June 7, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ntozake Shange By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) is one of those writers who just don’t want to stay on the page. The book that made her famous was not a book, really, but a “choreopoem”: the now legendary For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which was first performed at a women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, in 1974, before it traveled to New York City and eventually ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway. Shange wrote poetry, most of which was refined in the presence of a band, and novels, including Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, which bursts with idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, healing rituals, recipes, and gemstone lore. In its overall effect, her work feels less like something to be read than something to be experienced. This was a deliberate strategy of black American resistance, Shange tells us in her 2011 book of essays, Lost in Language and Sound. As a child of the seventies, Shange was, in her own words, an Afrocentrist, who adopted a Pan-African identity to the extent that she uses “we” in essays on places as disparate as Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. “My house, my neighborhood, my soul,” she writes, “was immersed as far as I can recall in the accents of Togo, Liberia, Trinidad, Costa Rica, Chicago, Lagos, New Orleans, Bombay, and Cape Town, not to minimize in any way drawls of the Mississippi, clipped consonants from Arkansas, or soprano-like chisme (gossip) of Kansas City.” Due to the cross-cultural riches of the diaspora and because “most black people have some music and movement in our lives,” Shange posited an “independently created afro-American aesthetic” that was essentially multidisciplinary. She refused limitations, hated plays that were just dialogue without music and dance, and rejected English as the speech of the slavers and “the language I waz taught to hate myself in.” After all, For Colored Girls more than just a work of art, it was a spell or a ritual or a promise of aid to those on the brink of despair. Read More
June 6, 2019 The Big Picture Modernism’s Debt to Black Women By Cody Delistraty An exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay centers on a black model named Laure in Édouard Manet’s Olympia and reinterrogates the role of black people in art history. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51″ x 75″. Presented at the 1865 Salon. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Around the time that Édouard Manet was painting Olympia, in 1863, a liberating politics was underway in France. Napoleon III had become so distracted with foreign affairs—handling the Second French Intervention in Mexico, breaking up a burgeoning Roman Republic in order to restore the Pope’s power, and making colonial conquests throughout Central Africa, Asia, and the South Seas—that he had little time to resist many of the political pressures back home. And so he was actually carrying out some of the promises he’d made in the run-up to his Second Empire coronation, such as reducing media censorship and allowing workers to strike. By 1870, Napoleon III, under the pressure of the Liberals, even assented to a parliamentary legislature in France, which would ultimately serve as the basis of the Third Republic. In the late nineteenth century, Paris began to seem like an integrated and relatively racially equitable city. After the 1848 Revolution, slavery had been abolished in France’s territorial colonies; Caribbean people moved en masse to the French capital. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and his father, Thomas-Alexandre—who was one of the most important black military men in European history—were viewed as unassailably prominent members of French society. Racism, of course, still existed, even at the highest levels of government: in 1884, Jules Ferry, who served as both prime minister and as president of the senate, was espousing his eugenics-based racism, saying things like, “The higher races have a right over the lower races … a duty to civilize the inferior races.” But for a moment, the scene seemed to be set for a fresh form of liberty and relative equality. Gustave Le Gray, Portrait d’Alexandre Dumas en costume russe, 1859, oval proof laminated on gray paper, itself laminated on cardboard, 10″ x 7 1/2″. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO 1986 11. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP. Art, naturally, was both driver and recipient. The poet Charles Baudelaire was dating Jeanne Duval, a French Haitian actress so beautiful she was often called the Black Venus and was painted by Manet. Manet, meanwhile, was fashioning himself as a recorder of the contemporary social scene. A number of his paintings depicted the black people who had immigrated to the northern neighborhoods of Paris. In his studio notebook, he described the black maid whom he painted standing next to the lounging white prostitute in Olympia and the black caregiver in his Children in the Tuileries Garden (1862) as “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, 3éme étage.” Manet’s depiction of Laure wasn’t exoticized—not the kind of nude caricature that had been standard of European depictions of black women. Instead, with her voguish neckline and bouquet of flowers, Laure modeled a typically “white role,” as a clerk in a department store or a server at a café. Also: whereas in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (ca. 1532), a clear forerunner of Olympia, the maid, who is white, is turned away from the nude, lounging women in the foreground; in Olympia, Laure is just as much a part of the scene, in both the amount of the canvas she takes up and her foregrounded placement. Read More
June 6, 2019 Look Beach Life By The Paris Review No one captures the colorful, blissful chaos of the beach like the British photographer Martin Parr. Some of his seaside shots swim with the verve of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Others are spare, dotted with tiny figures who are nearly swallowed up in the sprawl of the dunes. Everywhere there are stories: a seagull going about its day; surfers cresting and crashing; a couple, still wet from a dip, canoodling across their towels. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy collects and reproduces the latest in Parr’s long-running series of sandy photographs. A selection of images from the book appears below. Martin Parr, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. From the series Beach Therapy. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Read More
June 6, 2019 Arts & Culture On Effort and Letting Go By Salvatore Scibona Creative Commons License: alexanderward12 Every writer has a carburetor, unique to herself, that measures out a mist of fuel for the volume of flowing air in the cylinder of her imagination. A plug provides the spark, the fuel ignites, and off she goes. The spark is an idea; the fuel is effort; the air is grace. She needs them all, and all in balance. If the cylinder contains too much fuel, it won’t ignite. She sits in an old car on a winter morning and twists the key while she pumps the pedal: the engine makes a cranking wheeze, not the whoosh of ignition. She pumps the pedal again, adding still more fuel, to no avail. She has flooded the cylinder. She has tried too hard. For three years, I sat at my desk, about six mornings a week, and nothing happened. A strenuous nothing. With great force, I looked at the wall. Or I wrote a few paragraphs, revised, typed, extended, retyped, over a number of months, then threw it all away. Advice from Kafka hung from a thumbtack in the bulletin board over my desk: Wait. Vehemently, I waited. I was trying to write a second novel. The first had taken ten years, but I had spent most of that time writing my way into mistakes and cutting my way back out of them. Experience should have counted for something. Next to Kafka on the bulletin board hung instructions from Nina Simone to her band during a recording session: “Y’all pushing … Just relax, relax. You’re pushing it. It’ll go up by itself.” Read More
June 5, 2019 Arts & Culture The Tale of Genji: What Is It? By Anthony Madrid A woodblock print from 1852 featuring a scene from The Tale of Genji The Tale of Genji—what is it? It is a super-long, super-detailed proto-novel, written in Japan in the early years of the eleventh century. It was written by a woman whose personal name is lost but who acquired the nickname “Murasaki” on account of its being the name of the most important female character in the book. Murasaki means lavender. There’s a Japanese ink, purple of course, named after Nippon’s #1 purple girl —$20 a bottle on Amazon, if you’re into purple ink. (Probably a lot of purple things in Japan are named after Lady Murasaki.) Now, what do I mean by “super-long.” I mean 1,135 pages in the handy one-volume version of the Arthur Waley translation (originally published in six volumes, 1925–1933), 1,090 pages in Edward Seidensticker’s translation (two volumes, 1976), and I don’t know how many pages in Royall Tyler (2001) and in Dennis Washburn (2016). At any rate, it’s like with Proust: one narrative, a half-dozen novel-sized books. What’s it about? It’s about the life (especially the erotic life) of a very glamorous, heart-crushing, multi-talented dude: Genji. That’s about two thirds of it. Later, it’s about the next generation: Genji’s son, and these other ones, including a guy whom everyone thinks is his son… Doesn’t sound all that interesting, right? Oh, but it is! Because of the way the material is handled. The narrator, in fact a court lady who all her life dealt with Genjis and sub-Genjis and all their women and all their children, tells the story with a very modern-seeming strategic restraint. Her characters are selfish and generous, foolish and wise, from one minute to the next, and she simply tells you what they said, thought, and did, without overtly judging them. Now, this approach doesn’t amount to squat, when a narrator is describing beings whose moral status is perfectly clear, but the effect becomes exciting and engrossing for readers the second they find themselves longing to be told what to think. Read More
June 5, 2019 At Work Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong By Spencer Quong Two years ago, I listened to Ocean Vuong read poems from Night Sky with Exit Wounds in a crowded university hall. At the far end of the room, I leaned forward, closed my eyes, and heard his voice as if he were right next to me. Vuong reads with precision: he embraces the quiet between words in such a way that every sound is allowed to reverberate. Later, I found his reading of “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” published by The New Yorker. I listened to it over and over, and recited it to myself, trying to remember where he paused, which words he made sharp, and which he made soft. I wanted to draw as close as possible to this writer who had named something in me. I experienced a similar sonic pull reading his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The novel is a letter to a mother, but it is also a letter to anyone who finds it. On Earth uses the kishōtenketsu structure of classic east Asian narratives, which does not rely on conflict to advance the story. As Vuong told Kevin Nguyen for the New York Times, “It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone. Proximity builds tension.” Much of Vuong’s artistic practice—including the public reading of his work—seems to hinge on this principle. To listen and repeat, to read and reread, brings you into a proximity with his voice. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous concerns the most terrifying proximities, those involving the people we love. On the very first page, Little Dog, our protagonist, says, “Let me begin again.” He is writing to his mother about people and ideas he once fastidiously hid from her. There’s a boy he loves, for instance, who she has never and will never meet. But even if some isolation endures, the space between them collapses as Little Dog writes into it. He tells her about sex; about slipping under the water’s surface in the river outside the barn; about staring at the small tail of hair on the back of Trevor’s neck, the part of a “hard-stitched boy” that was “so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings.” His mother responds with her own truths and memories. The voice of On Earth is at once singular and various. Vuong performs a generous magic: he imagines every piece of each character all at once, in dialogue. And so the self’s fractal parts coalesce, if only for a moment. In our interview, Vuong speaks to the urgency of choosing to make art, “to breach new ground, despite terror,” to learn about himself and his relationships. I am grateful for his company, the words he presses down that I can carry, as we all go spinning forward. INTERVIEWER Little Dog says, “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” There’s both intimacy and distance here: “used to be.” I imagine it’s not always clear how exactly our family’s voices arrive—or fail to arrive—in our work. How have you balanced your family’s voices with your own? OCEAN VUONG That’s a beautiful question—and one I think we must navigate for the rest of our creative lives. I wonder if balance is possible, but I think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going—all of which are means toward self-knowledge. I think that’s what a novel is, at its core, one person trying to know themselves so thoroughly that they realize, in the end, it was the times they lived in, the people they touched and learned from, that made them real. This is why I chose the novel as the form for this project. I wanted the book to be founded in truth but realized by the imagination. I wanted to begin as a historian and end as an artist. And I needed the novel to be a praxis toward that reckoning. This book is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a coming-of-art. I would say that I begin with the voices of those I care for, family or otherwise, and follow them until they drop off, until I have to create them in order to hear them. My writing is an echo. In this way, On Earth is not so much a novel, but the ghost of a novel. That’s the hope anyway. INTERVIEWER There’s a moment where Trevor, Little Dog’s best friend and lover, asks Little Dog to close his eyes while they kiss, but Little Dog keeps them open. He is watchful, both observant and prone to staring. There’s another line in the novel about how mothers always look “too long.” Is there such a risk? To look too long? Read More