Ten books finished this month, all by women/POC thanks to Black History Month! Despite the British/Irish timing of BHM, the main focus was on German Black history.
- Contrapunctus — Michael Götting
- Gesammeltes Schweigen — Heinrich Böll and Sharon Dodua Otoo
- How Long ’til Black Future Month? — N. K. Jemisin
- Black Stars — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie et al.
- Aya Vol. 1: Life in Yop City — Marguerite Abouet tr. Helge Dascher
- Schwarze Wurzeln — Katharina Oguntoye
- Clear Horizons — Dorothy M. Richardson
- Glory — NoViolet Bulawayo
- blues in schwarz weiss | nachtgesang — May Ayim
- Devil on the Cross — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Starting with those Germans, Contrapunctus is a short novel about Afro-Deutsch life in post-unification Berlin. It begins in an essentially realistic mode, but over the course of the book the attacks experienced by one character, which draw on colonial and slaving history, come to dominate. Gesammeltes Schweigen is an interesting counterpoint: Otoo’s fragmentary text engages with the Böll story, exploring the meaning of silences in a less dramatic, but equally effective manner.
The other two German works make another pair: the authors collaborated on another work (Farbe bekennen) which is now on my must-read list. Schwarze Wurzeln is an essentially academic text, detailing the experience of Black people in Germany down to the post-war era. The main sources are oral interviews with a Black German family, and official (often openly racist) government documents, providing a fascinating contrast of language and experience. There’s a grim comedy in the Nazi-era officials trying to find employment for Black Germans who have lost their jobs to the racist attitudes of the white population. Ayim’s two volumes of poems focus on more recent Afro-Deutsch experiences, where the racism is often (by no means always) less explicit; her language games make the book a joyful experience, however.
Two collections of short stories this month: Jemisin’s had an irresistible title, and was very enjoyable: some stories relate more or less directly to the worlds of her novels, while the Black experience is mostly present, but not the defining feature of the characters. Black Stars is more variable in quality, but I loved Victor LaValle’s We Travel the Spaceways, which brilliantly plays with the reader’s expectations.
There were three books from Africa: the first, Aya Vol. 1: Life in Yop City, was my graphic novel for the month. It’s a gently enjoyable book, with soap opera-style shenanigans interesting mainly because of the glimpses of an Africa which we rarely see in the West/North. Like the other African books, it includes some wonderful sayings and proverbs — “You can’t satisfy an empty belly by not taking a crap.” Glory is a complete contrast: a big book dealing with big themes in an often cartoonish style, it still has huge emotional weight when required. Chipo Chung performs the audiobook brilliantly, exploiting the author’s use of repetition which might be less successful on the printed page. Less effective in this version, it must be said, are the social media-based sections, which are somewhat clumsy when read out. Devil on the Cross also makes great satirical use of cartoonish style in its depiction of the characters, though its repetition of content rather than style is sometimes wearying.
The Dorothy Richardson of the month, Clear Horizons, was not my favourite in terms of the writing style (sentences either too long or too short!), but there were still plenty of quotable pearls:
contributing, wherever he went, his qualities of strength and gentleness, gentle strength, strong gentleness
a life that had been a ceaseless stream of events set in a ceaseless stream of inadequate commentary without and within
Miriam on reading (Pilgrimage?):
nearly always, whether one feels capable or disqualified, reluctance to spend any more time on it, to sacrifice an indefinite portion of one’s brief leisure shut up and turned away from life.
They were the work of a superhumanly deedy female and could be lived up to only by an equally deedy female who, if indeed she did live up to them, would lead a dreary life.
most occasions are imperfect because no one is really quite within them, save before and afterwards; and then only at the price of solitude.
this habit, revealed to her by Hypo, of thinking about people in their presence and leaving her thoughts in her face