Wednesday, July 30, 2008

My new books



So what did I buy at the book shop?

‘Nature and Art’ by Elizabeth Inchbald, edited by Shawn Lisa Maurer (based on the second edition published in 1797). Another female writer I’d never heard of! Am really starting to get the shits with the vast array of amazing voices that I’ve never had the chance to read because their work and gender didn’t fit the pattern of what society deemed to be appropriate and their names and works haven’t been added to the commonly bandied about list of ‘Great Authors who had something important to say and who you really must read’. More on that later – I feel a rant coming on, but for now, just to say that the story of this women’s life really interested me and this book – looking at the prejudices of education, the artifice (‘art’) of contemporary western society, class and gender constructions through a story of two cousins brought up in different ways. Apparently the work is quite utopian in it’s vision of a potential classless future, where people value people more than status, and is in keeping with some of the other philosophical and social movements of its time. I think it’s even more interesting to read a work about outsider perspectives on culture written by someone who has lived that experience – which I think a single woman supporting her family through writing, in the late 1700’s can be said to have had. The author wrote many dramatic pieces, and several novels, and supported herself through her writing and acting before and after her brief marriage, as well as supporting her sisters. Aah all this I get just from the introduction to the novel. I’ll write some more when I read the actual book!

“Scotttsboro Alabama – a story in linoleum cuts” by Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez Edited by Andrew Lee. New York University Press.

[Please note that this review refers to violent death, racism and other yucky stuff]

This book is a reproduction of some very striking original artworks that were made as narrative and political statement in the 1930’s in response to the arrest of nine African American boys and young men (aged 13 to 19) accused of raping 2 white women on a freight train, the subsequent court case and the different responses by the public. It’s mostly pictures. Each page is an image and a small amount of text, also created through lino-cut. Narrated in the present tense, each page charts a moment in history or key element of the story (“the boss uses every means to keep the negro separate from the white”), and has very strong images, caricatures, symbols, and are almost cartoon-like in their directness and emotion – lots of. It has with it a new foreword, a new introduction, and the original foreword that came out when the prints were produced as a (self published) volume prior to 1935.



I bought this book for a few reasons. Firstly because I’m interested in text-image interplay in story telling, and am gradually collecting an interesting collection of books that use words and pictures together to tell stories. This is one of the earliest examples I’ve seen of the graphic novel format used to make a strong political statement – I found that really exciting (noting that I’m by no means an expert and maybe there are heaps of examples, and I’ve just not come across them in my wanderings yet).

Secondly because I’m interested in lino-cuts and relief printmaking in general. Partly because they are so primal and direct, and have been an accessible/affordable form of mark making compared to things like oil painting, and so have been used to express political views and experiences of the less privileged. Partly just coz I like them – because I think they’re tricky and back to fronty and can use a simple technique to make complex or simple images. I like to get books that have examples of different ways of using the medium, because I think I’d like to teach again one day, and find that using books with examples of work are a lovely, low key way to demonstrate different techniques, styles and applications.

But I was also interested in the story – I’d never heard of the trial, and as I flicked through the introduction it seemed like quite a significant event and quite an interesting moment in history. It seems like the trade union (ILD – International Labour Defence) was really involved in responding and defending the accused, and that many saw the event as being a way to divide the black and white workers, to dissolve solidarity amongst workers. In this way the case also became symbolic of the uprising of workers against unfair bosses and the powers systems of the wealthy.

“The Scottsboro case became one of the key episodes in the history of race and civil rights in America. It wasn’t the legal manoeuvrings of the defence counsel or the actions of the defendants that invested this particular case with such historical importance. Rather the ILD and their supporters brought this injustice before the world. Maintaining that a fair and impartial trial was impossible under white supremacy, the ILD publicized the case widely in order to expose Southern “justice” and pressure the Alabama legal system to free the nine defendants. Protests erupted throughout the country and as far away as Paris, Moscow, and South Africa, and the governor of Alabama was bombarded with telegrams, postcards, and letters demanding the immediate release of the Scottsboro Boys…And although the “Scottsboro Boys” themselves never identified with the Party’s goals, they became cultural symbols on the left – the subject of poems, songs, plays, and short stories that were published, circulated and performed around the world.

