Help Yourself

As an English major in college, my focus was American Literature--more specifically Early American Political Rhetoric. Plainly speaking, I studied the struggle to create and form an American Voice. It seems kind of dramatic now, 10 years removed from the world I was once submerged in--looking for America, but I was truly in love. The idea that social injustice was confronted head-on in this new land was fascinating to me. I found myself drawn to eras in which the oppressed would rise against opposing forces and make the world a different place. A better place. The Help catapulted me back into that college mindset, made me want to know more about this particular atrocity that took place in my America.

Kathryn Stockett, a white woman raised by a black maid in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote this story in an effort to seek absolution from the past sin of passivity. The novel follows two African American maids in the 1960s and the white women they work for. The white women who have fallen so neatly into the role of "master" to these black women who raised them and whom, in childhood, they had loved like mothers. It is also the story of Miss Skeeter, who I imagine is none other than Miss Kathryn Stockett herself, a young white woman and a charter member of the Jackson Junior League. Skeeter does what Stockett did not (in her youth) and begins to empathize with these maids and the injustices they face in the 1960s South. She wants to tell their story.

This is my book club pick for April and I am geared up for an array of Southern food tonight including fried chicken, cornbread and chocolate pie. I think I will wear an apron.

Oscar WOW

*

This is the kind of book that you can just tell probably ripped the author up to write. Controlled his being to the very core of his soul. Like he tried to write a work of fiction but could not avoid brutal autobiographical practices.

Told in a vibrant mix of ingles y espanol, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao would be a dura read for anyone not in possession of a working knowledge of el idioma espanola. It is the sad and brilliant tale of Oscar and the Dominican-American generations that preceded his existence. It schooled me historically on the plague of evil dictatorship in the Dominican Republic over the past century and had me asking my dad (the words leaving my mouth as the realization of their idiocy hit me) what year the Dominican Republic became a self-governing territory of the United States (shame on me and my Spanish endorsement!/sorry Puertro Rico!).

The Carribean culture being steeped in the supersticious, the root of the story revolves around a family curse (or fuku) that just keeps coming back. A curse that affects Oscar, his beautiful sister Lola, their mother Beli, her parents (dead under the rule of Rafeal Trujillo, Evil Dictator), their relatives, various neighbors and boyfriends and possibly any family pets that may have, unluckily, been adopted into the curse. Set alternately in New Jersey and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the book employs a literary technique I love called "en media res"--Latin for "into the middle of affairs"--in which the story begins in the middle or at the climax, fills in details from the past, and resolves after having done so (side note: this technique is also one of the reasons I love the show Southland).

Years after the publication of The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver is said to have, in press conferences, responded to questions about the novel by saying, "I gave ten years of my life to that story and I no longer have anything to give." I imagine this must be what Junot Diaz feels about the story of Oscar. An immense sense of pride (very Latin) and a constant, suppressed terror at the thought of returning, his heart heavy with apologies, to the narrative.

*The black, white and red cover is most familiar to me and the one mass-marketed in the US, but I think this one is a better representation of the story: