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The Stories We Need (Octavia Butler and Other Literary Mamas)

One of my favorite places in the whole world is a reading K-hole. I’ve been diving into these other realms since I first learned to read at age 3. (Necessity bred invention.) Even now when the going gets tough this toughie gets to reading, and even then I worried about how I’d resent any partner or offspring who kept me from a book. (A life-defining worry, as it turned out.) By kindergarten, I was on a first-name basis with everyone at my local library; today I volunteer at my neighborhood branch. The best is when I discover an author I love: I queue up all her books and sit pretty with the knowledge that I’ve divine company for weeks to come. My first such affairs were with Louise Fitzhugh, Madeline L’Engle, and Jane Austen. Then, when I needed a map out of my father’s kingdom, Marge Piercy. There’ve been so many since.

The last five days I’ve lived in a hammock under gently waving trees and read Octavia Butler, the speculative fiction author whom I’ve known I would love for 20 years but put off reading. Now I know why: I most need her at this juncture. I’m reading the Patternist series first, which is all about successfully harnessing psychic ability to create a functional community of conscious, connected people. As a woman who calls herself Carrie not entirely ironically, I’m inhaling these books like they’re oxygen and I’m underwater–which, let’s face it, I have been lately. I need to understand how to manifest what I’m starting to be shown in dreams and in my physical and emotional malaise. Butler’s words are a very fine place to start. She lets no one off the hook but devises brilliant solutions for the shadows and sunshine latent in everyone’s nature.

I always think of what Ray Bradbury wrote: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” I treasure the beauty of words, yes, but this is not why I love literature. I love it for the blueprint it offers the lonely, inventive child we each carry. This is why my favorite fiction is prescriptive rather than merely descriptive. I am looking to improve the human condition, starting with mine, and reading makes us all daughters of the universe.

Hilton Als on ‘Voyage Au Congo’

July 20, 2015 in Book Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Film Matters

It’s not an overstatement to say Hilton Als is one of the most important cultural critics working today. The theater reviewer for The New Yorker, he also is the author of the essay collections The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013), both highly original takes on the intersection of class, gender, race, and sexuality.

At Brooklyn’s packed Light Industry venue on July 16, he discussed author André Gide’s “Voyage au Congo,” a 1927 silent documentary that examines African “natives” with an appallingly detached curiosity. Als called it out with his characteristic mix of compassion and candor.

“This is a messed-up film,” he began, clad in a seersucker blazer and white bucks that put the resident hipsters to shame. “But it taught me not to look away.” He went on to discuss the abundant nudity in the film: “Gide had a lot of trouble with the black female body,” he said, and acknowledged the many other white male authors who had the same trouble, including poet Arthur Rimbaud. “Even educated people can be rude and ridiculous,” he said, and discussed recent instances in which colleagues and students had made nasty comments about his own physicality. (Als sometimes refers to himself as a “negress.”) “Perhaps this film would best be shown as a double feature with something by [black folksinger] Carole Walker. Perhaps cinema is not the best way to examine how black bodies have been treated.”

But he went on to say it is important that films like “Voyage au Congo” continue to be watched, so long as films made by people “in the margins” are watched as well. “We need to take in this material and change how it fits into our story and our society. As the world changes, this is our right and our responsibility.”

The applause from the usually too-cool-for-school audience was deafening.