At 32, Kirk W. Johnson is a veteran of a particularly harrowing kind of politics. A soft-spoken and reluctant activist, he met an auditorium full of high school students in downtown Cleveland on a mild November evening. Together, they reflected on his story, and his new book: “To Be A Friend is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind.”
The title derives from an observation by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. As America pulled out of Vietnam, Kissinger noted dryly that being an enemy of the U.S. could be dangerous, but being a friend could be fatal. Still, “within a few years, nearly a million people came here from Southeast Asia and have become a critical part of our nation’s fabric,” Johnson said. “Some are members of Congress now.”
The thousands of Iraqis who aided the United States – in the Green Zone, as translators, doing myriad support tasks – haven’t been nearly as fortunate.
Johnson’s host, “Facing History and Ourselves,” strives to teach students about perpetrators of violence, about bystanders and the rare individuals it calls “upstanders.” Mark Swaim-Fox, who directs Facing History’s Cleveland office, introduced the writer as an “upstander.”
Johnson painted himself an unlikely champion. In 2006, he was recuperating from injuries in his parents’ Chicago home, soured on his civilian work for USAID in Baghdad and Fallujah. But he opened an email from Yaghdan, an Iraqi colleague who had been spotted leaving the Green Zone. The next day Yaghdan awoke to a decapitated dog and a death threat. He fled with his wife Haifa to Dubai and sent Johnson one terse sentence: “People are trying to kill me and I need your help.”
The email led Johnson to write an op-ed piece, published in the Los Angeles Times December 15, 2006, under the headline “Safeguarding Our Allies,” the first major American newspaper to broach the plight of U.S.-affiliated Iraqis. Within days, Johnson’s inbox was flooded with pleas from Iraqis in similar straits. Frightened and uncertain what he might do, Johnson opened a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and started entering names.
The spreadsheet grew into “The List,” and then, more formally, “The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies,” a nonprofit organization that has become the largest pro-bono American legal effort on behalf of refugees. “For the last seven years, I’ve been trying to deal with the consequences of that 1,000-word op-ed,” Johnson said, smiling.
Scribner, $26, 338 pp.
The work also attracted independent filmmaker Beth A. Murphy, whose documentary, “The List,” draws a parallel between Oskar Schindler and Johnson.
Her subject would no doubt blanch at that comparison. As he spoke in Cleveland, Johnson repeatedly circled back to the word “frustrated,” stressing the “narcoleptic bureaucracy” that has thwarted the will of Congress, expressed in the passage of the “Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act,” which authorized 25,000 visas. That Act expired this October 1, some 17,000 visas unused.
“Bush or Obama, the bureaucrats all say the same thing: ‘9/11 changed everything. We need to keep the Homeland safe,’” Johnson said. “But has 9/11 changed this country so much that we can’t make the distinction between our enemies and our friends?”
Some of the people waiting for visas dragged wounded Americans out of harms’ way, only to lose their own legs doing so, Johnson said. It pains him that England and France evacuated their Iraqi employees within weeks, while his organization has documented that some 1,000 Iraqis were slain while their former employer, the United States, dithered.
Two who did arrive safely were Yaghdan and Haifa, who have become parents to a son. Yaghdan has earned his MBA.
Kevin Powers, winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf book award for “The Yellow Birds,” called Johnson’s new memoir “a heartbreaking reminder of the wreckage we’ve left behind in Iraq. And it is unafraid to ask some of the most essential questions regarding our involvement there: Are we who we say we are? And if we are, why haven’t we kept our word? I urge everyone to read it.”
In the harem, women did not go naked. Nor did they wear flimsy, see-through harem pants.
Despite the panting Western imagination, so memorably examined by Edward Said in his 1978 book “Orientalism,” the classic Western fantasy of the harem never existed in fact, reports Lisa Nielson, the Anisfield-Wolf scholar at Case Western Reserve University.
“The harem is the symbol of the Orient – women lounging, indolent, beautiful, passive objects,” Nielson said during an October lecture on “Improvisation and Transgression: Musicians of the Harem,” given for the Baker-Nord Center on Humanities at Case.
In the artistic imagination of Western painters, harems contained reliable tropes: feathers, the hookah, an exotic despot, unclothed women and often musicians. “Clothes are a sign of status, and playing musical instruments and smoking while naked is actually not that comfortable,” joked Nielson, who teaches a SAGES course on the women’s quarters in history and in the Western imagination.
Perhaps the Western nonsense reached its nadir, she said, in the 1965 Elvis Presley vehicle, “Harum Scarum.” This movie, in which Presley plays an American singer enlisted by sinister forces in the assassination of an Arab king whose daughter he loves, is so dreadful that Nielson said she “bought it for a dollar and I paid too much.”
Nielson stressed that there is much to discover about the historical harem, which is only one specific form of gender segregation among many. Such segregation is found in the Bible, ancient Greece, China, Korea, India, and Europe. The word “harem” as a reference to the women’s quarters is specific to Ottoman Empire; other cultures had different terms and rules for these spaces. Moreover, Nielson noted, “the women of the women’s quarters were highly educated, skilled, and, often quite ruthless.”
The role of the musician was one of entertainer and intermediary in the harem, reports Nielson, who earned her doctorate in ancient musicology and gender studies. As in the West, there was a struggle in Islam over whether music stirs indecency or represents a pathway to the divine. “In the West, angels play music and intercede for us,” Nielson observed. “Music itself is the intermediary. Among Sufis, music was a way of getting closer to God. Therefore, the musician, who was frequently a highly skilled member of the women’s quarters, had access to the ruler’s body and soul.”
We are very far from harem pants, indeed.
The wood-frame Cleveland house where Langston Hughes once scribbled teenaged insights is back from the brink. Four years ago its back door flapped open and its copper fixtures had been pilfered by thieves, leaving ugly holes in the walls.
Today, it is renovated, and ready for its new owner, an aspiring writer from Lyndhurst. Perhaps the 3-bedroom home’s proximity to long-ago greatness will bring him luck. Langston Hughes was just 15 in 1917 when he rented the attic room on E. 86th St. His mother and stepfather had moved away, and Langston was doing well at Cleveland’s prestigious Central High School. He had started to write poems.
“The only thing I knew how to cook myself in the kitchen of the house where I roomed was rice, which I boiled to a paste. Rice and hot dogs, rice and hot dogs, every night for dinner. Then I read myself to sleep,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea.
Young Langston was a star on Central’s track team, and in its literary magazine, “The Monthly,” where his first short stories appeared. Ethel Weimer, his much-respected English teacher, encouraged him to read Walt Whitman, Carl Sandberg, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay.
He went on to attend Columbia University (for a year), travel the world and play a central role in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes returned briefly to Cleveland in the 1930s when the Karamu House produced six of his plays. In 1954, he won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his novel, Simple Takes a Wife.
But even as Hughes became enshrined in the 20th Century American pantheon, the colonial on E. 86th St. declined. In 2009, a neighborhood improvement group bought the decrepit property for $100 from the city of Cleveland, only to discover that the celebrated poet of the Harlem Renaissance had been a boy there.
Debra Wilson, real estate manager for Fairfax Development Corp., said her small nonprofit was ill-prepared to find the cash that rescuing a historic landmark would require. Nevertheless, her group managed the renovation and to sell it in October for $85,000. (See listing here.)
“We put about $174,000 into it, but we’re not complaining. We’re very proud,” Wilson said. “We’re doing a Langston Hughes reading garden next to it on land the Cuyahoga County Land Bank donated.”
