Enchanted Prose

A wealthy Turkish woman’s identity crisis – implications for us (Istanbul 2016; Oxford England 2000-2002): What’s it like to be Turkish? The only Muslim country secularized by law, separating religion from the state. What’s it like to live in contemporary Istanbul, a teaming, ancient city overlooking the Bosphorus Strait? A gateway between East and West, where religion and politics encompass and bump up against each other.

Turkey has become such a hotbed for terrorism. I wanted to understand Turkey from a novelistic perspective. I went searching for Turkey through the eyes of its number one female author, Elif Shafak. Along the way, I found warnings for America.

With a population around 15 million, Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city and the second largest in the world. This city of “seven hills, two continents, three seas” (Black Sea, Sea of Marmara, Aegean Sea) is not only geographically at the crossroads, but its country globally pivotal. A Republic and its people important to get to know, making Three Daughters of Eve, the author’s tenth and newest novel (others also set in Istanbul), deserving attention.

“It’s very tiring to be a Turk,” says Shafak. “It’s a very polarized, bitterly politicized country,” she goes on to explain. “As countries become more authoritarian, as they slide backwards the way we have been sliding backwards and tumble into nationalism, isolationism, or populism, I think the society also changes, not only the governments or the politicians but also the society.” Is Shafak talking about Turkey, or America?

America 2017 is going through an identity crisis that feels as troubled, shaken up, and soul-searching as Shafak’s exquisitely torn, questing Istanbul protagonist Peri. Beautiful, thirty-five, well-to-do, and well-educated, yet what defines Peri the most is how unhappy and anxious she is, and has been for a very long time.

To understand Peri’s sadness and disharmony, one must also have a sense of her country’s pathos and fissures, a long, complicated history that cannot possibly be achieved in a single work. Three Daughters of Eve seems a fine place to start.

Many statements will give you pause like this one by Peri’s secular, “freethinking,” brooding father Mensur: “What happened to my sweet country?” Veiled yet underpinning that pained question are similar sentiments Americans are asking themselves, whether they feel their country has been sweet to them or not. What is happening to America? We’re bewildered like Peri.

One good thing about American politics 2017 is that it’s expanded and changed our reading tastes, as we try to grapple with what’s happening, or could happen. Shafak as a novelist, journalist, activist, and international speaker aims to do the same.

Peri, temperamentally and situationally, is exceptionally serious for these are exceptionally serious times. Her deeply religious mother, Selma, attributes her differentness to being “an unusually intense and introverted person.” Nature versus Nurture? No, I don’t think so. Peri’s spiritual angst seems firmly rooted in having grown up in a perennially at-odds, acrimonious household. No love is shown between her pious mother and drinking father, and a terrifically disturbing, turning point event befalls one of her brothers, when she was an impressionable seven-year-old in the late eighties. Reflective of the Republic’s extremely powerful military and history of political coups, ugly military practices in the name of protecting the state that will send chills down your spine. Peri, and her family, are privy to only so much; the reader, intentionally, knows far more.

Peri’s salvation, sustenance, and immersion in literature and scholarship fits her thirsting-for-guidance, solitary nature. She’s the spiritual, ethical voice posing the hard, far-reaching theological, philosophical, moral, and existential questions, seeking a place she belongs in her highly divisive world. In today’s Istanbul, that means she’s examining secularism over religion and other spiritual/mystical beliefs, nationalism, modernism, and capitalism amid a male-centric society, political volatilities, and senseless violence. Shafak’s Peri was made for the times.

Elif Shafak’s prose resonates with feeling. In part because she subscribes to the freeing view that a storyteller should “write what you can feel” (not just what you know). Listen in to her passionate TED talk, the same passion you’ll find in her writing.

So how do we feel about Peri? Turkey? First and foremost, that danger lurks. Danger that hits us in the opening sentence when respectable Peri realizes she’s “capable of killing someone.” Shafak quickly, informatively, skillfully unfolds a chaotic, dramatic street scene that confirms our feeling something is terribly amiss. Foreboding, it sets in motion something mysterious from Peri’s past, which drives the plot. It’s not until we’re more than halfway through do we put the pieces together.

