Margotlog: Writing Toward the "Other" -- Linda Hogan and Kathryn Stockett

Margotlog: Writing Toward the "Other"--Linda Hogan and Kathryn Stockett

     Sorry, you alien-mystery lovers. I'm not with you. Instead, I find myself drawn to writers whose imagination transcends their own boundaries of race, class, and culture. They have the power to evoke lives quite unlike their own.

     I've read other works by Linda Hogan, but People of the Whale has made the most indelible impression. Though Native American from the North American heartland, Hogan here describes people of the sea. Once whale hunters, always sparingly, but now almost not at all because there is an international moritorium on whale killing (which Norwegians ignore). The book focuses on a woman who lives on a boat and fishes for her living. She has lost her husband to the war in Vietnam, yet as the story unfolds, he will return, first in vividly evoked scenes from the Vietnam jungle, then to his original people (presumably on the coast of Washington). He is a broken soul, yet when a conniving tribal member rouses the people to a whale hunt (he intends to steal the flesh and sell it to the Japanese--don't get me started on the depredations of sushi on global  fish populations), this Vietnam vet once again takes his place in the hunt. .

     In the hunt, the husband--once the designated heir of the people's highest aims and beliefs--is injured, and his son with the main characters is killed. This is a terrible loss to the mother, and suggests how damaging to the people themselves this hunt will become.Slowly the narrative shifts to modern-day Vietnam, and the daughter of the Native American soldier with a Vietnamese woman who befriended him. This lovely, vital child--who figures out how to survive in Ho Chi Minh City by sweeping sidewalks in front of shops--is eventually taken into a florist's family. She becomes an arranger of beautiful flowers and an accomplished translator. This long section is perhaps the most sustained and powerful narrative of the book. Yet it is outside the author's immediate cultural experience. Hogan may well have traveled to Vietnam, but it is only through imagination that she could have created this vibrant, stunning young woman who breathes life onto the page.

     Segue to Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Since I grew up in South Carolina, I've been long aware of the divide between black maids and their white mistresses. My mother, the North Dakota prairie
invidiaulist, wouldn't have tolerated a maid--she had to do it all herself. Not to mention that my college-teacher father couldn't have afforded one anyway. But I met black maids in the lovely homes of well-off Southern friends-- kindly black women in their kitchens, soft-spoken, who served us girls as if we were royalty.

     Later as I grew up to ride the city buses, my fear of offense fought with my intense discomfort as maids, tired and hot after long hours at work, were forced to pass empty seats in the front and find accommodation in the back. Kathryn Stockett captures this conflict. In fact, one of her main characters is a privileged, well-educated white "girl," who decides to write the histories of "the help" in Jackson, Mississippi. I like the voice and difficulties of this white character, but it's the group of black maids who truly carry the story.

     Their personalities--from rough and feisty to gentle and well-spoken, from beaten by a black husband to solitary and prayerful--become the high point of the story. They are so fully real, so filled with the duty to submit to segregation in order to keep their jobs, and subversive as they undermine racism, while raising white children. These interactions are the most tender and laced with irony--white children being loved by black maids who often instruct them as they tend to their needs. Stockett shows us over and over how racism and segregation undo themselves in the persons of these black women.

     The book the maids write with the college "girl" becomes an outstanding success, but of course it is fully dangerous if the white women in Jackson figure out they are being portrayed. There are as many loving portrayals as there are searing portraits, yet it's terribly dangerous, in this lawless place. Ultimately it's a seed planted by the maids that ultimately protects them. I won't give any more away. Suffice it to say, it involves the most virulent (and ridiculous) white female racist of them all--Hilly Holbrook.

     When The Help first came out, I read it. But it's now as I listen to it on disk--with the maids' sections read by wonderful African-American voices--that the book gains my intense and lasting admiration. Yes, the author herself grew up in Jackson. We have to suspect she used much of her own experience from the 1960s. But it's her power to imagine the inner lives of the black maids that rings the most true. And Kathryn Stockett, according to her author photos, is white as they come.
    

Margotlog: The Hawks of Winter

Margotlog: The Hawks of Winter

     I thought it was a hawk as first. Swiveling its beaked head almost completely around. Sitting high in the white pine, level with my second floor windows. Big but not enormous. Not an eagle. Not a condor!

     The bird book disagreed. Not a true hawk (which to me means a Buteo, the classic red-tailed hawk). This bird had splotches of white on its back and a brown streamed neck, chest and wings. A juvenile Northern Goshawk, the largest of the family Accipters, from smallest Sharp-shinned, to mid-size Cooper's, to this threatening bird.

     Every one of the birds I feed winter, summer, spring and fall, were silent. It was like a tomb, which indeed it could well become for any bird that ventured to show itself.

     The day was brilliantly clear.with heaps of snow on the ground.where I had shoveled paths for ground feeders. Little did I know.

     That first day of silence and intense scrutiny--for this Accipter stayed put for hours, swiveling its head, shaking snow from its feathers--I was fascinated, training binoculars on it, checking on its position from all the back windows. 

     The second day, it had disappeared from view but must have stayed close. Blue jays bugled their warning calls, and when I returned after two hours away, mid-afternoon, there was evidence of a death in the snow--feathers spread in a circle and a touch of blood. The Harrier had carried off its prey. My heart sank: I was afraid it was a cardinal, one of the ten who usually settle in twilight to feed. I felt complicit in the crime. Thought of taking a pot-shot at the hawk. I've never shot anything nor did I intend to start. But the impulse was there, startling.

     The third day the silence made me so sad I almost covered my ears. No twitter of goldfinch, no gossip of sparrows, no chick-a-dee-dee, no little rasp announcing a nut hatch. No flutter of wings. I drove to the store for groceries and as crossed the freeway home, two big brown and white stripped birds soared close above. Accipters, two of them.

