of a phrase I love: the sun is on a different trajectory. To put it more clearly, in “exchange” for an European education, Sissie is supposed to follow the sun’s path and settle in the West. However, after her studies, she returns to Ghana.

I have often said that calling black literature “fiction” is a bit of a misnomer. Fiction is defined as “any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author(s)”. The accepted practice of censoring black voices, I believe, has led us to call our literature fiction as opposed to a term that reflects the understanding that what might not be factual, in whole or in part, in white literature, might actually be factual, in whole or in part, in black literature.

My parents and their siblings, were like Sissie – African students sent West to gain knowledge it was assumed would be brought back home. Unlike Sissie, however, my parents and their siblings didn‘t return to Africa – except for periodic visits. As their child, born and raised in the West, the things I experienced growing up in a culture which, from inception, has denigrated Africans and African culture, have led me to the belief that the price for such education was too high. Taking such history into account, there is no way this novel wouldn’t resonate with me.

The chapter of this prose poem that I liked the most is the last one, entitled A Love Letter. As the name suggests, it is indeed a love letter but one written after the cessation of a relationship, not at its apex. Sissie, who was given the appellation “killjoy” (although qualified by the words “Our Sister”) due to what her lover refers to as her “anti-Western neurosis”. In this section, Our Sister gives a litany of reasons of why she is uncomfortable in the West; reasons which range from artificial heat to combat the cold to eating food which causes her to break out in hives; reasons which boil down to the simple fact that she “…sometimes, missed plain palm-oil on boiled greens”.

That feeling, generalized as homesickness, transformed in Our Sister’s mind to spending “many sleepless nights trying to understand why, after finishing their studies, our brothers and sisters stay here and stay and stay.

After all, was it not part of the original idea that we should come to these alien places, study what we can of what they know and then go back home?

As it has turned out, we come and clearly learn how to die. Yes, that must be it. And it is quite weird. To come all this way just to learn how to die from a people whose own survival instincts have not failed them once yet. Not once.”

A blackberry bush. It crept its way up a wooden fence that separated the house I was looking to rent a portion of from its neighbor. It’s what made me take the living space that, in a previous incarnation, had to be a closet or, at best, a pantry. I was ready to go in, close the door and start looking at the woman in the mirror after the mess I made of my life in San Francisco.

Not yet knowing a single soul in Oakland, however, I was soon going back to SF for favored activities: getting high and drinking. But I knew it had to end the day I distanced myself enough to see the her that was I on the phone with “my” married man – crying; and to also see/hear my friends whispering about me. I couldn’t stand the vision and couldn’t envision any other way of being – in SF. So I relocated – across the Bay to Oaktown – where I grew up – where I became a woman.

Oakland, where I saw black people everywhere; unlike in San Francisco where, unbeknownst to me, we were being gentrified out of the city; unlike Boston where we were corralled into certain areas of the city. Oakland, panther country, blackberry bushes, a rose bush-laden walkway hidden in the middle of the city and schools with Katrina-like trailers on the grounds for the “overflow” of students. Oakland, where I decided I would never again straight my hair – not that big of a decision for me because I could count on one hand the number of times I had “processed” my hair; where the question of my identity (African) was settled once and for all. Oakland which I loved yet still had to kill.

The Death of California

Flash back to the time
when death row was a death sentence
and not a record label
featuring the hottest gangsta rappers.
Turn the clock back fourteen years
and revisit the streets of San Francisco.

A city split up into districts
and I found myself living in the one
called the tenderloin
although there was nothing tender
about the loins found there.
Laotians as dark as puerto ricans
pimps as murderously greedy as leopold
and refugees from pretty san francisco
were some of what I found there.

Join me on my sojourn down memory lane.
Avoid the cracks in the sidewalks
and the crack held in hands
closed tighter than fists
until the money is handed over.
Hear the soft refrain of coca, coca
whispered with south of the border accents
because this part of memory lane
has diverged to the mission district.
Oldest part of the city, first home of the spanish
who gave the area its "I’m a conquistador
but I still love Christ" name
and now home to members of
every spanish-speaking population
in the western hemisphere
crowded together on numbered streets:
undocumented scarfaces
peruvian flutists making music out of air
ecuadorians I mistake for asians
followers of che and pancho villa
girls living la vida loca
la migra, la policia
and cinco de mayo street festivals
where all the bars open early
and offer discounts on shots of tequila
and one year, I got drunker than drunk
and stumbled and fell
for coco and her flame.

Street hustlers of the lowest order
they bypassed the soft allure of coca, coca
and went straight for the hard sounding stuff.
Crack itself wasn’t enough however.
Crack had an addiction to itself in liquid form
a liquid form known as cisco.
Crack, cisco, coco
and her flame who had the same name
as a version of the bible
became my roommates
who never made their rent
because their addictions left them too dysfunctional
to do more than dig through garbage
and exchange their food stamps for crack
since that was the only thing they hungered for.

I blame eek-a-mouse
for transporting me back to the apartment
where his music was the soundtrack
to homemade sangria parties
and weed dazed days
laced every now and then
with the purest variety of acid
sold in golden gate park
where food not bombs
ladled out free bowls of soup
where girls didn’t wear flowers in their hair
but instead cursed me out for ruining the vibe
of santana’s annual free concert in the park
when my bottle of vodka fell and splashed all over
their wannabe hippie gear.

Striding the streets of aztlan
in the grip of a california dream
which I awoke from when I turned my back
on the go west young woman mentality
and accepted that california
wasn’t the la-la land portrayed by hollywood.
California was the land that gave birth to the panthers
and the panthers gave birth to a sense of purpose
which I inherited when I relocated to oakland
after two years in san francisco.
I stopped looking at my wrist
and started looking at the woman in the mirror
and what I saw
led me to the understanding
that refusing to die is a form of rebellion.

I stopped living in california
and started living in occupied aztlan.
I developed a mentality described as relentless
because I was on don’t stop, get it, get it kick
which had me flipping pages nonstop
while my feet stepped and my heart beat
to the drums of uhuru.
My soul united with the will of the revolution
and out of my barrel of my pen came slogans like
the contract with america was signed 500 years ago
with the blood of indigenous and african people.

And when I left occupied atzlan
and moved back to looted eastern shores
alongside assata’s knowledge:
that the revolution gave me more than I could ever give it
I carried with me the butterfly’s effect.

excerpted from still living on my feet