| 14 February 2010
Most of us have faded photos of grandparents or great-grandparents who seem as alien as creatures from another planet or denizens of a sunken civilization. “Fools in old-style hats and coats,” as Philip Larkin terms them in his famous poem This Be the Verse.
In her latest novel, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé sets out to unearth, by dint of research, family legend and imagination, the truth of one such forebear.
In Condé’s case it is a lost and mysterious grandmother, Victoire Elodie Quidal, a poor Caribbean mulatto of no education or distinction, who died before the writer was born in 1933. “All I have of her is a sepia-colored photo,” Condé begins.
“The sight of her never failed to make me feel uneasy. My mother’s mother had that Australian whiteness for the color of her skin. Her soft-colored eyes like Rimbaud’s, set deep in their sockets, were reduced to two Asian slits. She was staring at the lens without the shadow of a smile and without any attempt to appear gracious. Her headtie knotted with two points signified an inferior station.”
The life that Condé half-discovers, half-creates, is one of almost unfathomable harshness. The illegitimate daughter of a 14-year-old girl impregnated by a nameless, faceless white French soldier, Victoire exists at the very bottom of the Guadeloupean social hierarchy. Even black laborers are free to despise her, and her own mulatto relatives put her to menial work, “like a pariah, like a slave.”
Victoire grows up beautiful, silent, illiterate and unquestioning. At 16, seduced by a handsome black radical journalist, she gives birth to Condé’s mother, Jeanne. For a while Victoire, who discovers she has a genius for cooking, works for a family of cousins. But fleeing their abuse, she enters the household of the Walbergs, a prosperous white Creole family where she will spend most of the rest of her life.
Victoire becomes best friends with Anne-Marie Walberg, united by a love of music. Anne-Marie is grateful rather than jealous when her husband, Boniface, takes Victoire into his bed, pleased to be relieved of conjugal duty. Boniface, for his part, grows devoted to Victoire and years later, deprived of her company, pines away and dies. Victoire remains devoted to Jeanne, determined to provide the education that will elevate her daughter beyond misery and hardship.
To my mind Maryse Condé is among the world’s greatest living writers. At first the unusual attack she chooses for Victoire – part documentary, part imagined – seems to deny this book the full breath of invention that makes previous works such as Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat or The Story of the Cannibal Woman so powerful and beguiling.
Neither fully credible as nonfiction nor quite alive as fiction, this book, with its authorial intrusions and invitations to reader speculation, sometimes reveals Condé writing, something that has never happened in her previous stories.
But this is a sly ruse on Condé’s part. It’s important to take note the title designation – “a novel” – and to consider the occasional artlessness of the narrative as intentional, a master novelist making conscious use of the conventions of a lesser genre, the family history. Thus, when the narrator considers whether Victoire and Anne-Marie had a sexual relationship, she declares: “I refuse to believe it.” And then promptly undermines her own assessment by noting “the tradition of both masculine and feminine homosexuality is well established in the Antilles.”
And when Condé writes of Boniface’s relationship with the child, Jeanne, the writer in her squirms in feigned frustration: “How I would like to include here a case of pedophilia! The white Creole swine abusing the little Negro girl, his servant’s daughter. Alas! Boniface Walberg was a modest man of integrity.”
So while Victoire lacks the magical realism lightly present in Cannibal Woman, heavily in Celanire, Condé endows the narrative with a subtler, more difficult magic. Her resolute focus on her grandmother’s story, her touchingly naked attempts to make a personal connection with her, enables Condé to present the reader with a clear, if sidelong, view of Caribbean society, top to bottom, at a time of upheaval and transition.
The seeming artlessness of certain passages, in fact, conceals art of supreme sophistication. It succeeds in revealing Victoire as a fully realized woman of her time and place. It does the same for Jeanne, who grows up intelligent but emotionally rigid and judgmental. Indeed, in this book Condé humanizes everyone who comes under her gaze. The ruling white class is not always wicked, for example, nor is the rising black middle class always noble.
Victoire is another triumph of world literature from a novelist who, well into her 70s, with more than a dozen books available in translation, continues to write with remarkable creative energy and craftsmanship.
