Toni Has Me Thinking

I want to write. My mind is in a place where I want to spend an hour just writing everything and anything. I really want to write about this year in Peace Corps, but I don't have the thoughts or the words right now. So I'll write about books. While I was at Tiko's for the week, I read three books, all interesting, all very different - The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel, Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and The Martian by Andy Weir. I would recommend them all, though each for a different audience (unless you're like me, and pretty much read anything and everything). Those aren't the ones that keep me thinking, though.

In the past two days I read two Toni Morrison novels - Sula and The Bluest Eye. I can't believe I never read her before. Though come to think of it, I remember my brother reading Beloved in high school and hating it. The only reason I decided to pick it up was because Daveed Diggs talks about Sula and living in "the bottoms" in one of his raps, and I wanted to understand the reference. The stories are different, but the structure and energy is similar in both. They build the story around the community, examining different characters to expose flaws, discrimination, evils and misfortunes.

Sula was deeply emotional and casually horrifying, as if the unexpected was living, not dying. Poor Shadrack permanently terrified of his own hands and lost in his own mind, unsupported and hated in a country he lost everything for fighting in war. The novel follows Sula and Nel as they grow up, painted through their own dark experiences and colored through the history of Medallion, "The Bottom," and its inhabitants. When Chicken Little drowned, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't try to save him. The white assumption that the parents drowned their child when his body showed up downstream and the terrible indifference that meant they didn't return his body to his family for days and days painted a chasm in perception between lives, and a shocking lack of empathy.

The idea of The Bluest Eye, of deep-rooted racial self-loathing, is horrifically tragic and evocatively constructed through the novel's characters. I felt so terrible for all the children, raised without love in households barely scraping by, etched with casual violence. That Pecola bore then broke under the crushing violent loathing was gutting to watch unfold. Her mother, crippled and pouring sweet words only for the porcelain child she nannied, angry and full of spite. Her father, full of misplaced loathing of women after getting caught in sex by white men - the oppressed taking out his anger on those with even less power. An absent father, rejected by his own absent father for a game of dice, drunk, ugly inside and angry at his ugliness, a rapist. Her classmates, teasing and horrible like the boy who lured her in and killed the cat and the ones who taunted on the playground, or uncomprehending and powerless like the sisters who uncertainly try to help, but mostly are caught in their own troubles and their own uncomprehending observations of adults and a broken, divided society. The whores, who treat Pecola with rough kindness, but live their own lives of loathing men and being loathed and used in equal measure. The quack dream reader, who rapes girls and pretends it is cleanliness and despises himself and his sexuality, but somehow poses no threat to Pecola - she is already too destroyed by the time they encounter - there is nothing more to destroy. Pecola is such a sweet, sad child. I'm almost glad she retreated into madness, because who could relive the horror of her life, her twelve years that were already too much to bear? That her parents lived without love and grew up without examples does not excuse the horrors they brought on their child, and that the community shook their heads and blamed Pecola for her rape is terrible. The storybooks and media and society that rams that ideal of the little white children in their little house with their perfect family and their blue blue eyes as the epitome of beauty and perfection is destructive. If you see no one like yourself, how do you aspire towards a better life? If the ideal is determined by the color of your skin and everyone buys into that ideal, then the world is closed to you. It's full of locked doors and turned backs and rejection. 

I'm glad I didn't read Toni Morrison in high school. I don't think I would have understood, and worse, I think I would have been scandalized. Even through college, I'm not sure I would have understood. I grew up in a bubble of white middle class privilege. I spent my childhood in a conservative community where I recall having one black classmate in elementary school, maybe three or four more by high school, and all of them from military families. I abstractly understood poverty, or at least I understood that sometimes kids couldn't have the same things because their parents couldn't afford it, but the idea of a childhood of struggle and hardship and broken homes and anger was completely foreign to me. By middle school I went to friends' houses and understood that their families weren't as well off as mine, but I don't think I grasped poverty until going to El Salvador. Salvadoran poverty is a different kind of poverty, I think, from that of the U.S. It's more pervasive, and therefore somewhat less stigmatized. Not that the poorest families weren't worse off and the poorest kids weren't teased, just that the community I lived in knew that life was a struggle.

