Misty Bloom Book Club

Hi its Ada. I hope you are taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode, I will be reviewing Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.

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Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. 

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Hi! This is Ada, I  hope you‘re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So guys, I'm so proud to be taking you on this lit global journey with me and I can’t wait to go even more places with you. It’s only episode 4. And we’ve been to inner city US, northern Nigeria, South Africa, and today, we're returning to America. Native America that is. So, in this episode, I’ll be talking about Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog.  You ready? Lets get into it. 

So, Lakota Woman is Mary Crow Dog’s memoir . And if you remember from episode zero, I mentioned that in the Misty Bloom Book club I would be reviewing mostly fiction and on rare occasions would consider nonfiction. So I guess today is the rare occasion. It came early. This book reminded me a tiny little bit of Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. Not at all in terms of style or substance. They are very dissimilar in those regards because Born A Crime is Trevor Noah’s account of growing up in apartheid South Africa while Lakota Woman follows Mary Crow Dog’s story as an activist fighting for the rights of Native Americans. But my comparison here is in terms of Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah being compelling storytellers, not professional writers.

And also these are people, Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah just trying to tell us an honest story of oppression, all that matters is that these are stories that we should all be paying attention to and be provoked into positive actions. They are not trying to be professional writers so it feels dishonorable to critique their style of writing. So, I'm just not gonna do it. 

I think a great place to start this conversation is to ask who is a Native American? Because that's a question that always seems to keep popping up in public discourse. 

This book covers Mary Crow Dog’s life in the seventies and it’s interesting how 30, 40 years later people still try to claim a Native American heritage even though they do not think, sing, act, or speak like a Native and do not have familiarity with native traditions. I wonder what Mary Crow Dog would have thought of today's world where people benefit from and will fully exercise not being seen in the world as Native but will claim being Native when it's convenient and profitable. So your classic case of eating your cake and having it too. I’ve seen that happen where the majority of their existence in society is as an oppressor because of course, of the privileges attached to whiteness and then they switch over to oppressed when they wanna benefit from a minor advantage of their native heritage. So basically wanting to participate in the scarce wins but participate in zero of the struggle, pain and bloodshed that has to occur for those tiny wins. I've seen people do this. I find it to be pretty dark and disturbing. 

But moving along, I also wanna say that it felt like a treasure and a privilege to read this book. I felt like Mary Crow Dog was like letting me or us, since y’all are listening to this, into a sacred people and tradition that we do not deserve to know about but she is generous enough to share her people’s customs with us. In this case, obviously Lakota which is part of the Sioux people.

This book covers the systematic stealing of indigenous lands by white settlers, the forced sterilization of Native Women including the author’s sister. It recounts the organized erasure of the native customs, and traditions, the introduction of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness into Native life. So it's both a story of a people and a person.

Lakota Woman starts out on the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota where Mary is raised by her grandparents in a loving but extremely poor home, a shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing. The grandparents try to raise the author and their other grandchildren as Catholic and to adopt White culture and norms for practical reasons, you know, to make it possible for their grandchildren to survive in the world beyond the reservation. But it is also heartbreaking where the author reveals that her grandparents still subconsciously turn to some of the traditional ways to find healing because the old ways is their truth, you know. At some point Mary Crow Dog is forced by the government to go to boarding school where they employ inhumane methods in unsuccessfully forming her into a good white Catholic girl. The memoir also recounts her time as a young adult trying to find herself in the world, roaming the United States with a band of other footloose and fancy free Native youth also trying to find their place in a world that’s been stolen from them. As a sentence in the book reads, “He had himself wrapped up in an upside down American flag, telling us that every state in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.” It’s honestly overwhelming to even think about the depravities that America thrust upon and continues to do to Native America. 

But anyway, during their youthful, aimless wanderings, Mary Crow Dog and her merry band of Natives of course suffer police brutality and violence from random racists. It is during this time Mary Crow Dog becomes exposed to AIM, A.I.M which is the American Indian Movement. So her memoir also follows her activism in the AIM movement some of which includes historically significant actions like the March  in Washington DC as well as the siege at Wounded Knee. Thereafter, Mary Crow Dog or Mary Ellen Brave Bird at the time marries Medicine Man and civil rights leader, Leonard Crow Dog. And she becomes a mother wife and the stepmother all at the same time, at the ripe old age of, wait for it? 18! So Mary Crow Dog lived a lot of life in one. But anyway. towards the end, a significant part of Lakota Woman also follows Mary’s time as a wife fighting for the release of her husband, Leonard Crow Dog, when he’s imprisoned for his activism.

In this book, Mary Crow Dog spends a lot of time talking about how Native Americans are intentionally and systematically pushed out of society with little to no access to jobs, education or opportunities, the loss of their language, traditions, and ceremonies, the stripping of who they are as a people and them having to turn to alcohol to you know deal with the trauma that their lives have become. And in this book she addresses how alcohol becomes a coping mechanism because people often say things like oh you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, oh why don't you want better for yourself. And there's a line that took my breath away and it's on page 54 “people talk about the Indian drinking problem but we say it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise and sell it to us. They make their profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.” It’s the same thing today. Go to the hood, same situation, same conditions, flooded with liquor stores, pun intended. 

