Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Fanonne Jeffers' Love Songs - Best of 2021

I’ve found my number one book of the year! What a relief to realize that every fabulous review of Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel “The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois” was completely deserved. This glorious epic tale, which weighs in at just under eight hundred pages, is one of those books you dream about, one where you can sit for hours lost in another world, a world of horror, heartbreak, loss, and injustice tempered with an abundance of love.

This remarkable feat encompasses four centuries of history brought to fruition by Map

Description automatically generated with low confidenceAiley Pearl Garfield, a Black doctoral student whose dissertation, based upon the lives of her own ancestors, commences with Georgia’s native Creek people who lived on the land long before the arrival of the white Europeans whose ships’ holds carried enslaved men, women, and children from Africa’s Gold Coast.

How these three cultures, the Native, African, and European mingled as they built an agricultural behemoth, and produced, through intermarriage or more often rape, family lines of every hue, is the story of America in its best and worst iteration. Jeffers provides four pages of genealogy trees for readers to reference but you’ll be so wrapped up in the story that I doubt you’ll even need them. Apt quotations from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois preface each section of the novel adding to the solemnity and depth of the historical picture that Jeffers paints.

Ailey’s relationship with her own family is complex. She and her two older sisters, Lydia, and medical student Coco, share a devastating secret of abuse that each keeps from the other and which affects each woman in vastly different ways. A through line and salvation for Ailey is the deep abiding love she holds for her uncle Root, a retired professor, whose home in the tiny town of Chicasetta, Georgia, becomes Ailey’s respite from the pressures of being a strong, vocal Black woman in a world before “me too” or Black Lives Matter.

There’s a strong feminist bent to this book as Jeffers celebrates the strength and smarts of the women who have shepherded their families through the scourge of slavery, the false sense of freedom before Jim Crow took over, and the way the movements led by Dr. King and Malcolm X kept women in subservient roles that they resisted. The theme of colorism is also front and center as Ailey’s family is a mashup of its forbears, deep midnight black, chocolate, and white enough to pass.

But I think it’s the love of the land, the way Jeffers creates a sense of the earth as a place of blessing and peace, that most moved me. Though so many Black Americans moved north during the great migration seeking opportunity, the pull of the south represents a direct connection to the first peoples. Perhaps this is why Jeffers refers to herself during interviews as Afro-Indigenous.

This National Book Award nominee is truly a masterwork that’s difficult to adequately describe. You simply must just dive in and savor the language, the story, and the history of our nation in all its shame and glory.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Missing in Action but Lost in Books

I’ve had a nagging feeling that it’s been too long since I opined on the books that I’m reading but the truth is that I don’t thrive when I feel pressed to write. I’m much more enthusiastic and joyful about reviewing when I’ve finished something that wows me. There are currently six overdue novels sitting directly to my right and I so want to get into them but hey, Library Journal sent me two challenges with short deadlines and then the fabulous Library of Congress Book Festival began, virtual for the second year in a row – damn Covid – and it’s going on for an entire week. So many interviews, so little time.

Imagine the pressure of coming up with two hundred words that could remotely capture the essence of the first novel in fifty years from Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka. “Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth” will be released next week and it’s anything but a happy read. That was followed by a strange yet delightful debut novel from a Mombasan author named Khadija Abdalla Bajaber. I have finished “The House of Rust” but have yet to put pen to paper, mainly because I was finally able to pick up Honoree Fannon Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois” and I can’t bear to put it aside. More on this next week.

I’ve said before and I’ll repeat it again. Zoom may be less than ideal for some forms of communication but for author interviews it is fantastic! If you have a decent sized monitor, you might get the impression that the author you’re listening to is looking right into your eyes. It’s marvelous if disconcerting. And, as often as I’ve praised the Washington Post’s Ron Charles, (he and I have a mind meld when it comes to literature) I must offer kudos once again.

Sunday, I listened to an hour-long conversation he had with the glorious Yaa Gyasi, (“Homegoing” and “Transcendent Kingdom”) and I felt as if I was in the room where it was happening. They laughed and talked like old friends and because they were so comfortable with each other the insights they shared were deeper and more personal than you might expect.

Today Ron was live with Kristen Hannah “The Four Winds,” and Maggie Shipstead whose “Great Circle” was just announced for the Booker Prize shortlist. They spoke to the theme of this year’s National Book Festival, Open a Book, Open the World. Yesterday it was the lovely, unassuming Booker and Nobel winner, Kazuo Ishiguro speaking with former Post Book World editor Marie Arana. Their conversation ran the gamut from sharing their immigrant roots, to music, to the purpose of literature, and then to the purpose of life and the big question, why do we care! “Klara and the Sun” was deftly alluded to but there were no spoilers.

All of these and so many more interviews are archived here: https://www.loc.gov/events/2021-national-book-festival/

Do join the conversation!