I had a similar experience growing up in the mostly white suburbs of Baltimore. We read Beloved junior year and it was absolutely devastating. It opened my eyes to the deep, unhealed wounds of slavery and that sort of tumultuous, all-consuming pain. It was a difficult book to read at that age—I can't imagine any age when it would be easy to read—and I appreciate that we were asked to sit with it.
Another book that had a similar effect on me was Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask" about a boy growing up gay in 1930–50s Japan. I don't know that he ever actually says he's gay and you get this feeling that he doesn't even have the language to describe himself, let alone any kind of framework or support network. It was described to me by the friend who recommended it as "devastatingly sad" and I agree. He was absolutely, completely, and utterly fucked from the moment he was born and there's nothing he could do about it. The book threw me off for weeks. I highly recommend it.
Yukio Mishima's biography is a depressingly vivid example of the dangers of repressing your identity, with his repressed gay identity seemingly spilling out into far-right nationalism and then terrorism.
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll read both of them.
Jazz is so cool.
"Look. Look where your hands are. Now."
Re:Toni Morrison Has Died
by linksnapzz on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @04:14PM
(#20629054)
"Son ain't what a woman say; it what a man do"
Turned out to be one of the best classes I had during those years. It was a very small group (I feel like only ten people or something) and there was a lot of really excellent discussion about the books. Jazz stood out to me as one of her best works, the focus shift in narrators throughout the novel was, I think, my first real exposure to the "unreliable narrator" concept and it made the story so powerful.