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Book Review: River Between

08/11/2014 by Jamie 32 Comments

Next year it will be 50 years since the publication of River Between by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and I think one of the reasons the art of fiction is so beautiful is because stories can always teach us something or make us feel empathy for others. I LOVE that we can simply open a book and be deep in the heart of Kenya, identifying with a boy who is born into a tribe of rich culture and traditions. Through Waiyaki’s story, and the stories of the other children in the book, we can see the effects of oppression and colonization on kids. There are consequences for children when they grow up in a world of separation and divided morality, and those effects transcend national boundaries, and can certainly span generations.

Waiyaki is sent away at a young age to receive an education from missionaries that bring Christianity and “civilization” to the people of the ridges. The missionaries hoped to change the little Gikuyu children by bringing them education and rules to live by. When Waiyaki comes back to his tribe after his time away at school, he feels estranged. He doesn’t feel like he fully belongs in his own culture, but he also knows how different he is from the white missionaries. His dream is to bring the “white man’s education” to the tribes so they could have better lives. Ngugi portrays a boy who is caught in the middle of change. Waiyaki struggles with the fact that he may not seem loyal to the people in his tribe when he becomes like the missionaries with his educational pursuits. But the Christian missionaries still see him as a heathen because he condones the rituals of the tribe.

As Waiyaki grows into a young man, the narrative reflects on the work he has already done and his hopes for the future: “With the little knowledge that he had he would uplift the tribe, yes, give it the white man’s learning and his tools, so that in the end the tribe would be strong enough, wise enough, to chase away the settlers and the missionaries” (87). Ngugi reveals Waiyaki as a hero in this way. He doesn’t fall prey to the occupying religion or ways of life, but he adopts their best aspects and tries fervently to share what he has learned with his people. Waiyaki’s desire to remain a part of the tribe is at the heart of what Ngugi was doing when he wrote this novel in his native tongue, Gikuyu. Ngugi shares his character’s desire to spread education and also to remain loyal to his people. In a way, this story he tells is his own.

Another child in the story, Muthoni, grows up on the Christianized ridge, and when she decides she wants to get circumcised, her father is horrified. Even though she knows that her family will disown her, she chooses to “be made beautiful in the eyes of the tribe” (44). Ngugi depicts Muthoni as a brave child, and she foreshadows the attempt that Waiyaki makes later in the novel to bring the two sides together. Her death is a dark reminder that it is often the weak and the powerless that take the brunt of these kinds of cultural conflicts.

Muthoni’s sister, Nyambura, also tries to bridge the gap. She attempts to stay loyal to her family, not wanting to cause division, but eventually goes back to her tribal roots and leaves the umbrella of the colonial occupation. Her desire for Waiyaki shows her belief in the power of agreement between sides. Nyambura goes through the most struggles deciding what side to end up on, and she eventually chooses the middle ground. Her and Waiyaki both are too lukewarm to be accepted by either side. As the novel comes to a close, the two characters that have done the most internal soul searching, and experienced the most personal growth, are ridiculed. Their situation pays tribute to the difficulties children go through coming of age in a country that is being colonized. They not only have to find their own moral boundaries, but they must decide whose morality – their ancestors’ or the occupying country’s – they are going to accept as their own.

In the River Between it is the children who are most affected by the occupying country, and it is they who will live in the world that is created by the mess. Ngugi seems to suggest that a story of the next generation, after Waiyaki, might bring even more separation, rather than a coming together of the opposing sides. In the setting of the African jungles of Kenya, it is the children who feel the full force of colonization and oppression – both the struggles and triumphs in adapting to the precarious cultural position into which they were born.

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In his research abstract on the faculty page at U.C. Irvine, Ngugi says of fiction: “I use the novel form to explore issues of wealth, power and values in society and how their production and organization in society impinge on the quality of a people’s spiritual life.”

You can read more about his life and works at his website –> Ngugi wa Thiong’o | Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine

What do you think is the biggest effect that civil wars, colonization, and/or poverty have on the current generation of kids experiencing these things around the world today? Or do you think that these issues aren’t relevant anymore?

Book Review: Almost Somewhere

24/09/2014 by Jamie 4 Comments

“We’re with each other. Us three women together” (100).

Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail by Suzanne Roberts won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature. Roberts tells the story of the hike through part of Yosemite National Park that changed the life of her and her friends. They encounter bears, strangers, and extraordinary scenery. Each traveler makes her own discoveries along the way through injuries, personal battles, and victories great and small.

I really enjoyed the book, and as someone who only hikes every couple years and only for a few hours at a time, I admired her gusto for hiking for a whole month, especially her honesty about her own weaknesses, both physical and mental. Roberts quotes Thoreau: “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” and she laments that many people confuse ‘wildness’ and ‘wilderness.’ “Wildness can exist both outside and inside of us, whereas the very definition of wilderness seems to be the absence of humans, further separating us from our wild places and our very own wild natures” (64). Throughout her journey Roberts shows the struggles of all three girls and how they adapt in the ways they weren’t accepting the wildness inside themselves.