Occasional news stories have meant “we get phone calls about it from around the world,” she said.
Studying the poetry Langston Hughes wrote during his adolescent in Cleveland, the scholar Arnold Rampersadobserved that it is ”dominated by images of childhood. He was a star high school athlete, the best high jumper in Ohio, and again and again he depicted himself as a child in his poetry, showing an extraordinary quality of innocence” in a complex man.
In 2012, biographer Rampersad returned to Cleveland to be honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement award.
Junot Diaz did not dress up for his talk. He wore black jeans, worn boots and his white shirttails out beneath a charcoal sweater, front and back. On an October Friday afternoon, he walked into the terraced auditorium at Cleveland State University, and leaned companionably against the wall, sipping coffee out of a disposable cup as Professor Antonio Medina-Rivera introduced him.
Medina-Rivera ran through Diaz’s dizzying credentials: a full professor at M.I.T., a 2012 MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, a Pulitzer Prize for his vibrant first novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which also won an Anisfield-Wolf book award. In addition, his host reported, Diaz volunteers at Freedom University, a new institution that attempts to meet the needs of undocumented college students in Georgia.
The 44-year-old Diaz took the stage and gradually built a case for embracing ambivalence and imperfection. “I am never trying to be right,” he said. “I’m trying to be the launch pad for somebody to be righter.” He mocked the preening persona-building on Facebook. He smiled and joked, even as he delivered some withering political remarks. Here is one sample:
“The elites are running rough-shod over us. They are engineering forced income transfers to the top. Elites are gutting the middle class, and that gets a shrug. But say, ‘A Mexican is taking your job,’ and everybody has an opinion.”
Diaz read the same passage from “Oscar Wao” that he selected in 2008 when he appeared at the Cleveland Public Library: three pages at the start of Chapter Two that describe Oscar’s sister Lola called to the bathroom by their mother to feel for a lump in the matriarch’s breast. It is a gorgeous passage, and one of the few stretches in the book without profanity or explicit sexual asides.
When Diaz finished, a student asked him if he thinks in Spanish. The writer was born in Santo Domingo, a third child in a neighborhood without electricity. His mother brought him to Parlin, N.J., to rejoin his father when he was six.
“Spanish is my birth language, and everything that means,” Diaz answered. “English is my control language, and everything that means. I can’t be super-smart in Spanish. In Spanish, I am less guarded.”
Asked how he perfected Lola’s voice, Diaz observed that poor children come-of-age in front of each other, in packed living quarters. In the comfort of the American middle class, adolescence happens privately behind closed doors.
“Most of us have so many aspects of ourselves, it is almost impossible to reconcile,” Diaz said, recounting his own years pumping iron as a young man, only to be caught out for his nerdy, Dungeons and Dragons-loving side by a dorm mate at Rutgers. There he fell under the literary influences of Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, even as he worked full-time delivering pool tables, washing dishes, and pumping gas to cover tuition.
Diaz poked fun at peers who name Charles Dickens when asked who is their favorite author. He made a point of praising contemporaries – Ruth Ozeki for her new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being,” and Edwidge Danticat for “Claire of the Sea Light” calling it “unbelievable, the best one she has done.” (Danticat won an Anisfield-Wolf award for “The Dew Breaker” in 2005.)
Everyone, Diaz claimed, is searching for the place where “all the parts of us can be present and safe.” For him, that place was reading. “I write because I love books,” he said. “Writing is just my expression of my excess love of reading.”
Still, he warned his listeners against unbridled enthusiasm. “Love something too much and you know the kind of kids you raise. . .
“It is OK to be involved in a practice you are ambivalent about. Some of the best parents are ambivalent about being parents. . . I am deeply ambivalent about the craft of writing. Anyone who grew up in the shadow of the (Dominican Republic) Trujillo dictatorship can’t see stories as only good. There is a cost to everything. I am always aware of the shadows that lurk in every artistic practice, and I’m always troubled by them.”
Then the sober mood broke. In a different conversation, Diaz allowed that he had been texting pictures of Cleveland. He sent one to his buddy Christopher Robichaud, a lecturer in ethics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Robichaud grew up in Euclid and Chardon, and graduated with a degree in philosophy from John Carroll University. The two men bonded over “tabletop role-playing games, horror movies, superhero comics,” Robichaud said.
And yes, he answered Diaz: the structure the writer photographed was indeed the West Side Market that Robichaud had described in their chats about childhood.
October 9 is the first anniversary of the grim day that masked gunmen stormed onto a bus in Pakistan and shot a child in the head. Their motive was political: She had defied them publicly, having the temerity to insist that girls be allowed to attend school.
The world now knows her mellifluous name – Malala – and many were heartened by her medical recovery, capped July 12 when she addressed the United Nations. “One child,” she said, “one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.”
At least one cohort of adults believes her. A collection of poets has rallied to contribute to “Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai,” edited by Joseph Hutchinson and Andrea L. Watson. Its publication coincides with this first anniversary, and its proceeds go to the Malala Fund.
“This anthology is evidence that some poets still dare to respond to what’s happening in the larger world, and we believe they are making a significant contribution in doing so,” Hutchinson writes in the foreword. Meanwhile, speculation builds that the girl may win the Nobel Peace Prize this October.
For the moment, though, sixty writers from around the world stand with Malala. Kathleen Cerveny, poet laureate of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and the director of arts initiatives at the Cleveland Foundation, made the cut. Here, in its entirety, is her villanelle, “At Fourteen”:
Who was I at fourteen? Who were you?
Diverted from the real by lives of ease,
could we have stood up, then, and claimed our due
as humans growing hungry for the new
excitement of the mind – things never seen?
Who was I at fourteen? Who were you?
A girl has stood against her world. She drew
the fire of those who guard what’s always been
and stood steadfast against them, claimed her due.
Her courage is a brush that paints a view
of human worlds more worthy – rarely seen
by coddled ones, like me, like you.
The cowards’ bullets aimed to silence truth;
pierce brain and tongue – still both thought and speech.
She fell, but has not failed to claim her due.
And has the gift for rights now been renewed
by blood, the hunger of one child to learn?
This girl of fourteen shames both me and you
If we don’t stand – demand what we all are due.
When the starter failed Tuesday in A. Van Jordan’s car, the poet leased a rental and made a deadline dash from Ann Arbor to Cleveland. He arrived in good time to read five poems for “Brews and Prose,” a monthly literary series at Market Garden Brewery that uses beer to try to ease art away from its academic moorings.
Jordan, 48, a University of Michigan professor, won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2005 for “M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A,” which explores the life of MacNolia Cox, the first black child finalist of the National Spelling Bee in 1936. She grew up in Akron, as did Jordan, who infuses his work with history, physics, and music.
A year ago, Jordan told an audience at Arizona State University, “I went to a kind of crappy high school where we didn’t read novels. We were reading out of readers.” But a summer library program widened his vision, as did the coffee shops of Washington, D.C., where Jordan worked as a young environmental reporter and discovered open mic nights.
“A brother who can write is far more threatening to the status quo—and I mean the Negro status quo as well as the white—than a brother with a gun and pants hanging off his butt,” he told an interviewer for Baltimore’s “Spectrum of Poetic Fire.”
In Cleveland, Jordan used his pleasing baritone to introduce listeners to his latest poetry collection, “The Cineaste.” The Rumpus reviewer, poet Sean Singer, called it Jordan’s “best book (so far).”
