Christian is the New Black
Jul. 13th, 2007 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe
I've just finished reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, the debut collection of short stories from ZZ Packer. It's a really excellent set of fiction, with mostly young black folks, poor and naive, traveling to some other place and having these enormous, conflicting experiences that changes something fundamental in them. Then, somehow, they must take their realizations back and not integrate them in themselves, but very probably into the community around them.
What's great about these stories is while there's a strong connective thread of race and class, that's not the focus. The background of these characters remains just that, and while it informs what they say, how they think (how could it not?), it doesn't necessarily feel like you're just reading a bunch of stories about po' Negroes and their Earthly troubles. Alienation, familial obligation, the dissonance between thought and reality, all of it is in there, living and breathing, under the trappings of Pentecostal churches and blasted neighborhoods with boarded-up homes.
Packer has a tremendous grasp on language and dialogue that makes me envious. Her characters speak and I'm immediately transported back to my childhood in the heart of Baltimore City, hearing ten year old girls using words they've yet to grow into and doing all the things I've always thought of as distinctly black: rolling their eyes, sucking their teeth, frying their hair until it can be plastered to their skulls in crispy, wavy strips. She knows this world intimately, and while she's certainly in a different place these days (she lives in Pacifica, CA of all places) her memories are firmly rooted to her formative experiences. From her writing it seems that she wasn't the most comfortable with her childhood environment but she's learned to love it, because it's hers. There's a lesson in there for me, I know.
As soon as I finished with the last story in the set, "Doris Is Coming," I immediately started doing a bit of research on her. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has made a lot of noise in the literary world, becoming a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, being personally selected by John Updike for the Today Book Club, earning rapturous reviews in O Magazine and from Zadie Smith, whom she's frequently compared to. I can totally see why. :) (Note to self: Read White Teeth.)
The greatest find, though, is this essay on America and religion, which I couldn't agree more with. While there's been an understandable uptick in adherents to aggressive atheism ("It's not OK to just disagree with religion any more, it must be purged from society if we expect to survive."), I'm not sure the current tack of the liberal movement in America is one that's destined to work. Like it or not, religion isn't something that people will wake up one day and realize they don't need. It's been here since we've learned to think in abstractions and it'll continue to endure to the last man. A sense of mysticism has been hard-wired into our brains, and while it's true that it can be expressed through science, reason and logic, it's simply not something everyone will flock to. If we're really going to be effective in tackling the religious and moral quantities that have popped up in politics, we're going to need to speak the language of the people who really view them as important, even if we don't believe them.
I'm really excited that she's coming to San Jose State sometime next year. :)
What's great about these stories is while there's a strong connective thread of race and class, that's not the focus. The background of these characters remains just that, and while it informs what they say, how they think (how could it not?), it doesn't necessarily feel like you're just reading a bunch of stories about po' Negroes and their Earthly troubles. Alienation, familial obligation, the dissonance between thought and reality, all of it is in there, living and breathing, under the trappings of Pentecostal churches and blasted neighborhoods with boarded-up homes.
Packer has a tremendous grasp on language and dialogue that makes me envious. Her characters speak and I'm immediately transported back to my childhood in the heart of Baltimore City, hearing ten year old girls using words they've yet to grow into and doing all the things I've always thought of as distinctly black: rolling their eyes, sucking their teeth, frying their hair until it can be plastered to their skulls in crispy, wavy strips. She knows this world intimately, and while she's certainly in a different place these days (she lives in Pacifica, CA of all places) her memories are firmly rooted to her formative experiences. From her writing it seems that she wasn't the most comfortable with her childhood environment but she's learned to love it, because it's hers. There's a lesson in there for me, I know.
As soon as I finished with the last story in the set, "Doris Is Coming," I immediately started doing a bit of research on her. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has made a lot of noise in the literary world, becoming a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, being personally selected by John Updike for the Today Book Club, earning rapturous reviews in O Magazine and from Zadie Smith, whom she's frequently compared to. I can totally see why. :) (Note to self: Read White Teeth.)
The greatest find, though, is this essay on America and religion, which I couldn't agree more with. While there's been an understandable uptick in adherents to aggressive atheism ("It's not OK to just disagree with religion any more, it must be purged from society if we expect to survive."), I'm not sure the current tack of the liberal movement in America is one that's destined to work. Like it or not, religion isn't something that people will wake up one day and realize they don't need. It's been here since we've learned to think in abstractions and it'll continue to endure to the last man. A sense of mysticism has been hard-wired into our brains, and while it's true that it can be expressed through science, reason and logic, it's simply not something everyone will flock to. If we're really going to be effective in tackling the religious and moral quantities that have popped up in politics, we're going to need to speak the language of the people who really view them as important, even if we don't believe them.
I'm really excited that she's coming to San Jose State sometime next year. :)