Throughout the hike they were surrounded by beautiful mountains, lakes, and wildflowers, which they all seemed to appreciate. “I wanted to study the landscape, to look at it long enough, until it entered me and I could carry it with me, inside my body, always… I wasn’t ready to leave the view. I wasn’t sure what the questions were, but I was certain these mountains contained the answers” (106-107). I’ve had many moments like this in nature and I thought Roberts described it beautifully.

I really enjoyed the “where are we now” paragraph at the end of the book. I spent the whole book wondering about what they are all up to and I was glad I didn’t have to go googling to find out. I also wondered about all her detailed memory of conversations and tiny details all these years later. I know that she kept a journal, but it seemed that most of the time she had writers block and drew pictures of her surroundings rather than write. I’m not one to make a big deal of re-created dialogue in creative non-fiction, but I’m curious to know how much of the dialogue was in her journal, written shortly after, or written decades later.

“Memory sometimes acts as a corrective lens, allows us to say the things we never said, take back the things we regret, but the truth is I don’t remember what I said to my father at the end of that phone conversation. Did I tell him I loved him? It’s possible, but in truth I can’t remember” (258). This is an honest admittance, which I appreciate. I know the feeling of foggy memories, especially when it was something that I only wished had happened. It make me wonder if she couldn’t remember that conversation exactly, how realistic was the rest of the dialogue throughout the book. Again, not a huge concern to me. I would have enjoyed the book almost as much if it had been a complete work of fiction. Her comment in the acknowledgments is this: “Although the memoir adheres to the truth of my fallible memory, some of the names of minor characters have been changed” (xii). It seems to be acceptable in modern memoirs to be open about what is absolute fact and what might be only based on what happened, and I think her acknowledgment could have been more detailed regarding the narrative throughout the story.

There were many references to the group of women being affected by the presence, or absence, of men. Here are just a few: “Every woman who has ever been out camping alone knows that bears are nothing to fear compared to predatory men” (52). “It started to seem that whenever one of us started crying, men would appear, thereby solidifying the wimpy woman stereotype” (90). “Would I find a version of myself not dependent on the male gaze?” (150). Some fellow hikers expressed their concern that the “girls” were hiking without men, and others called them an inspiration. Roberts is clearly pleased that the group ended as just the three women. She seems to reconcile some of the gender frustrations by the end of the 28 day hike, feeling safe amongst her girlfriends.

“And I realized I was no longer obsessed with how I looked to a man, whether he liked me or not. The irony is that it made me more likable, both to others and, more important, to myself” (258). After spending years following men around, trying to attract their interest, or being afraid of them, Roberts finds the “wildness” in herself among her other inner strengths. And years later in yoga she learns that “the journey from pose to pose is the feminine, the pose itself, or the destination, represents the masculine, and we must honor both as equally important” (259). Its nice that she ends on a note of equality, rather than smug girl power; honoring the greatness in both genders.

Overall, it was a fun summer read that inspired me to get back into hiking!

Book Review: Out of the Woods

23/08/2014 by Jamie 7 Comments

Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding by Lynn Darling is a beautifully written book of finding her way after her only daughter leaves for college. A widow already, she moves to a run-down cabin in the woods by herself where she hopes to find her reason to live.

Her first venture out to her new home in Woodstock was telling of how the rest of her time there would go. Shunning GPS and even the knowing advice of locals, she sets out on her own with just broken maps to find it. “I needed to get to where I was going according to my own lights, along a path I had chosen, not one generated by some witless computer program, or traced out by helpful strangers” (15). Of course, she gets lost.

One of the aspects she found strange in moving to a place where she had previously been a visitor was the small details: “What was hay exactly? Such details had seemed exciting and curious once, but a visitor sees things differently than a stranger trying to settle down in a place… Mulch? What the hell was mulch?” (48). She describes the moment when her choice to live in Woodstock completely overwhelmed her.

In her solitude at Castle Dismal she wonders if her feelings of seclusion with this new place has to do with not knowing the names of the birds and the trees “Was it better to know the names of things or not to know?” (52). She reflects on the connection she made between a bird that had visited their previous vacation home every spring and how its disappearance preceded her husband’s diagnosis. She hated the bird, but also grieved for it as well. “We name things so we can know them, and, knowing them, won’t be afraid of them. Maybe we should be afraid.” Darling brings up deeply important questions without answering them. Rather, she doesn’t spell them out right away. I appreciated the way she did this, trusting the reader to make these connections between her own diagnosis, her relationship with the land, and with herself.