Moving along, remember I mentioned earlier that Mary Crow Dog joined AIM, the American Indian Movement? Well, there's a line on page 74 which I thought was really very insightful and articulates what I’ve always thought about activism and its effects on an activists’ lives. Here it goes, “I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly. Some of our men and women got themselves killed and thereby avoided reaching the dangerous age of 30 and becoming elder statesmen." This is why I have the utmost regard for activists. They live a principled life and they pay dearly for it, because it is marred with great sacrifice and suffering. Secular martyrs. And while we are on this, here is a quick plug. Please be supportive of and kind and generous to an activist.

Also, this book made me reconsider the meaning of Thanksgiving in a new way. While I’ve always known Thanksgiving to be a troublesome holiday, and that’s understating it, I don’t think I realized the breadth of the pain it represents to Native Americans. I'm gonna read a short paragraph from page 75. By the way, this is the author's first encounter with AIM, the American Indian Movement. On page 75 she writes "he talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one's own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our land and massacring us for 300 years, could not now come to us now saying celebrate Thanksgiving with us, drop in for a slice of turkey." So yeah.

Okay, so I found something very interesting on page 77, where Mary Crow Dog says, and this is relative to the American Indian Movement, “we took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences. I think it's significant that in many Indian languages a black is called a black white man. The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out. That is the main difference.” It’s such a shrewd observation. But I think there is a bit more nuance that I’d like to offer here based on historical context. So yeah black people want in on a country that was built entirely and completely on their forced labor. And Natives want out because they are indigenous to America, with a complex and established civilization, until the advent of the white settler state known as the USA. They want out of the white settler state and the return of America to them. But I’d love to hear what you all think about this.  

Anyway, Mary Crow Dog says something that I think it's really profoundly interesting on page 111. “I do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. If that is revolutionary, then I sure fit that description. Actually I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life, normal in the Sioux sense.” That right there is what every oppressed person is trying to scream above the noise of the oppressor. We just want a normal, peaceful life. It’s really that simple.

Mary Crow Dog also makes another really astute point in the book.  In fighting her husband’s incarceration, Mary Crow Dog visits New York for the first time and she's comparing the cost of things in New York versus on the reservation and this is what she says on page 112. "Everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please. Everything is more expensive if you are poor." This is an ongoing conversation that I'm always having in real life about how poverty is expensive, and capitalism is built on and sustained by racism. If you're poor you're working so many jobs which is detrimental to your physical and mental well-being because there’s no leisure time to recharge, you're not taking time off, you’re not taking long walks, you’re not hanging out in the park, you don’t spend time with your family, you're not going on vacations. And all of these things have a cumulative effect and impact your overall well-being pretty quickly. So you break down and because you’re poor you can’t afford adequate healthcare so you have to pay a massive sum out of pocket or be riddled with debt or both. So, yes poverty is expensive. And think about the demographic of people who typically work multiple jobs to make ends meet and you’ll realize why I said capitalism is sustained by racism. When you are poor you also don't have access to quality and affordable safe foods so you're spending your scarce dollars on cheap meals that are not good for you so that also has an impact on your health and then you develop expensive physical problems that you can not afford. So here we go again. Or when you’re poor you don’t have emergency savings so that when something big happens you are forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from predatory lenders because you don’t have collateral to negotiate a cheaper rate. So it’s like wash, rinse, repeat.  I could go on and on but I think you guys already know this already. Poverty is expensive.

This memoir as you’ve obviously seen so far is full of quotable quotes. From page 241, Bill Kunstler, who is the attorney for Leonard Crow Dog. Anyway, here is what Bill Kunstler says and before I read the quote when I say they, you, or we in the quote, it refers to the oppressor, okay? "they are most afraid of the fact that the claims are morally right, because when you are confronted with the moral imperative against an immoral imperative on your part you got to hate the people who assert that moral imperative. And I think there is an irrational, guilt-caused hatred now that is beyond my ability to analyze. We hate them because their claims are totally justified and we know it." I encourage you to rewind this if needed. This very eloquently explains the oppressor’s illogical denial of the claims of the oppressed. This underpins the whataboutisms, the all lives matter crew, And in my opinion, it’s why the oppressed should not devote too much energy to debating the oppressor’s arguments because they are irrational. To me, the energy is best spent working for equity and justice.  

Many things are so familiar in this book. On page 244 Mary Crow Dog says and I quote "to me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman."  I mean, I’ve always thought the same thing that the feminist movement is not inclusive of minorities. It felt validating to read this.

