[CW-Grad] Fwd: for all faculty and grad students

[goldl at ucr.edu]

Hooray!

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:33:49 -0800
>From: Tiffany Long <tlong002 at ucr.edu>  
>Subject: Fwd: for all faculty and grad students  
>To: Faculty:;, cwgrad-announcements at lists.ucr.edu
>
>     http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207334.html
>      
>     BOOK WORLD
>     'Candle': Flickers of despai! ! r, hope in lives
>     in the shadows
>     By Wendy Smith
>     Tuesday, November 23, 2010
>     TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM
>     By Susan Straight
>     Pantheon. 320 pp. $25.95
>     Americans don't generally deal well with the
>     fraught subjects of race and class, often reduced
>     in our public discourse to slogans and platitudes.
>     But in six novels, including the 2001 Error!
>     Hyperlink reference not valid. " Error! Hyperlink
>     reference not valid.," Susan Straight has made it
>     her literary mission to add nuance and empathy to
>     the discussion. Exploring the lives of African
>     Americans and undocumented immigrants, she doesn't
>     airbrush the crime and substance abuse endemic in
>     impoverished communities, but she reminds us that
>     these are communities, anchored in family ties and
>     filled with hardworking, law-abiding people who
>     understand all too well why some in their midst
>     succumb to destructive despair. Straight's Error!
>     Hyperlink reference not valid. examines the nature
>     of community itself, revealing its strength and
>     limitations through the odyssey of a woman with
>     her feet uneasily planted in two worlds.
>     Fantine Antoine comes from Sarrat, a tiny Southern
>     California enclave built by her father as a refuge
>     from racial violence. In 1958, Fantine's mother
>     and four other 16-year-old girls were sent west
>     from their home town because a white man had raped
>     three of them and boasted he would get the other
>     two. Things hadn't changed that much in rural
>     Louisiana since Fantine's enslaved ancestor
>     Marie-Therese was given by her owner as a sexual
>     favor to a white man whose child she then bore (a
>     tale related by Straight in "A Million
>     Nightingales"). "It was my mother who told me the
>     story," says Fantine, "so that I would stay home,
>     safe, and never trust the outside world, or the
>     white people in that world."
>     Instead, Fantine went to college and remade
>     herself as FX Antoine, a successful travel writer
>     who takes sardonic amusement in her professional
>     contacts' attempts to guess the origins of her
>     taupe skin and wavy hair. Pushing 40 when her
>     narrative begins in late August 2005, FX is the
>     classic, self-invented American. She lives in a
>     trendy Los Angeles neighborhood, her apartment
>     decorated with mementoes from far-flung
>     assignments. Her best friend is a gay white
>     photographer, himself from a blue-collar
>     background, who understands why FX seldom makes
>     the 62-mile drive to Sarrat. Like her, he has
>     rejected the guiding principle of a fiercely
>     protective, self-enclosed clan that believes the
>     only important things in life are "the fire - the
>     table - the tribe. There was nothing else outside
>     the circle that mattered."
>     Straight poignantly evokes the mixed emotions of
>     someone who has seized the opportunity to move
>     outside that home circle. For her mother, Fantine
>     admits, "my absence was almost as unforgivable as
>     drug addiction or imprisonment." Within her
>     family, good girls, such as her sister-in-law
>     Clarette, become correctional officers; lost girls
>     like her childhood friend Glorette become
>     crackheads and get killed. No one in Sarrat reads
>     the glossy magazines that publish FX; her
>     accomplishments are unknown to them. But leaving
>     behind her past means that her true self is
>     unknown to those who know only FX. "I was
>     floating. I was invisible," she thinks.
>     That isn't possible for her godson Victor,
>     Glorette's son. He's a bright kid, eager for the
>     intellectual pleasures and the wider world that
>     lured FX away from her tribe; he's done well in
>     community college, and FX is urging him to apply
>     to four-year schools. But he doesn't have his
>     godmother's racially indeterminate skin and hair.
>     When members of the privileged world Victor wants
>     to enter see him with his drug-dealing friends,
>     they see only threatening black men. The
>     restrictions imposed by race and class are
>     intertwined but not the same; accents can be
>     suppressed, clothes can be upscaled, but color is
>     a marker for life.
>     When Victor's friends involve him in a murder, the
>     three flee to Louisiana, and Fantine follows with
>     her father. Their journey becomes a voyage into
>     the past, all the way back to Plaquemines Parish
>     at the mouth of the Mississippi, site of the
>     plantation where Marie-Therese labored. As they
>     frantically search for Victor, Error! Hyperlink
>     reference not valid. guts Louisiana - capping a
>     plot rife with shootings and revelations of past
>     violence that occasionally seem designed to make a
>     political point.
>     Straight's lapses into didactic melodrama are
>     redeemed, however, by her textured portrait of the
>     African American experience and her brilliantly
>     specific language. The voices here ring absolutely
>     true, from the stoic, French-inflected cadences of
>     Fantine's father to the gangsta-wannabe lingo and
>     Victor's recital of lyrics from "Baba O'Riley"
>     that capture his conflicted soul. Meaning comes
>     from the sound and weight of words as well as
>     their content.
>     And words echo down the centuries, like the phrase
>     reiterated throughout "A Million Nightingales"
>     that gives this novel its title. "Take one candle
>     light a room" was Marie-Therese's defiant
>     affirmation that her daughter, conceived from
>     rape, brightened her enslaved existence. Here it
>     becomes a mandate for Fantine, who finally sees
>     her way clear to honoring her family's history
>     while shining a light toward a different future
>     for herself and her godson. Layering the rich
>     particulars of African American life into a
>     classic tale of individual desires straining
>     against collective constraints, Straight adds
>     another complex, compassionate achievement to her
>     distinguished body of work.
>     Smith, a contributing editor at the American
>     Scholar, frequently reviews books for The Post.
>      
>