What We Are

Struggling with words right now, but this song = this book.  A more legitimate  post will follow when I’m feeling more verbose.

Ode to Ghettonerds

It’s not a book, but I’ve listened to it about twenty times in the past two days.

House on Mango Street

Sometimes I ask words to do too much.  I struggle through the first twenty pages of a book as if it will fix something.  Sometimes I ask authors to have paragraphs that are heavier than my thoughts so they can occupy spaces of my brain that have been colonized by worry.  I do what I’ve deemed defensive reading.  When I’m upset, speechless, and out of alcohol, I reach for a book.  My favorite book, the one that has grown with me and inspired more growth, is House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.  I let a friend borrow my copy, so I find myself missing it.

I first read it in the sixth grade when I was too young to appreciate most of it.  The only chapter that spoke to me was entitled “My Name.” My name is Tavae (tuh-veye).  It tumbles around clumsily in the mouths of most Americans because of all the vowels, but there’s a beauty to the way Sāmoan-speakers say it.  It should be considered a talent the way they make sense of words that have such an absence of consonants.  Using plain and simple language Cisneros shows readers a girl who felt othered by her very name.

Years later, I read the book in my high school Spanish class.  I’ll admit that I was more taken with the imagery than anything else.  The themes were of little concern to me since they didn’t seem to coincide with the latest episode of Gilmore Girls.  She described the feeling of loneliness as only a young Esperanza could because for a little girl with no best friend loneliness was a sad red balloon floating around aimlessly.  Cisneros’ vivid sentences also had movement as she wrote of apostrophes leaping over commas justifying the invention of personification.

In college, I rediscovered the book in Chicano Studies 40.  I didn’t like the class, but I always enjoyed the reading list.  It had been some four years since my previous reading.  All of the words seemed new, and they struck me in ways they hadn’t before.  “My Name”  now resonated with the patriarchy that I was just beginning to see in my own life.  Here was a protagonist who was determined to avoid her grandmother’s fate, a womyn who “sat sadness on her elbow.” I thought of my own great grandmother who I was named for.  She lived to be 103 years old.  I never met her, but always knew her legacy and felt physically and emotionally the effects of European diseases like misogyny.

As my love for N’Sync and Animorphs has faded over time, this book has remained relevant.  When my niece Ailaoa (who has already garnered at least five nicknames) comes to me complaining about how no one can pronounce her name, I will sit her down and introduce her to Esperanza.

Miss Universe

This morning while delaying my trek to work, I perused my roommate’s library.  I make it sound far fancier than it actually is.  It’s really the result of her inability to throw anything out. Her collection spans everything from Captain Underpants to Jane Austen.  She does not share my voracious appetite for literature, so some of the books sit on our shelves dusty and neglected.  Case in point, after reading this she responded with, “I have Jane Austen books?”  That being said, I try to show her books some love every now and then.  They’re also FREE!

Today I happened upon a treasure called Miss Universe by a super empowered Pinay womyn named Ruby Veridiano-Ching.  She is a self-proclaimed pun-aholic (the title of the book itself is a pun) with a fierce commitment to her search for (self) love.  Her book of poems speaks to the “hopeful romantic” that she prays exists in everyone.

Things to love:

1. This book is what bravery looks like.

She lays bare all of her emotions, thoughts, and insecurities giving readers true insight into her own perpetual journey to self.

1. Real talk.

Like a true artist she seems so robust with honesty that her words bleed truth in a language that is simple, accessible, and well…swaggeriffic.  Yes, spell check, I know this is not a word recognized by Webster’s colonizer dictionary.

1. It’s about love.

Although I would appreciate the irony, hating something that is so unabashedly about love just seems wrong.

A caveat…

Much of the poetry is done in the spoken word manner that the author is accustomed. So if you find yourself reading it and it doesn’t sit right, then READ IT ALOUD!  That’s what it was intended for.

I’ve never been accused of any Nicholas Sparks influenced tendencies, but this book on love just worked.  Maybe it was Ruby’s nomadic tone or the fact that after reading this once, I feel comfortable enough to use her first name.  It could also be the Jazmine Sullivan station I was bumpin on Slacker radio (the Blackberry alternative to Pandoria that takes up a lot fewer gigs). Either way, I will always co-sign on a powerful womyn of color who writes about her learned self-hatred and her decolonial path to self-love.

Purple Hibiscus

I was first introduced to Chimamanda Adichie in the front row of Victoria Robinson’s Ethnic Studies 130AC class.  Professor Robbie played a clip of an eloquent Nigerian womyn who warned of the “dangers of the single story.”  In a ten minute YouTube video she had provided more enlightenment than I had received from hours of class lectures.  (Sorry Vickie B!)  Adichie taught me a life lesson that would inform my daily interactions with people.  With such a dazzling first impression, I was only further excited to read what Professor Robinson dubbed her favorite book, Purple Hibiscus.

Adichie shares the story of Kambili, a young girl growing up in Nigeria bound by her religious fanatic of a father and her own seemingly limitless fear of the world.  Kambili’s world changes in one short visit to her aunt who serves as a foil to her father’s conservative nature.