In that jarring opening scene, Peri gets stuck in what feels like the worst traffic jam in the world. She’s driving in her expensive Land Rover with her snippy teenage daughter, Deniz, en route to a lavish dinner party at a CEO’s mansion, where she’ll be meeting up with her “self-made,” much-older husband, Adnan, and others who’ve made something of themselves, likable or not. What takes place on that eerily named Mute Poet Street is an early indication of the concessions, anger, disillusionment, and uncertainties Peri’s bottled up for years.

The national hero who established secular Turkey was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, for whom the country was named, and whose democratic principles are part of a movement called Kemalism.

Among the Istanbulites who worship him is Mensur, Peri’s father, whom she’s closest to, while her mother is preoccupied with praying, fasting, and cleaning, growing increasingly obsessive. It’s Mensur who consistently and wholeheartedly encourages and supports his daughter’s education. So when Peri makes a gargantuan cultural and emotional leap to attend Oxford University, it’s her traditional mother who strongly opposes.

Suppression of intellectual freedoms comes through loud and clear, with damaging consequences. Shafak, not surprisingly, is an activist for women’s rights (among other causes.) She’s the Muslim feminist the inner Peri yearns to be, but feels constrained by her culture and experiences. As women in America 2017 are rising up, Shafak pushes buttons.

The reader hopes at Oxford Peri finds a comfortable footing that encourages confidence and assertiveness when she becomes friends (though by happenstance not self-determination) with two very different Muslim women. Together, they compose the three daughters of the title’s name. One is British-Iranian, dubbed the “sinner;”the other, Egyptian-American, the “believer” – thus perpetuating Peri’s outsider status, drawing her to a seminar on God taught by a charismatic, controversial Professor Azur, loved and hated for his highly unorthodox teaching methods. The “God debate” is not only a course, it’s the soul of the novel.

The author has smartly structured her thought-provoking novel to a pace similar to Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-Prize winning All the Light You Cannot See. Numbering more than sixty chapters, each just a couple of pages longer than Doerr’s. This works for the reader since a lot is packed in each. The unpacking makes for some challenging, broadening, and fascinating reading.

Chapters swing back and forth between Istanbul and England, a bit like Shafak who currently lives in England and returns to Istanbul, her “motherland.” The Istanbul 2016 chapters alternate back and forth to Peri’s childhood years and to university days and trauma. As they do, events on the evening of 2016 progress and devolve. Unfinished Oxford years are strategically set right before and after 9/11.

The God seminar is like a group therapy course, whereby students are pressed to shed their assumptions and prejudices, leaving them vulnerable. You’ll see how wrought with complications that turns out to be for Peri.

Peri feels like she’s drifting, sinking in one of the seas surrounding her stressed city. If America 2017 has made you feel like that too – afloat, perhaps lost at sea – you will relate to Peri, profoundly.

Lorraine

PS This looks like my last post of the year. Wishing you the comfort, love, peace, and happiness Peri struggles for.

Currier and Ives escapism (Vermont, present-day): The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living is a feel-good recipe to lighten a year bombarded by darkness. Louise Miller, a real-life baker – a pastry chef – has whipped up some delicious, warm nostalgia pie.

Her treat arrives for the 2017 holiday season wrapped in its new Christmas-y paperback cover. The 2016 hardback design also harks back to old-fashioned memories.

Miller’s debut confection is set in a fictional town in rural Vermont – Guthrie. Yet its character, culture, traditions, and landscape feel as authentic as the name Guthrie – Woody, that is, the folk hero. Apropos as folk music (and contra-dancing accompanying it) thrive here. Stringed instruments are prominent – fiddle, banjo, dulcimer, guitar, mandolin.