I mentioned before that reading this book felt like a privilege. And the reason for that is that Mary Crow Dog lets us into Native or more specifically Sioux ceremonies. I learned about the peyote, the curing ceremony, the traditional Sioux family, which is the tiyospaye, that is the traditional extended family unit that people from most indigenous cultures around the world can relate to, and which was you know intentionally destroyed by white settlers and replaced with the nuclear family system. I learned about vision seeking, the sweat lodges which I kind of knew about before but learned a lot more about the sacredness of sweat lodges. I learned about the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance. On page 253, Mary Crow Dog writes, and I’m paraphrasing just a tiny bit. "in 1883 the government and the missionaries outlawed the dance for being barbaric, superstitious, and preventing the Indians from becoming civilized. The hostility of the Christian churches to the Sun Dance was not very logical. After all, they worship Christ because he suffered for the people, and a similar religious concept lies behind the Sun dance, where the participants pierce their flesh with skewers to help someone dear to them. The main difference is that Christians are content to let Jesus do all the suffering for them whereas Indians give of their own flesh year after year to help others. The missionaries never saw this side of the picture, or maybe they saw it only too well and fought the Sun Dance because it competed with their own Sun Dance pole - the cross." She roasted Christianity and made also cringe thinking about the sundance channel and they should consider renaming it.

Mary Crow Dog, while being an activist herself, also discusses the other perspective which is the toll that being the wife of an activist can take. And she writes, "Cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems. It became too much for me. I was going under. Wherever Native Americans struggle for their rights, Leonard is there. Life goes on."  And just so you know Mary died at the age of 58.

And there, my friends, I think is a poignant place to end on.

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Hey hey hey, it's Ada. how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well.

In this episode of The Misty Bloom book club I am going to be reviewing What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. You ready? Let's go into the clubhouse.

Before I launch into my review of what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I want to talk a little bit about honesty. So grab your coffee, water, wine, whatever your drink of choice is, sit back and relax. Because it's about to get real. So there's this great advice that I’ve seen floating around the internet. I’ve seen two versions of the same advice and I don’t know who to originally attribute the quotes to but if you do know, let me know. Okay, so the first quote is truth without love is brutality. And the second quote is honesty without compassion is cruelty. So both of these quotes are essentially saying the same thing. And it's stuck with me because honesty is a virtue. And that is unquestioned. We are taught from a young age not to lie, to always speak truth to power, we are taught honesty is the best policy. There's no negotiating honesty. We should all strive for honesty as one of the greatest virtues to pursue and practice. However, honesty is not an excuse for us to hurt people. You know in the exercise of being blunt there's no need for us to administer blunt force trauma. There has to be a way, and I'm learning this as well, to be honest without inflicting harm on someone. So finding a balance between being honest and truthful but also couching the honesty and truth in the way that minimizes harm.

So now that I've given you my whole spiel on honesty and brutality, let me start my review of What We Lose with a quick and dirty overview. See what I did there?

What We Lose is written in the first-person, the I, and follows Thandi who's born and raised in Pennsylvania to a South African mother and an American father. Partway through the novel, Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and very unfortunately passes away. And the novel transforms into a meditation on dealing with terminal illness, grief, and loss. So going into what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I had high hopes for the book. And the reason I had such high hopes is because the writer Zinzi Clemmons. Ok, hold on let's talk about her name for a second. I love her name, Zinzi, by the way. It just sounds glorious and she has the coolest initials. Zee Cee baby. Zee Cee in da building!!!. Anyway Zinzi Clemmons is part South African and part African-American so I was looking forward to getting her extremely unique and distinctive perspective on race and race relations. You know with her coming from this dual heritage that's very loaded on both sides with very different but both extremely intense race histories and that's putting it mildly. And no I'm not putting this burden on Zinzi Clemmons to talk about race. You guys know exactly how I feel about black and minority writers being forced to take on social issues. If not, go listen to Episode 1 of The Misty Bloom Book Club where I talk about this in a little bit more detail. I had this expectation for Zinzi Clemmons to address race issues not because of her heritage. But because the actual book jacket describes the protagonist of What We Lose, Thandie, as being caught between being black and white. So there you go.

Aside from that, What We Lose had some profound moments. And I'll give you some examples. I really liked the part of the book where Thandi's father is moving on and finding a new relationship after the death of his wife. And Thandie is understandably resistant to her father moving on from her mother. And I'll read the scene to you from page 164. "I want to be happy again" he says, his voice breaking. "Don't you think I deserve happiness?" "of course, I say." you deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you've chosen." That right there is a pearl of wisdom that I want you to think about in your life. For example I think many of us are not really resistant to other people finding happiness. We only question their methods for doing so. Whether or not is our business to do so but it's something to definitely think about.

I also liked this line on page 185, “Peter sighs, reaches for the pacifier, and pops it nervously into M's mouth, as if our child is a bottle of champagne threatening to explode.” I thought that was a fun sentence.

Here’s another great line page 206. It reads, “sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn't come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.” It is a heavy sentence and it made me sad. I think the sentence was so effective because we associate smell with memories and nostalgia so I think that's what was so profound about this particular sentence.

