in the company of giants
I just discovered the link I posted for my first review of Stranger in the Family no longer works…so I’m pasting the entire review in here. Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve stopped journaling, and that worries me sometimes…am I being honest in my blog? What happens to the intensely personal feelings and experiences I’m not willing to share online? Today I canceled my Typepad account; it doesn’t make sense to pay for a blog these days, and I can’t devote time and energy to more than one. So this blog is now my sole “confidante”–the “bank” into which I deposit my artistic and intellectual valuables…
Older Post ❱❰ Newer PostAuthor asks us to examine our cliches of Americans
AFRICAN HERITAGE Month is more important than ever this year, given the identity of the 44th president of the United States, who is also, simultaneously, the most powerful person on the planet.
Though Barack Obama is not a black president, but a president who happens to be black, it’s in every one’s interest to know a little about Africa — and its diaspora, including to what is now Canada.
Born and raised in Toronto, Zetta Eliott is a visiting professor of African and African American studies at Mt. Holyoke College, and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Biracial, she is also, frankly, bi-national, as an African-Canadian who now resides in the United States, in a community where African-Americans comprise the majority.
This position gives her a unique perspective: as an African-Canadian African-American, she may consider race and racism, as well as cultural differences, from both sides of the 49th parallel, and she is ably suited for doing so.
After a Canadian publisher rejected her manuscript, asking, “Why should I care about this individual — what makes her experiences so special that I would want to read about them?” Elliott chose to self-publish Stranger in the Family ( www.zettaelliott.com $16 US), her “mixed-media memoir that examines the shifting terrain upon which we negotiate race, kinship, and identity.”
Already listed as a Best Book of 2008 by two book-trade magazines, Elliott’s memoir deserved issuance by mainstream publishers, for she writes lucid, beautiful, thoughtful, and compelling prose. Then again, her cultural background does make her “special,” and enough so that her book deserves “to exist in the world,” even if some deem it “irrelevant” or “heretical.”
Thinking about why she feels more “at home” in Brooklyn than in Toronto, Elliott states, “Toronto will always be indifferent to me: uninterested in my talents, unconcerned by my particular needs. . . . Cities only rely on certain kinds of people; the rest of us are disposable.”
Elliott then pens an excellent, one-sentence description of Toronto: “a cold, clean, barren place with bits of life and flashes of color separated by endless lengths of highway.”
In contrast, Brooklyn offers “grit and bustle” and “dense blocks crowded with black and brown faces”: “There I have no self-conscious stammer, no urge to shrink within myself. . . . (T)here are no white fingers grabbing at my hair, pressing me to explain or justify my appearance. The whites in Brooklyn know their place.”
Elliott does not demonize one locale at the expense of another; rather, she is fastidiously balanced in seeing the benefits of health care in Canada, while also acknowledging the ghetto conditions of her part of Brooklyn.
Rather, she insists that her readers view Canada from a black woman’s perspective and America from a Canadian perspective. The result is a book that forces one to rethink all the clichés about each nation.
But Stranger in the Family isn’t mere sociology or self-help therapy either. It is writing that draws comparison to both Bell Hooks and Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin and Mordecai Richler, uniting African-American and Canadian influences.
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