Like so much in the novel, the author/baker mixes and blends fiction with real. Miller plays the banjo; Livvy, 32, her main character, does too, handed-down from the father who raised her, now deceased (her mother left them, she’s gone too). Martin, 40 – the romantic entanglement in the maple-sugary air – is a fiddle player; his endearing, ill dad, Henry, used to play too.) Henry’s the reason Martin has returned to Guthrie from Seattle, making him an outlier as his two older brothers (and their families) remained nearby. A close-knit crew – something Livvy never had. Martin’s absence, his non-conformism, keenly felt by his siblings, though their dear mother, aptly named Dolly, shows no outwardly signs of resentment. Though, in this small, gossipy New England town, villagers tend to hide their personal feelings.

Also flourishing in these parts, novelistically and realistically, are apple pie baking, fiercely competitive baking contests, and apple growing (apple pie, the State’s official pie); annual festivals; maple-syruping (Vermont our largest producer); cozy country inns; and romantic sleigh rides.

Miller invites us to come take a good look around. Here again, real life pipes in as you’ll want to do more than armchair traveling – drive here if you’re within striking distance. Livvy is, at least when we meet her. An unsettled soul, she’s moved around a bit, all big cities. Like Miller, she lives in Boston, about a three hour drive to Guthrie.

Head to the Maple Sugar Inn. To the homey kitchen, where you’ll find Livvy laboring away much of the time. Trained at the renowned Culinary Institute of America, baking is far more than a career for Livvy. A “labor of love,” it’s her creative outlet, what she excels at, and how she retreats and soothes herself. Miller paints a realistic, less glamorous picture of the incredibly long hours demanded of a professional chef. When the novel opens, this James Beard award-nominated chef flees to Guthrie to be rescued by her best friend Hannah who lives there (married to the town’s doctor), after a calamitous incident at a private club’s five-hundred-dollar-a-plate charity fundraiser Livvy was sous cheffing for. Hannah did save the day, introducing her to an innkeeper looking for a new dessert chef.

Meet Margaret, the inn’s proprietor, one tough-cookie. Her gradual softening to Livvy is a highlight – an unlikely bond until the story evolves. Margaret is prim and proper compared to Livvy who literally stands out.“Cute at best,” though we’re not so sure as she’s forever dyeing her hair – wild colors in the Manic Panic Electric lineup, many inspired by foods like banana, candied apples, cotton candy pink. The visual rendering exaggerates her bohemian nature, which fits with unconventional images we may have of Vermonters. A hardy, diverse bunch – old-timers and new – attracted to the State’s free-spiritedness, tranquil beauty, farm-to-table sustainable lifestyle.

Bring a wad of napkins for Livvy is serving mouth-watering desserts, from simple to fancy: apple pies (of course!), sugary-glazed cinnamon buns, white chocolate mousse, huckleberry clafouti, pumpkin crème brulee, buttermilk custard, sour cherry napolean, bavarian torte … Grab a couple of tissues too as there’s sadness and pathos in this novel of “longing and joy.”

Louise Miller writes with the same warmth as she bakes. (Take a look at her sweets on her foodie blog: https://louisethebaker.tumblr.com/.) Warmth that’s seen in Livvy who wears her emotions on her sleeve – a “pudding-soft heart” – and in the unexpected friendships she makes with inn staff and Martin’s loving family. They’ve been spared the kind of loneliness that “becomes a part of who you are,” Livvy tells us.

It’s the warmth of the prose about the meaning of Home that gives the novel so much heart. In an enlightening interview, the author offers insight into how she evokes those feelings and yearnings, which explains, I think, how she landed a two-book contract deal with a prestigious imprint. (Her second novel, The Late Bloomer’s Club, comes out Summer 2018. I can’t wait to read it after this charmer): Miller studied art so she thinks visually, envisions scenes before she writes them. Indeed, The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living is ripe for the movie screen.