I feel like I'm not explaining myself well. I think it ties somewhat to the idea of the American Dream. I often think that the American Dream is a toxic ideal because it creates a standard that says those who have power and money got it through hard work and deserve what they have, while those in poverty just aren't trying. It's looking at someone and saying that because you didn't grow up with the same privileges as I did, you deserve less humanity. All of the news filtering to me across the world has me thinking a lot about America's racism, discrimination and ego. I've been listening to More Perfect, which is a podcast about the Supreme Court and some major cases that have changed the landscape of law and justice in the US. Over and over the law seems to get twisted to favor those in power. One that keeps sticking in my brain is one about striking jurors. After eliminating jurors for reasonable cause, defense and prosecution can strike jurors without providing any reason, to get down to the eleven they need. There was a case where a black man was being tried and the prosecution struck all the black jurors. The end result when the defense called them out on it was that it eventually got referred up to the Supreme Court and they ruled that jurors can't be struck based on race. You'd think this would be helpful, but what ended up happening was that prosecution would invent any reason other than race, even the flimsiest excuse, the judge would agree, and all the black jurors, over and over, were struck from black cases. This is STILL a problem and has major repercussions on sentencing, since white juries are more likely to convict and black defendants are more likely both to be arrested and receive harsher sentences. It seems to me that the solution would be to eliminate this practice altogether - neither defense nor prosecution can strike jurors for anything other than the cause questions posed to all of the potential jurors. Another solution could be that the jury would have be demographically representative of the community the case is in, so if the community was 50% white, then so would the jury be. Shouldn't a jury of your peers reflect your peers? Your community? Our country is majority minority. Why is our "representation" white?

Thinking about equality makes me wonder why we haven't gotten it yet. Thinking about it conjures up all of the opportunities that I was, and am, afforded that others are not. The deck is stacked. Think about school. A school in a poor community gets less resources, and the kids less quality education. Aren't we then saying that because you are poor, we value you less, we provide you with less, we start you off ten, twenty, thirty feet back from the starting line? It's much cheaper to send a kid to college than to prison, but here we are feeding the insatiable prison system. Tread lightly, they say. Cooperate, they say. Work hard, they say. But when we think your skin or your religion or your sexual orientation makes you worth less, we don't offer the opportunities, the second chances, or the empathy. I know my generation likes to think we're above all that, but those snap judgments and socially ingrained habits run deep. It's hard to remember that people are three-dimensional. It's absolutely necessary not to turn injustices into nameless, faceless statistics. When I say "oh, another one," I'm not only distancing myself and minimizing the loss, but I'm feeding a stereotype of "those people." Another arrest, another murder, another death, another tragedy. They all run together into mere numbers, rather than the real people with flaws and dreams who lived and loved. I can't feel them all - it's too overwhelming - but I keep reminding myself that victims are real, not numbers. The people killed by police violence, the policemen, the victims in Orlando, the students, the immigrants, the refugees, the women, the children. I am constantly reminded that as a PCV I represent the United States, and the United States is all of us and our government and our policies. I want to be proud of the country I represent, but that's really hard, so I try to represent what I wish our country would be - equality, empathy, compassion, optimism, empowerment, service.    

In a related vein, I often feel upset and sad about the way we treat immigrants, in large part because my Salvadoran communities were those immigrants. When I see how we ignore and abandon Syrian and other refugees to die because of our fear, I am disgusted. This isn't some academic theory. People are dying. I think about my beautiful friend with a pure heart and so much hope, and wish that my country would let him save himself. He wants to live, to learn to sing, to get a GED, to get in shape, to support his family. He wants to love someone without fear of being lynched or shot. He wants to start a small business without paying "renta" to the gangs and living with a nagging fear every time he steps on a bus that this one will be the one the Maras decide to hold hostage, shoot the driver, and run off the road. If he could leave, and not die in the process, he would build a life for himself that would bring light to everyone around him. Especially having lived now for more than three years abroad and having been welcomed into countless homes and families, I cannot understand the denigration and fear-mongering that we sow so often in the U.S. People with nothing offered bread and juice and fresh-caught fish to welcome the stranger on the road. They asked to hear my story and shared their own. They invited me back again and again. Are we so isolated in our pretty houses and pretty lives that we forget the humanity of those who are less fortunate?




New Books Read: 141
Total Books Read: 188
Recommendations: Sula by Toni Morrison - she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Laureate (among many other awards) for a reason. The Martian by Andy Weir - it's both funny and has really cool science. The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel is a little weird, but turned out to be a really poignant reflection on loss and faith.