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
Victoire: My Mother’s Mother: A Novel, by Maryse Condé, translated from the French by Richard Philcon, 193 pp., Atria, $19.99.
| 03 February 2010
NothingWasTheSame_cvr.indd
Kay Redfield Jamison has often written and spoken eloquently about her lifelong struggle with manic depression, otherwise known as bipolar illness.
In her new book, Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, she writes with the same honesty and passion about coping with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, from cancer. Both were well-known psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Despite severe dyslexia, Wyatt became a leader in the study of schizophrenia.
The book can be divided into three parts: a poignant story of unexpected love, a desperate search for ways to prolong Wyatt’s life, and a tormented period of mourning after he died.
Wyatt was 45 and Jamison 38 when they met. She was drawn to his reserve and intelligence, and saw him as “catnip to women.” He understood her mental illness and encouraged her to write about it -- a scary thought because she had hid her fears and grown up “sealed tightly as a vault.”
When her book An Unquiet Mind was published in 1995, Jamison received thousands of letters, most of them supportive. But she also received hateful missives, which gave her “more than a taste of the intolerance and hatred religious extremity harbors toward those with mental illness.”
The couple’s fairy-tale marriage took a sharp turn when doctors found tumors in Wyatt’s liver and lungs in 1999. The remaining few years of his life became a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs.
Because of Wyatt’s reputation and connections, he was able to take advantage of every experimental treatment that offered any hope. One wonders if he was getting medical care superior to what most people could access or afford, merely because of his position.
According to the author, Wyatt had no spiritual faith. He trusted medicine and science to find answers to cancer.
During Wyatt’s gradual decline, the couple bravely tried to enjoy life as much as possible. Jamison recalls “long evenings of friendship and laughter” with friends. He became more physically affectionate and held her close “in a way I had not known him to do before.”
Near the end, Wyatt’s lungs collapsed. He underwent surgery, but within days, other major organs failed. Jamison finally gave permission to remove life support.
Initially, the loss almost overwhelmed her. When she was least expecting it, “a memory would bring me to my knees.” She visited his grave often, spoke aloud to him and often blurted out, “I want my husband back.”
“I felt at sea, assailed, numb,” she writes. “I did not know what I thought or felt – everything was jumbled, in flux, and contrary.” Gradually, Jamison found strength in the support of family and friends. She also drew on poetry, particularly Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
She eventually found her way back to life through writing. During her husband’s illness she was writing a book about exuberance, “an odd topic, given what we were going through.”
The author distinguishes between depression, which she knew well, and grief, which was a new experience. The two may be distant cousins, but grief bears little resemblance to the “malignant, indiscriminately destructive” nature of depression, she writes.
Reading Nothing Was the Same, one senses the author’s devotion to her husband and her grief over his death, and yet something is missing. Few of the scenes are etched deeply enough to create lasting impressions.
Moreover, the book fails to rise to the level of universal meaning or significance. In the end, this is a story of a middle-aged couple deeply in love, and the author’s grief when her husband died. But one searches in vain for wisdom or deeper meaning that might help others who have lost a spouse.
It may be unfair to expect that every book about love and loss will resonate on a universal level. Perhaps it is enough to think of this account as a well-written personal story by a talented author who has suffered – and survived -- serious mental illness and, more recently, the loss of her beloved husband.
Bill Williams is a free-lance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, by Kay Redfield Jamison, 208 pp., Knopf, $25.
| 25 January 2010
Poet Marie Howe.
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
-- Bertolt Brecht
A somber tone dominated the sixth edition of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, with the distinguished faculty focusing on “poems of witness” and elegies for the dead. Yet by Saturday, the busy last day of the festival, the atmosphere had turned almost giddy with the sheer joy of poetry.
As Marie Howe remarked during the afternoon panel discussion, “An elegy is a love poem.”
Carolyn Forché set the grave mood the previous Monday, when she opened the festival with a discussion of her influential 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. She was joined by Ilya Kaminsky, who came to America when his family fled anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
The emphasis on elegy arose from Kevin Young, whose latest collection, Dear Darkness (2008), was inspired by the death of his father. In March, his anthology of elegiac poems, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, will be published.
During a break in Saturday’s programs, Miles Coon, founder and director of the festival, said the week had been anything but a downer, despite the dark and serious subject matter of many of the readings.