Livvy has followed her mother’s prescription to “always do what you can to make life sweeter.” A culinary artist drawn to the “predictability” of baking versus the instability her life has been. Along with her vintage tastes in clothing and unusual living conditions (for much of the novel Livvy lives in the inn’s sugarhouse), there’s humor and quirkiness to her lively character in contrast to the quiet seriousness of Martin’s.

The novel is like comfort food, mixing and blending fine ingredients. This recipe starts with an appetizing opening line: “The night I lit the Emerson Club on fire had been perfect for making meringue.” Restless Livvy who can’t imagine country living finds peacefulness in the beautiful Green Mountain State. Miller describes the physical setting with clever prose using food metaphors, such as:

“The dark limbs of the apple trees were already trimmed in a thick coating of snow. Together they looked like layers of cake and frosting.”

Ingredients are added in order, month by month in an unnamed year, taking us from September’s colorful harvest season through the winter into June. In July, an epilogue is whipped up, running for another year, answering questions that keep us turning pages. Chiefly, what happens to Livvy and Martin? Both came to Guthrie temporarily. Music is the special ingredient that binds. When the flavor gets intense between Livvy and Martin cool it down with the inn’s avuncular chef, Al, twice Livvy’s age, who touches us in the way he genuinely cares about her. Whisk in a key ingredient that smooths it all throughout: Livvy’s sidekick, a big, lovable Irish Wolfhound named Salty.

“Vermont in June is like Oz,” Livvy says. Which makes The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living  feel fairy-tale like. It’s been a while since I read one with this much wistfulness. With America 2017 tasting oh-so-bitter, savor this sweet holiday gift.

Lorraine

An extreme choice to pursue a writer’s dream (Falkland Islands, a few years ago): What if you had A Room of Your Own? If you could go anywhere in the world for up to three months to write the novel of your dreams? Where would you go?

An enviable position for aspiring writers. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity Nell Stevens answered when she was twenty-seven, a Global Fellow from Oxford, England completing her MFA at Boston University’s creative writing program. How can you not be intrigued about Stevens when her choice was the “bottom of the world” – the Falkland Islands, in the wintertime?

The Falklands are an archipelago in the southern hemisphere, en route to the Antarctic Peninsula, where seasons are reversed from ours. So the author spent her summer reawakening in a land “stranger, wilder, colder, and bleaker” than she could imagine. In your wildest sunshiny dreams, the Falkland Islands, in the dead of winter when the sun rarely shines, would be a strange, wild idea.

Besides, it’s not a place you’d typically dream of. Maybe if you’re British you’d be curious since it’s a British territory. And if you’re a wildlife enthusiast, a nature adventurer, the Falklands could be on your bucket list for a summer destination, particularly to witness the greatest colonization of Gentoo penguins on earth. But our intrepid author ventured there even when nature lovers don’t, when “there is more nothing than there is something.” A place “so desolate, so isolated” and so gray Stevens resorts to describing the landscape’s colors in amusing shades of gray like seal-flank gray.

Before you get the wrong impression that Bleaker House is a bleak, dreary read, better set the record straight. Key to characterizing it, alluded to above, is that’s its darn funny. Smiling, chuckling, laugh-out loud funny.

Jacketed with an adorable penguin on the grayish-front cover and accolades on the back saying it’s “fun to read” and “charming,” Stevens’ debut is clever and full of wit. Though there’s nothing humorous about her anxieties, self-effacement, and feelings of worthlessness if she doesn’t produce a novel with characters that feel real by the time she hits thirty. Until now, her writing has been judged dry and pointless, rejected.

Stringent airline restrictions led to paring down essentials to the barest minimum, a problem that plagues. Yet the determined author made sure her hefty copy of Bleak House, from which she quotes, accompanied her (along with her Kindle), prioritizing intellectual substance over food and ensuring a nagging reminder of the multitude of vivid characters Dickens created versus her vexing work-in-progress. Which makes this a serious, intimate look at the struggles of self-actualization and becoming an artist packaged in an inventive, whimsical way.

