biracial

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

barbara — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Heidi W. Durrow’s novel swirls out from and obsessively around the moment when a mother and her three children fall from the rooftop of a Chicago building. The narration crystalizes around this striking event, with multiple narrators adding their points of view to the interpretation of the mystery surrounding the plunge. Rachel, the sole survivor, struggles to adjust to the losses and changed that characterize her life after the fall. Brick witnesses the family tumbling from the rooftop, mistaking the plummeting bodies for birds. Laronne is the former employer of Nella, Rachel’s mother, and is charged with sorting through the aftermath of the tragedy, trying to make sense of the event through only what fragments of the family is left behind: their belongings and their story, with its embellishments and rumors.

Like Laronne, the reader has to piece together the fractured picture of that day. Many pivotal characters stay on the periphery, darting in and out of the narrative through memories or secondhand accounts: Rachel’s father makes his voice heard through one chapter and through his encounters with Jamie; Nella speaks through her diaries, chronicling her journey towards sobriety; Rachel’s siblings are muted, as is the man that convinced Nella to leave her husband behind and move to Chicago to pursue a new life. The true story of what happened on that roof is elusive and evolving.

With such a startling and intriguing premise, Durrow still manages to shift the focus and drama of the story to Rachel’s life after the fall. The young girl not only tries to come to terms with her mother’s motives, her father’s distance, and her brothers’ deaths, but also tries to fit into a new culture that is at best dubious about her blue eyes and mixed race. Rachel seeks to establish herself as a “new girl,” with a new start after her the deaths of her brothers and mother, but finds she cannot escape from who she was and can only try to shape who she will become.

Durrow is a talented and eloquent storyteller. The metaphor of flight, both as flying and fleeing, is satisfyingly woven throughout the novel as the thread that unites characters and revelations. Durrow creates a affecting and personal portrait of a girl growing up in a world that expects her to define herself as either black or white, a stark decision she’s never considered and that makes her feel she is betraying the memory of her mother or the culture of her father and grandmother. Durrow’s novel deftly explores the idea that there is no singularity of truth, self-identity, or survival.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 20th 2010

You Have Given Me a Country

caitlin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Neela Vaswani

Sarabande Books

At the beginning of You Have Given Me a Country, author Neela Vaswani writes, “What follows is real, and imagined.” Thus begins Vaswani's memoir, a dreamy collection of reflections on her family's multiracial, multinational history.

Ashok Vaswani, Neela's father, was born in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan) before the cataclysm of Partition. As a toddler, Ashok fled with his family to the new state of India, where his father found a job as a traveling railroad physician. Later, Ashok traveled to the US to practice medicine and to leave behind a tense postwar economy and a family that had fractured under the pressure of exile. “To my father, nationality was fickle, unreliable,” writes Neela. “My father said, 'Homeland is in the body,' and 'Land is in the blood.'”

Neela's mother, Sheila Vaswani (nee Kent), was born an Irish Catholic American to a family that could beat up and then forgive an uncle who had molested another relative, but that could never accept a gay cousin. Sheila remained a lifelong Catholic, sitting stone-faced at church with her mixed-race daughter, forevermore denied the privilege of communion for having married outside her faith. It was Sheila who castigated Neela's father's colleagues for calling him Frank: “It's not hard. Ashok. Rhymes with Coke.”

The book is told in a loosely chronological series of vignettes and family stories. On the whole, You Have Given Me a Country is told through Neela's eyes, but it is not Neela's story. Although we learn the journeys, prides, and sorrows of Ashok and Sheila, we catch only glimpses of Neela: a nosebleed here, a day in preschool there, and then, at the end, the preparations for her wedding, to a man whom we never really meet. What we do learn about Neela, though, is that she has consistently watched and loved each of her parents, seeing the complexity, the isolation, the miracle of their lives together, creating one tiny space where, as Neela writes, “difference was a way of life. A constant negotiation of respect, ignorance, new understanding... What was not accepted by society was real and lived by me and mine. Love, the great border crosser. No passport required.”