It took place in that period after the Civil War and slavery had been abolished but before segregation had been abolished – the story charts the realities of African Americans trying to find work and still being victimised, discriminated against and lynched around the time of this trial. It’s hard to imagine that this was all happening at the time my Grandparents were kids. That it’s within living memory.* And for some reason this particular time and place in history really resonates with me – maybe it’s that I’ve read other things that explore these experiences (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sojourner Truth) and that some of the music I love most comes from the mouths of Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith.

Many of the images refer to lynchings and deliberately draw no distinction between mob lynching and the court case and sentencing of death to all but the youngest of the 9 boys. The foreword talks about this, explaining that at that time, there seemed to be very little difference:

(Notes from the editor on use of the word lynching):
“the usage at that time, at least among African American and leftist activists, consistently did not distinguish between a court-sanctioned execution and a mob execution. In my youth I was told about one such lynching that occurred just before the Democratic National Convention in 1928, when the man who would become the sheriff of Harris County, Texas, led a mob in lynching a black man accused of raping a white woman. The prevalence of such stories, especially those involving the overt and active participation of law enforcement officers, make a moot point of such fine distinctions between legal and vigilante justice.”

Also this

“Stories like this one were not uncommon in the South during the late nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth. Black men were frequently accused of raping white women and most never even made it to trial. “Judge Lynch” usually presided over these affairs; a local white mob would take custody of the accused (with the complicity of local police), and save the state the costs of trial by hanging the defendant from a sturdy tree branch or street light or a bridge. Lynchings were more than hangings. They were public spectacles intended to punish and terrorize the entire black community. For white’s who needed to prove their white supremacy even as they struggled to make ends meet, a lynching was like a picnic, a celebration of their power and an affirmation of black inhumanity. Whole families often showed up – wives, children, grandparents – to watch black bodies tortured, burned, riddled with bullets, and to partake in the severing and selling of body parts. For the black people who had to clean up after this carnival of violence, a charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree served as a visible and potent reminder of the price of stepping out of line. But these “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees were not the only reminders of racial hierarchy. the fields, mines, and roads were dotted with black men on chain gangs whose main crime was insubordination.” (from the foreword by Robin D.G.Kelly).

This stuff makes me so sad, and as I read I kind of wince, at the thought of that really tangible, physical violence that represents the pervading sense of hostility that must have been borne out in so many other ways at the time. And I wonder if there is a need to be reminded of things like that sometimes, to do a little bit of grieving, to process some of the, perhaps collectively not yet fully processed, grief that must arise from such violence in our recent shared history. Don’t you think?

Anyway, the story seems like such an interesting mix of class, gender and race politics – all made evident through the focal point of one court case.

As an aside: I guess there’s a part of me that wonders about the gender politics of the case too, mostly because the narrative of the book and its recent commentary doesn’t really touch on that – it’s assumed the women made false accusations to prevent them for being arrested (they, like the men, were “riding the rails”, trying to get a ride to the city for work – but unlike the men were likely to have been arrested for prostitution, by virtue of being alone amongst other male hoboes). I wonder about the experience of being single and out of work as a women at that time, and how safe it would have been to travel, about the male instigated violence (or threat of that violence) that takes place against women in such a wide-spread way as to be almost invisible. I wonder how safe I would feel as a poor woman without power or connections travelling with a freight train full of angry, hopeless, desperate men (white and black). I wonder at the ongoing injustice of wealthy men who can visit prostitutes without fear of recrimination, but who in their working lives would arrest and prosecute women for having sex in exchange for moeny. I note that sexual violence has been used, and continues to be used to ‘keep women in their place’ and to threaten women into socially acceptable gender roles. I also feel angry at the way that accusations of rape has been used by men to target other men (a crime with less tangible ‘evidence’ than say murder) – white men ‘defending the honour of their women’, but at the same time goes most frequently unreported and unpunished as a crime when there is no ulterior race-driven motive for punishment. In fact, it often seems that rape is considered a regrettable, but kind of unavoidable crime- you know, boys will be boys, women can be so darned hard to figure out, men have needs.. etc. I’m not saying (fervently not saying) that this is what I think, but just that in my reading of popular commentary, I get the feeling that violence against women at the hands of men isn’t yet something we collectively take very seriously. It selectively being used falsely as a vehicle to funnel racial hatred, historically or in the present, is an injustice to all women (who have experienced sexual violence and whose attempts to have it be taken seriously are undermined by stories of false accusations like this) as well as the specific men affected.



Oooh. That was all very serious wasn’t it? Anyway, a good book if you can track down a copy.

