Memoirs

          When I first read a memoir, it was a book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and I was fourteen years old.  I just remember thinking that nothing really happened in the book, yet I was enraptured all the same.  I couldn’t put it down.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me hope.  This confused me.  I was in a stage of life where all I wanted to read was books that had lots of fighting and action and dragons and there I was, reading a book with seemingly no plot whatsoever, and completely falling in love with it.  What I slowly realized was that the reason I was drawn in so strongly is because the power of experience.  The power of listening to someone’s story.

Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, which is an excellent book and movie, said that bad memoirs are narcissistic.  They are only for the author.  Good memoirs are for all of us.  This statement perfectly captures what makes a good memoir so enticing and relatable.  Memoirs, good ones, have the uncanny ability to take someone’s experience and making it everyone’s experience.  We, as readers, get to share in someone else’s story.  Some memoirs are about small, trivial things told with whit and charm, while others still are about unbelievable and unforgettable things that seem impossible.  Either way, the best writers are able to tell their story in such a way that reminds all of us of the agency that we have in our own lives.  Whether it is in the small, mundane moments or in the massive, life changing ones, each person has a story.  It is up to us to listen to the stories of others just as much as it is our responsibility to make our story the best that it can be.  Here are some of my favorite memoirs that remind me why life is worth living, and worth living well:

1. Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss One Song at a Time, by Rob Sheffield

            Rob Sheffield is a writer who is most known for his work in Rolling Stone magazine, but this is the memoir about his relationship with his wife and music.  Each chapter begins with a different mixtape that he made for his wife at various times in their relationship, which he uses as a springboard to discuss love in all its various forms.  Sheffield writes with compassion and conviction as he forces you to fall in love with his wife and music alongside him.  If you find yourself jaded and cynical, that will disappear as you read this delightful tale that will equally crush your soul and compel you to laughter, smiles, and joy.  This book is driven by a perceptive spirit, a hopeful disposition, and an incredible knowledge of music through the generations.

 

2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

            This small book is one of the most powerful narratives that I have ever read.  It is the tale of Maya Angelou’s childhood told in such a way that only Angelou is capable of.  If you have never read anything by her before, stop whatever you are doing and go get this book.  Utterly dripping with poetry, this story describes one of the more singular lives of the last century.  Angelou travels from the south to San Francisco and beyond as she catalogues both joys and horrors with a voice that is impossible to forget.  She takes her readers on a visionary journey through the most important parts of her life; all of the good, all of the bad, radiantly connecting the two so as to remind us how love, joy, and hope can ultimately overcome some of the most overwhelming situations.

 

3. Night, by Elie Wiesel

            In the most haunting 100 pages ever written, Wiesel wrote the seminal memoir about life under the Nazi regime and in concentration camps.  Young Elie traces his life from the beginning of the Nazi occupation, being corralled into ghettos, and finally being shipped off to the concentration camps.  Filled with brutal truth and darkness, this is one of those works that you read and never forget because, as disturbing as these details are, we must remember them collectively so that we can keep this sort of violence and insanity from ever happening again.  This is one of the most important books from the 20^th century.

 

4. Through Painted Deserts, by Donald Miller

            Donald Miller is most famous for his book Blue Like Jazz, which is also great and you should read that too, but personally, I liked this one more.  It is, on the surface, a memoir of him driving around the country in a broken down van, but below the surface it is a beautiful look at solitude, solidarity, spirituality, and life in general.  With Miller’s accessible prose and irreverent yet compassionate tone, this book takes you on a journey through the deserts of the American southwest and beyond.  The scenery and the landscape dance off the page, as do numerous life lessons that we’ve all thought before, but never really had the words to describe.

 

5. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

            This novella isn’t specifically a memoir in the fact that the title character, Esperanza, is fictional.  However, the stories that she tells are steeped in memory and imbued with experience.  Told through a series of disparate vignettes that seem, at times, more like poetry than prose, this tiny book tells the story of a young girl growing up in inner-city Chicago.  It tells stories about youth, love, family, race, gender, and so much more.  Some are hilarious, some are tragic, some are both, but all of them are beautiful.  Sort of like the mind of a child, this book seems to happen all at once and it is that much more insightful because of how the stories are spun.  Drawing upon her mastery of poetry, Cisneros tells a myriad of stories that all speak the same compassion and hope.  This book is a quick read and a delight, but it will also challenge any reader that picks it up.