So those are the things that I appreciated about What We Lose. Now, I'm gonna flip the script and talk about what I didn't like quite as much about What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. But before I do that here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don't go anywhere.

Welcome back to the Misty Bloom book club thanks for staying with me. So now I'm going to talk about what frustrated me about What We Lose

So, overall, I'm going to admit that I struggled with What We Lose. Sadly, it didn't hit the spot for me. And I hate that it didn't because like I said earlier, I had such high hopes for this book.

However, I wouldn't call what I didn't like about the book as weaknesses per se. But I see this more as a cataloging of my frustrations with the What We Lose.

What We Lose totally was a worthy and admirable attempt at being experimental and innovative with fiction However and ultimately for me. I’m sorry. it just didn't work. While I wholeheartedly understood that the author was making a deliberate eclectic artistic choice, I struggled with the way the book was structured. I mentioned that it had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs, it is wildly non-chronological making it difficult to follow, the philosophy felt like it was thrown in, there are what I found to be problematic expositions on South Africa that I'll talk about a little bit later . The inconsistency of the novel's structure crippled my enjoyment of it. It interrupted the flow of the novel and gave it a distinctly jerky quality that felt like whiplash. I appreciate the author’s experimentation. But to me, it just read as disjointed and came off as gimmicky. Or maybe I just simply have boring, stock, archetypal tastes in literature. You tell me, I don’t know. But my advice here for any new and aspiring writers who are listening, my advice for whatever it's worth is to be aware of the line between avant garde and gimmicks. You should always, always aim to express your own originality or uniqueness like Zinzi Clemmons did here. However, please remember that your originality or uniqueness is like a fingerprint, it’s innate in you. And you don't need the gimmicks, bells and whistles, or whatever the writing version of auto-tune is. Trust yourself that your work will reflect your individuality. Period.

Apart from the stylistic and structural choices that Zinzi Clemmons made in What We Lose, I also found that unfortunately there was nothing special about the writing itself. And that was another problem for me. The writing overall was pretty basic. But it did have some very strong, thoughtful moments which I shared with you earlier in the episode. And those were the shining moments. I didn’t like that beyond those examples that I shared earlier, most of the rest of the prose was pretty basic. Like describing winter as a “long dark and cold period”. Or saying “The sun is shining with full strength.” I don’t expect descriptions like this from someone with an MFA in Creative Writing. And for those who don’t know, an MFA is a Masters in Fine Arts. Which is an advanced degree for fiction writing. So, when I get descriptions like winter is long dark and cold period or the sun is shining with full strength I get genuinely confused and frustrated.These are some of the ways in which I found What We Lose to be frustrating.

I mentioned before that What We Lose contains expositions on South Africa. These expositions on South Africa did not resonate with me at all. I wasn't feeling them because the protagonist’s story would suddenly stop, and then the author would randomly veer off into unrelated discussions sprinkled through the book on South Africans and South Africa. Like talking about Oscar Pistorius, talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Kevin Carter, the author inserted a blog post about crime in Durban, there were sections on Winne Mandela. And then we'd return to the novel’s main plot, Thandie's story. It was totally disruptive to the story’s narrative arc. And the hard part about reading these expositions on South Africa was it didn't feel like I was reading it from an insider, it wasn't a knowing, intimate, and heartfelt perspective of a South African but felt like it was coming from a foreign, touristy gaze. These South African sidebars had the quality of reading as academic, like something copied and pasted from Wikipedia or a newspaper article. They were all things that anyone who even has a tiny micro familiarity with events in South Africa already knows. It wasn’t new information or like you know a new take on these people or events. And there was no emotional connection or narrative links between these events and Thandie. And this matters because Thandie is supposed to be half South African. It really really frustrated me because all it did was to say "hey I'm Thandie, I'm half South African and I'll prove this to you by talking about some South African things. " It just felt like a cheap shot, like these South African events and people were used as filler, to fill in pages in the book. And it made me honestly feel defensive and protective of South Africa being used this way.

Something else I had mixed feelings about was that this book is very unapologetically upper-middle-class. I felt like Thandie kept trying to emphasize the fact that in South Africa she is a colored and therefore higher up the social ladder than a black person. And in America, she comes from an upper middle class black pedigree. The issue is not in having these social advantages. The issue here is that they're not stated merely as fact but stated as a sort of point being made about social separation. And I'm not sure who that point is being made to because this book is written in the first-person. Hmmmm.

I honestly cannot see it appealing to a diverse array of literary tastes. I mentioned that this book is a meditation on Grief. And grief is a universal emotion and feeling that everyone across every social category will go through. We will all experience loss. We will all experience bereavement. We will all mourn people that we love. That's bound to happen to all of us unfortunately. So I feel like this book should have read as universal but it didn't. It's very specific in its target audience, very specific in who it would appeal to. And it would appeal to firmly upper middle class readers. But maybe ultimately there's nothing wrong with that. You know there's an old saying - know your audience.