Its 25 poems each focus on a film, from “The Great Train Robbery” to “The Red Balloon” (introduced to young Van in that Akron library series) to “Blazing Saddles.” Jordan called the Mel Brooks comedy “one of the most brilliant films on racism in America” and launched into his piece that begins:
What is so funny about racism
is how the racists never get the joke.
In most settings, racists stick out
like Count Basie’s Orchestra in the middle
of a prairie, just as awkward as he is . . .
One of the most moving poems in “The Cineaste” is “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing,” the title of a 1987 movie by Patricia Rozema about unrequited lesbian longing. It begins, “Often, I find myself in situations/for which there are not adequate epigraphs.” Jordan read it in Phoenix, and in Cleveland. Here is a video clip – the poem begins at 2:45:
Kevin Powers didn’t flinch when the novelist Thrity Umrigar asked him a pointed question—had he considered incorporating substantial Iraqi characters in his much-honored novel “The Yellow Birds”?
Power’s first book, an impressionist portrayal of combat and its consequences during the Iraq War, won an Anisfield-Wolf book prize this year for fiction. The National Book Award cited it as “an urgent, vital, beautiful novel that reminds us through its scrupulous honesty how rarely its anguished truths are told.”
Umrigar, a professor of creative writing at Case Western Reserve University best known for her novels “The Space Between Us” and “The World We Found,” politely asked if Powers had thought to write a story that “would give the Iraq people agency?”
Powers, 32, nodded vigorously, standing at a lectern on the Case campus, and said he’d weighed that question. “Because I’m telling this single soldier’s story, I wanted to be true to his perspective, his inability to understand the larger picture,” Powers said of his narrator, Private John Bartle. “I wanted to stay true to the distance, the chasm that exists, in an unformed young person, not capable of these interactions.”
Powers himself joined the U.S. Army the day after he turned 17, serving as a machine gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. He was deployed “outside the wire,” backing up infantry and cavalry in units trying to find Improvised Explosive Devices before they found their targets.
Thoughtful, soft-spoken and given to the “y’alls” of his Richmond, Virginia upbringing, Powers took 20 minutes to read the final chapter of “The Yellow Birds” to his Baker-Nord Center audience. It awakened in several veterans a desire to speak about the burdens they bury, and carry, from the killing they did and the dying they witnessed. The atmosphere was tense, and Powers listened long and intently. Three times he responded to statements from veterans with a quiet “absolutely.”
Occasionally, Powers said, someone will object. They will note that “War is hell” and assert there is nothing new to say. But, “it still feels necessary to me,” he said. “Until we can say, ‘War was hell,’ then somebody needs to keep saying it. We shouldn’t have the excuse that we didn’t know how bad it was.”
The writer assured his listeners that the specifics of “The Yellow Birds” “are very different from my own experience,” but acknowledged that he drew upon his own guilt and shame and attempts to make sense of his memories in crafting the novel.
“I spent four years writing it, more or less, in isolation,” he said. “I didn’t know if anyone would publish it or read it.” He often wrote until 3 a.m., persisting, he said, because writing was the way he makes sense of the world.
“I can’t separate reading and writing,” he said. “If I wasn’t a reader, I wouldn’t be a writer. I simply have never found a better way of dealing with the confusion I feel when confronted with the world.”
Powers didn’t keep a journal as a soldier, saying he didn’t have the stamina, or the mental reserves. But the books his mother mailed him were a lifeline, and he wrote some letters. About two years ago, a friend showed him one that he’d sent to her.
“I could see the point in the letter where I almost opened up, but didn’t,” he said.
Next April 1, Powers will publish his first collection of poetry, “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” And he has begun work on a second novel, set in hometown Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and the ashes of the Civil War.
He notes, “I will probably always be interested in the way that violence affects communities, how people respond to those sorts of situations and how people put a life together when not all the pieces are intact.”
Eugene Gloria says that he is fascinated by failure. He was quick to describe a particular poem or two as failed, and even his book, “My Favorite Warlord,” which won a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, as a failure of his original idea to describe 1967.
“I ran out of ideas for 1967, became bored,” Gloria told listeners at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. “I ran out of gas, even though I was obsessed by it. The idea of failure is fascinating to me.”
And yet, 1967 is a fulcrum in “My Favorite Warlord” – the year his family arrived in San Francisco from the Philippines, the year his future wife was born in Detroit, the year that Wole Soyinka is “being hauled to jail/on trumped-up charges” as Gloria writes in “Allegory of the Laundromat.” He told the MOCA audience that he was thinking about soul music as he wrote it.
Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., praised this very poem as he introduced Gloria to the sold-out audience gathered at the Ohio Theatre Sept. 12 for the Anisfield-Wolf awards ceremony:
“What I find so resonant in all of these poems is the idea of multiplicity, that we possess many identities stemming from the many diverse forces that have shaped us,” Gates said. “In Gloria’s case, he is shaped by a Filipino background, though education among the nuns in a Catholic school, to coming of age in the same neighborhood in which he found ‘Janis Joplin shoring up supplies/from our corner Chinese grocer.’”
Gloria, 56, has taught for 13 years at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. He read his poem, “Here, On Earth” for both the crowd at MOCA and the throng at the Ohio Theatre. He told his listeners that it captures his relationship to Indianapolis. The final two stanzas:
Here, on earth we are curtained by rain.
A subset in the far corners floating
toward the center. We are an island
in landlocked America. We are
Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese.
We are, all of us, post exotics.
At MOCA, Gloria followed a reading from Kazim Ali, an Oberlin College professor who started with his poem “Fairytale.” It concludes, “All the sacred words/are like birds wheeling in the sky./Who knows where they go?” The political nature of Ali’s reading inspired Gloria to start with “Elegy with Ice and a Leaky Faucet.” He called it “one of the oddball poems in my collection; it failed as a political poem.”
And yet “Elegy with Ice and a Leaky Faucet” is many reader’s introduction to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man beaten to death on the eve of his wedding by Detroit auto-workers enraged at the ascendancy of Japanese cars in the U.S. market. “The dialectics of fists and ball bats/turned his wedding party into a funeral” Gloria writes.
When Ali and Gloria perched on tall stools together at MOCA, Ali spoke about the context for two of his newest poems, which focus on Bradley Manning, convicted in July for violating the U.S. Espionage Act.
“We are political,” Ali said. “We can notice it or not notice it.”
“Amen to that brother,” Gloria responded. “We try to avoid being cliché. The struggle is taking an overt political position in an art that calls so much attention to language can be problematic. But like Kazim says, we are all political.”
The men riffed on Shelley’s famous maxim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” suggesting that the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” may well be the secret police.
Before he returned to Indiana, Gloria said, “The idea of identity is always going to be a subject. I have no choice. Identity is so multi-layered and I am obsessed.”
Photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems paused in front of more than 600 rapt listeners in late August to take a question from a young woman about her series called “Ain’t Jokin,” excerpted in the current retrospective of her work at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Weems had shown her Cleveland audience a slide of a black woman looking into a mirror asking who is the fairest of them all. The cutting retort in all capital letters: “Snow White, you black bitch, and don’t you forget it!” Weems then repeated aloud another question posed in the 1988 “Ain’t Jokin” series: “What are the three things you can’t give a black person? Answer: a black eye, a fat lip and a job.”
Some in the audience gasped. “Humor has become a very important place for me to land,” Weems said evenly.
“Your joke series can be very jarring,” the young questioner began.