“There’s been a lot of elegiac poetry,” Coon said. “Carolyn Forché and Kevin Young seemed to inspire a lot of people. Thomas Lux read a couple of elegies. Ilya Kaminsky. But there is an element of joy in elegy, and then there is just the power of poetry in general.”
By any metric, this year’s festival was a success. The six days of workshops drew more aspiring poets than ever, with a waiting list for the 96 seats. Poets came from 25 states and several foreign countries to study with Howe, Forché, Young, Kaminsky, Lux, Stephen Dobyns, David Wojhan and Mary Cornish.
Many of the daily public events – poetry readings, panel discussion and performance poetry – drew near-capacity crowds.
During Saturday afternoon’s panel, “Beloved and Influential Poems,” Howe praised her workshop participants. “My students worked so hard this week,” she said.
Among this year’s students, Donna Hunt came from Athens, Ohio, to study with Kevin Young. An adjunct English instructor at Ohio University, she’s already been published in literary magazines like The Diagram.
“I had a great week,” Hunt said. “Everything was amazing, like just being in the same room with Marie Howe or Carolyn Forché.”
The Saturday panel proved a potent celebration of poetry, with the acclaimed poets on stage – Pulitzer finalists, Guggenheim fellows, National Book Award finalists—reading and discussing their own favorite poems.
Lux chose We Are Many, by Pablo Neruda, for example. Forché read On Living, by Nazim Hikmet, who she named the best Turkish poet of the 20th century. Among the other selections were poems by John Berryman, W.S. Graham, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats.
“It’s an impossible task, picking out one great poem,” said Wojahn, a Pulitzer finalist in 2007 for Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004. “I think I now have an iPod behind my cerebrum with 400 of my favorite poems and sometimes I put it on ‘shuffle’.”
Lux noted that all the poems selected were by men, even though the panel included three women. Moderator Campbell McGrath, South Florida’s most distinguished poet, added that only three of the selected poems were by Americans.
The panel briefly discussed the question of whether American poets don’t “have as much at stake” as Europeans or Latin Americans. Kaminsky suggested modern U.S. poets are drunk on irony, while Wojahn said “the professionalization” of poetry might make modern poets “too comfortable” to take risks.
But the poets seemed less in the mood to worry about political correctness than to exult in its pleasures.
“I don’t think poetry is as complicated as we sometimes want to make it,” Lux said. “Every time I read (Hart Crane), I get a physiological response, like an electric eel shooting through my body. Poetry for me is more visceral than anything else.”
Cornish, who spoke movingly of a grandmother “who recited poetry only when she was fishing,” said favorite poems provide balance to the chaos, speed and bad news of modern life. “This is my balance to the headlines,” Cornish said. “This is my balance to how can I cake one more headline about the Supreme Court.”
Howe and Wojahn closed out the week’s readings on Saturday night. “The people in my workshops were wonderful,” Wojahn said, “and I’m scared shitless to be in a room with poets I’ve been in awe of for 30 years.”
The festival ended with performances by slam poets Andrea Gibson and Anis Mojgani. Host Taylor Mali called them “two of the best performance poets today,” offering as evidence: “They have no other jobs. They support themselves going place to place, performing their poems.”
Mali, himself a four-time National Poetry Slam team champion, praised Coon for including performance poetry from the festival’s inception.
Last year, Mali was one of the slam poets on stage, but in a conversation earlier in the day, he noted that he has attended the festival for three years – as a student.
“I make my living teaching poetry,” said Mali, who lives and works in New York. “But you never get so good you can afford to stop studying. There’s a lot stage and page poets can learn from each other.”
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
| 17 January 2010
Miles Coon and Delray Beach Mayor Woodie McDuffie, with a proclamation designating Jan. 18-23 as Delray Beach Poetry Week.
Miles Coon did not build the Palm Beach Poetry Festival into one of Florida’s top literary events in five short years by being cautious.
After last year’s economically troubled festival, when one workshop had to be canceled for lack of enrollment, he knew prudence dictated a smaller, less ambitious plan for 2010.
Instead, Coon chose a bolder path, increasing the advertising budget and putting together another impressive slate of poets. The result: Every workshop seat is taken, the high school poetry contest fielded 100 more entrants than last year, and the number of public poetry events has gone up.
