Junot Diaz: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; Ernest J. Gaines: "A Lesson Before Dying"

Winner of 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Junot Diaz wrote a very contemporary story about love, which corroborates the pop-song phrase "love hurts". Oscar is an overweight lovesick ghetto nerd, who devours fantasy fiction in the hope of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. Because of an ancient curse, fuku, he will finally die in the name of love, beaten to death by a gang of bandits, such as those who are in the service of Dominican tyrannical President Trujillo. In an interview, the author himself defined the subject of his novel as follows: It’s the quest story of this young Dominican guy Oscar, his quest for love, for a safe place in the world, which is what love is. It’s not only his quest, but it turns out to have been his entire family’s quest. If nothing else speaks to the human condition, it is that quest. You could expand it, of course, another degree and just say that that’s really what this whole thing that we call humanity is about: each of us trying to find a place where we’re safe and where we can know love. The rest of it is, in the end, kind of garbage.

Universal though the story's theme is, Diaz is a very demanding writer, exposing his readers to the multiculturality of his characters by peppering his narrative with many (unitalicized) Spanish words and expressions. In this way he seems to repeat the gesture of many bicultural writers - for example Gloria Anzaldua - who emphasize their rich and complex border identity by mixing two languages. This constant crossing of linguistic borders reflects the mixed identity of Dominicans, who are of African, Taino and Spanish descent. Despite such heterogeneity, all of them are subject to the Curse and Doom of the New World - fuku, brought about by an Admiral, who was both its midwife and one of its great European victims. In this way Oscar Wao's cursed life reflects Dominicans' history shaped by bad luck, and a sense of doom is perceptible from the very beginning of the story.

However, despite the fact that the story is so sad and tragic, it is also very entertaining: the narrative is funny, also in the footnotes supplied For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history. A passage about Trujillo will sufficiently illustrate Diaz's fierce style: Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.

All in all, with its absorbing narrative - rich and playful thanks to its shifts in language and point of view - the book is a wonderful read and deserves a place on every book shelf. Only one thing disturbed me as a woman reader: the narrator's uncritical attitude to machismo, so pervasive and taken for granted (natural, some might say) both in the culture that he depicted and in his narrative.

Ernest J. Gaines's Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for a reason. This piece of solid realistic prose poignantly portrays a small town's life in Louisiana in the 1940s, where African Americans still suffer from segregation and are expected to show respect and submissiveness to whites despite the fact that slavery is long over. The narrator, Grant Wiggins, is a university graduate working as a teacher of the Negro plantation school. Although he returned to the town to help his people improve their life, he has lost all hope for the possibility of such improvement. Another African American young man, Jefferson, has been accused of and charged with murder of a white shop owner. His complicity in the crime is dubious (he was only an innocent bystander), but the prejudiced white community leads to his conviction and execution on an electric chair.

The verdict and the ensuing sentence may as well have been the result of the incompetent defense, and a passage from the advocate's speech will illustrate white people's attitude to the members of the black community. In his final speech before the jury the advocate focused on undermining Jefferson's humanity, which supposedly made him incapable of committing the crime: Gentlemen of the jury, look at him--look at him--look that this. Do you see a man sitting here? I ask you, I implore, look carefully--do you see a man sitting here? Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes. Do you see a modicum of intelligence? Do you see anyone here who could plan a murder, a robbery, can plan--can plan--can plan anything? A cornered animal to strike quickly out of fear, a trait inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa--yes, yes, that he can do--but to plan? To plan, gentlemen of the jury? No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans. What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. ... I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

The lesson mentioned in the title begins when Grant is asked by Jefferson's grandmother to teach the boy that he is not a hog and to make sure that he goes to his death like a man. The task seems impossible since at first Jefferson, who is mentally slow and barely literate, refuses to speak to Wiggins. In the course of the two men's weekly meetings Grant manages to transform Jefferson into a hero, who is the strongest man in the courthouse when he walks to his electric chair. However, it seems that Jefferson is not the only student here: Wiggins, who hates himself for having to teach black children on white people's terms and for the necessity to compromise his pride in the constant struggle over whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be, also learns from Jefferson a lesson in heroism (a hero does for others) and humanity. Jefferson, who in the novel is compared to Jesus (analogies can be easily drawn though they are not too obtrusive), proves his manhood by accepting with dignity the plight that befalls him, and teaches Wiggins to accept his own, and do the utmost for the bettering of his people's condition. In this the novel seems to endorse the lesson preached by the famous black nation's leader from the turn of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington: cast down your buckets where you are. In the reality in which black people are constantly humiliated (for example, Wiggins can enter the sheriff's house only through the kitchen door, and has to wait over two hours for the sheriff to finally come to the kitchen and speak to him), preserving one's dignity is subversive enough to be perceived as fighting for civil rights. A great book: poignant, moving and eye-opening.

P.S. After reading this book one can't fail to realize that the recent inauguration of the American President marked a historic change, perhaps comparable only to the inauguration of George Washington. President of the United States Barack Obama - I still have to repeat it to myself over and over again to make it sink in.

Edward P. Jones: "The Known World"

Edward P. Jones's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes its readers to antebellum Virginia and to fictional Manchester County, in which a former slave, Henry Townsend, becomes an owner of his own plantation and 33 slaves. His first and oldest slave, Moses, an overseer and major character in this incredibly populous panoramic novel, is also one of the many points of view (or voices heard) in The Known World.

The following passage neatly introduces the issue which Jones's book takes under scrutiny: Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

The novel thus delves in a very perplexing problem of black people, well familiar with the slave-owner's whip, buying other black people and treating them with similar cruelty, as does Henry Townsend. Bought out of slavery by his father, who decided to never own a person, Henry is more loyal to his former owner than to the father. Though he originally plans to treat his slaves better than white people do, his ex-master, William Robbins, persuades him to change his mind as follows:

Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. Immediately after he hears this humiliating sermon, Henry hits Moses on the face and sends him to live in a shed.

This whole episode is told in flashback though, as in the novel Henry dies first and his young wife Caldonia runs the plantation with huge help from Moses. Despite her efforts, the plantation comes undone: slaves run away one by one, they start fighting among themselves and the work is not done properly and on time. The degeneration of the Townsends' plantation seems to be the linking motif of the otherwise very fragmentary novel, which presents a range of minor characters' stories. The inclusion of so many characters turns the book into a picaresque novel of an episodic structure and roguish characters: no one here is absolutely positive and no one, even the most influential white citizen of the county - Robbins - is absolutely negative. Moses himself is a living example of what slavery does to people: separated from the woman who he said was his "family", Moses later mistreats his wife and son. Moreover, seeing that a black man can be freed and become a slave owner, he intends to take his master's place by romancing with widow Caldonia. Finally, he persuades his wife to run away with the child and abuses the power which he has as an overseer by sending a pregnant woman to hard work in the field, which results in miscarriage.

Apart from the issue of black people's owning other black people, the novel uncovers some other facts concerning the reality of life under slavery, the most eye-opening to me being the practice of selling free black people into slavery again by so called slave "speculators". Now the burlesque ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and Tom free Jim, who is already freed by his owner, does not seem so entertaining at all: you might need to free a freed slave again and again. Moreover, another conclusion can be drawn at this juncture: namely that once a person becomes a slave, they will always remain slaves.

The most interesting episode, however, is connected with the character of Alice Night, a woman who "was kicked in the head by a mule" and became crazy. She wanders alone at night singing funny songs and talking nonsense to strangers. When she succeeds in running away from slavery, she becomes an artist and has her own art gallery. The story of Alice Night is the most poignant commentary on the debilitating effects of slavery on both owners and the owned. Though not even close to the power of Toni Morrison's Beloved (but then, what is?), Jones's novel is definitely worth giving it a try.