Weems in a 2003 piece titled Missing Link (Happiness): “Ultimately, I’m a performance artist documenting my performances in the world.”
“It is really jarring,” Weems echoed her. “Nothing human is alien to me,” she continued, quoting the ancient Roman dramatist Terence. “I don’t think you need to be very, very knowledgeable to engage with art. Art changes lives all the time.”
It certainly has illuminated Weems, who said she was aware, as a seven-year-old in Portland, Oregon, that she wanted to create art. With her father’s blessing, she left home at 16 to try to make her way, landing as a performer in Anna Halprin’s progressive Dancer’s Workshop in San Francisco. It was 1969.
“A boyfriend, who was actually a jerk, gave me a camera on my 18th birthday,” Weems said. “I picked it up and I immediately had a sense of what I wanted to do.”
What she has accomplished has placed Weems, 60, among the most celebrated contemporary American artists. Her photographs and
accompanying text explore justice and gender and race through bodies, often constructed tableaus, which reverberate with gestures toward history and culture.
So, for instance, she takes up a desegregation protest in Boston, placing documentary video of angry whites in juxtaposition with counterpart blacks, slows the footage and sets it to stunningly mournful music. The result mesmerizes and haunts, making the viewer look again at what he or she assumes to know.
The exhibit, which was first shown at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, is free and open to the Cleveland Museum of Art public through September 29. It collects more than 125 photographs, videos, and sound installations from the last 30 years of Weems’ work. One of the most famous and moving is “Kitchen Table,” a powerful black-and-white series completed in 1990 in which Weems explores relationships between women and men, and women and women.
The photos are hung alongside 14 panels of text that narrate a story of a 38-year-old woman with a “bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions.” Weems used herself as a model.
“Making ‘Kitchen Table” was one of the most profound experiences of my life,” Weems told her Cleveland audience. “It was coming, it was gushing, it flows and it went where it needed to go.” She looked out at Robert P. Madison, 90, a pioneering Cleveland architect. “I know Mr. Madison knows what I am talking about.”
“A Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome,” from Roaming, 2006.
Weems’ smile, her frankness, her erudition and her rich, alto voice demonstrated a gift for intimacy—a hallmark of her art. Weems said she believed that avoiding what makes us uncomfortable keeps us apart.
And then her smile broadens with candor. “I only like people to a certain extent,” she added, “because usually they are a pain in the ass.”
This August 14, the graduate program at Case Western Reserve University for a Masters of Finance will welcome 60 new students, culled from more than 1,000 applicants. This entering class will be 95 percent Chinese, all international students eager to learn about securities and capital markets that are newly applicable in their homeland.
This dramatic demographic shift has its echo in American undergraduate ranks. U.S. colleges and universities are enrolling a surge of new students from China, tripling in the last three years, according to data from the Institute of International Education. The first-year class at Case will include 135-150 new international students, the largest cohort in the Cleveland university’s history. The vast majority will be from China.
These students—more than 100,000 in California alone—contributed $21 billion to the U.S. economy in 2011-12, but the fit is tricky and the trend is stirring debate, said Nancy Abelmann, a professor of Asian-American studies and a vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“In the midst of this national debate, not lost is the fact that international students are cash cows,” she said July 9 during a webinar for college admissions staff entitled “Today’s Chinese Students.”
Typically, international students pay full freight and are ineligible for U.S. government aid. “We’re in something akin to the gold rush, a frontier-style environment where college and universities, like prospectors in the 1800s, realize that there is gold out there,” said David Hawkins, the director of public policy at the National Association for College Admissions and Counseling, in an interview with the New York Times.
The webinar, sponsored by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, picked Abelmann as keynoter to give preliminary findings from her anthropological study of some 200-250 students on her own campus. “Changing demographics is really changing the meaning of diversity on campus,” she said. “And the rise of international students coincides with a dip in under-represented domestic minorities.” International students now outnumber American minorities on her campus, she said, and the pattern is spreading across North America.
Faculty can be particularly baffled by this shift. Abelmann said colleagues often ask, “Who made this decision? Who is in charge? And what are we doing about it?”
Language barriers can erode a professor’s confidence and a student’s participation in class. This disconnect can bleed into the social realm. Many U.S. campuses have a club for Chinese-American students speaking English and another for Chinese international students speaking Mandarin.
Another challenge is falsified documents. Zinch China, a consulting company that advises U.S. college administrators about China, published a 2010 report based on interviews with 250 Beijing high school students bound for America. The study concluded that 90 percent of Chinese applicants submitted false recommendations, 70 percent hired others to write their personal essays, and half used forged high school transcripts.
Such findings require context and discernment: one webinar panel addressed “Evaluating Chinese credentials.” For generations, Abelmann said, the United States has attracted “a population of students who went to upper-tier Chinese universities and come here to graduate school. They are very, very different from the fee-paying undergraduate population, which is a wealthier population with different intellectual preparation. Adjusting to this very different new group of undergraduates has been a challenge.”
Abelmann and her colleagues call this new group “indifferent globalizers,” who don’t seek out America’s multi-cultural waters. “Indifferent globalizers have an aversion to building multi-cultural social lives,” she said. “They like the comfort of exclusivity and don’t see why they should apologize.”
Like many in the world, Chinese students perceive Asian economies as creating the best opportunities, and many plan to make their careers at home. “It may be that one reason the students are not so oriented to older models of integration here is that many students don’t intend to stay,” said Adrienne Lo, an anthropology professor and colleague of Abelmann’s at the University of Illinois.
Two days after the women addressed the webinar participants, University of Delaware undergraduate Jianwe Ke described his U.S. collegiate life. He said he traveled to Newark because he wanted applied knowledge in electrical engineering, not more of the theoretical emphasis he had at home. “And,” he added, “in the U.S., there are not so many obstacles between you and your dream.”
Liya Huang is majoring in hospitality management at the College of the Desert in Riverside, Calif., “Before I came here,” she said, “I had no idea of U.S. colleges. I thought it would be similar; I found it was totally different. Chinese universities give you the schedule. You don’t pick the classes you want.”
Abelmann stressed there is much variability among students, and across campuses. The University of California-Irvine serves fifth generation Chinese-American students, and American schools of engineering are often ahead of other departments in retaining and serving students from abroad.
Both Ke and Huang spoke poignantly about making American friends, although not as easily or as deeply as they would like. Huang said orientation at her campus was a wonderful icebreaker full of practical, useful advice. Ke said he joined no clubs, but had found a friend is his lab partner.
“I interested him in Chinese food and he interested me in African-American food,” Ke said. “I have been to his house several times. In the U.S. – how to say? – it gives you many cultures. I can have a beautiful adventure.”
The gorgeous new documentary, “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” delivers several jolts of insight, including this small one: Women who can hit and bend those beautiful notes have glorious laughs.
Laughter buoys much of this 90-minute film that explores the unheralded world of backup singers. The spotlight falls on Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer, Judith Hill, Claudia Lennear, Tata Vega and Merry Clayton. “About time, too,” as Bette Midler remarked in 2011 when she introduced Love as a new inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
These women – mostly African-American – sang back up on countless rock classics, adding vocal transcendence to the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Bruce Springsteen and plenty of others. And because they sang the bridge, they – not the stars – are the ones we invariably sang along to.
Expect to get a head rush of revelation.
