The Vanishing Half | Brit Bennett #USfiction

 

I suspect, like me, many of you have heard about the basic premise of this story. The book seems to be everywhere (which is partly why it was selected as our October book club book). It features a fictional town inhabited by African Americans who have light skin, 'lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.' People who felt like they could not, and did not, belong in a white world or a black one. Mallard was a town for those 'who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.'

The story is about identical twins, Desiree and Stella, who grow up in this town. One marries a dark man and has a very dark baby, horrifying the inhabitants of Mallard, and the other decides to 'pass' as white and disappears from all their lives.

However, this is not the only vanishing or 'passing' or pretending to be someone else, that is considered by Bennett in The Vanishing Half.

The idea of 'passing' is examined alongside gender identity, transgender, drag queens and the games that many twins play, pretending to be the other to confuse their family and friends. Bennett also makes one her characters an actor to discuss what is real, what is make believe and our ability to inhabit a character to tell a story. Another character is a 'hunter' who helps to find people running from the law, bad debt and bad people. He helps find those who want to disappear. He understands disguises and subterfuge and the lies people tell when they create a new life. Mixed in with all of this is the common, every day desire we all feel at different points in our lives, to start over - the end of a bad marriage, the death of a partner, to escape childhood friends etc. 

Do we create our own identity? Or do we spend our lives deconstructing other people's ideas of who we are (or should be)?

It was fascinating stuff.

Naturally, the contrast between one twin living a life as an African American and the other as white is the predominate theme. The life of plenty and ease for one, compared to the hard work, living on the edge of poverty and fear for the other. Yet it's not all ease for one and it's not all fear for the other. Bennett's story is far more nuanced than that.

Passing requires one to be constantly vigilant and constantly 'in role'. A back story has to be created and remembered. The fear of being exposed creates tension and keeps one on guard the whole time. It's impossible to relax or feel like you completely belong.

Bennett covers off a lot of very complicated, complex ideas about who we are, how identity is determined or created and how we judge and classify others. She shows us how the childhood experiences of each twin leads to the choices they make. We see it play out again, with their daughters, growing up in very different worlds, struggling to find who they are, where they belong and with whom. The whole idea of nature or nurture is woven through each story line, and each character, in that messy, mixed up way we all experience.

Coincidence plays a part in the story, which could be annoying for some readers. As can the omnipresent narrator. But both devices worked for me. Bennett incorporates both successfully to negotiate the various time jumps within the story, the 'seeing forward and backward at the same time', that allows the reader to see what all the characters are experiencing. We see that 'passing' or changing identity, can be permanent or temporary, tragic or fun. It can be liberating and painful. A relief and guilt-ridden at the same time. 

Bennett leaves us with the lies, or stories, we all tell our selves and our families. Are they really lies? Or are they a natural desire to reframe our lives into the one we really want? That 'better' self that makes us feel whole or complete or more like our real selves? 

Who gets to decide what is real or not, in the first place? The performer or the audience? Are we pretending, performing or projecting? Are they secrets or an act of privacy or a bid for personal safety? Bennett doesn't judge or moralise. She doesn't ask us to condemn Stella for her choices, or Reese, or Barry, or Jude, or Kennedy, or Early or Adele. 

Stella is not made to pay the ultimate price, usually asked of characters in her position. There is no dramatic moment of exposure. There is no guilt-ridden martyr sent back to where she came from, in disgust and ridiculed, welcome nowhere and understood by no-one. The moral of the story is not to stay with your own kind at all cost. It's about making your own life in whichever why that feels right to you. 

There's a whole lot more to say about this story and I'm sure my book club will go there tonight. 

Favourite Quotes: 

• The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.
• That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone.
• Jude wanted to change and she didn't see why it should be so hard or why she should have to explain it to anyone.
• You shouldn’t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it.
• The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

The Fire This Time | Jesmyn Ward #NonFiction

It seemed like it was the right time to finally read this book. 

The Fire This Time was first published in 2016, but my edition is a 2019 Bloomsbury publication. The collection of essays and poems is edited and introduced by Jesmyn Ward.

I like to give space to every essay or article in a anthology; to consider each one in it's own right and to take the time to check out a little more about each author. As I was reading these essays, though, it became apparent that there were quite a few US-specific cultural references and current affairs that I was not particularly familiar with. Therefore, my responses below, may include research I did to clarify what was happening or who was being referred to. 

Many of the essays also gave me pause to consider our own creation myths in Australia, and how the past is still being played out in our present day lives.

• The Fire This Times opens with a poem by Jericho Brown, The Tradition. 
• It's a sonnet that beautifully and brutally compares flowers, blooms and earth to black lives. In just 14 lines, he alludes to the tradition of slavery, the desire for belonging and the current loss of black lives. The poem finishes with three names - John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
• John Crawford III was a 22 yr old man, shot and killed in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on the 5th August 2014. 
• Eric Garner was killed on the 17th July 2014 in Staten Island after being placed in a choke hold by police. 
• Mike Brown Jr was an 18 yr old young man shot by police on the 9th August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
• Brown is the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning poet and this poem can be found in his latest collection also called The Tradition.
• I was so impressed by this poem, I've ordered Brown's anthology in at work. 

• Introduction by Jesmyn Ward.
• Begins with the shooting death of 17 yr old Trayvon Martin on the 26th February 2012 in Sanford, Florida.
• Also Tamir Rice a 12 yr old boy shot & killed by police on the 22nd November 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio.
• Mike Brown (see above)
• Sandra Bland was found hanged on the 13th July, 2015, after 3 days in gaol for a traffic infringement in Waller County, Texas. Her death was declared a suicide. 
• Emmett Till was a 14 yr old boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. His body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River three days after he went missing. According to wikipedia,

The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

• She turned to the writing of James Baldwin for 'kinship in this struggle'. 
• He told her that she was 'worthy of love...worth something in this world...[and]...a human being.'
• His book The Fire Next Time inspired the title of this book.
• Which led her to seek out other writers, thinkers, and voices from her generation. Only three of the submitted pieces referenced the future.
• 'It confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily the past bears on the future.' 

