Posted on by slb

Musings on ‘Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire.’

It took me a long time to write about Sapphire’s novel, Push, being adapted for the silver screen. But write I did and here’s what I came up with:

People who love this book will tell you that it’s a triumphal story of hope in the face of brutality and despair. And it is. But for me, hope appeared too late in the work and retreated without a satisfying enough redemption for our heroine. I couldn’t stop mourning her abundance of tragedies, no matter what brief victories she won.

So when I found out Push was being adapted for the silver screen, I cringed at the prospect of revisiting Precious’s bleakly rendered world. I dreaded watching in technicolor all the awful things I’d imagined while reading. And I reeeally didn’t want to return to the hollowness that haunted the ending. What possible reason would Hollywood have for further dramatizing an existence as heinous as Precious’s?

Check out the article in its entirety over at Postbourgie.com.

Posted on by slb · 13 Comments

ManWomanBoogie.

Can man be stronger, if a woman is there?
I would have to say yes.
Can woman make it without men being there?
She would have to be blessed.

— Q-Tip

For the first ten years of my life, I was raised in a matriarchy. I lived with my mother and her mother (or, intermittently, with my mother alone) until I was ten. I don’t think it’s possible not to have feminist leanings, being raised in households like these. There is no male energy and, by extension, no male “authority.” Women are paying for everything that is essential to life–and they’re doing it on far less income than a man would have to. When you’re disobedient, women are doing the chastising. When you’re obedient, women are doing the work of positive reinforcement. When you’re broken, women are mending you, to the best of their ability.

If you’re fortunate, they’re doing all this without pining for the men who have been long absent or the men they have yet to meet. If you’re fortunate, they’re doing this without bashing the whole of the male species.

But that’s only if you’re incredibly fortunate.

Read more

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

A Meta-Workshop.

An aside: Writing fiction is like slipping into a home and taking things— hushes, aromas, and laughter, for instance. Unless you’re good at it—like, acrobatic cat burglar good—you never quite know how to get in and you never escape unnoticed. Your presence is a loud and clanging reminder that you’ve inserted yourself into a space where you don’t belong.

To write well is to avoid notice. But how? Do you start at the back door or the front? Should you try the basement window? These are not naive times; there will be no spare key under flowerpot or welcome mat. Your own your own. Find yourself some tools:—a hairpin, a credit card, a crowbar—and get to breaking and entering.

But once you’re in, however you manage it, you can’t discard your stealth. You’ll need it to capture the awkwardness at the dinner table, to pocket the longing in the teenager’s bedroom, to siphon the mother’s resentment-for later, literary use.

# # #

It always took Nine about five false starts before she found the right entryway for any of her stories. She was always tempted to start in the middle, a conjunction igniting her first sentence: “And then we were silent,” she’d type, or “But Bessie wasn’t ready.” This never worked. A novel wasn’t an episode of Lost, after all, and Nine had little patience for flashbacks. Beginning at the beginning seemed too obvious; she didn’t believe the hype about Occam’s razor. And starting at the end posed many problems similar to attempting an arc in medias res.

Mind you, Nine didn’t arrive at this kind of indecision—paralyzing indecision, the kind that renders you immobile as deadlines march doggedly on, as merciless as Gestapo—on her own. She’d gone into a great deal of student loan debt to learn this brand of self-doubt. She’d sat, for two years, in a series of crumbling Tudor cottages, taking courses led either by wizened codgers hard-pressed to find anyone’s work impressive anymore or by the young, hip, and newly published (their skin as intricately inked as atlases, their best advice: besot your work with casual sex and obscenity).

But now that Nine she was unconscious, she was also un-self-conscious. Without any of her customary hemming and hawing, she had found herself already in. Whole paragraphs materialized, unaided. Her clever turns of phrase (“The wind is a sieve,” indeed.) were ambling along on a blank mental slate reserved, it seemed, for precisely these kinds of health crises.

Nine could hardly stand it, prolific at last! Eloquent self-narrative was emerging with legendary swiftness. Just look at that: “tectonic shift!” Were she awake, she would’ve stricken through that phrase and written, “Inaccessible reference?” Not here. Here, in her coma, every phrase worked; though, irony of delicious ironies, here, in her coma, there was no one to read them.

Posted on by slb

Considering the Neo-Mammy.

Yesterday, PostBourgie published my essay on the idea that Hollywood is slowly reconstructing its traditional archetype of the “Mammy,” to curious, problematic, and vaguely uncomfortable results:

Hmm. It isn’t often that Hollywood strives for any sense of honesty about what was really going on in the hearts and minds of black domestics, as they scrubbed floors and diapered white folks. Though The Secret Life of Bees is no trailblazing manifesto, it isn’t exactly mamby-pamby in its discussion of black-and-white-woman relations in the 1960s, either.

Read it all here and be sure to leave a comment.

Posted on by slb

Collapse.

Five years ago, Nine baked a rainbow cake to impress Ahmir, who she’d been seeing for three years by then. Three years was, by far, the longest she’d made a relationship last. There’d been 22-year-old Levi when she was eighteen; he stuck around for a year. And when she was 21, there was Damon, who she dumped after six long-distance months. Her relationship with Ahmir was uncharted territory. Was he a blessing or a barnacle? She hadn’t decided. Until she did, it made sense to continue crafting a certain self-mythology for his benefit.

