KJ is a junior studying Mathematics and Creative Writing. She is entangled in the library system and desperate to break free. Her free time is spent staring at a wall. She felt obliged to write this bio.
The pseudo-hip-hop group, Young Fathers, is coming to The Blind Pig on March 27th. I say pseudo-hip-hop because while they are more hip-hop than rock or pop or folk or another genre, Young Fathers are still very far from anything resembling mainstream hip-hop. They exist in their own genre of beat-driven, electronically fused, vocally soothing, and strangely dance-able sound. It’s the kind of music that makes you want to break out your best interpretative dance moves and jam and shake as if your heart is leaping from your chest and making quite the mess. Check them out here.
Young Fathers will be joined by HXLT and Captwolf. The doors will open at 9pm and tickets are $15.
If you happened to be in East Quad last Saturday, you might have been surprised to find yourself in the middle of a bookfair. The main atrium was stuffed with tables featuring booksellers, publishers, and various literary magazines (both student and non-student run). For a book-lover, or any person nostalgic for the days of elementary school bookfairs, this was a dream come true.
In the basement of East Quad, at the Keene Theatre, were panels running all day long with publishers, authors, and professors. I attended the panel on the Midwestern character with the authors Angela Flournoy, Fred Arroyo, Peter Geye, and Phong Nguyen. The panel purported discussion on both the character of the physical landscape and the people, but ended up leaning towards the former. Though the desire was not articulated, a main function of the panel seemed to be to dispel the notion that the Midwest is bland, boring, and indistinct–that unlike the coasts or the cities, the in-between has nothing noteworthy to say. However, as the panel pointed out, five of the nine Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were from the Midwest and many of America’s “great” writers, such as Mark Twain, also hailed from here. The argument then shifts from whether or not we have a voice to whether or not our voice is too ingrained in America’s literary tradition to distinguish between the Midwest and the rest of America–can we exist and thrive as a unique entity when the Midwest often seems to speak for all of America? But even this goes unrecognized–the Midwest is usually thought of as having no literary tradition of any importance rather than as the stronghold of the American literary voice. As Angela Flournoy pointed out, “Midwestern writers are often recruited to other places,” and this applies especially to the loud ones, the ones who rebut the meekness that is expected of them. She used Toni Morrison as her example, who, in spite of the fact that she was born in Ohio, is often seen as a Southern writer.
But the panel talked about more than just the voices and the literary traditions of the Midwest–they also discussed the landscape of this place. Fred Arroyo stated that “the stories are in the landscape.” What he meant by that is that when you look around, when you see a rusting farm, an abandoned factory, a foreclosed home, when you see these things that are just a passing glance in your world, you’re seeing the loss and heartbreak of someone else’s story. You can’t get very far without finding something to write about. Furthermore, there’s always the question of the place, of this very point of latitude and longitude. From one perspective, it’s just an endless, rolling sea of plains and as Geye asked, “why come here?” That’s a question these writers consider when situating there stories (and also a question that was considered by the pioneers who stopped here instead of continuing on their way)–why here? Why not further west with it’s deserts and mountains, or the east coast with its seas and cities? What drew us here?
I’m not sure that’s a question I can answer–at least, not for anyone but myself. What I will say is that after that panel I found myself thinking of the importance of having literature that features your home or places like your home. People often read books hoping to find something of themselves–and they can do that without the book taking place in their hometown, but every place is unique and every city has it’s own set of stories. And for those of us who didn’t grow up in NYC, it can be difficult to find books about the world in which you live, about the highways that never end, the cornfields changing with the seasons, the silence of cities sleeping under the snow, the rusted and vacant buildings, about, well, home. To me, that’s the point of the Voices of the Middle West Festival: to celebrate the books written by us and about us.
Do you enjoy reading? Meeting authors? Bookfairs? Open mics? Literally anything to do with the written word? Then come on down to East Quad this Saturday and attend the Voices of the Middle West festival! There will be a bookfair in the main atrium in EQ all day (10am-5pm) and panels with authors, professors, and publishers in the Keene Theater (basement of EQ) from 10am-3:30pm. For a list of the various panels and panel speakers, see here. Then, there will be an open mic from 3:45-4:45pm and finally, the keynote with Ross Gay at 5pm. It is the best literary event to happen on campus all year, so don’t miss out!
And, if all that’s not enough for you, come to the Voices of the Middle West Kickoff Reading at Literati, this Friday at 7pm.
The student who introduced Angela Flournoy started by reading some of her tweets. Not just random tweets, but a particular set where Flournoy had attempted to describe a group of teenagers in a store. Her suggestions included such quips as “a selfie of teenagers,” “a snapchat of teenagers,” “a whatever of teenagers,” and many more. But the point of these descriptions was not to create some witticism or remark about the age of vain and vapid teenage wasteland we are living in–in fact, the goal was quite the opposite. Flournoy sought to find a term to describe the teenagers that was reflective but not judgmental. She wanted a way to capture what they are without a condemnation or negative connotation. This idea of truth without judgement is present throughout her work.