By deliberately framing her story as a “mixed-genre memoir” (which is to say a lived history, but one that refuses to claim perfect allegiance to fact), Vaswani makes a contribution to the contemporary debate about trauma, memory, and narrative. By refusing to promise truth, Vaswani protects her story against anyone, be it relative or critic, who would wish to discredit its accuracy. At the same time, she carves out space to tell as much truth as she wants while still protecting her family's privacy; readers are bound to remember that each story she tells could be a fabrication, after all. (It should be noted that Vaswani is not the first author to take this approach: Audre Lorde's “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name comes to mind.)

Critics sometimes have a point when they complain about the accuracy or objectivity of memoirs. However, sometimes these complaints are merely cleverly—and perhaps unconsciously—disguised ruses to silence marginalized stories that are, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst, incriminating. By sidestepping the demand to portray herself as an objective witness, Vaswani shrewdly protects her own story against such attempts to discredit it. Simultaneously, she subtly makes the point that when it comes to narrative, validity and significance stem from something more complicated than mere literal truth.

Vaswani's prose is spare and vivid and her characters richly human. In this series of carefully chosen, effortlessly linked memories, she tells the histories, the romances, and the tragedies of her own family's dance with diaspora, exile, homeland, immigration, identity, and dignity.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, October 20th 2010

Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Edited by Sherene Razack

Between The Lines

Institutional racism: we all know it exists, yet many deny it does. In this book, Sherene Razack, author of Looking White People in the Eye, edits a set of deeply disturbing accounts of racially-motivated public policies and resultant public consciousness in North America. Beginning with the premise “Race is Space,” _Race, Space, and the Law_ unearths half-forgotten history of racial injustice and challenges the romanticisation of European settlement which is so deeply embedded in Canadian and American folklore. In other words, it seeks to unpack and debunk the notion of the peaceful collaboration between settlers and the aboriginal community, and the idea that the Native peoples have “always accepted, and to some degree, were willing to agree that being the possessors of a land need not necessarily be the only source of legitimacy of its use.”

Razack's book brings together disparate laws and fragments of history—laws on drinking establishments, the ban on "unparliamentarian" language, midwifery, mosque-building, a murder of a sex worker, and inner city slum dwellings—to subvert the "universal" values of justice upheld by the law. There are far too many examples in Race, Space, and the Law that illustrate these modes of subversion and resistance in brilliant, infuriating colour to fit into this review, so I will only be able to share a few.

In "Keeping the Ivory Tower White," Carol Schick sets the predominantly White University of Saskatchewan as a stage for the maintenance of White privilege by exploring the responses of White students to multicultural education. The course, which focused heavily on Aboriginal culture and history, brought out feelings of discomfort. As members of a respectable and intellectual domain of the university, students founded their discomfort and racial insecurity on rationality to side step racist or non-PC misgivings about the content of the course. Schick argues that by making disclaimers and claiming credentials as a feminist sympathizer, students can project themselves as utterly reasonable people—especially as ones who understand the necessity of civility and self-control as they secure White privilege and entitlement.

Renisa Mawani's "In Between and Out of Place" describes the situation of biracial individuals who symbolised the destabilisation of colonial power through the blurring the racial boundaries in mid nineteenth-century British Columbia. Racial categories, often a product of British colonialism, were crucial to maintaining the “racial order of things,” that determined who had certain rights to land and citizenship. Biracial men and women were perceived to be troublemakers and untrustworthy, and hence there were strict laws on alcohol purchase and distribution for this group. The logic behind this was motivated by the fear of interracial mixing because it might result in, quite simplistically, more biracial people.

Perhaps the most recent challenge to Whiteness is the growing presence of Islam in the West, particularly after the September 11 attacks. In Engin Isin and Myer Siemiatycki's essay "Making Space for Mosques," xenophobia and Islamophobia emerged from behind the cloak of neighbourly respectability when the building of new mosques in Toronto was met with resistance. The level of restrictions placed on the Muslim places of worship, particularly on those built on sites of formerly Christian worship, was unprecedented. Suddenly, the “change” a mosque would bring to the look of the neighbourhood became a prime concern for the surrounding residents that resulted in the physical curtailment of the mosque's development, including the reduction of the minaret's height and in some ways, its potent symbolism.

These essays reiterate the fundamental premise that space, particularly a public one, produces identities of privilege and degeneracy. I highly recommend this book to people interested in marginalised history and its place in institutionalised racism today. Perhaps a dose of history will give naysayers of institutional racism some food for thought, too.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, July 29th 2009