 

Race

           Race is, has been, and most likely always will be a hot topic in society.  What I find to be the problem with most “hot topics” is that people spend way too much time talking about them and less time listening to others who are more knowledgeable and educating themselves about the subject.  Worse than that, the spend even less time actually doing something about the problems at hand.  What this leads to is rampant naivety mixed with arrogance, a crippling lack of helpful dialogue, and a scarcity of positive action.  Now, race is an incredibly complex concept that covers a wide range of people groups.  That being said, this particular blog is focused expressly on hearing voices from the black community and is aimed at the white community.  I do not claim to be an expert on race in any way and am, in fact, less informed than any person of a minority people group our there for the simple fact that they live this problem every day and I do not, which is the definition of white privilege and informs why I am writing this blog in the first place.  Allow me to elaborate…

So many people (specifically those perceived as white) in this day and age are obsessed with clearing their name of racism that they turn a blind eye to the unbelievable systemic issues that are still undeniably prevalent in our society.  People everywhere are so quick to say, “I’m not racist!,” that they shift the focus to themselves rather than fixing the problems at hand.  Racism is alive and well, and the cultural trends in most educational, economic, and political spheres demonstrate that every day.  There are definitely bigots who are still explicitly racist and that is a huge, obvious problem, but a more extensive and subversive problem are the people like me who grew up with white privilege without ever knowing it.  Once again, ignorance and closed-mindedness cause all the problems.

            Race is a funny thing.  What it comes down to are social constructions more than anything.  For example, I’m not even predominantly white.  I’m Spanish and Mexican, but I look white and am therefore perceived as white; and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.  Growing up, I didn’t understand how or why people could be racist.  I mean, people are people, regardless of how they look, right?  So when people generalized about the white community being racist, I would get immediately defensive.  “Me?  No way!  I mean, I have a black friend!”  Oh young Luke, you stupid ignorant fool.  The problem at hand is that through my immediate defensiveness, I neglected to recognize the problem.  And as any twelve-step program will tell you, the first step is recognizing that you have a problem.  The problem to me became fear; fear of being labeled as racist and bigoted.  God forbid some one judge me because I seem white!  Come on!  Just because of the way I look you are going to label me as racist when you don’t even know me??  Oh, wait… I see now.

            This small, tiny, insignificant affront against my race calling us out for being what we actually are, which is racist (or simply uninformed) is the most minuscule example of prejudice possible.  It’s not even prejudice, it’s just truth.  The truth that we become so self-justifying that we are blind to the real problem which is that society, in and of itself, is imbued with undeniable biases and prejudices.  Therefore, if you are a member of society, you should be constantly checking these biases, which are sometimes painfully obvious, yet overlooked.

            One tangible example is something called the achievement gap.  This gap is an educational concept that people of racial minorities are less likely to succeed in school and it is mathematically and empirically proven every single year in the form of graduation and dropout rates across the country.  The amount of factors that contribute to the gap are staggering, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to mention the one that pisses me off the most.  The majority of government funding allotted to any given school is determined by the property taxes of houses in the district.  What this means is, schools that are in areas with higher property values will receive that much more money just because of the affluent nature of the area.  Therefore, schools in poorer areas receive less money, and schools in nicer areas receive more.  This creates a defined economic gap that only gets worse and worse, and we have yet to change the laws of funding for schools.

            I went to a nice school in a nice area.  I was completely unaware of the achievement gap until I went to graduate school.  Through my perspective, everything was hunky-dory and some people were just unlucky.  Luck has nothing to do with it.  Race, as much as you may want to fight against it, plays a major role in society and the blind cry of “But I’m not racist” is not helping anyone.  If you are a person who is perceived as white like me, there is nothing that we can do on our own to “fix” racism.  We are the oppressors and we have been for centuries.  The first step is recognizing that, accepting it, and then going to people from racial minorities with contrite hearts, willing spirits, and open minds ready to shut up for a moment and listen to someone else’s experience.  We will never fully understand persecution of this nature.  We will never truly experience what it is like to, day in and day out, be a member of a racial minority with all of the prejudices and persecutions that go with that.  We simply won’t be able to solve this problem alone because we caused it.  All we do is perpetuate it with our apologetics and impotent attempts at being the savior.  We need to stop talking and start listening.  Here are some of the amazing voices that have taught me how blind I was and still am in certain ways.  Stop being defensive and open your eyes to this issue, which is the root of so much violence and hate.  Then, maybe we can become a part of the solution instead of just worrying about ourselves and how people see us.