Many of these singers were preacher’s daughters, notes director Morgan Neville. “These voices make their way from the church onto vinyl,” he says. British legends such as Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker and David Bowie jumped to hire them, partly to import soul and authenticity into their songs. Neville splices in archival footage of all three performers with their backups – and we see and hear with fresh eyes why “Young Americans” sounds so good.
Neville said that this project blew apart his assumption that the voices in the background were less talented than the ones at the front: “Backup singers can blow away lead singers any day of the week, every day of the week.”
The psychology of being a secondary is explored in these women’s stories. “I felt like that if I just gave my heart to what I was doing, I would automatically be a star,” says a pained Merry Clayton, whose magnificent voice didn’t make her a headliner, despite the best efforts of Lou Adler.
Clayton describes being awakened in the night to record with the Stones – arriving at the studio in silk pajamas and curlers to be handed the music for “Gimme Shelter.” She delivered the immortal “Rape. Murder. It’s just a shot away.” And it still stuns Jagger, 50 years later, as he listens to it here.
The film tucks in other stunning bits. We learn that Darlene Love—Darlene Love!—cleaned houses to pay her bills before her comeback in the 1980s. We soak in the jazz-saturated richness of Lisa Fischer’s voice, and witness her emphatic joy in singing harmony, even after winning a Grammy.
These women take us places that Auto-Tune will never go. Can I get an Amen?
Lawyer Louise P. Dempsey punctuated her recent lunch-hour talk by passing out sheets of paper with a single riddle: “A father and a son are in a serious automobile accident. The father is taken to University Hospitals and the son is life-flighted to Metro. In the operating room, the surgeon says, ‘I cannot operate on this patient; he is my son.’ How is this possible?”
Some of the listeners gathered at the Union Club in Cleveland were stumped. Others knew the answer: The surgeon is the boy’s mother.
“I didn’t get this riddle the first time, and I consider myself a feminist,” Dempsey said. “And recently, the entire Civil Rights division in Boston saw it, and no one could solve it.”
Dempsey, who serves on the American Bar Association’s Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline, used the brainteaser to illustrate implicit bias. These are the hidden assumptions people carry that influence their behavior despite their explicit beliefs.
Research shows that people can be committed to egalitarianism, and work to behave without prejudice, but still carry implicit bias that bleeds into behavior. “These biases remain in us as a sort of mental residue,” Dempsey said.
Skeptical? Scientists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington have a little test for you. Measure your implicit bias on race, gender, sexuality, religion, weight, Arabs & Muslims and in several other categories. Each test focuses on one variety of bias and takes about ten minutes online. It can come — as mine did on race — with a corrective slice of humble pie. Find out at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
On July 2, Atria Books will publish eight versions of a new autobiography, “Unbreakable: My Story, My Way,” by Jenni Rivera, the Mexican American star who sold more than 15 million albums in a career cut short in a fatal plane crash last December.
“Unbreakable” will come out in English and Mexican Spanish—which Rivera sang and spoke fluently—and in hardcover, paperback and digital formats. The publisher will also print two special editions with extra photographs—an idea from Walmart, which committed to accepting 17,000 copies to sell, said Judith Curr, Atria’s publisher and founder.
Curr told an audience in Manhattan at Book Expo America that Atria is “one of many rooms where a different community can be heard.”
Founded 11 years ago, her upstart imprint enjoyed a critical breakthrough with “The Distance Between Us,” a coming-of-age memoir by Reyna Grande about growing up in Mexico while her parents worked “on the other side.” This moving book—also published simultaneously in English and Spanish—was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle in autobiography this year.
Such occasions are rarer in American publishing than outsiders would guess, even as some 50 million people in the United States speak Spanish.
“We’re looking to bring the work of more Mexican writers into North America,” Curr said, “but discovery is difficult. Distribution is a problem, especially with Borders gone. We are experimenting with ebooks on Amazon in Spanish and English. The results are not great, but better than not having ebooks at all.”
David Unger, a Guatemalan novelist, said that when he arrived in New York City in 1974, there were seven Spanish-language book stores. “Today, we have a boutique book store in Spanish Harlem,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Many people speak Spanish here (in the U.S.), but there is not a book market,” Trujillo said. “First- and second-generation Spanish speakers here, they want to speak English. They want to move in English, work in English and Spanish has been left for the house, the tradition…Books in Spanish that are here have come mainly from Spain, and that is a trend we are trying to buck.”
Unger said that Spain’s stumbling economy, with 27-28 percent unemployment, has created an opening for more Mexican Spanish books, one that he sees prospering under the Guadalajara Book Fair, which started in 1987 and now attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. “Some 700 book professionals from the United States attend each year,” he said.
Diego Rabasa, co-founder of the Mexican publishing house Sexto Piso (“Sixth Floor”), argued that literature meant more than developing markets for books. “We live in a country going through a very deep, complex, long-lasting conflict,” he said. “How do we shape a new social consciousness? Each book should contribute to that.”
“Some of you may be asking: ‘Hey, John Lewis, why are you trying to write a comic book?’” said the legendary civil rights leader, smiling at the incongruity of this development for an audience at Book Expo America, the annual publishing trade show in Manhattan.
John Lewis was 17 when he met Rosa Parks; 18 when he joined forces with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, he was one of the “big six,” an architect of the historic Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963. Standing at the Lincoln memorial, Lewis spoke sixth and King spoke tenth, stamping the day with his immortal “I Have a Dream.” Of all those who addressed the throng a half century ago, Lewis is the only one left.
Now, at 73, he has become the first member of the U.S. Congress to craft a comic book. Called “March,” it will publish August 13, the first in a trilogy written with Lewis staff member Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell, the award-winning cartoonist.
The idea isn’t as whimsical as it sounds. Aydin, a comic book enthusiast from Atlanta, knew that in 1957, a 15-cent comic entitled “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” inspired the Greensboro Four. At least one read the comic and the four students from North Carolina A&T State University decided to sit down in protest at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
Lewis himself led a group trying to integrate a Woolworth’s counter Feb. 27, 1960. They prayed and drew on the principles of non-violence. “People came up to us and spit on us and put cigarettes out in our hair,” he told listeners at the Book Expo. “I was so afraid, I felt liberated.” The episode led to jail, the first of Lewis’s more than 40 civil rights arrests.
He grew up on 110 acres in rural Alabama, the third child of sharecroppers who managed to buy the land for $300 in 1940. Young John liked to wear a tie and give sermons to the chickens. Local kids called him “preacher.” As a boy, he was instructed “not to get in the way” of whites, but he still applied for a library card in tiny Troy, Ala, where the librarian scolded him that they were only for whites.
On July 5, 1998, Lewis returned to Troy, for a book signing of his memoir, “Walking with the Wind,” which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award that year. “At the end of the program, they gave me a library card,” he said. “It says something about how far we’ve come.”
Lewis said he initially resisted Aydin’s notion that he tell his story in a graphic format. The two were hammering up yard signs in southwest Atlanta during Lewis’ campaign for Georgia’s 5th District seat five years ago and chatting about how to teach the Civil Rights movement to 21st century youth.
“Finally, he turned around with that wonderful half-smile he can do and said, ‘OK, let’s do it,’” said Aydin. “‘Let’s do it, but only if you do it with me.’ ” Aydin called this a threshold event in his life.
Watch a short interview with John Lewis and Aydin at the 2013 Book Expo America
“When you grow up without a father you spend a long part of your adolescence looking for one,” said Aydin, who is now 29. He and artist Powell said “Walking with the Wind” became their Bible as they brought Lewis’ story into the present. The trio frame the trilogy around the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.