     The backyard was strewn with little fans of pale grey feathers. A pigeon had put up a fight and succumbed. The body had been carried away. Since then, I've seen one of the Accipters again. It dove out of the blue into a gaggle of pigeons gobbling up seeds. I saw the wide shadow on the snow, the spread wings. The pigeons got away, probably because the Accipter knocked into a low-hanging feeder. But in a trice, it righted itself and was gone.

     We all are wary. I am no longer angry or even sad. Just glad the small birds know they are in mortal danger, know to stay low or simply not to appear at all. I'm saving on bird seed. And wonder when the Accipters will lift the imbargo on my yard, and restore my usually peaceable kingdom.
According to the Sibley Guide to North American Birds, these Goshawks do not spend spring and summer here. I'm praying that spring comes soon.

Margotlog: Facebook & Company

Margotlog: Facebook & Company

Dear Readers, I am no longer on facebook. A while ago, someone or other impersonated me. There were, thus, two facebook pages almost identical, purporting to be from me. But I could get into only one, the "real" one. The other used, I eventually found out, a name I suspect was assumed--something like William Schilling.

How do I know this? Because a few, real life (as opposed to cyper) friends began calling, asking was it true? Had I changed my profession and just won a $50,000 grant? Had I somehow lost my English language ability and was now writing in odd phrases and combinations?

With help, I did what I could. I contacted the people who had "friended" me and gave them instructions on how to "defriend" the duplicate facebook page with my name on it. I also told them I was erasing my real self from facebook.

Since then, I have been mulling over what it means to know someone via cyber space. The image that comes to mind is of a dark night sky with swirling balls of light, which are facsimiles of people. They can't touch or speak face to face because, in truth, they are only hanging out somewhere in the dark. But they can send glowing messages across the night sky. It's rather beautiful. Dazzling really. But it's not hold-in-your-hand real, You can't ask these supposed friends to literally befriend you with a loaf of bread or a borrowed phone..

Studying these friends in the dark also creates some rather dizzying behavior. We have to keep our heads back in order to study the sky. And the blood supply to our heads is shut off because we don't lower our heads frequently enough for the blood to flow normally. We become rather giddy. And sometimes act silly, imagining a reality that is actually pure facsimile.

I adore fiction, but I try not to let it come through the door and ask for drinks. I try to keep it within its glowing little boxes.  And limit the time I sit before it.

I'd rather have the old-fashioned fictions with no faces at all. But only voices. Radio voices or photograph voices. And best of all, fictions written and shaped with creative intent, distanced from their authors by a craft that considers how we humans make sense or nonsense of the world and how the world fights back. Not off-shoots of real people pretending to be high-flyers, more or less or other than they are.

 As to the facebook page that impersonates me? I hear it's still up in cyber space. Please don't "friend" it. Recently someone I actually know reported that an acquaintances had "friended" me and received a message the tune of $50,000. I don't have that kind of money to t give away.

If you have become involved with this impersonator, please "defriend, unfriend" as soon as possible. Even if it's difficult, it will make your star-gazing just a little bit calmer. I'm applauding in advance.

Margotlog: Art Warriors

Margotlog: Art Warriors

     Odd these conjunctions: lifesize Chinese tomb warriors from 200 BCE striding in their stone shapes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Then rooms full of women's art, made from the mid-1970s to the present era, associated with one of the earliest American women's art galleries, WARM.  

     I knew nothing and still know very little about the Chinese warriors, but two clashing standards stay in mind. The warriors are extremely lifelike, with faces full of individuality, clothing different too, some with doubled over skirts, others with thick trousers, some tunics, hair rolled into cords around the brow. Others with heads covered, only a bit of hair showing above arrow-proof vests. Yet, these figures were not meant to be viewed and appreciated. The artists, in fact, were buried alive to prevent word from escaping about the entombed warriors. Either their instigator, the first emperor to unite China, fervently believed they would meet him in the afterlife, and wanted the faces of real life people around him. Or the artists could not help themselves--they had to create what they knew, in other words what we call realism. Realism, without the viewers to appreciate it. It makes our seeing them even more compelling.

     Now to our modern warriors. It's hard to recapture the stress and excitement, the rigor (I only heard about this) with which the WARM artists interrogated themselves as they launched their radical experiment. Hard to recapture because what they won has entered and changed the fabric of American art. As I viewed the current show at the Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, I was struck by this. There is Lynn Ball's assemblage of continuouly playing: photographs portraying an artistic love affair in Italy. I had to see this several times, almost better than a movie because I knew the landscape and the lovers. Art as biography, art as personal history. The photographs are even grainy and slightly out of focus. A real life camera, quick shots, now shown slowly--contemplation after a lover's death.. 

     There was Quimetta Pearl's astonishing deployment of embroidery--every stitch known to woman--to outline in flame silk a woman's body. Quintessential women's work, yet with such exquisite finesse. It's going, going, gone. How many women do you know who embroider, who stitch? An homage to common occupation become artistic in her unique hands.

     Then there are elements from Linda Gammell and Sandra Taylor's "seed" house construction on the Grinnell College campus (since dismantled). I didn't see the original, but got a taste of the artists' wide experiimentalism--sun-dried peppers become a window dressing. A baby dress rendered ghostly through an odd photographic medium--suggestive of how frequently children died from diseases now long past, and of the elusive, quickly changing character of childhood itself. This is wild realism that takes communal truth and forces us to see it fresh.

     Which, for many of these artists, was the point. They wanted to rename through art what in women's lives is taken for granted, subsumed, ignored. Now that their struggle has born such fruits, now that their examples inform  many younger artists, male and female, environmental and political, it's fine to unearth from the past what shines with such vigor and knowing.