Something else I wanna discuss and this is not just specific to what we lose or Zinzi Clemmons but broadly across the literary world. Literature has a lot of jobs. You know? To inform. To help us empathize. To reveal who we are as a people. To introduce us to new worlds. Blah Blah Blah. But there's another function of literature which I feel is often minimized or not seen as important as the other functions of literature. And I'm just going to say it. Literature also has a duty to entertain. It's like other forms of art whether it's film or music or paintings or fashion. I don't care how high brow or indie or niche or upscale your sensibilities are. Art should also be aesthetically pleasing and part of being aesthetically pleasing is the duty to entertain, to please my senses you know. It's kind of like those super, super indie movies that only like two people that get what the filmmaker is trying to do . Or those haute couture outfits that only 10 people in the world will ever wear not because of the price tag but because there's no normal everyday event to wear them to. In those cases, you're ultimately producing art for yourself and not to please an audience. And this is how I felt reading What We Lose entertaining. My opinion is that yes make art for you. But, if you expect to have an audience participate in your art, then you have to think beyond yourself. Look, I get it this book is not a $100 bill so it's not going to appeal to every single person that reads it. Including me. But I would have at least liked to have been able to relate to a tiny aspect of it. And speaking of being unable to relate to this novel I think I figured out what the crux of the issue was for me. What We Lose reads like the diary of a moody, conflicted teenager. Even though Thandie is not a teenager. So you're immersed in this conflicted, jumbled reality of a person who doesn't even know who they are, who has no sense of direction, who's simply aimless. And there was no inner growth or progression as Thandie got older. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. I found Thandie to be very tiresome. And the reason I found her to be tiresome is because she is one of those people that's very feelings based who is so severely inward looking. You know those people who never really look outward, who don’t seem to be concerned about how other people are feeling or how they're doing. They're just so into the supposed complexity of their own super important feelings. You know those kinds of people who define themselves by their feelings and think that somehow the complexity of their feelings makes them cool. But all it does for the rest of us is it make them appear selfish because they don’t care about how other people feel. They come across to us as insufferable because they don't have the capacity to realize that other people besides them also experience very complex emotions.I said earlier that What We Lose is a novel about handling grief. It also deals with the depression that accompanies grief which I think is a really powerful subject to always address in fiction. But the problem with Thandie as a fictional character is that she was always inward looking and feeling sorry for herself even before tragedy hit so we never saw her degradation from normalcy into grief. Thandie was mourning life waaay before death came along.

Another aspect to this was that I didn't feel like I could latch onto the secondary characters even if I wanted to ignore Thandie. Thandie was so me me me, that I never got the chance to really get to know the secondary characters in a tangible way.

So guys, that's the main gist of my catalog of frustrations of What We Lose. Next up, I'll do the fun personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons and guess what I think she is like as a person. And then I'll end with some final thoughts. But before I do that, here's a quick message from my sponsor. Per usual, don't go anywhere.

Okay I'm going to do a personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons. Of course this is purely fun guesswork from reading What We Lose.

Soooo, I'm gonna guess that Zinzi Clemmons is probably a spontaneous, adventurous type person, who wears her heart on her sleeve. If you know Zinzi Clemmons, let me know if I hit the bullseye with this or if I'm completely way off base.

Finally I'll close with saying that i admire the unconventional eclectic style and structure of what we lose. Even though i think would have been incredibly successful if it was written as a straightforward memoir. But I also realize it's a selfish thing for me to say because by saying that, I'm wanting the author to adapt her art to suit my own particular preference. And I suspect, and of course this is pure but respectful speculation, that it was a deliberate choice for Zinzi Clemmons not to write this book as a memoir to intentionally put some distance between herself and the grief, and shield herself from direct pain. And I completely understand this.

So, if you've read What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons or if you do plan to read it, let me know what you think. I'd love to have a conversation with you on social media.

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Hi guys, this is Ada, I hope you’re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So welcome members of the Misty Bloom Book Club to your first bonus episode. You guys make it possible for me to keep this podcast alive so thank you and enjoy. You deserve this. By the way bonus episodes are ad-free because you guys already make the episode possible with your sponsorship so thank you again. So far this season, we’ve made pit stops in inner city America, northern Nigerian, south Africa and you guys, I thought you know what? Let’s escape the world entirely for a little while, there's a pandemic ravaging the world so we deserve this escape. So in this bonus episode, as you know, I’m gonna be reviewing Circe by Madeline Miller. 44.7And because you guys are members it’ll be even more fun to do this review because you have the reading list and have probably already read Circe...

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Welcome to the Misty Bloom Book Club! Hi, it's Ada. Hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. We’re on episode 2 already? Can you believe it? Thanks for sticking with me. It’s just gonna get better and better. In this episode I will be reviewing Season Of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim. Let’s get into it!

So the reason I selected this book was because I wanted to read a book by a northern nigerian author. Perhaps you know this already, but umm, most of your best known Nigerian authors, including yours truly, are southeners. This novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms is set in northern nigeria against the backdrop of Hausa culture and Islamic conventions of behavior. So this totally fit the bill.

