Category Archives: what’s on your bedside table

The Monday Book: WE NEED NEW NAMES by NoViolet Bulawayo

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bulawayoI got this book out of the library on CD to keep my company careening up and down I-81. It was very good company indeed.

The opening chapter was the winner in a short story contest, and sets up the whole theme of the book: the innocence of children observing the folly of white people trying to “save” Zimbabwe (and a neighboring country or two). The whole book is one long lesson in irony. Had she taken a different approach to the writing, Bulawayo’s book could have been non-fiction history. Or horror.

One of the best features of her writing is how the children who are its heroes run through the insanity around them. They find a woman who hung herself because she had AIDS, and take her shoes to buy bread because they’re hungry. They run to meet the NGO truck that passes out toy guns without food. They lament that they no longer go to school because life is so boring, then they play “funeral,” imitating the machete-hacking death of a local leader who encouraged the citizens of the “Paradise” refugee village to vote. When the BBC crew that covered the actual funeral find them playing this game, they are horrified.

Not the children. They are living their lives in the circumstances surrounding them, watching the crazy go down with the sweet, confused, triumphant, intent on getting food and staying out of trouble for the most part. Not unlike the adults around them, just a little less aware of the subtleties.

I actually recommend this novel to people writing about trauma, because it shows how the voices of children narrating terrible things can make space for people to read about it without blaming the narrator or the writer. (It takes the me-me-me out of memoir.) That said, I don’t want to cheapen what Bulawayo has accomplished here. More than using innocence to point out guilt, shame, horror, she’s written with an internal voice of honest brutality that comes off as gentle. Her writing is lovely. What she’s writing about is not, on two levels: the violence of a country coming apart, and the whiteness that haunts both its dissolution and its recovery.

In a quest to be “woke,” several of my friends have begun a challenge: reading books or watching movies that represent African or Caribbean voices without white saviors. Bulawayo’s books should be at the top of this list.

The Monday Book: AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH by Neil Postman

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postman                In the 1960’s the media and culture critic Marshal McLuhan famously opined “The Medium is the message.” Neil Postman, who was a student of McLuhan’s expanded McLuhan’s thesis in “Amusing Ourselves to death.” The book is a stinging critique of the television culture and how television and other forms of media have changed society forever, and not for the better.

Postman takes us through a brief exposition of the history of language communication pointing out how each new development, from writing to the printing press to the telegraph expanded our access to information while at the same time exposing us to more and more information that we had little use for. He points out that while a man in 19th century Virginia could learn about the happenings in New York, he had little use for the information.

The advent of radio and television increased the deluge of information reaching us every day, but with the added problem that these media must keep our attention so that we are not tempted to change the channel or get up and go to the kitchen for a bag of chips.   When this strategy is applied to news and information it tends to trivialize.  An average evening news cast may feature news of a horrible wreck on the Interstate juxtaposed with a cute puppy story followed by an ad for a new dish detergent, with the most frivolous stories given the same weight as the most important.

Postman died before the advent of modern social media, but one can guess what he might think about a medium wherein profundity is now limited to 140 characters or less, and with a constant firehose of data spewing from one’s device it is impossible to sort through it all, and studies show that one is most apt to pay attention to information with which one is already in agreement.

Is it any wonder that college students, who, having grown up in a world where they could ignore or drown out any idea they did not want to be bothered with, are asking for “Safe Spaces” where they are sheltered from thoughts with which they disagree. Postman would see it as a logical progression of a society in which information is as cheap as air. As Michael Crichton put in in Jurassic Park, “In the information society nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”