Stevens goes far, geographically and artistically. Bleaker House is billed as “a work of memoir and fiction.” A memoir broken up with fictional writing pieces in the form of spreadsheets, short-stories, and the obsessed over novel-in-development. An unusual, experimental journey, reflected in an unusual, experimental narrative.

Creative formats serve multiple purposes. First, to offer insight into the motivation behind the words stated in her internship application pitching the Falklands. For instance, in a spreadsheet column she wrote: “There has never been a literary novel set there.” Alongside it, another column in which she candidly reveals: “If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me.”

Elsewhere we learn she chose an empty place assuming “zero distractions” to achieve “effortless concentration.” Contrary to what you might think, Stevens left behind an active social life (albeit a dissatisfying love life) and a happy family life (absent the drama that can inspire compelling novels). So her thinking went along these lines: if she forfeits all distractions, her novel will burst forth from agonizing blank pages, animated by a dramatic landscape.

Stevens pokes fun of herself to prove her writing is flawed. She doesn’t just tell us she shows us, exaggerating the point eccentrically. Her short-stories, “The Personal Assistant” and “Misadventure,” are wacky, fall flat, and verge crudely, an attempt to be bold and critical of herself in an outlandish, condescending way. To her dismay, this enterprise continues: her novel is slow, slow going and corny. Since it’s set in the Falklands, she remixes the absurdity of what’s she’s finding, but there’s a gem of poignancy in her solitary character, Ollie, who parallels her feelings of “ridiculousness and doubt, loneliness, hardship.”

Stevens is a student well-versed in planning and organizing, someone who counts days, words, calories, and the only luxury she’s brought: chocolates. She’s also someone drawn to challenging herself, such as the time she went to Lebanon to teach English in a refugee camp and war broke out. She seeks to put herself in life-changing positions to make her life more interesting for writing and to grow as a person.

The Falklands is a test. This syllabus is aptly dubbed: “isolation taster course.” Grade this student A+ for identifying what must be one of the most isolating places in the world in the winter, marked by a “guestless guest house” on an island archipelago totaling around only 2,000 to 3,000 residents. This student doesn’t cut corners for she could have at least selected Stanley, the capital of the Falklands (though she stayed a week to get acclimated and conduct research in the government’s archives.) Instead, she chose Bleaker Island, population two, plus a housekeeper who thinks the printer is the Internet – a “disconnected life.”

The Falklands are located in the South Atlantic Ocean east of Argentina. In 1982, Argentina invaded the islands. Britain won the war but the aftermath is still very much felt, which the author uncomfortably discovered when she arrived in Stanley, palpably suspicious of strangers (and writers, presumably journalists came in droves to report on the war).

Just like her fiction, her journey “unfolds in increasing degrees of strangeness” as she finds herself in a “strange landscape” that’s “not so much a different country as a different planet.” Stevens wasn’t prepared for all the discomfort.

Remember how snail-like the Internet was when it first emerged? She needs to buy scratch cards with magical codes to access it, if you’re lucky enough to find a magical card in the first place. Food is also scarce, expensive, and “fresh” produce and fruit precious. The news is doled out on DVDs, a week at a time. Sure there’s radio, but mostly there’s indomitable weather, more like forces of nature, and relentless solitude, except for a few lovely days with the lovely owners of the guest house she’s staying in, the one without the guests.

At one point, the author wonders: “How to fathom the bleakness of Bleaker?” She decides it’s bleaker than anything she’s seen before.

This memoir-embedded-with fiction is sprinkled with tidbits from the long-time director of her program, novelist Leslie Epstein. The author tries her hardest to follow his “tips on writing and life,” but when did writing and life go as planned?

“Passionately hungry,” Nell Stevens couldn’t have predicted the fruits of her labors. What she finds is more precious than the single potato she cherished.

Lorraine

Broken memories, broken souls, and a broken country (Montreal 2005; flashbacks to the Cambodian genocide 1975-1979): Madeleine Thien is a literary star in Canada. She ought to be one in America too.

