10 Minutes for Mumbai

1o minutes is not sufficient time to think and write about the attacks in Mumbai this week, but it's all I have this morning and it will have to do. I just read an interesting op-ed in the NYT about the "sin city" status of Mumbai in the South Asian world: because Mumbai is the economic and entertainment center of India, and so many wealthy Indians and westerners flock there for business and pleasure. Muslim and Hindu radicals have long targeted the city for its transgressions, replacing, as the op-ed writer suggests, the bloodless quest for lucre with the bloody public slaying of the irreligious.

I think it's a good time to remind ourselves that the quest for lucre is not bloodless. It's just that all of us who live well, and want to live better, don't have to see the humanitarian consequences--collateral?--of our consumption and dreams. The fact that the modern Western concept of success is built upon an Indian graveyard of third world labor and environmental pollution is not a justification for violence. But it is irrefutable, and it may lend some insight into the motivations of the Mumbai terrorists.

I know that it is possible that these men, like other terrorists, are just unhinged religious fanatics who want to impose their idea of God onto everyone else. But that is too easy an answer, and it allows us no culpability and no possibility for discussion, self-criticism, diplomacy, or societal revision. Religious fanatics exist, but I think that they are primarily charismatic individuals who manage to attract mass followings because those following are feeling unfulfilled. Maybe because they're poor and disenfranchised members of the global community; maybe because they see through the Western dream Shangri-La to the heaps of garbage pushed into the corners and out of sight. Maybe because they are that garbage.

So what can we do? Because this killing, it is so wrong.

Correction: Wao-za

The Watcher reference in Brief Wondrous is an allusion to The Fantastic Four, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For those of you who, like me, never read superhero comics, The Watchers are a cosmic race with total knowledge of coming events (especially catastrophes caused by evil doers). They can also manipulate the time-space continuum and molecules, change physical characteristics, project energy, and create high tech gadgets. The catch is that the Watchers do not allow themselves to share their foreknowledge with other races, as doing so once lent to the destruction of an entire race. Despite the Watcher-wide prohibition on warnings, the Fantastic Four have a Watcher who lets them know when Galactus, et al are planning world demolition.

Okay. So armed with that knowledge, we have to do some serious thinking about the role of the narrator in Brief Wondrous. Is he implicating himself in Oscar's death because he failed to pay sufficient attention to threats, failed to understand what Oscar was planning? Or, is he (Yunior? Diaz?) making a broader statement about the impotency or ridiculousness of the whole Watcher fantasy; no warning is going to overrule Oscar's all-consuming need for requited love.
Or poonanny.

And that's where the book gets troublesome.

Wao-za

Now deeply entrenched in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Making me miss graduate seminars and the assignments where one student would have to prepare a brief presentation and several discussion questions for the text of the day (I know, how dorky). I just have so many questions, and I'm afraid of alienating my fledgling book group.

First--and obvious, okay--who is the primary narrator? I have a hunch that this will be revealed in a body-slam conclusion and I'm willing to wait for it (I've never been one to purposefully anticipate plot twists, and I dislike the pleasure other readers take in getting all Dupin on a text), but I'm getting a little tired of all of the "Watcher" nonsense. I get the allegory--well, actually, that might be another question.

So far the novel cleaves most tightly to the Lord of the Rings, but there's Star Trek, Buffy, and some video game, D&D, and genre fiction references I'm too mainstream to fully appreciate. The narrator positions himself as the Giles to the de Leons' collective Slayer, but these aren't redemptive characters. And their troubles, for all their primacy and focus in the novel, are just a part of the ebb and flow of the loud, poor Dominican communities that dominate the upper, upper westside and I guess parts of New Jersey. It's not that what happens to the de Leons isn't epic, but that a lot of poor bastards from third world countries who come to live in the slums of the U.S. live lives of just such immense proportion and little importance. Is it fuku, as Lola asks, or just life? Life is fuku; life in the diaspora and life in the motherland. Life in one's body. So maybe the Buffy relation is accurate: the de Leons live on a shifting Hell Mouth and need all of the ferocity and violence of a vamp killer to maintain, if not seguridad, then simply being.

Okay: another two questions. Why the footnotes and much more interestingly, why the Dominican Spanish, which alienates the non-Dominican reader from the text, building a barrier, preventing full disclosure of the lives and events of the characters? It's a prose simulation of the invisible storm-proof windows between cultures. I read Spanish and have trouble deciphering the slangy verbs and unusual syntax of Diaz's characters. The narrative feels foreign, like the trip to Guatemala where T and I wandered around, talked with indigenous Guatemalans and Antigua Guatemalans, ate rice and beans, climbed a volcano through thickets of coffee plants, and at the same time seemed to occupy a second country, where we got the tastes, smells, feel of Guatemala, but nothing of its essence. That's how I feel reading this book. Like I can see Beli's luscious and immense t&a, but I don't get their beauty.
I feel so white.

And finally, though this question may be a function of where I am in the text and so unnecessary, where the hell is Oscar? For an eponymous antihero he takes up a fractional portion of the narrative.

I like Junot Diaz, and I like this novel. The sentimentality I was worried about, coming from the cuteness (which loses its toothache sweetness in the shadow of the twin terrors of Trujillo and self-hatred), is not present. This is not a walk through the post 9/11 city with Foer's Oscar and his "heavy boots." This is not a self-satisfying rumination on love or even ruin. Through devices that could grate--dialect, abruptly shifting perspectives, nonstop nerd allusions--Diaz manages to create a cultural universe of playas (not the beaches, the Romeos), sunburn-mean Dominican mamas, Catholic viejas, gangsters and dictators, longing and anger and dreams that (I suspect) is real. And really, really sad.