“We took the accuracy very, very seriously,” Aydin said. Powell, who grew up in Little Rock, Ark., and now lives in Bloomington, Ind., is drawing the second book now. He said he emails with Aydin almost daily, and when they are unclear, they consult Lewis.
“I feel the most important thing is to capture what is not explicit in the script,” Powell, 34, said. “I am looking for the emotional resonance – the doubt, fear, unity and togetherness that characterize the Civil Rights movement but don’t come with captions.”
He said he works hard researching the clothes, food, insects and plants that give his art verisimilitude. “It is very easy to get caught up in the drama of events,” Powell said, “but there is a lot of beauty in the South, in the red soil and the bricks, the kind of walking and talking people in the South do.”
Already, Powell has told one Civil Rights story in graphic form, “The Silence of Our Friends,” set in Houston in 1967 and written by Mark Long. It explores the tested friendship of two men across race.
The Congressman dedicates “March” to “the past and future children of the movement.” He told the publishing crowd in New York that another installment is overdue.
“I believe it is time to do a little more marching,” Lewis said. “I believe it is time for us to move our feet… I hope that this book will inspire another generation of people to get in the way, find a way to get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 477 pp., $26.95
Hair asserts itself on the first page of “Americanah,” a knowing, prickly and virtuosic novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She was 29 when she won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2007 for “Half of a Yellow Sun”; she picked up a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant the following year. Her mother, a Nigerian university registrar, likes to say little Chimamanda started to read when she was 2. The writer herself thinks it was probably around age 4.
“Americanah” wears its genius lightly, starting with a pleasurable and assured set-up chapter that puts its central character Ifemelu on a train from Princeton to Trenton, N.J. Her mission: to have her hair braided. After 13 years stateside, most recently on a fellowship to Princeton, Ifemelu has decided to return to Lagos, Nigeria. At the salon, she asks for “a medium kinky twist” and negotiates $40 off the $200 asking price. The salon is thick with relaxing chemicals, hair extensions and black female sensibilities—a rich elixir that brings out the personalities and styles of the women gathered there. The air-conditioner is broken; Nollywood melodramas play across the television. Adiche returns her readers to the shop again and again.
All manner of hair and women come under scrutiny, including “the clamped, flattened” appearance of the current first Lady: “Still, there was in Michelle Obama’s overly arched eyebrows and in her belt worn higher on her waist than tradition would care for, a glint of her old self. It was this that drew Ifemelu, the absence of apology, the promise of honesty.”
Ifemelu herself is blunt; all of her opinions are strong. She writes a popular, anonymous blog called “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” The novel contains a handful of these posts – one very long installment is improbably read aloud at a party. The voice is funny, astringent and revelatory: “When white people say dark they mean Greek or Italian but when black people say dark they mean Grace Jones.” I can imagine both Cornel West and Clarence Thomas learning a thing or two. I certainly did – none of it particularly flattering. No place or demographic niche escapes unscathed.
“Americanah”—it should be stressed—doesn’t reprimand. The writing glints; minor characters flair and spark: “The General had yellowed eyes, which suggested to Ifemelu a malnourished childhood. His solid thickset body spoke of fights that he had started and won, and the buckteeth that gaped through his lips made him seem vaguely dangerous.”
At the braiding salon, Ifemelu pegs a young white woman named Kelsey with “the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America is.” This woman is reading to prepare for a sight-seeing trip to Africa. She finds “Things Fall Apart” “a little quaint, right?” but says “A Bend in the River” made her “truly understand how modern Africa works.” In one withering paragraph, Ifemelu blows up the enshrined V.S. Naipaul novel so completely that it left me gasping. At such moments, it is hard not to see Ifemelu as a doppelganger for Adichie.
Earlier this month, the author told National Public Radio that “this is a novel about love, about race, and about hair.” Ifemelu’s core love interest is her secondary school sweetheart, Obinze, with whom she cuts off communication after she enters a very bad patch in the United States. Obinze, for his part, makes his way to London, and even as everyone in his smart set in Nigeria “joked about people who went abroad to clean toilets,” he starts work with a lavatory brush. Later, at a London dinner party, Obinze listens to guests who are sympathetic to immigrants fleeing atrocity, but not those seeking an economic foothold:
“They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.”
Adichie’s cultural acuity is a marvel, but she glosses how some systems create more “choice and certainty” and others less. Her observations hug the interior. Much of the book is dialogue. One blog post mentions Beyonce: “We all love Bey but how about she show us, just once, what her hair looks like when it grows from her scalp?”
The author, interested in “the rolling contradictions that were the world,” cleaves them open on three continents. Those who like their literature bracing should crowd in for a look.
Few modern poets range as widely through time and geography as Rita Dove, the former U.S. poet laureate. But when she took the stage of the Ohio Theatre in downtown Cleveland April 11, the evening had the sweet tang of home.
“It’s always good to come back,” she said, 60 years after her birth in Akron. “There is something in the Midwest — particularly in Northeast Ohio — that never leaves your system. I come back and immediately I fall into the cadences of the Midwest.”
Dove, whose musical alto drew an audience of more than 700, grew up immersed in the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, during a childhood that also made room for fractal geometry and “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” Ronald B. Richard, president of the Cleveland Foundation, noted that the 1955 children’s picture book influenced the poet’s “sense of color and space, two primary concepts in her poetry.” As he introduced Dove, Richard praised her instrumental work as a juror for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Dove told her audience that her creativity “starts with a line, not a grand idea. It’s an ache, an absence that I am trying to fill.”
The evening flowed chronologically through Dove’s nine poetry collections. She began with “Geometry,” a poem that reflects her love for mathematics, and one, she told the audience, that also grapples with its limits:
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
and above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.
From her second book, “Museum,” Dove selected “Parsley,” a two-part poem that addresses the mind of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic who in 1937 ordered the slaughter of 20,000 black Haitians. (Trujillo figures prominently in Junot Diaz’s novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which earned an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2008.)
Trujillo chose death for those who could not pronounce the rolling letter “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. As Dove explained this background, she encapsulated the horror: “Evil can be creative.”
Arthur Evenchik, who helps run the SAGES Fellows program at Case Western Reserve University, bought a ticket to hear Dove partly because of her work in “Museum.” He said he found out about her appearance from a SAGES instructor, Mary Holmes:
“Mary and I had never talked about poetry, and I didn’t know it was one of her interests,” Evenchik said in an email. “ But on this particular day, she mentioned lines from . . . a poem titled ‘Grape Sherbet,’ in which Dove recalls her father’s tradition of making dessert for Memorial Day picnics:
The diabetic grandmother
stares from the porch,
a torch
of pure refusal.
Evenchik continued: “Mary and I had just met up by chance on one of the quads when we had this conversation. It was wonderful to learn that we both carried this image in our heads, that Dove’s work had made such an impression on us both.”
The impression was heightened by hearing the words in Dove’s mouth, standing at a lectern with a stack of books, her hands often aloft, open, gesturing the music of the phrasing.
Dove turned her palms upward when she mentioned her initial doubts about “Thomas and Beulah,” a book that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. “I thought, will anyone want to read about Akron? And then I remembered Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’:
“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
Dove then read “Daystar,” a short poem about a young mother seeking a moment of peace. It ends:
Later
that night, when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour — where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
The audience response caused Dove to smile and say, “The mothers are applauding.” She paused to praise the Cuyahoga County Public Library, which sponsored her talk. Her gratitude took its form in what Dove often calls her “love poem to libraries”: “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967.” She told the audience that was the year her parents wrote a note to the staff to let their daughter check out anything she wanted.