• PART I - LEGACY 

• Homegoing, AD by Kima Jones

• A hybrid poem that begins with a prose section about a family funeral and ends with a free form verse about outrunning the 'gators. 
• Jones is the founder of the Jack Jones Literary Arts whose mission is to 'provide publicity services and support for writers who are unafraid. We work diligently to announce book projects to audiences who seek literary art that is unorthodox, underappreciated, and unparalleled.' 

• The Weight by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
• Ghansah won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
• She is  know for her writing about James Baldwin and his historic home in the South of France, including this piece that discusses her first visit to his home.

'If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn't count on a thing, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death....a black death was a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory.'

• Lonely in America by Wendy S. Walters
• 'I resist thinking about slavery because I want to avoid the overwhelming feeling that comes from trying to conceive of the terror, violence and indignity of it.' 
• New-to-me word - cathexis -  'the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).' 
• Discussion about slavery in the northern states, especially New Hampshire.
• Black Heritage Trail, Portsmouth.  

• Where Do We Go From Here? by Isabel Wilkerson 
• 'We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address.' 
• After the end of slavery, came the Reconstruction.
• Then the reversal of black advancement - the Nadir. I had heard of the Jim Crow laws but not the Nadir (1890 - 1940). 
• 'Six million African Americans fled that caste system, seeking asylum in the rest of the country during what would become the Great Migration. Denied the ballot, they voted with their bodies.'
• In the north they met with 'redlining, overpolicing, hyper-segregation, the seeds of the disparity we see today.'
• Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism Feature Writing in 1994.

• The Dear Pledges of our Love: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley's Husband by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
•  Phillis Wheatley - poet (1753-84)
• The Age of Phillis published March 2020 by Wesleyan University Press - 'imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters.'

• White Rage by Carol Anderson
• 'white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors.'  
• for every 'African American advancement, there's a reaction, a backlash.' 
• As an outsider, I'm astounded every time I read how easy it is to manipulate the US electoral system - against African Americans, against women, against the poor and disenfranchised. Our system is not perfect, but we make it easy for everyone to vote. Whether you choose to use that right is up to you. It's a right and a responsibility.   

•   Cracking the Code by Jesmyn Ward
• on the difficulty faced by most African Americans when creating their family tree. 
• and on the unsettling & discomforting information that genetic DNA testing can provide.
• is identity genetics, heritage, personal history, or how others perceive you?

• PART II - RECKONING 

• Queries of Unrest by Clint Smith (poem) 
• modelled after the work of poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
• Maybe, maybe, maybe...
• Maybe I'm scared of writing another poem/that makes people roll their eyes/and say, "another black poem." 

• Blacker Than Thou by Kevin Young
• the issue of blackface, 'passing' and reverse-passing.
• I did not know that Thomas Jefferson had a black mistress, Sally Hemings, who gave him six children.
• Young is the poetry editor for the New Yorker. 

• Da Art of Storytellin' (A Prequel) by Kiese Laymon
• 'voices aren't discovered fully formed, they are built and shaped.' 
• storytelling via hip hop and rap.
• Read - Octavia Butler | Kindred

•  Black and Blue by Garnette Cadogan
•  the art of walking and the difference between walking the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, New Orleans and NYC.
• 'I could be invisible in Jamaica in a way I can't be invisible in the United States.' 
• 'walking is an act of faith...we see, we listen, we speak, and we trust...I strolled into my better self...' 
• 'walking while black restricts the experience of walking...it forces me to be in a constant relationship with others...' Understood. It's the same for most women when walking alone.

• The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning by Claudia Rankine 
• the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement - 'an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.'
• Just Us: An American Conversation published September 2020 by Graywolf Press.

• Know Your Rights! by Emily Raboteau 
• how to talk to your children about protecting themselves from the police.
• 'this mural struck me as an act of love for the people who would pass it by.'
• Raboteau spotted her first social justice mural and went searching for the others (below).

    

•  Composite Pops by Mitchell S. Jackson
• the importance of father figures to kids, especially boys.
• a lovely homage to the men who mentored him throughout his life. 

 PART III - JUBILEE 

Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey 

• US Poet Laureate 2012 & 2013 .

• Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry 2007.

This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution by Daniel Jose Older     

• 'unraveling all the creation myths this country has always held most sacred.'

Message to my Daughters by Edwidge Danticat

•  African Americans as internal and external refugees

• 'You think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.' James Baldwin

This was an eye-opening read. 

Many of the writers, though, assumed knowledge than many non-US readers may not actually have. I learnt a lot more about African American history thanks to the googling I had to do to find out the who, what, why, where and when discussed in many of the essays. 

Australian history had a brief but equally unedifying experience with slave labour from the nearby South Sea Islands. Given that many Australians are, to this day, completely unaware of this practice, we can claim no moral high ground with regard to race relations or facing the truth about our own history. 

An historical record that only takes note of one side or one version will always be divisive. Books like this, that open all our eyes to another history, another side, another version are important steps towards understanding and acceptance, and hopefully, one day, justice and equality for all.

Highly recommended, but take you time.

Update: 

• Tragically, Jesmyn Ward's 33 yr old husband died in January this year after they all contracted what they thought was the flu. She writes about her grief in a recent Vanity Fair article, On Witness and Respair.
• Respair - OED: noun and verb, meaning the return of hope after a period of despair—only citation for this dates back to 1425. Sadly, it has now fallen out of use.