When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams

A white crowned sparrow.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice is about Terry Tempest Williams finding her writer's voice. It is also about grief and loss. "I am leaving you all of my journals" her mother had said, before she died of cancer when she was 54. There were three shelves full of them. They were all blank. Williams struggled for years to understand her mother's legacy. This collection of poetic essays is the result. It is both elegiac and celebratory.

Over and over, I found resonance with my personal life, with my love of birds, with books I've read and art I've seen. I'll use footnotes to link to a few of them. When Women Were Birds is a treasure that flew straight to my heart. I flagged so many passages that it'll be a challenge to select only some of them here.

The physical design of this small book is lovely and reflects the word repetition Williams employs in the text, except in avian form. The white dust jacket is embossed with a pattern of white birds in flight. The flyleaf features a pattern of overlapping feathers. Repeating black silhouettes of a bird in various stages of flight are positioned on the inside pages in such a way that the bird can be animated by flipping through the pages quickly.

Terry Tempest Williams writes that the title When Women Were Birds came to her in a dream. I think of tales from Greek mythology in which women turn into birds, and also the bird goddess figurines of Old Europe. (1)

Bird goddess figurines at the Louvre.

A book that Williams checked out repeatedly from the library when she was a child was called All About Air. She learned that Earth's atmosphere receives tons of dust from meteors every day. "Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust." (2)

Raised in the Mormon faith, Williams writes "Indoor religion bored me; outdoor religion did not." She found her senses "more trustworthy than any religious doctrine."

Conceptual art (3) like John Cage's silent concerto, known as 4' 33", and Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings give Williams insight into her mother's blank journals:

"My Mother's Journals are theatrical. [...] My Mother's Journals are a transgression. My Mother's Journals are a scandal of white. My Mother's Journals are a "harmony of silence."

When her grandmother gave her the book Creation Myths by Marie-Louise von Franz, Williams didn't initially understand it as a subversive text. "What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act that led us out of the garden and into the wilderness. Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves. For a woman or a man to speak from the truth of their heart is to break taboo. The mask is removed. The snake who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honour your hunger and feed yourself."

"On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first family planning and birth control center on 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn." Williams' mother had her tubes tied -- "not a common practice among her peers," -- and later said it was for "freedom." (4)

"I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings. In a voiced community, we all flourish." (5)

Listening to an opera by Strauss left Williams enraptured: "Would you believe me if I told you when I opened my mouth a bird flew out?" (6)

"Cancer. So much cancer. Nine women in my family have all had mastectomies, and seven are dead." Williams' grief paralyzed her. Her husband suggested that walking would help. "Every day, I walked. It was not a meditation, but survival, one foot in front of the other, with my eyes focused down, trying to stay steady." (7)

"To look at the script of Nushu is to see bird tracks, crows walking deliberately down a narrow path of snow. [...] This is the secret script of women, used for hundreds of years in the rural villages of Jiangyong in Hunan Province of China." (8)

"How shall I live? [...] We cannot do it alone. We do it alone."

"Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated."

One of my early pastel paintings, inspired by a photo on the dust jacket
of  a book about the mythology surrounding different animals and birds.

Readalikes: The Turquoise Ledge (Leslie Marmon Silko); Wild (Cheryl Strayed); and A Country Year: Living the Questions (Sue Hubbell).

(1) If We Were Birds (Erin Shields)

(2) You Are Stardust (Elin Kelsey)

(3) Glittering Images (Camille Paglia)

(4) Unterzakhn (Leela Corman) and details from the edge of the village (Pierrette Requier)

(5) The soundtrack in my head while I read this book was the chant "A River of Birds" as performed by Libana. ("There's a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings.")

(6) Raven Girl (Audrey Niffenegger)

(7) Wild (Cheryl Strayed)

(8) Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See)

Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir by Joyce Farmer

Joyce Farmer's Special Exits is a tender, fictionalized memoir in comics of her elderly father and stepmother's final years. Increasingly frail and ill, one nearly deaf and the other blind, Lars and Rachel are determined to remain independent in their home in south Los Angeles. Their daughter, Laura, regularly drops by to help.

Farmer's meticulous black ink artwork depicts the piles of stuff that the old couple have accumulated over decades, as well as the decrepit exterior of their bungalow. As Laura cleans and clears things away, Lars and Rachel share the stories connected with various objects.

The couple experiences the outside world mostly via television news. When he hears that former President Nixon died (at age 81), Lars raises his fists in victory: "Look! I beat out Nixon!" Deaths of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, a major earthquake, and the riots after the acquittal of the officers in the Rodney King case all contribute to the strong sense of time and place. Lars and Rachel are complex, fully realized characters. I thought of my dear grandmother, Mary, who died last year. She was in her own home until she was 94. (The inside of grandma's house was crowded with treasures too.)