If only Dogs at the Perimeter was dystopian fiction. Yet historically, Thien’s searing novel really did happen. Which makes her sensitive approach to telling horrific history more laudable.

Thien focuses on the psychic trauma to survivors of unimaginable horrors when “nothing seemed real.” What happens to their brains, to the area that regulates memories? What’s lost? What’s left?

Canadian-born Thien creatively sets the contemporary portion of her historical novel at a brain research center in Montreal to drive home the memory theme. (She lives in Montreal, where there’s a leading neurology center.) There, two characters propel the telling: Janie, a researcher in a lab that studies brain activity, and her senior neuroscientist boss and friend, Dr. Hiroji Matsui.

Thien has us thinking about memory in terms of fragments, opening with a mini-Epilogue (and later other mini-introductions) she calls “Fragments.” Fragmentation of memories, minds, souls, and an entire society is the devastation she examines. Fragmented also in the sense that the author tells us precisely what she wants us to know and leaves much out. I probably spent as much time googling as reading this 253-page paperback release. (The novel was originally published in 2012.) That it so provoked is a testament to its eye-opening engagement.

In a lengthy, fascinating interview, Thien says Cambodia’s genocide was essentially “invisible”:

“It’s one of those genocides that seems to be known at the basic level – when you say “Khmer Rouge” people know – but after that, there’s not a lot of knowledge.”

Astonishing, for these killing fields took place well-within recent memories of the Holocaust, also under the guise of making life better for the masses. History repeating itself, grimly. Where were the lessons learned?

Thien’s haunting account uses what may well be a conservative figure – two million (out of a population of 7 million at the time) – to cite the number of Cambodians tortured, murdered and perished due to starvation and other bodily breakdowns at the brutal hands of the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, after a five-year civil war and before another. (The UN finally brokered a peace accord to end an “infinite war” in 1989.)

No one knows for sure how many Cambodians were wiped out. Chillingly echoing Nazi fanaticism of keeping track of their crimes against humanity, Pol Pot’s holocaust also kept meticulous records, so perhaps a more accurate accounting will come to light when an extraordinary museum is erected in the capital city, Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s ground zero for it was from here that all the “city people” were forced to evacuate into the jungles, rice fields, and schools-turned-prisons, tearing apart families, leaving behind and losing everything, including identities and names.

A $40 million Sleuk Rith Institute dedicated to memory, justice, and healing was the architectural vision of Zaha Hadid, whose sudden death appears to have delayed the ambitious project. Thien’s memory theme eerily resounds within the envisioned Museum of Memory. Until then, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, referred to in the novel, is piecing these fragments together, supported by Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. Thien’s determined novel aims to do the same for us.

The novel is all the more important right now as America is going through a dark period in our history, when we’re seriously worried about the fragility of our democracy and on high-alert to the threats of totalitarian governments. An interesting convergence of pertinent events is happening, or just ended. One is Angelina Jolie’s film First They Killed My Father, now streaming on Netflix, inspired by two Cambodian survivors: a friendship and the memoir by Haing S. Ngor. An exhibit recently closed at the U. S. Holocaust Museum, and there’s been a surge in dystopian fiction titles like 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and It Can’t Happen Here back onto bestseller lists. All trying to make sense of the senseless, carrying warnings about freedom, morality, vigilance.

Note: Ngor’s heartsickening words preface the novel: “Tell the gods what is happening to me.” Which Dogs at the Perimeter does in Thien’s unique way. Ngor won an Academy Award for his supporting role in the 1984 film, The Killing Fields. Troubling that it seems we need to be hit over the head again filmically to jog our memories, or etch a memory, about the worst that can happen to vulnerable and complacent people under evil despots.

The artful author has created an artistic website for the novel that includes delicate, entangled, lace-like drawings related to the brain, a depiction labeled “minimalist,” alluding to and quite descriptive of Thien’s writing style.