And clearly, with this taboo type relationship there’s bound to be drama, shenanigans, secrets, lies, implications and consequences for not only Binta and Reza, but also for their families, and for the wider community. So I was excited to see how this would all play out.

But before I dive into my review, let me introduce you properly to Binta and Reza to help contextualize the rest of my review. I’ll start with Binta. Like I said, Binta is a widow. She's tragically lost her husband and her first born son to socio political circumstances which are endemic to Nigeria and maybe even particularly the northern nigerian experience. The book interestingly is set sometime during the first ever attacks by the Boko Haram terrorist group and there are some references to that happening in the background.

But anyway back to Binta. She lives with her 8 year old granddaughter, Ummi, love that name, Ummi, and her 16 year old niece, Faiza whose father and brother were murdered in one of the many religious riots that plague northern nigeria. On the other hand, Reza, Binta’s lover is also a victim of a society that quite frankly and sadly sees him as disposable and has thrown him away. He is a 25 year old criminal with serious mommy issues. And I’ll talk about that a little bit later.

Ok, let’s just jump into what I thought was successful about this novel.

To me, the author shows off prose that is observant and thoughtful and there is a maturity to the writing. This novel contains some beautifully written prose which I will read to you to underscore what I’ve just said.

For example on page 123, the author writes, "...the two bus drivers were standing by the door, arms hanging by their sides. One was Yoruba and the other Kanuri, but Reza thought they looked alike; the same worn faces, the same sweat-stained jumpers, and the same strained eyes. Occupational siblings."

What I just read shows off the author's strong observational skills and appropriate use of metaphor which separates amateurs from professionals.

A second strength of this novel is the interrogation of Hausa and Islamic norms. For example, this novel explores a custom in which mothers are disallowed from calling their firstborn children by name or being affectionate toward them. Or even acknowledging their later born children.

I appreciated that the author didn’t use this custom as a device to make his novel appear cool. You know what I mean? You know how people do that? Throw in something that has a novelty appeal to compensate for being boring or other weaknessnesses in their storytelling.

In this case, the tradition served a purpose which was to explain the motivations of the characters and propel the story forward. For me, it was one of the most moving parts of the story. No pun intended haha.

But you know, it's in the nature of a rogue to also be charming and I think the author did an amazing job with infusing this character with equal parts compassion and charisma without shying away from the moral complexities that Reza presents.

In this book, the author does a great job with balancing out Reza. I mean, it's just like any other human being, we're never just one thing. Reza is the kind of character, the kind person on the fringes of society, most middle-class people who read literary fiction like season of crimson blossoms and yes, I'm calling out myself and dragging all of you who are listening to this too.

Thirdly, I enjoyed the realism of the novel. I felt a sense of place, a strong sense of the characters, their foods, their routines and habits, desires, their pain. Their interactions all felt very authentic and genuine. The novel did not at all feel false or artificial. It all felt real, like I was transported into their town and paying witness to their lives. There was a strong sense of realism woven throughout the novel. It was very well done.

Last but not least, I also thought the author's use of pacing and suspense as literary devices was pretty sharp. I liked how the author would delay revealing the character’s motivations for withholding significant information. It set me up for a greater expectation of more to come. Which is what every writer should be aiming to do with their readers. So two thumbs up to Abubakar Adam Ibrahim for doing this so well.

So that's it in terms of the major strengths of the book. But before I dive into what I thought was a little less successful about this novel here's a quick message from my sponsor.

Welcome back! Thanks for staying with me. So let's pivot to the less successful aspects of this novel.

Cons

First, the tone of the writing felt a little too serious to me. It wasn't so bad, however, as to deter me from continuing to read. It kind of reminded me a little bit of how I felt reading Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In Season of Crimson blossoms there’s no playfulness or lightness to the prose. No air, no space to move and play. The only glimpses of humor are to be found at the beginning of a few of the chapters. Each chapter in the book starts with a proverb. For example Chapter 10 starts with a proverb that says… the search for a black goat should start way before nightfall… which I found to be pretty amusing, clearly it doesn't take much to amuse me.

However the intrinsic nature of a proverb is not only to present wisdom but to do so sometimes in a cheeky, shady way. But the proverbs in this book as far as I could tell, are not original to the author so I can not ascribe the humor that they provide to the author.

Anyhoo, interestingly both of these writers, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Ta-Nehisi Coates are also journalists. So, I suspect that because of their backgrounds reporting the news and presenting factual information in a sober manner, this style of writing bleeds into their fiction leaving it feeling a little stiff.

I'll give you an example. I’ll read you a line from page 12 of the book but before I do, I’ll lay out the scene for you. In this scene, Binta attends a madrasa, which is islamic school, with women in her neighborhood.

On this particular day, their teacher has called in sick and the women decide to spend the time productively by going over previous lessons but they cannot agree on which topics to revise so they agree to disperse.