Watch Rita Dove read “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967” in the video below.
Some of the fruit of that reading may well have nourished the pointed poem “Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove,” set during the 1940 Academy Awards, when the actress won an Oscar for her performance as a maid in “Gone With the Wind.” Dove’s poem contains this question:
What can she be
thinking of? Striding into the ballroom
where no black face has ever showed itself
except above a serving tray?
Dove spent the rest of the evening dwelling on her latest title, “Sonata Mulattica,” a book-length cycle telling the story of the 19th century African-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower and his turbulent friendship with Ludwig van Beethoven. As with all her work, the attention to detail threads through a profound feel for history. Dove said the most difficult part of the work was freeing Beethoven from the plaster cast modern readers picture when thinking of him.
Dove, who wore a brilliant turquoise dress, acknowledged her relatives in the crowd, and read a new poem called “Reunion.” It begins: “Thirty seconds into the barbecue/my Cleveland cousins have everyone/speaking Southern.”
The sense of family was palpable, even for those whose kinship was aesthetic. “I felt that I was surrounded by fellow readers who appreciate her writing as much as I do,” Evenchik remarked. “That was a privilege almost as great as hearing Dove herself. “
As for Dove, she was generous and encouraging to the students who flocked to her after the performance. “Read your butt off,” she told them. “Read, read, read. Nothing is too low or too high. If you don’t love reading, you can’t love writing.
“The other advice is: live. Writing is about life, it is not about literature.”
Gary Schmidt, the lanky author of winning children’s novels such as “The Wednesday Wars” and “Okay for Now,’ stood up before a dining hall at Kent State University and admitted to choking up early in the day. He had caught a 5 a.m. flight south from Grand Rapids, Mich., where he teaches at Calvin College, to join the Virginia Hamilton Conference, the longest-running event in the United States to focus exclusively on multicultural literature for children and young adults. It is held annually at Kent State in the spring.
Once in his airline seat, Schmidt got out his copy of “First Part Last,” a luminous book by the conference keynote speaker, Angela Johnson. “I’ve taught this book eight times to college classes,” he said. “And I got to the part where Bobby tears up the adoption papers and I start to well up. The people sitting next to me in seats 11 B and C asked if I was alright. They offered to sit with me if necessary.”
Schmidt paused and shook his head. “I was completely humiliated,” he deadpanned. “Thank you for that Angela.”
Johnson, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2003 for her own children’s fiction, laughed. When it was her turn at the lectern, she let the audience imagine her at age 15, one year younger than Bobby, the mesmerizing narrator of “First Part Last.” He tells of teen fatherhood from a boy’s point-of-view.
Young Angie was angst-y. She wore a necklace made of razorblades. She stormed around her small town home in Windham, Ohio, threatening her brother with decapitation if he entered her room. Her writings were rejected by the school literary magazine for being too grim, too full of rats in tumbled down buildings. (What the adult Johnson didn’t mention was she was also a Windham High School cheerleader.)
Into this potent adolescent moment came Valerie Barley, “an old Beatnik teacher,” who commanded the attention of her students, including Angie, whose tastes ran to detective stories. “She got us to love the Beats,” Johnson said. “She got us to read about people on the road.”
The audience of about 150 was rapt. Johnson, 51, doesn’t own a car and rarely accepts speaking invitations. She joked that her Kent neighbors perceive her as a wacky character wearing “a hoodie and pajama bottoms” throughout the day.
She claimed to have overhead one woman whispering, “It’s OK. I think she’s a writer.”
That writer’s beginnings predate high school. Johnson said that she “didn’t say much as young child. I was a born listener. I was the child who sat under the table while my aunts talked – full of inappropriate stories, by the way. They’d throw their heads back and laugh and their laughs made me want to tell stories.”
Her first book, “Tell Me a Story, Mama,” started as a manuscript discovered by Cynthia Rylant, of “Henry & Mudge” fame. The older woman met a college-age Johnson when Rylant advertised for child care. The women got to know each other and Johnson remembered shelves of children’s books and “real food in the crock pot.”
Then, unbeknownst to the babysitter, Rylant copied the Mama story and mailed it off to her own publisher. The editor at Orchard Press offered to buy it on the spot.
More than 40 titles later—with three Coretta Scott King awards for “Toning the Sweep,” “Heaven” and “First Part Last”—Johnson still commands a room. In warm, mellifluous tones, she retold a family ghost story for the Kent State audience, describing the red dirt of Alabama caked on the feet of her father as a child. Every table was leaning in.
“Kids and teens are so much more interesting than adults,” Johnson once told the African American Literature Book Club. “Life is happening when you are a teenager. One minute you’re a child, the next you’re allowed to go out in the world by yourself. Who knows what will happen?”
Looking out on the audience in Kent, Johnson said, “I sometimes still feel like a confused teen or a small child stumbling. But the quest goes on, and I write on.”
American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is not allowed into China.
He mentioned this fact at the end of his well-attended March talk in Cleveland, noting he is unwelcome because of his support of Liu Xiaobo, a writer and political activist who won the Nobel peace prize in 2010. At the ceremony in Oslo, Liu was represented by an empty chair.
Appiah, a Princeton University professor, won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 1993 for his book, “In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.” Today he is president of the PEN American Center, whose home page features a vibrant photo of Liu, with the statement “jailed for writing seven sentences in China” and an invitation to view his case.
“Many, many more writers would be in prison today if we weren’t constantly popping off about it,” Appiah said of Liu’s incarceration. “Still, we haven’t managed to get him out.
“Chinese people complain to me about my regular complaints about Chinese human rights,” Appiah told several hundred listeners assembled in Severance Hall for his lecture on making moral revolutions. “I say, ‘Don’t complain about my complaint – complain about us, the United States.’”
This robust dynamic is caught, Appiah writes, by Thomas Jefferson, who referred to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” in the American Declaration of Independence. This is “why the nation’s honor can be mobilized to motivate its citizens,” Appiah writes in his 2010 book, “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.”
His latest book is a scholarly and elegant examination of three practices—dueling in 18th Century England, foot binding in China, and Britain’s transatlantic slave trade—and how each came to a decisive end. All collapsed fairly abruptly.
“Whatever happened when these immoral practices ceased, it wasn’t, so it seemed to me, that people were bowled over by new moral arguments,” Appiah writes. “Dueling was always murderous and irrational; foot binding was always painfully crippling; slavery was always an assault on the humanity of the slave.”
Still, foot binding, which thrived for a millennium, ended in the span of a generation: Political scientist Gerry Mackie reports that “the population of Tinghsien, a conservative rural area 125 miles south of Peking, went from 99 percent bound in 1889 to 94 percent bound in 1899 to zero bound in 1919.”
In his book, Appiah calls this “the great unbinding” and attributes it to Christian missionaries campaigning against the practice combined with an awakening of national honor. The Chinese elite were increasingly shamed that outsiders condemned the practice as backward.
But as he gave the F. Joseph Callahan Distinguished lecture, Appiah did not dwell on foot-binding. He spoke, softly and forcefully, about cracks in U.S. national honor: 25 percent of the world’s prison population incarcerated in a country with four percent of the global population, and a lack of “democratic discourse” over drone strikes abroad, which Appiah said, had “killed huge numbers of absolutely innocent people, more than were killed in the World Trade Center.”