“In every measure the festival will be bigger and better than in years past,” says Coon, who founded the event in 2004 and serves as its executive director. “It’s amazing to me in these economic times we have people coming from London, Vancouver, Grand Bahama and 25 states.”
This year’s lineup includes top names in American poetry: Stephen Dobyns, Caroline Forché, Marie Howe, David Wojhan, Ilya Kaminksy, plus one of the country’s leading younger poets, Kevin Young. And, Thomas Lux, the only poet to appear at every Palm Beach Poetry Festival to date.
The sixth edition of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a mixture of intermediate and advanced workshops for poets and public readings and panel discussion, starts Monday and runs through Saturday.
Public events take place each of the six days at the Old School Square Cultural Center in downtown Delray Beach. One highlight is Wednesday’s gala dinner ($250, 5 p.m.), followed by a reading featuring Dobyns and Young (all readings are $12, $10 for seniors and $8 for students.)
Unlike some literary events – the Key West Literary Seminar, for example – the Palm Beach Poetry Festival does not declare a theme. But if it did have theme this year, it would be memory, suggests Coon.
“Poets keep the past alive,” Coon says, citing Forché’s 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, which “gathers 1,800 pages of poems written during periods of exile, torture imprisonment and oppression.”
Poetry preserves personal memory, too, Coon says, pointing to Kevin Young’s latest collection, Dear Darkness, inspired by the death of the poet’s father.
“He writes against forgetting, about capturing what his father stood for, how the everyday objects in our lives serve as reminders of those we love and lost,” Coon says.
Poet Kevin Young.
At 39, Young is already well-established in the firmament of contemporary American poetry, with an impressive output of eight collections – some containing more than 100 poems – since his 1998 debut, Most Way Home.
“A lot of my books engage different aspects of history,” Young said by phone last week from his office at Emory University in Atlanta, where he is a creative writing professor. “Personal history, general history.”
A direct heir to the “blues poetry” of Langston Hughes, Young is often admired for the musicality of his work. But even when he writes directly about the black experience, as in For the Confederate Dead, Young’s poetry remains inclusive and personal.
“The important part of that title is not ‘confederate,” Young says, “it’s the ‘dead’ part. I wrote it as an elegy for a friend who had died on the one-year anniversary of 9/11. It’s more about public mourning than anything else.”
In considering why poetry seems, against conventional wisdom, to grow more popular each year, Young and Coon agree. While the advent of hip-hop and spoken-word performance may have brought a new awareness of poetry to a younger generation, the main thing is the capacity of poetry to help people through adversity.
“The past 10 years I would say America has been going through a period of extraordinary uncertainty on the world stage and also in our economy,” Coon says. “Right after 9/11 an amazing number of poems from the canon circulated on the Internet and gave people some sense of how to deal with the terrible grief we felt from that attack.”
Young addresses grieving in his next book, an anthology of poems called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Coming out in March, it is a collection of elegies, and another project inspired by the death of his father.
“A friend and I were talking and we realized no book like that exists,” Young says. “I was thinking about the elegy a lot and what it means. That’s one of the ways poetry is always relevant. It can honor that experience more than anything.”
Yet while Young, as a blues poet, doesn’t hesitate to “name” tragedy, he’s quick to name comedy, too. “The tragicomic mix is what I strive for,” he says. “It may be sad, but the music of the language underneath is light.”
That’s one reason, Coon says, the festival chooses its featured poets with care.
“We want to hear America singing,” he says, “through the voices of the poets we invite to teach and read and talk about poetry. I can tell you, the poets are all excellent readers. I don’t have poets who are boring.”
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
For a full Palm Beach Poetry Festival schedule and ticket information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org/home.
Judges and some of the winners of the festival's High School Poetry Contest. Standing left to right: Jeff Morgan of Lynn University; Miles Coon and Blaise Allen of the Poetry Festival; Benjamin Copan, 16, of Wellington High; sitting left to right: Rachel Katz, 17, Dreyfoos School of the Arts; Adriana Ugarte, 16, Dreyfoos School; Melissa Dubey, 15, Jupiter High. (Photo by Michiko Kurisu)
| 10 January 2010
pariah
Most newspapers and magazines posted their lists of the best books of 2009 by the end of November. I was no exception (you can see mine at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts Website).
