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

[Stephanie Hammer]

Brava!!!! (-:  stephanie h
"The most beautiful thing under the sun is being under the sun."  

Christa Wolf, PATTERNS OF CHILDHOOD



---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:38:51 -0800 (PST)
>From: cwgrad-announcements-bounces at lists.ucr.edu (on behalf of <goldl at ucr.edu>)
>Subject: Re: [CW-Grad] Fwd: for all faculty and grad students  
>To: "Tiffany Long" <tlong002 at ucr.edu>, Faculty at ucr.edu, cwgrad-announcements at lists.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.
>>      
>>      
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