Clarisse Thorn

Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas

priyanka — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

I was initially unimpressed by Firebrands, but that was because I approached it wrong. I tried to sit down in my living room and read it cover-to-cover, and that's not what this book is for. It's a pocket-sized compendium of amazing people—people "left out of the schoolbooks because they were too brown, too female, too poor, too queer, too uneducated, too disabled, or because they daydreamed too much." Each firebrand gets a page-long description, a lovely illustration, and a number of suggestions for further reading.

Firebrands reads somewhat like a reference book, and it could function that way—one could keep it on the shelf in case one heard the name of a lesser-known abolitionist, revolutionary, or what-have-you; then one could simply look that person up. As a blogger, though, I see it as much like a themed blog. It's best opened at random pages, read in fits and starts. It might have been interesting to include some kind of decentralized theme-organization within the book—something along the lines of a blog's tags. A few blog-inspired books have done things like that in recent years, such as the sex-positive anthology Yes Means Yes, which attaches a number of tags at the end of each essay, then lists all tags and their associated entries at the beginning of the book. (Firebrands does have a very nice index, however, so it's possible to navigate the book by themes in that way.)

Once I started reading the book at random and in small chunks, I started liking it a lot. The authors have done a great job of digging up pithy quotations and interesting anecdotes. A few entries lack vividness (it's hard to be enthralled by vague sentences like "She did a lot of community organizing"), but for the most part, these firebrands really sound inspiring. One of my favorite quotations came from the description of Latino baseball player Roberto Clemente: "Clemente's motto was, 'If you have the chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.'" And I was charmed by an anecdote about the singer Nina Simone: "During a recital when she was twelve years old, Nina's parents were asked to relinquish their front row seats to a white family, and Simone refused to perform until her parents were returned to their original seats."

I was also impressed by the book's genuine inclusiveness—it covered a wide array of warriors, artists, leaders, and it did so while pushing beyond the typical "inclusive" boundaries. For example, as a sex-positive activist I was thrilled to note that the painter Frida Kahlo was acknowledged to be both bisexual and polyamorous.

The illustrations add a lot to Firebrands. I particularly love the images by Roger Peet. It goes with the last biography in the book, Zumbi dos Palmares, a Portuguese slave in Brazil who led an insurrection in the 1600s. Firebrands was produced by an artists' cooperative called Justseeds, and it's clear that the whole group pitched in for this book and thought carefully about each element. So you could benefit a bunch of artists by giving this charming collection as a gift! What’s not to love?

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, January 28th 2011

The Memory of Love

gwen — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Aminatta Forna

Atlantic Monthly Press

The Memory of Love is a slow and beautiful book. I'm not the biggest fan of art that proceeds at such a deliberate pace, but this is definitely at the top of the heap for such books; the descriptions are lovely and precise, every detail picked out with absolute care. I loved the representations of African life, which felt honest and authentic. Having recently spent a year in Africa, I had lots of moments of recognition—for example, the racism of many international aid workers is often well-depicted (although it’s carefully not attributed to the “good” expatriate characters, which struck me as simplistic). The author—who is biracial and was raised in the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone—also includes some good post-colonial critique, but it rarely feels like the critique overpowers the narrative.

The book is set mainly in 2001 in Sierra Leone, with three main characters (all male): a dying university professor, a brilliant young surgeon, and a British expatriate psychiatrist. They're complex characters with intriguing perspectives—particularly the professor, who survived very un-heroically through turbulent times, and is not painted in a sympathetic manner at all. The whole story forms a vivid, touching portrait of war—its devastating, multifaceted effects on human beings; its numb aftermath.

It seems like an odd choice for a female author to tell a story primarily through male characters, however, and it's a little bit difficult to know how to review such a book as a feminist. Interestingly, The Memory of Love fails the Bechdel test (to pass, it would require "at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man"). There are at least two women in the book, but I can't think of a scene offhand in which they talk to each other. Of course, the main characters are male, so how could there be such a scene?