Her first introductory fragment informs us that Janie has not heard from Hiroji in three months, having disappeared without a trace. Others are drawn from Hiroji’s files Janie finds in his apartment where she’s holed up in. Immediately, the reader is seized with curiosity as to why she’s taken up such a bare, sorrowful existence, apparently separated from her husband, Navin, and their 7-year-old son, Kiri, whom she adores.

Other fragments send messages about the brain from Hiroji’s notes on neurological cases of patients losing their memories and minds. Then, Janie stumbles on his personal letters, which arouse fragments of memories when she was a girl in Cambodia terrorized under the Khmer Rouge. Some memories are tenderly evoked, like the sound of her father’s voice echoing like “rainfall.” As these fragments accumulate and sharpen, we painfully sense and feel Janie’s deep-seated, emotional turmoil and the Cambodian thread connecting her to Hiroji, which might explain his vanishing. The details we’re given are still relatively scanty, allowing the author to deftly prepare us for what’s to come.

Chapters alternate between Janie and Hiroji’s names, sharing fragments of past histories. As Thien’s minimalist style reveals more, their chapter names are altered, jarring us, reflecting their former lives and selves (and those of significant others). Even Cambodian children took up arms and spied on millions the Communists deemed enemies and useless. An entire citizenry trusted no one if they had any chance of staying alive. Radicalism that sought to erase every element of a progressive society, destroy a beautiful country, and rock Buddhist beliefs.

The author threads her chapters finely, laying bare fragments of the atrocities. More than enough to rip our hearts, disturb existentially.

People went to “great lengths in the hope that they never will be found.” Dogs at the Perimeter takes an unusual approach to explain why.

Lorraine

The ghosts of racism (Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and Delta regions, past and present colliding): Jesmyn Ward’s brilliant Sing, Unburied, Sing woke me up nights. Of all the books I’ve blogged about, this is the one most affecting.

Creative writing professor at Tulane University Jesmyn Ward – who just won a Macarthur Genius Award and is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award having already received it in 2011 for Salvage the Bones – has created a work of art that’s an activist’s plea for racial justice, equality, dignity. She speaks for all the oppressed, marginalized people who’ve been victims of bigotry, violence, racial profiling, economic injustices and other forms of discrimination and prejudice not only in America’s Deep South – where all the author’s books are set, specifically in Mississippi her home – but for swaths of our country where people are also suffering and stereotyped.

“The rotten underpinnings of the South anchor the whole damn country, like the swampy bottom of the Mississippi River delta. And now we are all sinking in it,” she wrote in a 2016 piece, This Was the Year America Finally Saw the South.

Clearly, this is not a light-hearted novel. The songs that it sings are painful ones, sorrowful like the Sorrow Songs sung by slaves on plantations and at Parchman Farm – Mississippi’s notorious State prison with its legendary brutality said to be worse than slavery – wrenchingly portrayed in the novel. An immoral past that lurks and crashes into a troubled, troubling present, embodying the racist soul of the novel. Lest we forget, Mississippi Blues music originated from the Delta.

The author writes like a poet. Not just rhythmically but in words that pack a lot of meaning into a few. At 285 pages, the novel feels longer as we stop to contemplate the implications of veiled words or a phrase, subtexts and emotions. Illustrative is the lyrical title and the word unburied, which took me almost to the end (page 233, to be precise) to fully grasp its full import, making the novel an ideal choice for book clubs. Moreover, it could trigger honest, deep-set feelings for this fiction is as real and as forceful as it gets. Hot like Mississippi’s heat.

My night wakefulness brings to mind what Pat Conroy revealed how he felt about slavery when he read Toni Morrison’s Beloved: he got “nightmares”. In fact, some are calling Jesmyn Ward the Nobel Prize winner’s contemporary.

Opening with a chapter on the graphical slaughtering of goats, the author forewarns that her story of a poor black family living in bayou country is going to be harsh, that her story will be Black or White, not gray. Yet what bubbles underneath the surface is nuanced, boiling with anger, grief, despair, disillusionment, confusion, waiting to erupt like Yellowstone’s geyser. The surfacing happens most of the time in cringing and subtler ways as everyone in this family is hurting, building to several out-of-control explosions. The most central, setting off the most reactions, is brought about by a car trip from Mississippi’s south to the north, to that torturous prison in the Delta.