Similarly, she describes the wolf tree and how much it meant to her while weaving in the story of her mother’s decline. A beautiful metaphor for a devastating and harsh way to lose one’s grip on the world. “It seemed desperately important to get our mother to recognize what was happening to her, because if she could still do that, then the relationship was still intact. But, of course, for her, it was an admission she could not make without the very ground beneath her feet dissolving” (219). She lost the tree and her mother around the same time, and she knits the two stories together: her mother was a kind of ‘lone wolf’ as a child, fighting for survival; wolf trees usually begins as sole survivors in a cleared meadow, “their solitude protects them” (224). As she brings in the arborist to describe her woods and essentially “name” all that surrounds her, Darling seems to find even more meaning in the woods – she is no longer afraid of them.

“A tree dies from the top down. The crown withers, the branches become fragile, the center dries up and hallows out. Still, the tree will stand, to all outward appearances alive, like an ancient warrior brandishing his weapons against all comers” (227). A near exact description of her Darling’s mother, clinging to her last chance of survival like she had always done, her mind slipping away while she is otherwise relatively healthy for a woman of her age. “You can’t think about the forest without thinking about the soil, [the arborist] said. You can’t think about soil without thinking about bedrock. And you can’t think about bedrock without thinking about time” (228).

Going through her mother’s things she finds an old photo of her mother as a young woman. She took the photo home to remind her to be gentle on herself. “[I]t reminds me to remember how much of what happens to us now happens because of the vagaries of ancient glaciers, because of the way in which continents collided in generations no longer remembered. You did good, I tell the picture… You did the best you possibly could” (232). Darling needed to come to realize her similarities with her mother, and also reconcile her feelings of losing her mother and the associated feeling of being lost in the world without her.

In her continued drive to NOT feel lost in both her little part of the woods and also in her life, she gets private lessons of how to find her way with a map and a compass. Her success at finding her way on the “Harriet Line” is a great triumph: it builds her confidence in parting from her mother, healing her body after cancer, and finding her way in this new world she has found herself in.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. Her conclusions are poetic and create a calming effect after the tumultuous journey she took over the previous years. She finds herself at the beginning of a new adventure. “I wasn’t any of the things I had strived to be, or tried to escape. I was just a walker in the woods, who had learned a thing or two perhaps about finding her way, one who would get lost again and again” (267).

Book Review: In the Neighborhood

02/08/2014 by Jamie 4 Comments

Peter Lovenheim’s memoir In the Neighborhood was more or less what I expected from the subtitle: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. After a murder suicide takes place a few houses down from him, Lovenheim makes it a personal goal to get to know the people with whom he shares his street. Some neighbors give him the cold shoulder, but others embrace his efforts, welcoming him into their homes and sharing their own perspectives on what makes a neighborhood a community.

Lovenheim did research on communities around the world that foster a healthy feeling of togetherness among members. He quotes the Australian social scientists jenny Onyx and Paul Bullen: “Simply put, if you know your neighbors, greet them on the street, keep an eye on their house for them, or invite them to dinner, this builds connections that in good times can enrich your sense of community, and in bad times can give you someone nearby to call for help” (64). In pursuit of that kind of community, Lovenheim meets up with a few neighbors, but soon gets discouraged by the neighbors that turn him down for various reasons. I empathized with him because I’ve also searched out connections with my neighbors and sometimes people just aren’t interested.

For over two years Lovenheim gets to know his next door neighbors: the mailman, newspaper deliverer, a lady that has walked in the neighborhood for decades, and many others that he tries to nonchalantly connect over the long-term. He eventually makes the match of an ill woman with an elderly man in search of something to do with his life. When her first met Patti and discovered her illness, he asked her, “So how does it feel to be surrounded by people who know your difficult situation but who are not available to talk to, or to be of any help or comfort?” (142). This question really made me think about who of the people living near me might be experiencing extremely difficult times that I have no way to know about if I simply smile and wave from across the street. Maybe there are ways I could be helping, but I won’t know until I ask.

At the end of the memoir, Lovenheim experiences his own difficult time and his grateful for the friends he has made living all around him over the previous years of his “social experiment.” Walking through his neighborhood contemplating his life he says “All these lights, and others, taken together formed a sort of constellation for me, a picture of my neighbors inside their homes, living their lives, side by side with mine. Picturing myself as one point of light within that constellation was comforting” (220). He takes shelter in his friend and neighbor Lou’s house and feels the comfort that usually only comes from family.

My favorite part of the book was the references to communities around the world that are making strides toward creating a sense of collective togetherness. In Columbus, Ohio in a neighborhood called Old Oaks the neighbors take turn hosting “Wednesdays on the Porch” where the community can gather and spend time together (233). The Caldera Arts Organization sponsored a project in ten communities in Oregon. “Photographer Julie Keefe Joined with middle school students to interview and photograph neighbors as part of a statewide arts project called ‘Hello Neighbor.’” Then they hung mural-size black-and-white photographs with text throughout the communities to introduce the neighborhood to its children and neighbors to each other” (234). One woman suggested simply starting a garden in the front yard and being receptive to those that stroll by and want to chat (235).

Overall it was an encouraging and motivating story. We are moving in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the ideas in the book that will help create a network of friends among the people I will soon share a street with.