The problem with these early lists, though useful for Christmas shopping, is they risk missing worthwhile books published late in the year, especially from small independent publishing houses.
Take Dave Zeltserman’s Pariah, an entry in what I think of as the Whitey Bulger sweepstakes. Fictions based on the fugitive Boston Irish mobster to date include George V. Higgins’ 2000 novel At the End of the Day and the Oscar-winning Martin Scorsese film The Departed. Zeltserman, writing in the pitch-black comic tradition of Jim Thompson or Charles Willeford, deserves to stand in such exalted company.
Once the number-two man in the South Boston Irish mob, Kyle Nevin finishes an eight-year prison stretch determined to revenge himself on his rat-bastard former boss, Red Mahoney (the Whitey Bulger character). Embraced as a folk hero in his old neighborhood, Kyle extorts protection money from liquor stores, breaks heads at any opposition, and draws his gone-straight brother into a plot to kidnap a rich kid for an $8 million ransom.
That’s not the half of it. Zeltserman has a gift – maybe a genius – for plot. The kidnapping, which I expected to be the climactic sequence, goes bad halfway through the book (the horrific details are too delicious to reveal), after which Kyle not only beats the rap but gets a multimillion-dollar deal to write a book.
Zeltserman’s no-nonsense prose conceals a serious literary ambition. He subverts genre conventions even as he fulfills them, and he mocks literary pretension with a knowing wink. The real power of this novel, though, lies in its portrait of Kyle, a monster who knows right from wrong and doesn’t care.
If you’re like me, you’ll be ashamed of yourself for exulting in Kyle’s appalling adventures as they spiral in shocking directions, each topping the last. Pariah, for all its noir trappings, is a kind of amoral, post-modern masterpiece – Kyle learned computer technology in prison – and reading it is a thrill of an altogether different order.
bookcover
Pat MacEnulty is another talented novelist who deserves a much wider audience. At least two of her five books are among the best I’ve read this decade – Sweet Fire, a semi-autobiographical novel of addiction, prostitution, drugstore robberies, prison and redemption; and The Language of Sharks, a subtle reworking of similar material in short stories. Her work tends to involve crime, too – Serpent’s Tail was her first publisher – but she’s not really a “crime novelist,” as she shows with her coming-of-age-in-the-'60s novel, Picara.
Eli Webster is a familiar type, a Southern girl growing up without adequate supervision. Her alcoholic mother vanished years ago, and her hippie father lives in the Midwest with his new family. When her beloved step-grandmother, a semi-retired opera singer, dies of cancer, Eli runs away with a draft-dodger, thinking she’s on the road to adventure and romance.
What she finds instead – this is the late '60s, early '70s – is a world of underground Weathermen, black power revolutionaries, snitches and shoot-first police. Eventually Eli is rescued by her father, who turns out both more responsible and more revolutionary than she’d imagined. But life with his new family goes bad, and she finds herself on the road again.
MacEnulty writes with a concrete grace, deftly skirting pitfalls that might have tumbled the narrative into sentimentality, didacticism or predictability. She even avoids the curse of the Magic Negro – Miz Johnny, the maid who helps raise Eli, has an inner life, and she loves her own family more than the white people she works for.
Eli is a winning character – imagine Harper Lee’s Scout as a teenage runaway, or maybe Huck Finn as a girl. She has moments of aching clarity, as when a friend attempts suicide: “I wondered why she wanted to die. True, life was sad, but there was something nice about its sadness, something good enough to make you want to wake up and be sad for a little more.”
Although Eli smokes pot and takes part in some revolutionary shoplifting, she never drifts into drug addiction or full-blown criminality. She remains believably herself — smart and resilient, despite harsh experience and some pretty dumb choices.
But Picara is more than a compelling story. It’s a time-machine visit to a particular American moment, and MacEnulty gets the details just right.
Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit him on Facebook.
Pariah, by Dave Zeltserman, 276 pp., Serpent’s Tail; $14.95.
Picara, by Pat MacEnulty, 290 pp., Livingston Press; $16.95.