In sampling historic moral revolutions, Appiah cited Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia, John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, “the Bernie Madoff problem” and the 1792 novel by Frances Burney, “Cecilia.” He ranged fluidly across cultures and centuries.
Appiah suggested that U.S. students—such as those at CWRU—were bound up in the nation’s honor, and the beneficiaries of “one of the best university systems in the world.” He expressed optimism that his listeners could be instigators of the next moral revolution.
“When you point out that people aren’t living up to their standards,” Appiah concluded, “you are appealing to their national honor, which, by the way, is what was crucial to the ending of foot binding.”
Boston—U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young turns 81 this week. He was barely into his 30s when he traveled with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fewer than eight other civil rights activists to confront the violent, insidious racism of Birmingham, Ala.
Wearing a blue bow tie, a sweater vest, and a calm mien, Young sat down at Harvard University for “A Freedom Fighter Looks Back: A Conversation With Ambassador Andrew Young on the 50th Anniversary of King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
“Today, key provisions of the Voting Rights Act are under attack,” observed Young’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and Anisfield-Wolf jury chair.
The afternoon began with a distilled tutorial on the legendary letter. Jonathan Rieder, a Barnard College sociologist, played an audiotape of King talking about the water cannon and police dogs of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s notorious public safety commissioner.
“We will leave them gutted by their own barbarity,” King said on the tape, as Young sat listening, his eyes closed. King saw the water cannon – which would hospitalize the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth — as a form of baptism. “Growing up, I was dog-bitten for nothing,” he said. “I don’t mind being bitten for freedom.” King described Bull Connor moving around in a white tank: “They can get their dogs, get their water hoses, Bull Connor can even get his white tank. Our dark faces will stand up in front of that white tank.”
Quietly, Young suggested his listeners “get the frame right. We went there with a plan, and we started back in January [1963]. My job was nursing the negotiation process – the outreach to the Episcopal bishop, business leaders, and students.”
The economic boycott of Birmingham – supporters bought nothing but food and medicine – was 95 percent successful, Young said. From January through April 1963, the slogan was “blue jeans for Easter.” All the while, Young, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King, and Shuttlesworth pressed the Birmingham department store owners to allow their black “maids” to sell clothes. They demanded the segregated signs over drinking fountains come down.
“They cussed us out,” Young remembered. Meanwhile, in Alabama’s largest city, a young black delivery boy had been castrated and dozens of bombings of black homes and churches were unsolved.
“Martin had not really recovered,” Young said. “He was stabbed in the chest in ’58. He was arrested in the middle of the night in ’60 and put in chains, then driven four and half hours on the bad, back roads of Georgia in the back of a paddy wagon with a German shepherd. He was just 30 years old, and that was as close to a nervous breakdown as he came – that was what killed Steven Biko,” the South African whose 1977 death after 11 hours in a police Land Rover helped draw global attention to the evils of apartheid.
In Birmingham, King was “being pressed to give up. He was thrown in jail, he was despairing, and then he wrote that beautiful letter,” Young said. Galvanized by a public “Call for Unity” from eight Alabama clergy – who called King an outsider and a troublemaker – King used the margins of a newspaper to write what became a sacred text of the 20th century.
Young described King as a prophet, but insisted the rest of the activists were unremarkable. He quoted his daughter Andrea, who edited his 1996 memoir, “An Easy Burden.” She said: “You were just some get-down brothers in the right place at the right time and you did the right thing.”
Young made it clear that his time in Birmingham was “a religious experience,” that he felt the presence of God when King was in jail and the nation newly stunned by television scenes of dogs tearing at the legs of nonviolent protesters, and blasts from fire hoses knocking children down.
The protesters returned, he remembered, and someone shouted for prayer: “You had 5,000 black folk on their knees, and what you heard was not so much prayer as a moan. We were singing, ‘I want Jesus to walk with me’ and, even with Bull Connor yelling at them, the firemen let their hoses drop, and the dogs didn’t bark, and we got up and walked to City Hall.”
Young, an ordained United Church of Christ minister, joked that the Baptist men around him didn’t take his faith too seriously, but he saw that jail – in that context — could be sanctifying: “We had Bible study three times a day and freedom songs all day and all night. For some of the youngsters, it was the closest they had to a loving spiritual experience.”
The movement began, Young said, to fight racism, war, and poverty: “Now, legal racism is dead and war is increasingly seen as unpopular and irrational. But we criminalize poverty and put poor people in jail at a greater expense than it would be to educate them.”
During the questions, a young woman asked the ambassador to identify a few key characteristics that will help new movements rise. Carolyn McClain Young, the ambassador’s wife, spoke up from the audience. She advised the student to look into her own heart, and to take a lesson from King’s father, “Daddy King”:
“In life, everyone is given a cross. When you really arrive is when you pick up the cross not given you. When you pick up the other’s cross and carry it.”
She sat down and Young waited to catch her eye. He held it for a second, and nodded.
Somewhere, a canny business professor may be plotting to put Mohsin Hamid’s astringent new novel into an MBA course. It would be a brilliant move.
Not because the advice it contains is revelatory — “Get an Education” and “Work for Yourself” are actual chapter headings — but because Hamid’s tight, mesmerizing story raises the thorny questions that cluster around the bloom of wealth. Indeed, readers will detect a whiff on cultural criticism in the eight words of the new book’s title.
As it opens, “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” poses as a self-help book. Following this convention, it addresses the reader as “you.” The text finds you as a small boy “huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning.” This is because you are weak, your eyes yellow with hepatitis E, and your family’s fortunes turn on your health. When you recover, your parents decide to move to the city, the first step on your trajectory toward riches.
You don’t get a name, nor does the city, nor does the nation, although Time magazine has decided it’s Pakistan. That will no doubt amuse Hamid, who won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 for his hypnotic novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” The author grew up partly in the United States, and partly in Lahore. Yet in interviews around “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Hamid observed that he was sometimes asked if he was a version of the title character, never the American listening across a cafe table to that character’s story.
Like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Hamid’s new novel is taut and smart and subversive. Each of the 12 chapters starts with a playful verbal squall about self-help. “Distasteful though it may be,” begins chapter seven, “it was inevitable in a self-help book such as this, that we would eventually find ourselves broaching the topic of violence. Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else.”
Hamid is echoing French novelist Honore de Balzac’s riff that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” This idea helped animate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and like Gatsby, the protagonist in Hamid’s new novel longs for an unattainable woman. Here she is just called “the pretty girl.” Despite such fable-like distancing, Hamid manages the significant trick of seducing his readers to care about these characters, even as he toys with our expectations for a rags-to-riches story.
So dear “you” first moves around his new town on a bicycle, then a motorcycle, then in a rebuilt truck. As the conveyances become more luxurious, the commentary becomes more pointed, and Hamid’s pleasurable light touch fades. By the time “you” has become a water industrialist, you are keeping company with “four pump-action-shotgun-wielding security guards” and “the aquifer below the city is plummeting and becoming more contaminated every year, poisonous chemicals and biological toxins seeping into it like adulterants into a heroin junkie’s collapsing vein.”
Clearly, Hamid can write. His is a confident, confiding prose. But underneath, as in “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a quiet fury gathers. The reader travels these pages fueled by dread. Capitalism may have won the globe’s embrace, but becoming rich is still filthy work. Importantly, reading this latest Mohsin Hamid novel is no work at all. May it work its subversive way into the curriculum of business schools everywhere.