What I'm Reading

Reading Peace Like a River, and starting The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I like the first novel, find the narrative engaging and funny, the writing surprisingly accurate given that the main character is an 11-year old boy (so often authors instill way too much maturity--intellectual and emotional--into theoretically prepubescent narrators--Leif Enger narrowly misses this mistake by writing a retrospective text). The only element I really dislike is the messianic, mid-western wholesomeness of the plot; the biblical allusions are self-conscious at least, which implies a level of authorial honesty, but the miracles and joyousness in the Lord can be hard to stomach.

I'm only five pages into the latter novel, but I can already tell that the narrative voice(s) are contrived. Not inauthentic--Junot Diaz is a Dominican American writing from a Dominican perspective--but maybe too cutesy and too reliant on a text-specific dialect to make ideological points. I'm desperately hoping that it doesn't go the way of Jonathan Safran-Foer's work, which is also well-written, clever, and so painstakingly constructed that no accurate human characterization or emotional truths emerge from his fiction. I'm going to have to tread carefully in the Diaz waters to make sure that I'm not seduced by the humor and manipulated by the already emerging language game into believing the text to be far more profound, and better written, than it is. This is sometimes my problem with Safran-Foer.

Trying to finish In Defense of Food, which is interesting, but not for 300 pages. Maybe because I already know to eat whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and have no objection to butter over margarine. Speaking of which, I'm hungry.

Uh, what else? Just finished The Twentieth Wife, which is definitely a romance novel but about Moghul India, so I justify it as educational literature with a lot of juice. I'm trying to convince myself that the same rule applies to Phillippa Gregory's Henry VIII novels, but it's considerably more embarrassing to be caught with one of those. Somehow the corsets and lurid sex scenes strip Gregory's stories of intellectual value.

On the list for future reading is Flannery O'Conner (finally) and 18th and 19th century gothic literature. They seem like a good pairing: Catholic lit. with lit. that demonizes Catholics. And in such delicious, morbid, insidious ways.

Whole Grain Politics

Two things I need to mention right away, because I don't have time this morning for witty prose and digressive introductions.

One, I had the most disappointing discussion with my students last night about food. I could not for the life of me interest them in a conversation about the ethical implications of how we source our food, or get them to follow me into thought about how what we eat both causes and is a symptom of other national and global instability. This is the first time I have ever taught this unit to a disinterested classroom and it was frustrating. I finally said to them, "So basically, the world could crumble because we're misusing resources, and we're all too lazy or selfish to do anything about it." And they replied--oh my breaking heart!--that they would care when something catastrophic occurred.

And two, I read this in the paper this morning, courtesy of a Republican party member:

"The most important question for Republicans in both the House and the Senate — and for the future Republican chairman — is how forcefully to take on Mr. Obama once he becomes president. Richard N. Bond, a former Republican chairman, said he thought the Congressional Republicans would — and should — take on Mr. Obama aggressively. Mr. Bond suggested that Republicans should not be deterred by the enthusiasm inspired by Mr. Obama’s election, which he argued would be transitory.“When people wake up from their Bush hangovers, six months from now,” Mr. Bond said, “it is my belief that they are not going to be buying into some of the things that Obama will potentially be doing. You have a real potential for these guys making a fundamental misjudgment of this election. They just didn’t want George Bush anymore" (Nagourney, NYT).

Maybe instead of plotting their next move to further destroy the sanctity of democratic government and our economic system (I'm not sure Henry Paulson really needs any help destroying the economy), they should figure out how to work with the new president to ensure an increasingly stable infrastructure and foreign policy. Our country is broken and it needs to be fixed, not fought over.

Maybe they're waiting for "catastrophe," too.

Proud to be an American

I'm used to belittling that phrase, "proud to be an American." For a long time now, patriotism has been co-opted by country music and the Republican Party. And the redefinition of "patriot" to mean card-carrying member of the NRA, pro-lifer, evangelical Christian, conservative, middle class, war mongerer, borderline xenophobe has exempted me from even wanting to participate in the American collective. In fact, most of the educated people I know are cynical bastards for whom faith in the democratic process is a sign of idiocy.

So it is with trepidation, shyness, and not a small degree of social fear that I say tonight that I am proud to be an American.

Tonight we elected Barack Obama to the presidency. And while I know that this election is only the tip of the iceberg and that it will take years to correct our economy, our global standing, and the national infrastructure, I have never before felt so hopeful about a leader. Not only did Americans finally manage to elect someone intelligent to the position, but he's the first black president of the United States. And while I resented McCain's emphasis on Obama's race in his concession speech, which stripped Obama and his campaign of any significance and accomplishment beyond being historic, the fact that he's black really is incredible.

Listening to President Obama's acceptance speech tonight was the first time that I agreed, "yes we can." It was the first time in a long time that I thought, the democratic ideals of justice and liberty are still accessible to us; we can begin to make up for the last eight years of greed and corruption and cruelty; we have the power to mend education, health care and environmental policy--we just have to roll up our sleeves and do it.

Tonight I feel like action is possible.
My sleeves are ready.
Let's go.