Now, Adichie is without a doubt a talented wordsmith.  Her writing is visually stunning, and she does with sentences what painters achieve with brush strokes.  Her style is both light and powerful, and her tendency to place nouns where others would use adjectives is impressive.  However, I found the main character Kambili frustrating.  This is probably reflective of my own prejudices, but her growth was far too slow for my liking.

Perhaps the aspect of the book that really spoke to Adichie’s strength as a writer was the way she made Nigeria itself a character.  It was as round and dynamic as any one of Kambili’s family members.  The landscape also appeared to grow and breath with Kambili’s moods.

I’m not surprised that my favorite Ethnic Studies professor loves because it very directly addresses issues of colonization and imperialism in a Fanon-like manner.  Would I recommend this book?  Sure.  It’s well-written and tells a story that few other authors will.  Conclusion: buy it so you’re supporting a womyn of color author, but get the used copy like I did.  Ballin’ on a budget…

Wild Seed

Reasons to love Octavia E. Butler:

1. She’s Octavia E. Butler.

2. She says things like this:

“I am a 53-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer.  I’m comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive…”

As you may have guessed by now my newest literary obsession is Octavia Butler.  Ever since reading her novel Kindred in my first year of college, I have wanted to further explore her works.  Finding myself with more time for leisurely reading I have finally delved into her repertoire by reading Wild Seed.

This book is one of the best I have read in a very long time.  After wading through many a novel with predictable plots and tired archetypes, this read was refreshing.  Wild Seed traces the story of immortal healer and shape shifter, Anyanwu.  Terribly lonely after living hundreds of years and watching her loved ones come and go Anyanwu agrees to join Doro, a fellow immortal who promises to father children that she will never have to bury.  However, Doro differs in one key manner.  He survives by killing, violating the very nature of Anyanwu’s healing abilities.

Butler does well by using these characters to investigate gender performance, race, and the politics and power dynamics inherent to those identities as Anyanwu and Doro interchange between male and female forms throughout the book.  Although I won’t wax poetic about Butler’s prose, she creates strong dynamic characters that drive her plot.  Each person she introduces is intentional and integral to her narrative.  I think the most telling aspect of her writing is her Baldwinesque ability to neither “demonize nor deify.”  She breaks down the traditional binary of hero(ine) and villain by humanizing otherwise immortal characters.

I once insulted Butler by calling her a womyn of color science fiction writer.  I was wrong.  Her writing goes beyond western European categories.  She is a truly talented and gifted storyteller who challenges norms while provoking thought and inspiring growth.

READ IT!

And so it begins…

Upon the suggestion of my older and wiser friend Holly who is prone to accuracy and generally bad-ass behavior, I started this blog.  This is a blog for the often ostracized and under appreciated ghettonerd in all of us. Ghettonerd is a term that I have borrowed from awesomely talented Dominicano author Junot Diaz.  Ghetto and nerd…two words that have often been used to alienate and mistaken as mutually exclusive.  The French would call the combination a port-manteaux; scientists would dub it an amalgam.  For a Samoan-American girl with a healthy and sometimes freakish appetite for books who grew up in a world that said that white people had the monopoly on knowledge, the word was a welcome respite.

I started reading at the age of three, when my dad in his iron fist drill sergeant manner would have me read him stories from my children’s bible.  I’m sure he intended this as more of an exercise in morals (the funniest of jokes for those who know me well), but instead I walked away with a respect for storytelling and a need to keep reading.  The father who treated biblical parables like bedtime stories was the same man who enforced strict reading rules:

1.  I had to read silently for at least one hour each day.

2.  I could not watch a movie unless I had first read the book.

The rules have outlasted my father’s ability to enforce them (with the exception of Harry Potter, sorry JK Rowling).  As I grew older, books became less of a burden, and more of a retreat.  I would look to the words of great womyn authors like Toni Morrison and Sia Figel to explain things that I couldn’t express.  When I felt weird about my overtly ethnic name that sounded nothing like Sarah or Brittany, Sandra Cisneros gifted me with the story of Esperanza who grew up on Mango Street.  When I complained about constantly reading European thoughts from European authors, Albert Wendt shared the legend of Pouliuli.  Books have always been a site of learning and healing for me.

So, what does my torrid love affair with books mean for everyone else? Well, I will be using this blog to offer up my uncensored and unabridged suggestions, reviews, critiques, and something that falls somewhere in between all of those.  You won’t find me scouring the shelves of the public library for my next intellectual meal.  This is mostly unfortunate because I love things that are free, but I find the forced silence of libraries disturbing.  I try not to turn my nose up at books with Oprah’s seal of approval, although her non-fiction selections leave something to be desired.  I gravitate towards womyn of color authors, and I want this blog to be a space to highlight the unsung heroines (and maybe if I’m in a good mood the heroes too) of literature. May this blog be as good to you as readers as it is therapeutic for me, the writer.