Some describe the novel as a “road trip.” It is in the sense that its intent is to carry home the white father of the two children in the family, incarcerated for three years. But this is not a trip that frees. And it’s not the kind of high-spirited trips you might immediately think of like Thelma and Louise or Jack Kerouac’s rollicking classic, On The Road. No, this is a bedeviled trip from start to finish, where the spirits are dark and ghostly.

Speaking of ghosts … Two of the characters who inhabit the novel powerfully and importantly are ghosts: Given and Ritchie. Ritchie’s spirit is the more prevalent and invasive, his yearning voice even taking over a chapter. An unsettling presence when the family begins its trek home from Parchman, but the truth is he’s been weighing down the patriarch in the family, Pop, for a very long time. Back then they called him Riv, when he was an innocent imprisoned at the wretched slave-farm, where Pop met Richie on the cotton chain gang. Ritchie was just a boy, thirteen, the same age as our male narrator, Jojo (Pop’s grandson). The second apparition – Given – appears whenever Pop’s daughter, Leonie (Jojo’s mother) – our female narrator – is high on drugs. Ritchie and Given were both murdered young, murdered because of the color of their skin.

You may not favor the magical realism style of writing, but Ward works it like magic. She invents supernatural beings to vividly express how the history of racism keeps repeating and haunting. She imbues two characters – the alternating narrators, a boy and the mother he can only bear calling Leonie – with super-powers. They can see the ghosts of the racial past so we can.

To borrow from Laura McBride’s short-cut to introducing the main characters in her novel, ‘Round Midnight, here’s a snapshot of this sorry family:

• Jojo is the one who breaks our hearts.
• Leonie is the one who can’t mother.
• Kayla is the “golden one,” the one most “starved for love.”
• Pop is the tough one whose soul can’t rest.
• Mam is the sweet one dying of cancer.
• Michael is the white one, the outsider.

To fill in the blanks some more: Jojo is the profound heartbreaker because he’s just a kid expected to be both a man and a mother. His acceptance, sensitivity, caregiving, and abundant love for his three-year-old sister Kayla also uplifts us the most. He sleeps on a pallet on the floor with Kayla to soothe her. Their drug-addicted, physically and emotionally abusive mother is never around, physically or emotionally, unhealthily grieving the violent loss of her protective younger brother, Given. Pregnant at 17 by Michael, she’s the character most complicated, begging us to try to understand her rather than like her. Even that’s not easy as she’s so out-of-it she doesn’t notice her children and when she does, she “can’t.” Can’t isn’t poetic but there’s so much baggage and distress loading down all her can’ts. Most evident is her Mama (Jojo’s Mam) is dying. A herbal healer, she can’t heal herself.

Jojo and Pop are the carers in this novel (Mam used to be but now she’s bedridden). Grandparents gave Jojo a place to call Home. Home is more than a physical place, it’s the place where we’re cared for. Ward wants us to know this even before we begin the novel, through a lovely dedication to her mother: “who loved me before I took my first breath. Every second of my life, she shows me so.” The concept of Home looms large. Baby Kayla’s clinging, hugging, nuzzling, longing to be “smushed” fills the pages, meant to not only consume her and Jojo but us. Unconditional love and belonging are strong tools that might help weaken some of Leonie’s can’ts.

Jojo and Pop’s nurturing are the lightness, as is the beauty of the saltwatery, marshy landscape and Mam’s growing garden. We’re searching for Hope yet keep bumping up against the stark contrast between the richness of the fertile soil to nourish versus the deprivation of the “black-soiled heart of the State” personified by Parchman.

Mississippi is our hungriest State, the second poorest. Sing, Unburied, Sing sings those Mississippi Blues. Music we should all be listening to right now.

Lorraine