Laura gets understandably upset with her father's adamant refusal to be a bother. When he can't get up after a fall, he lies there for a day and night even though the telephone is within reach. Laura asks why he didn't call her. He says, "I knew you were coming today."

In hospital for a few days for tests, Lars doesn't complain that he has no view. Instead, he says he enjoys watching airplanes in the sky. "I think about all the people in those airplanes and where they're coming from." He reminded me of Astrid in the YA novel Ask the Passengers.

Farmer's style is similar to that of Robert Crumb, who says of Special Exits "One of the best long-narrative comics I've ever read, right up there with Maus." I agree.

Readalikes: Ethel and Ernest (Raymond Briggs); Mom's Cancer (Brian Fies); and You'll Never Know (C. Tyler).

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a strong and vibrant novel about identity, belonging and race. Nigerian-born Ifemelu does not think of herself as Black until she moves to the United States for college. There, she cannot escape the all-pervasive racism that accompanies her skin colour. She eventually starts a blog directed at other non-American Blacks, explaining the cultural differences they will encounter in the USA. Ifemelu finds a supportive community and intellectual engagement online.

Blogging is an obvious hook for me, and novels that are written in a mix of formats appeal to me too, so I really liked the excerpts from Ifemelu's blog posts that appear intermittently throughout the book.

Ifemelu is considered a difficult person by some of the other characters, but I love her defiant self-reliance and her forthright manner. When she behaves badly, she is usually quick to make amends... except when it comes to affairs of the heart. One character tells Ifemelu that she is too hard, and that she "has the spirit of husband-repelling." Boyfriends are her biggest challenge.

"Ifemelu once told [her African American boyfriend Blaine] as they watched a news item about a celebrity divorce, that she did not understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships. 'What do you mean?' he asked her, and she heard a looming disagreement in his voice; he, too, believed in unbending, unambiguous honesties. 

'It's different for me and I think it's because I'm from the Third World,' she said. 'To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.'"

Ifemelu's broken relationship with Obinze, the sweetheart of her youth, propels Adichie's narrative. Americanah is one of those rare books, a romance that affected me so deeply that I wept a little at the end.

It's pure chance that I was already listening to Daughters Who Walk This Path (Yejide Kilanko) when my hold for Americanah came in at the library. Ghana Must Go bags, unreliable electricity and traditional proverbs (Yoruba in one, Igbo in the other) are just a few of the small overlapping details in the two novels. I felt completely immersed in Nigerian culture for a while. Overall, however, Daughters Who Walk this Path is more like Adichie's debut novel Purple Hibiscus than Americanah.

Readalikes: Ghana Must Go (Taiye Selasi) and On Beauty (Zadie Smith). There are also similar themes of identity and belonging in the latter part of We Need New Names (NoViolet Bulawayo).

2013 Man Booker Prize Longlist

Hooray, the Man Booker longlist has been announced!

Perusing titles on the longlist for awards like the Giller, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Booker is exciting because I know I'll find titles that are new to me that I will enjoy. I also derive some pleasure from having already read some of the books on the lists, partly because it makes me feel au courant and partly for the sense of accomplishment. As if a longlist is a "to do" list and I can check some of them off... which is kind of crazy. It's not like I set out to read every prize contender, only those that appeal to my taste. Anyway, these are the books I've read that are also on the Booker longlist, with links to my reviews:

People have told me they like to see pictures on my blog
so here's a random photo from my garden.  

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Harvest by Jim Crace

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Of the remaining 10 titles, I'm most looking forward to:

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin, because I adored his Brooklyn

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw, because I loved The Harmony Silk Factory

Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, because everything she writes is wonderful

and

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, because it's described as Dickens meets Deadwood in nineteenth-century New Zealand and I don't mind tackling a doorstopper once in a while. I think The Luminaries is over 800 pages long. I think she's the only author on the list who will be at the Vancouver Writers Fest this year.

Daughters Who Walk this Path by Yejide Kilanko

In Daughters Who Walk this Path, Yejide Kilanko follows the life of Morayo from her childhood into womanhood in contemporary Nigeria. Many of Morayo's female relatives also have significant roles in this story, especially her Aunty Morenike and her younger sister Eniayo, an albino. Their lives are not very different from those of girls and women living in North America, negotiating family relationships, friendships, romance, education, work and motherhood.

The tone of Kilanko's novel is sometimes dark, addressing difficult issues like sexual violence and injustice based on gender, but this is counterbalanced with a lighter tone in other parts, more reminiscent of chick lit. It ends on a hopeful, uplifting note.