1. Race Matters, by Cornell West

It is important to note that the title of this book is double entendre.  West means that race really does matter as much as this work is about racial matters.  This book was written right after the Rodney King riots of the early nineties, but it is just as insightful and transcendent now as it was back then.  Cornell West is one of the most amazing thinkers of our time and more people need to hear his voice.  Race Matters elaborates on the racial issues in society, how they are perceived by different sides of the political spectrum, and how we as a whole need to recognize how our own skewed perceptions get in the way of us constructing a beneficial solution.  West tears apart these problems and offers remedies that are founded in love and respect, which he argues are the main ways that any person can commit to racial reconciliation.  He also brings up the vacuum that has resulted with a lack of leaders such as Malcom X or Martin Luther King Jr. and the need for a central rallying cry in this post-modern civil rights movement.  Lastly, he highlights the need for simple education.  An academic himself, West acknowledges the fact that misinformation and obliviousness are driving catalysts behind the racial dilemma.  With incredible compassion and unabashed truth, West created one of the most important works on race from the turn of the century. 

 

2. The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

            Ta-Nehisi Coates is an amazing contemporary voice in not only racial issues, but also literature in general.  I featured his other book, Between the World and Me, in my blog about diversifying my reading list and you should read that one too because it is incredible and also about these racial issues in our culture.  The Beautiful Struggle, however, is different in the fact that it is a memoir about his life growing up in the crack-age of inner city Baltimore.  With beautiful poetry and lyricism, we as readers see the world through young Ta-Nehisi’s eyes complete with his complex relationship with his parents, his brothers and sisters, and the world at large.  Tracing his life from childhood to college, we see what it was like for him growing up young and black during a pivotal time for his city.  Steeped in musicality, this book is so much more than just informative: it is inspired, visionary, and eye-opening.  This book helped me to realize that I know nothing.  I am simply an uneducated part of the problem and I need to change my tune and listen.

 

3. Native Son, by Richard Wright

            There are certain books that are so visceral, so powerful, and so vivid that you will never forget them.  This is one of them.  When I read Native Son, it easily jumped to the top of the list of my favorite books of all time.  Bigger Thomas is a young, twenty-year-old black man living with his family in a dilapidated, one-bedroom apartment on the South-Side of 1940s Chicago.  The lines between the white world and the black world are painfully obvious to Bigger and the anger and fear that this causes in his consciousness are palpable.  When he commits a vicious crime, we as readers are thrown into a tumultuous and unforgettable storm filled with racism, panic, and violence.  Wright wrote a masterpiece when he wrote Native Son.  Word of caution, this book is disturbing and haunting in a way that is hard to describe, but it is ineradicably important.  This is a must read.

 

4. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

            In this fearless novel, Morrison plunges courageously into the depths of slavery, shedding a lyrical light on an excruciatingly violent time in our nation’s past.  Sethe is a recently escaped slave living with her daughter whom she gave birth to while on the run.  Her sons have left because the house that they now occupy, which is simply called by it’s address, 124, is haunted by the memory and ghost of the daughter that didn’t survive named Beloved.  The address itself echoes the fact that her third child is missing and memories that are too disturbing bubble beneath the surface as Sethe tries to adjust to a life of freedom.  Identity, remembrance, and the supernatural play an authoritative role in this outstanding novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in literature.  Widely heralded as the greatest American novel of the late 1900s, this book exudes evocative poetry and engulfs its readers in a haunting, ominous, yet hopeful look at one of the bleakest times in American history.  Few people command the English language with as much mastery as Morrison.  She is one of the true artists.

 

5. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

            Wilkerson is an award winning journalist who has dazzling powers with the non-fiction genre.  In this, her masterwork, she weaves the true story of America’s Great Migration.  In the century between emancipation and the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies, black people left the South in droves and headed North and West to escape Jim Crow, segregation, oppression, and violence.  Since then, it became one of the most overlooked and misrepresented movements in American history.  Through painstaking research and endless interviews, Wilkerson gives us the first comprehensive look at this Migration that affected and continues to alter so much of our country.  What is most amazing is how she utilizes people’s stories as a lens to analyze this seminal time in our country.  Driven by compassionate narrative, this book shows the reader how non-fiction is anything but dry and mundane, but instead is filled with heart, soul, and necessity.  This book taught me so much that it would be impossible to put it into words.  Just read it, and listen to the true stories of these millions of lives.

 

As usual, happy reading everyone!  See you next month.