When my friend Anna and her friend Graeme came for a whirlwind visit just before the Christmas break, I took them to Sidney to troll the used bookstores. I wagered that they might be just the people to appreciate this kind of outing, and I think I was right. Actually, I can't think of anyone else I've ever had such an enjoyable time book-shopping with. No one whining "Can we go NOW?" or "I'm boooooored" or "This bookstore is DUMB." (And don't assume it's always children saying these things either!)
I took them to the Haunted Bookshop, not realizing that it specialized in Britannia. They live in the UK and had heard that Victoria was very English. Going directly from the ferry into a bookshop crammed with books by Englishmen, for Englishmen, and about England certainly added to that impression! Anna picked up one and showed me a picture of a place near where she lives.
Anyway, while we were in the bookstores, I was musing to myself about what book Anna would pick. She researches genocide survivors and forced migrations and all sorts of horrific things in her academic life and then goes and reads stuff like We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda in her free time! Just to unwind! (She also has an ungodly penchant for books about cats but we won't go into that.)
When I saw what she ultimately chose, I laughed out loud. If I could have made up a title for the perfect book for Anna, this probably would have been it: The Horrors of War. She explained that it was fascist propaganda and would be useful for her research but I just laughed. I am rabble.
Anyway, all this is just preamble to what I really want to write about, which is some books I've been reading. But what I'm trying to point out, first of all, is that I, unlike Anna, avoid books with unpleasant content. War, genocide, slavery? No, no, and no thank you. Despite this avoidance, I somehow seem to have read both Mauses (Meis?) and The Book of Negroes over the past couple of months. And let me tell you, they were all excellent.
While reading these books, I've noticed some things about the way I process disturbing content, i.e. bad things happening to innocent people with the promise of more bad things to come.
Case A: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
I wish I'd never read this book, even though I think it's a great book. But I wish I'd never read it because it was so upsetting, and the upset spilled over from my reading life into my normal life. I found myself avoiding reading it, to avoid being upset and stressed, but also I couldn't read anything else, because I felt like I was abandoning the characters. It basically ruined a whole summer of reading for me, and often made me feel grumpy. I don't remember whether I dreamt about it, but I probably did. I wasn't able to figure out what made this book so difficult for me until recently: the innocent people are children, and mostly helpless. So when I wasn't reading, I worried about them.
Case B: Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman
These were excellent books: entertaining, profound, and educational. I had a couple bad Nazi dreams, but overall, very little spillover of book stuff into my real life stuff. The characters had horrible things happening to them, but they were adults, and had some resources to protect themselves to a certain degree. Also, the main character was telling the story in retrospect, so you knew he survived, you knew his wife survived, and you knew his baby didn't survive. In that sense, there was less to worry about. At the same time, however, this was an actual true story, not a novel, so it had that extra edge to it. This is the type of disturbing content that I can read and learn from without being totally traumatized.
Case C: The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
Maybe it's because I read this the most recently, so it's still fresh in my mind, but I think that this book had the most horrible things happening in it of all the ones I've mentioned here. And also the most horrible things that were historically correct that were previously unknown to me. For example, I had a clear sense of how being a slave would be horrible, not only because your life is not you own but most especially (from my point of view) because your own children are not your own. Prior to reading The Book of Negroes, I would say that that part of the slave experience was the most horrifying to me. You have a baby, and then, maybe in the dead of night, someone takes it, and you never see it again.
But now, after having read the book, I feel it may be a toss-up between having your children stolen from you and having to travel on a slave ship. The way Larry tells it, the trip across the Atlantic may have been actually the worst part of a slave's life. In comparison, being owned by someone and forced to work and having absolutely no agency is a walk in the park! I haven't seen it yet, but I understand Amazing Grace puts a focus on this aspect of the slave experience as well, with the abolitionists forcing a bunch of British politicians to come aboard a slave ship and see (and smell) for themselves what it's like. Larry describes it in detail in The Book of Negroes, and it is the most gripping and sad part of the whole tale.
So definitely, The Book of Negroes has content that is extremely grim. And yet, I have no qualms recommending that anybody and everybody read it (Canada Reads 2008, anyone?), because it didn't affect me in the way that The God of Small Things did. I never avoided reading it. Instead, I gobbled it up, snatching moments whenever I could to get back to the story. And yes, while I was reading, I would cover my mouth in shock and say "My God!" out loud, and cry. But when I wasn't reading it, I could think about it and not become completely depressed. I could think about the main character, and what she was going through, and then just enjoy my own, free life all the more.
So what was it about the story that made it easier to cope with? I think it had a lot to do with the main character, Aminata, and her strength. If you accept the notion that while you're reading a novel or a memoir, the characters in it become your friends, then Aminata was a friend that could I could trust to look after herself. Certainly I wouldn't have done as well in her situation as she did, so what was the sense in worrying about her? (In Maus, you had a pretty capable and strong main character too, so I'm wondering why I didn't feel he could handle things. Probably this is just an artifact of my baby being a boy and my first born being a girl and so maybe deep down I think think that females are capable of taking care of themselves more than males? I don't know.)
How do people read all that Oprah's book club stuff? I don't mean that it's not quality literature. I'm not in that camp. But I do see a tendency toward books that really break your heart and show some of the worst humanity has to offer. Black and Blue, I Know This Much is True, We Were the Mulvaneys? Yikes! I mean, has everyone else had a much harder life than me and so what happens to these characters doesn't seem as bad in comparison? Did my happy childhood make me unfit to read a significant amount of Western literature? Am I just a wimp?
While we're on the subjects of books I recommend highly, I should mention Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. It actually makes Canadian history interesting: a Herculean task. A very fun read and highly educational, of course. It would make excellent supplementary reading for any Social Studies 10 class. I think that's when you do Riel. Honestly, I was so bored in Social Studies that I couldn't muster about anything but a very vague idea of who Riel was or what he did. But now I know! He was a raving lunatic! Ha. No, really he was, but that's not the important bit. The important bit was how the Canadian government treated the Metis people, and how John A. MacDonald actually worked to incite an armed rebellion among the Metis of the Red River region in order to justify the building of the CPR (because the railway would help transport Canadian soldiers west to stop the rebellion). He may have had excellent sideburns, but John A. was a bit of a bastard. I don't remember seeing that on The National Dream. Or maybe I skipped class that day.
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