And this is how the author describes their dispersal… after a lengthy and discordant debate garnished with thinly coated sarcasm the women left in groups…

In my opinion, this was an opportunity for lightness or humor, you know like the women can’t get it together, but for whatever reason, the author just chose not to take it. so I struggled with the overall serious tone of the book.

Please understand that my desire for air or lightness is not to, you know, escape from the importance of the themes that are being discussed but as a reader I demand, mmm look at me demanding things. I demand, as a reader to experience the fuller breadth of human emotion.

I want joy, sadness, empathy, grief, levity, loss, good Humor, compassion, i want to smile, I wanna grunt at something, I wanted be pissed off. Look, I'm spending a good chunk of my time with this book and taking hours over several days to engage with the characters and have them feel like real people that I am interacting with.

and when you interact with people in real life, guess what, you experience a spectrum of emotion. So, this should be no different. This novel felt monotone.

And while we're still on the subject of humor, there is a book Binta owns that's mentioned pretty frequently throughout the course of season of crimson blossoms. The book is titled The Major Sins and is written by Az Zahabi.

I know a book within a book. pretty meta huh? Anyhow the major sins by az zahabi features pretty frequently throughout the narrative of the story. However, it never becomes of significance to the plot and i was confused and slightly irritated by it.

So after I was done reading this novel I went and looked up the major sins. and then I got it. it's kind of supposed to be this ironic, inside joke type thing. However, I think, and this is my personal preference, the most successful jokes while they should be intelligent and engage with the audience's intellect, it should also be immediate.

I don't think the audience should have to go home to uncover research in order to get the joke. You feel me?

Second, I mentioned the character, Faiza, earlier. She is Binta’s rebellious, teenaged niece. Her characterization starts out strong. I appreciated Faiza’s refusal to be tamed especially when juxtaposed against the repressive community in which they live.

I know, I know this is not particularly novel, pun intended this time. We’ve all seen that characterization of the modern teenager rebelling against old customs a thousand times before. However, I promise you in the hands of this author it still comes off as fresh and truthful and not all hackneyed.

On the flip side of this, however, is that I thought the author didn't quite achieve the evolution of Faiza. If you recall earlier I mentioned that Faiza lives with Binta because her father and her brother were murdered in a religious riot. Quick sidebar. I hate the term religious riot.. But here I am using it. It’s such an easy throwaway term that's also inaccurate because religious riots are never really about religion but a perversion of power and corrupt political machinations.

But back to Faiza. Midway through the book, she starts to deal with the trauma of that tragedy. While I do think it was good of the author to address mental health and question the norms surrounding it, I did not think the author did justice to the scope of Faiza’s issues.

And I feel strongly about this because I also tackle mental health issues in my novel, OYIBO. In Season of Crimson Blossoms, Faiza transforms seemingly overnight from this mouthy rebellious teenager into a subdued, moody person. There was no gradual transition.

And the author also abruptly resolved her trauma. He didn't handle it with the finesse I would have liked to see. It felt choppy.

I do understand that the novel is ultimately Binta and Reza's story and the author was perhaps being careful not to let Faiza's story overshadow the main characters but I also thought he could have done a little bit more with Faiza. I thought there was a little more wiggle room in the story for Faiza. She deserved better.

Third, I also spied a few paragraphs that i feel should have been left on The Cutting Room floor. I think the book could have done with a tiny bit more you know tighter editing. I also caught a few words that were overused throughout the prose. Itinerant was one. Exotic was another.

For example, on page 151, the author writes,"... Musa, the teaman came in with an exotic tea set." did you catch that repetition? did you see how the author unnecessarily used tea twice in the same sentence within the space of 11 words?

he could have just simply written Musa wheeled in a tea service and that would have sufficed. You know, it's the little things that bug me and make my skin itch.

The rest of the sentence reads, "Reza admired the dainty porcelain cup with intricate powder blue floral designs and a teapot in the center which was giving off a steady stream of steam through the spout."

did we need the additional words that tell us that steam comes out of the spout? The base? Could we have lived without it? . The editor could have totally cut out those words because any person with a basic understanding of kettles or tea pots knows that steam comes out of the spout. where else would it come out of? the handle?

Or on page 230 where the author mentions Binta feeling a deep sense of foreboding." Can you guess what my gripe here is? I mean to the average reader it’s no big deal. The sentence works just fine.

And I get it but as a writer, my eyeballs latched on to deep sense foreboding and would not let go. A sense of foreboding is a sense of foreboding. foreboding suggests that things are about to go left, something bad is about to happen. Foreboding is ominous. There is no such thing as a deep sense of foreboding. Just as there's no light sense of foreboding. There's no minor or easy sense of foreboding. There's no gentle sense of foreboding. And now the word foreboding is stuck in your head cos now I'm ranting uselessly about foreboding.

But seriously though, look, I've become a pretty merciless editor of my own writing. And I think if any of you listening are aspiring novelists, those are just simply examples of how you can be a more effective editor of your own writing. You know, take a step back, take more steps back, infact take 50 kilometers back and always ask yourself is this word relevant to the story? Does this move the story forward?