She wasn’t much of a baker, though she’d been at it since toddlerdom. To keep her occupied, her mother would shake a bit of unsifted flour and tap water into a shallow bowl for Nine to mix. Mixing had been a favorite pastime of Nine’s ever since. Stirring ingredients by hand, in rhythmic, clockwise motion, was nothing short of cathartic. Over the years, she’d come up with her best lines of poetry while absently creaming butter and sugars. She’d discovered her ability to hit high notes in accurate pitch, while melting German chocolate on a stovetop.

On the Sunday of the woebegone cake five years ago, Nine had cooked an entire meal. Seafood alfredo (sauce from scratch). Steamed lemon-butter broccoli. Garlic bread, also from scratch. It was a good meal—great if you you were Ahmir and used to subsisting on value menu items at McDonald’s.

And so Nine’s mythologizing gained momentum. The dinner was more than enough to reinforce her position as a steady girlfriend. But the cake, if properly executed, might just secure a proposal.

It was a basic white cake—not from scratch. If it were about the mixing alone, she would’ve been just fine. But there were layers. Nine knew nothing of layers and how to pour the batter evenly between three round pans or how long to let each cool before attempting to wrest it from its metal casing or how to balance one atop the other, neatly, unbroken.

Still. All this might’ve been managed, were it not for the jello. Three different kinds were required. (After all, how else would the cake be a rainbow?) This meant adding careful measurements of hot water to the the powdered gelatin and a delicate hand to drizzle each color atop each layer of cake.

She tried. Oh, how the girl tried! She held her breath, watching the cherry and lemon and lime liquid-jellos soak into the white cake, staining it red and yellow and green. She placed the layers onto a cleared rack of the refrigerator and waited the necessary two hours for the liquid to gel.

Things seemed to be going well, and if she cleared this hurdle, there was only one more to jump: the even slathering of Cool Whip frosting. She pulled each layer from the fridge and smiled that her cake seemed to have reached its proper consistency. But when she tried to jimmy one tier from its pan, she realized she’d been far too liberal with the jello drizzle. It’d seeped straight through to the bottom and stuck. Each rainbow color was a fault line, her every movement, no matter how gentle, an earthquake. There was no way the remaining white sections of the cake would survive as a whole. This, she thought, must be what her middle school geography teacher was trying to tell her about tectonic shift and its potential repercussions for California.

Read more

Posted on by slb · 6 Comments

Welcome to 2009.

Hello, friends.

We’re already five days into the new year. Just two days ago, I was in Baltimore, happily spending the end of my winter break with my mother and grandmother. Now, it’s back to the frigidity and conservatism of Grand Rapids… not that there’s anything wrong with that. (:-/)

Classes began at Grand Valley today, though I don’t start teaching until tomorrow. At 8 am. Which means waking up at 4:30 almost every Tuesday and Thursday for the next fifteen weeks.

I know normal people with normal careers are totally sitting there, like, “Get over yourself. Waking up before dawn comes with the territory of adulthood,” but even at 29, I have yet to accept this.

Anyway, between teaching four classes this winter and (hopefully, finally!) getting a driver’s license, I really do intend to write and update this site. Thanks to all of you who’ve read what’s here and who’ve left thoughtful and encouraging comments. I do so love a good comment.

Here are a few book recommendations to start your new year off right:

1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I know it’s late to be recommending a book that’s been out long enough to win a Pulitzer and be printed in paperback, but still. I’d be doing Junot Diaz and you a great disservice if I let buzz die on this amazing novel. Read it, if you haven’t already. I’d love to discuss it with you. I read it back in October and I still contemplate it, regularly.

2. Keep the Faith, Faith Evans. As memoirs go, this one is very well done. There haven’t been many (if any) well-written memoirs by ’90s r&b chanteuses. Co-writer Aliya S. King lent a polished, professional, and highly readable bent to Faith’s entertaining romantic and professional life.

3. The Other Hand/Little Bee. Chris Cleave is one of my favorite authors. So I have to recommend his sophomore novel. It isn’t out here in the states until February and it’ll be called Little Bee when it’s released. I read its UK printing, The Other Hand. To clarify: same book, different title. Though I liked it slightly less than his first novel, Incendiary (which I’d recommend reading while you wait for Little Bee‘s release), it’s beautiful and odd in just the right measures; the characters will haunt you, particularly Little Bee, who spends the first half of the book finding the easiest way to kill herself whenever she enters a new room of a house or turns down a different Kingston-upon-Thames street.

4. The Book of Dahlia. I’m still reading this one, but I love it so far. It’s bitingly satirical and Dahlia reminds me of me, my friend Melissa, and most members of Generation X I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

5. Last but not least, I’d LOVE it if you’d preorder the anthology that will contain my very first national fiction publication. It’s called It’s All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family, and Friends and it’s slated for February 3 release. The legendary Marita Golden edited it. My friend Felicia’s in it, as well as the poet Kwame Alexander (for whom I interned in undergrad, when BlackWords Press was still up and running) and a host of established artists (Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. Ethelbert Miller) and up-and-comers. I’m totally stoked and I want you all to support the project.

Do see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but not before reading the short story which is vastly superior.

Don’t see The Day the Earth Stood Still, because it sucks.

Do see Doubt, I guess, but I don’t recommend it with much enthusiasm.

Other than that, welcome to the new year, folks. Have a grand time!