Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing

Struck by these passages from Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi:

A mother, Willie, reflects on a hard past with her young son, Carson: "The sweetness of the smile was bitter too, for it reminded Willie of the days of his endless crying. The days when there was no one in the world except for the two of them, and she was not enough for him. She was barely enough for herself."

As an alienation sets in between Willie and her husband Robert: "Even on that first day she'd gone to play with him, even as she pushed him, even as he fell, Robert had always kept his eyes steadily, almost ravenous lyrics, on hers."(208)

"The Morris's had been in New York since before the Great Migration, but they ate as though the South was a place in their kitchen instead of one that was miles and miles away."(209)

Do you know, have you heard the story

Always interested in the way people use stories.

In Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, there is much about stories. At one point, a young Asante woman, Esi,  being held captive in 18th century Ghana by slavers. Amidst the brutal conditions of her prison in Cape Coast,  Tansi, a woman she has met in captivity , asks her "'Do you know the story of the kente cloth?'" Esi had "heard it numerous times before, twice from Tansi herself, but she shook her head. Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself"(30). Thus, the question and response are a ritual. The asker is asking the listener to mind the story again, to take its wisdom to heart, to hear it, or, in this case, pay attention and heed it again.

Stories bear wisdom for coping and navigating life. They also bear history for the characters who often, due to the fact of their enslavement, have a sparse sense of their history. Yet stories of ones past can be a thin gruel for some.  Kojo (whose name is a story that speaks to his being born on a Monday) escaped slavery when his mother and father attempted to flee north in the 1830s. They don't make it but infant Kojo does.

Sufficient

jenifur passed, was let go, died this past Friday.

That morning, I had been listening to the pod cast recordings of Section 43 of Whitman's Song of Myself on the University of Iowa's  International Writing Program's Whitmanweb.

Some lines of that poem struck me that morning and stayed with me all day, before and after jen and I said bye.

"Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,

I take my place among you as much as among any,

The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,

And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.

I do not know what is untried and afterward,

But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

Each who passes is consider'd, each who stops is consider'd, not a single one can it fail."

 

I miss you jenifur. I hope it was sufficient. I hope it is sufficient. I hope sufficient is sufficient.

A Legible Causality

From Laura Miller's review new Yorker 1/30/2017 of Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1: "The narration in Auster's novels typically dominates every other element in a ferocious and doomed assertion that the world the book describes is not ruled by happenstance. Maybe that's what all storytelling is meant to do: reassure its audience that a legible causality shapes our world and our lives."