Traditional proverbs are at the head of each chapter, and Yoruba words for food and clothing -- egusi soup, a woman's iro (wrapper), a man's agbada (robe) -- add to the sense of place. I was interested to note a reference to carrying things in a Ghana Must Go bag, because I only just learned about this particular type of tote bag this year, when I read Taiye Selasi's book of the same name. (The expression originated in xenophobia, but I don't know it's context in Nigeria today.)

I listened to a Blackstone audiobook [10 h 19 m] narrated by Claudia Alick, whose perfomance is a bit too theatrical for my taste. Alick puts extra emphasis on words that don't need it and her voice often conveys something close to farce which I found at odds with the unadorned style of Kilanko's prose. I got used to it, however, and found myself caught up in Morayo's life.

Kilanko grew up in Nigeria and now lives in Ontario.

Glittering Images by Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia writes that her new book, Glittering Images, was inspired by her "dismay at the open animosity toward art and artists that I have heard on American AM talk radio over the past two decades." Her introduction explains why we need art in today's society. Children, in particular, need the opportunity to focus the eye, to perceive deeply and become receptive to contemplation.

"Civilization is defined by law and art. Laws govern our external behaviour, while art expresses our soul." [...] "Art is not a luxury for any advanced civilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die."

From ancient Egypt to twenty-first century film, Paglia has chosen 29 works of art and writes about what makes them endure in our culture consciousness. The essay for each is only a few pages long and gives historical, social and political context, as well as examining details of the artwork itself. Later essays reference the artworks in earlier chapters, so it's a good idea to read them in order.

I especially appreciated Paglia's explanations about styles that tend to mystify me, such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, conceptual art, and performance art. I came away with greater understanding of difficult works, like Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: "There are no welcoming smiles in this cabal of urban nymphs. Their snakelike lidless eyes are fixed and blank or at mismatched angles or missing altogether. They are sleepless watchmen of the heaven-hell of sex, where the price of momentary ecstasy may be disease or obliteration of identity."

Paglia isn't shy about voicing her opinions. In the chapter on Eleanor Antin and conceptual art, she writes: "Antin's feminist pieces avoided doctrinaire victimology as well as the lugubrious excess often marring feminist productions of that period, such as Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (1974-79), with its florid vulval table settings." I don't agree with her assessment of Chicago's work, but it doesn't stop me from respecting Paglia's knowledge and views on art. Her writing is always interesting.

Paglia's thesis in the final chapter, that film director George Lucas is the worlds' greatest living artist, emerged during the five years she spent working on Glittering Images. "Nothing I saw in the visual arts of the past thirty years was as daring, beautiful, and emotionally compelling as the spectacular volcano-planet climax of Lucas's Revenge of the Sith (2005)." "The exhilarating eight-minute battle over Coruscant that opens Revenge of the Sith, with its dense cloud of stately destroyers, swooping starfighters, and fiendish buzz droids, cuts optical pathways that are as graceful and abstract as the weightless skeins in a drip painting by Jackson Pollock."

I came away from Glittering Images determined to watch all of the Star Wars movies. I think I saw the first three when they came out in theatres, but not since then, and I've never seen the more recent films. Star Wars references pop up all the time in modern literature, like Friends with Boys (Faith Erin Hicks) and The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Tom Angleberger). Jeffrey Brown's cartoons about Darth Vader as a single father raising young twins contributed to my interest in re-watching the movies too.

Readalikes: A History of the World in 100 Objects (Neil MacGregor); and My Favorite Things (Sister Wendy Beckett).

Vader's Little Princess, and Darth Vader and Son: two books by Jeffrey Brown

The gentle warmth in Jeffrey Brown's comic strip memoirs (Funny Misshapen Body, Little Things) comes through strongly in his two hilarious new books, Vader's Little Princess and Darth Vader and Son. Brown re-imagines the Star Wars backstory and pictures Darth Vader raising Luke and Leia from early childhood into their teen years. 

Each page is a single-panel comic in full colour. Brown often plays with dialogue (out of context) from the Star Wars movies. Darth Vader's lines are in all caps and a zigzaggy word balloon helps convey the amplified scary tone of his voice. In one panel, Vader stands with fists clenched, declaring "TOGETHER WE CAN RULE THE GALAXY AS FATHER AND SON!" Luke as a preschooler asks, "And then I can have a treat?"

These books made me laugh out loud. Getting a ride to school, Leia tells her father "Just drop me at the corner." Vader responds, "IT'S OKAY, I CAN TAKE YOU RIGHT TO THE FRONT DOOR..." and Leia thinks, "I'm so embarrassed" as she disembarks from one of those giant walking machines.

Fun for the whole family!