When Angela Flournoy took the stand, she talked for a few minutes about why she chose Detroit as the setting for her novel. According to her, Detroit is a rare kind of place: a city where everything is changing and falling apart, where the home you grew up in or the store you used to visit is simply not there anymore. And unlike other areas, this isn’t because something replaced it, something new and shiny, something to tender the loss of the old–no, now there is nothing but weeds and cement. Detroit is unique because it is place of vacating and decay where nothing grows anymore. For Flournoy, this particularly interested her as a place of change. For most of us, when things change, they don’t really change completely, there are always elements of the old remaining. When we walk of the old neighborhood changing, we might mean that a new group of people moved in and the old moved out, but we rarely mean that the neighborhood just isn’t there anymore. As Flournoy said, the demographics might change but the physical reality hardly does. And this was the idea that she wanted to explore in her book, The Turner House: how do we cope with memories when there are no physical landmarks.
She read from only one section, a chapter titled “Motor City, Friday Night.” This chapter involved Lelah, the youngest of the Turner family and also currently homeless, visiting a casino she frequents. Lelah has a gambling addiction (part of the reason she’s homeless) and spends part of the night watching a woman win at a roulette table. When the woman wins, she gives Lelah a chip before exiting the casino herself and with this chip, Lelah goes over to her own roulette table and with the skills and knowledge she’s picked up during her addiction, she transforms that $20 dollar chip to $300. She considers walking away and enjoying herself in a hotel room for a week, and she almost manages to, but addiction is a beast not easily beat, and she thinks of what she could do with just a little bit more money, another week off the streets and–she loses most her money in a quick spiral down.
The reading was short, as that was the only section she read. From the beginning of the introduction to the end of Flournoy’s reading, the whole thing was over in half an hour. I didn’t find the reading or perhaps the prose itself particularly engaging, but I thought that Flournoy’s ideas on memory and physical reality had great potential and if The Turner House spends time pondering these things, it might be a really spectacular book. Angela Flounroy will be back on campus for the Voices of the Middle West literary festival on March 12th, so if you’re interested in seeing her speak, check it out.
Tomorrow, author Angela Flournoy will read at the Helmert Stern Auditorium in UMMA at 5:30pm. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a signing. Angela Flournoy is the author of National Book Award Finalist, The Turner House, the story of a home and its family in Detroit. The house’s fate, after being the home to all thirteen Turner children, is being determined now that the matriarch of the family can no longer stay and with its monetary worth so much less than its mortgage. Angela Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writing Workshop and one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” There will also be Q&A section in the Hopwood Room in Angell Hall at 2:00pm.
I’ve learned to take notes during these things because it’s easy to let the experience rush past you and carry you for a little while, but when trying to think of things to write the review about, you can remember nothing but the shivers the author’s voice sent down your spine–you can’t even remember the words. But looking over my notes from this reading, I find that they fall flat in an unexpected way. I enjoyed the reading immensely, but looking back at my notes, looking at things that I wrote down thinking this is it, this is what I like, I find something lacking about them, as if they were random, tangential scrawls with little discernment. Whatever it was that roused my interests during the reading is not there.
I think this has to do with the voice of NoViolet Bulawayo. When she speaks, she speaks knowingly, confidently. Her words fell from her lips heavy and assured, as if the way they would land upon ears was predetermined. It was an enchanting certainty–there was nothing hesitating, nothing nervous about it and that lack of a quaver, that calmness–well, it made her words seem true in a nothing-but-the-truth kind of way.
And that really describes Bulawayo’s work and book We Need New Names: true and truth. She has a way of writing about things that one knows to be true but does not think to be true. The kind of things that you wouldn’t come up with on your own, but when spoken aloud, seem like a truth that has always been lurking in the back of your mind. This was noticeable particularly in the second section she read. That section described Darling (the narrator) in Detroit after her move from Zimbabwe. First, she is sitting there thinking about home and what home means to her different family members–they have many homes, according to her, and even though some of them are the same homes, they all describe them differently. Most of these are “before” and “after” kind of descriptions–descriptions less about the homes themselves and more about the events surrounding them, their occupancy and vacancy. Bulawayo does not describe such things with verbose, complicated language–her voice is simple and straight and sufficient for the task at hand. Later, this section transitions to the phone call Darling’s aunt is making. Her aunt is trying to place an order with Victoria Secret but the woman on the other end of the line is having trouble understanding her accent. Readers are given a taste of the frustration, a sip of the embarrassment and the degradation of being accused of not speaking (or knowing) a language that you can speak, and speak well. The words Bulawayo uses to describe the competency of the aunt’s English are particularly precise: “like it was the only language she has ever known.”
The other two portions of her book she read were equally weaved with simple truths. In the first, she talked of how people came to live in Paradise, the shantytown where Darling and her friends reside. They were desolate, they were desperate, but these were not things explicitly stated–like any good author, Bulawayo brought these words to your head by describing their possessions (or lack thereof), their families, or perhaps their children’s fearful eyes. And for the last part of her reading, Bulawayo read from a scene involving Darling, older now, calling her friend Chipo who was still in Zimbabwe. Darling found out, when she attempted to speak of it, that she no longer has the right to speak of the suffering and the turmoil going on in her home country–she is not there, she left. It is no longer her country, her home.
I highly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of We Need New Names. It is touching, insightful truth.