Perhaps it's more relevant to discuss how the female characters are portrayed. There are definitely women in this book to equal the men; I particularly liked the psychiatrist's close female friend Ileana, a brusque psychologist and likewise European, whose narrative function is usually to call him out for his assumptions or stereotypes. He also has a female patient with a sad and stirring story. The book's two most important female characters are quite mysterious, though.

Those two female characters are the major love interests—and the two scenes in which we see men fall in love with them depict love at first sight. The women's personalities usually seem incidental to the passion of their lovers. In fact, I would go so far as to call both women ciphers. I never felt like I had much idea of what they were thinking. The male psychiatrist also has a wife and daughter back home, who (in the rather rare instances that they appear) are similarly opaque.

In general, I liked The Memory of Love, especially as a delicate description of a war-ravaged country. But—oddly for a book whose title implies that it's mostly about love—though I enjoyed the portrayals of the men’s emotional experiences throughout their difficult romances, I closed the book feeling somewhat dissatisfied, because I felt so little connection to the female characters.

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, December 19th 2010

Best Sex Writing 2010

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Cleis Press

As a fairly obsessive sex educator, S&M activist, and informal researcher, I didn't expect Best Sex Writing 2010 to make me think nearly as much as it did. I'd imagined it as an anthology that would hit all the usual bases and say the usual sex-positive things: Sex work should be decriminalized! Open relationships can work! Fetishes don't have to terrify us! Women deserve to be promiscuous, if that's what we really want, and we must be empowered to say no to sex too!

The first few essays struck me as par for the sex-positive course—though extremely well-written. Indeed, my favorite essay in the book is the sixth (of twenty-five), an absolutely brilliant work by gay escort Kirk Read that made me want to close the book and start selling sex on Craigslist. Still, it didn't actually challenge any of my current preconceptions, it just made me want to cheer.

But then the book surprised me. As editor Rachel Kramer Bussel explains on the anthology's website, "I want writing about sex that makes people think about it in a new way, that confronts sex and sexual stereotypes, that opens people's eyes, that says things people might find uncomfortable." This even applies to perverts like me, I suppose. The chapters that unsettled me most weren't the explicit ones, but rather the ones that don't align with my ideals of positive sexuality: as openly and carefully communicated, for example, or negotiated with an eye to egalitarian ideals. (No matter how extreme the power differential when a gentleman friend whips me, I approach the relationship itself on an equal footing.)

I felt most grossed out by Michelle Perrot's essay on her upcoming affair, in which she writes: "I don’t want an open marriage, where you and your partner agree that you can have sex with other people. I don’t want hurt feelings and jealousy, all the inevitable trouble that would come with such an arrangement..." but then notes that she's discussed the idea of cheating with her husband, and that "if one of us were to have sex—just sex—with another person, we’d just as soon not know."

In other words, Perrot refuses to style herself as one of those open relationship people—and let's not even get into the stereotypes in her description thereof—because having a tacit agreement with your husband that both of you can sleep quietly with other people isn't an open relationship. Huh? At the same time, Perrot published the essay under a pseudonym "to protect her marriage," which would seem to indicate that she's not actually sure about her husband's consent after all.

I don't mean to pick on Perrot, whose essay was quite well-written and gave me a lot to ponder. My point is that Best Sex Writing 2010 has something for everyone, including material to make a jaded sex theorist think twice. It lacks political sensibility by missing some important bases (e.g., trans people, polyamory, and people outside of the US) and makes one or two truly odd editorial choices. (Why on Earth is Mollena Williams' essay on race play, a fetish so transgressive that it unnerves most people even within permissive S&M communities, placed before Betty Dodson's much gentler memoir that could serve as an introduction to S&M? Are we trying to blindside and horrify the newbies?)

Still, lesbians and sex work and sex education and sex biology and safer sex all appear; S&M is comes up a surprising amount, and even manliness gets a mention. Most importantly, Best Sex Writing 2010 is a genuinely layered and challenging book.

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, August 30th 2010