Every single word must be loaded, must be weight-bearing, must serve a narrative purpose, must work, work, work, work, work to earn their space on the page. Every single word must be used judiciously to move the story, must help the characters do something, introduce new information that's relevant to the story. Words need to earn their place. So moving on.

Another major gripe that I had with this book was the unfortunate ageism, the reference to Binta as an aged woman. There was a part early on in the book where the author describes her as tagging along with a number of aged women.

I just assumed that she was walking with older women. But as I kept reading, I realized Binta was also part of this aged woman clique. On page 12, the author writes… “it almost made her heart devastated already by the ravages of age and the many tragedies she had endured in life, burst..”.

And on page 13 Binta is pleading for her life, and she cries out, “Please I'm old”. At the beginning of chapter 6, the author refers to Binta’s hair as "a clump of ancient hair". Here we go again and again with the age thing.

Honestly, if the author had not revealed Binta’s age as 55, I would have assumed she was in her 90s or something.

On page 90, in a scene where two women visit Binta in her home, the author describes these visitors and I read...Kandiya in her dampened Hijab and Mallama Umma with her shriveled face and sunken eyes had witnessed 60 rains and 61 harmattans. I found the obsession with women only in their 50s and 60s being described as aged, ancient, and shriveled, as honestly super weird, gross, and disturbing.

And guys, can you guess what the absolute worst part of this is? None of the older men in this book are being degraded or defined by their age. On page 281 for example, an old Senator is described as a "little man with boyish eyes." seriously?!

The author also allows one of Binta's suitors, an old man to proclaim his virility. At that point, I was just like, I cant! Anyhoo moving on

I was unable to differentiate among the residents of San Siro where Reza lived with his gang.

I know it's a difficult thing for any writer to successfully individualize members of a collective especially when they are always appearing together in the same scenes.

And I recognize the author's admirable attempts to differentiate between them but I think the problem here was that in the initial descriptions of the residents of San Siro, the author would simply describe the person and not have that person be involved in some immediate plot advancing action which would have helped the character stick in the reader’s mind. So there’s another writing tip. I’m dropping all these gems.

Anyway, overall I didn’t find this aspect of the book to be successful.

Also Season of Crimson Blossoms did not necessarily grab onto my emotions. While I was curious to see how things would turn out, where the characters would end up, I didn’t feel emotionally invested in their journeys.

so you know that common psychological thing where people will say women end up marrying a man like their father or a son will marry a woman that reminds him of his mom, or a man remarries a woman that looks exactly like his ex wife.

Basically to explain where someone would subconsciously fill a void in their life with a person with very specific traits. In this book, Binta and Reza, are doing the same thing which is not unusual, and is a pretty common thing that happens in the lives of many people.

However what makes it uncomfortable here is that both characters are doing it literally, not subconsciously. Binta and Reza are both hyper aware that they are attracted to each other because of significant people in their lives that they’ve lost.

This made me really uncomfortable and not in a good way. I do like when art that I’m consuming causes discomfort whether it’s television, film, reading fiction or whatever. I like to be made uncomfortable because it helps me confront issues and challenges what I think I know of the world.

But in the case of this book, it made me really really uncomfortable in like a gross, unpleasant way. I want to be provoked into thinking differently not into wanting to throw up.

I also thought it was lazy of the author to have this direct psychological manifestation. I thought it would have been more successful if the writer had manipulated the reader into knowing that this is what Binta and Reza were doing without them realizing it and then the reader could observe the characters come to that realization.

So that's it for what I thought was less successful about Season of Crimson Blossoms.

Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thanks for staying with me.

So in terms of personality I felt like Abubakar Adam Ibrahim came across as studious. The type of person that when he was a kid was an excellent student and diligent in school.

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim also came across to me as a cautious sort, the kinda person who takes his time with warming up to strangers. But among close friends he puts his guard down, and is very relaxed maybe with a little bit of a wry sense of humor. Well if you know Abubakar Adam Ibrahim let me know if I pegged him correctly or if I'm completely off.

I’ll end with some final thoughts.

Both books were published around the same time and in both books there is a focus on northern nigerian characters who are lost boys, street kids who sell weed, hire themselves out as political thugs, you get the gist.

So even though this might be indicative of and endemic to the socio economic and political environment of Northern Nigeria and even other parts of Nigeria, I don't want to see these characters take center stage in every single novel that's written by a contemporary Northern Nigerian writer.

Final Thought 2: I'm a gigantic fan of people chasing happiness because life is tough. And finding happiness is even more weighted and intense in a repressed society so that it then becomes this act of courage.

So I personally can't help but cheer on the people who seek happiness even if I disagree with their methods or values, I'm still ultimately that person who will be like do you, boo.

So if you like stories about ordinary people trying to find simple happiness where and when they can, check out season of crimson blossoms.

Oh one more, absolute final thought, if you do read Season Of Crimson Blossoms let me know what happened to Reza's money?

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