*Noting of course everything awful and race related that’s happened in my own country, in the past and now, and not thinking that for one minute that this story isn’t also replicated right now in lots of other countries with battles between ethnic and religious groups.

And on a lighter note
Blab! – Fantagraphics Books, 2006
Stories, artwork and illustration. Comic /graphic novel/ folk painterly outsider art illustration style. I like this! Bunch of different artists. Great variety of contemporary styles. Varied and exciting, like a comic of random bits and pieces. No grand moral message or story, just bits and pieces that make you smile or frown – like being a kid reading comics all over again.

To market to market

Gleebooks is having a sale- on for the rest of the week I think. This book shop is a must-visit if you’re Sydney, not only is it big, and has a great ‘literary fiction’, crime, graphic novel, art book and non-fiction philosophy/social science/psychology sections, but it has an unpretentious, lived-in feel, with wooden bookshelves going up to a very high ceiling. It stacks books in piles on tables and on the floor, you have to walk through sideways sometimes if you have a big shoulder bag and don’t want to take out some fellow browser. The atmosphere is all the nice stuff about a crammed full second hand book shop, but less crammed and not dusty, all the nice stuff about a new bookshop, without all the dross you never want to buy anyway or the giant cheesy advertising material invading your view around the store, staff who actually read, and are cool but not quite as young, trying hard and shiny as those in some of the ‘I’m a cool bookstore’ stores around town. It feels comfortable, well-read, expansive and welcoming. Aaah.

Anyway, book sale. Upstairs, neatly arranged in tightly clustered rows, spine up, trestle tables, lovely, higgledy piggledy lack of order (think ‘blogging for your church’ sitting next to ‘sex and development’, ‘Jung as a writer’, sitting next to ‘imagination games for people working with children’ sitting next to ‘the complete gluten and dairy free cookbook’). The sale has been on for a while so I may be seeing the less popular remains, but there still seems to be some great stuff – especially in the sociology/ psychology/ theology/art book domains. There are novels on sale too, but I think the sale range is no better than a second hand bookstore for that, the best savings seem to be on the non-fiction stuff, where you can get current and interesting reference materials for half to a third of their RRP. Oh and some cards and postcards too, but I browsed very slowly and the store closed before I had a chance to look!

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Reading writing about writing

Read an interesting journal article today about the process and experience of writing. Maybe it's my love of blogging, but I really enjoy the emerging auto-ethnographic approach to social research. There seems something honest to me about hearing the voice of the researcher, and I think when it comes to the human condition, self reflection is an interesting 'data source' - as much as grand scale surveys and quant studies. As a form of identifying one of all the possible experiences, and exploring that in some depth. Enough chatter - here is a beautiful passage from that paper:

"Today, in the garden, I killed a snail. As soon as I did it, I vowed in my life never intentionally to kill another creature. But I have just woken up in the middle of the night, thinking about the snail. I only broke its shell, but breaking that shell ended its life.

What is the significance of that snail and its shell? For the snail, its shell was not simply its protection from being killed, or simply its home: It was the snail: Breaking the shell equaled killing the snail. What has that got to do with writing? In my sleepy reverie, I have connected writing with the shell. This is not meant to be a simple figure of speech, which allows me to think that cracking the shell of (my) writing will somehow crack some hidden code and lead me to a profound understanding of self. But there are some parallels. Writing is not simply a shell or a code which protects us or allows us to be identified in certain superficial ways; our writing is us, or to paraphrase Richardson (1997), writing becomes us, we inquire after ourselves through our writing. So finding out about our writing is also finding out about ourselves.

Every snail shell is idiosyncratically unique, allowing us to identify every snail. The snail’s shell is becoming, it grows with, the snail; there is no separation.
So my writing is not there simply to identify me, nor to protect me, nor to give me my home—it is me, its fluid, energetic, emerging shades, it is me becoming. It is identifying me, it is protecting me, it is my home but can only be characterized in these ways through the constant fluid movement of becoming. So between the two, me and my writing, exists a multiplicity of connections, a state of fluidity, an ever-changing nexus of identifications, infinitesimally small but hugely significant moments that give something to my sense, my feeling of knowing, of self."


Source: Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt (2006) Inquiring Into Writing: An Interactive Interview Qualitative Inquiry 2006; 12; 1117
Downloaded from http://qix.sagepub.com by on July 15, 2008

Reference cited above:
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play (constructing an academic life). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.