Opinion: An Open Letter to a Bookish Charity

Dear [REDACTED],

I discovered you in my quest to find new homes for some of my books, and thought highly of your mission to distribute book to people on the streets across Australia. At first, it seemed we would be a perfect fit. You only wanted books in good condition; I already had a 'to go back to the Salvation Army store' pile and a 'good quality' pile, so I'd give the quality stuff to you. Except that, on further research, I realised you wouldn't want them, because, while my pile has historical fiction, non-fiction and speculative fiction, it also contains many romance and chick-lit novels. GASP!

I know that this is not going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because "out of respect for your customers", you do not accept romance and chick-lit, or other inappropriate and pernicious influences such as religious materials and guides to getting rich quick and/or losing 10 kilos in 10 days.

Perhaps you fear that, if you did accept romance novels, you'd be swamped with tattered Mills & Boons and old school romances with dubious covers and even more dubious expressions of consent. Except that you have already stated that books must be in "near new condition", so anyone who did so would be showing a blatant disregard for your guidelines and the work you do.

Therefore, I can only assume you have made a moral judgement on the content of romance novels, in general but in specific as to their suitability for people who are homeless. It can't be that, despite greater visibility of men sleeping rough, you are unaware of the large numbers of women who are homeless. There were 45,813 women who were homeless on census night in 2011, which accounted for 44% of the total number of people experiencing homelessness. I cannot believe that, with the removal of government funding from domestic violence and homelessness services over the intervening years, that things are any better now.

Speaking of domestic violence, 55% of women state this is the primary reason they have presented to homelessness services, and I suspect this is where your reasoning for banning romance lies, given that you have also disallowed true crime books, and books that deal with drugs, depression and suicide.

And, of course, there are undoubtedly women who, after experiencing intimate partner violence, do not want to read books that centre relationships, some instances and sub-genres of which may normalise controlling or other problematic behaviours. But I also know many readers in the online community who have experienced domestic and/or sexual violence, and who read romance and chick-lit for exactly this reason. As romance author and scholar Maya Rodale said:

Unlike any other literature, romance novels champion women who defy expectations, they validate their interests and experiences, they declare women deserve love, respect and pleasure, and they reward them for refusing to settle for second best. 

They are escapist and provide a guarantee that everything is going to be okay, which can provide comfort in a world that offers no such assurances, especially to women.

Thus far, I've spoken exclusively about women, but statistics from America show that only between 82-84% of romance novels are bought by women, so perhaps your male clients would also appreciate the choice of a few romance novels now and again.

I can only assume that you think that romance is trashy, anti-feminist, not what your clients want, and potentially detrimental to their wellbeing. I don't even know what to say about the exclusion of chick-lit, because I'm finding it hard to see any objection there but undisguised literary snobbery. It's true that there may be sub-genres, tropes and themes that might not be the most suitable, but this is also true of literary and other genre fiction, all of which you accept without caveats.

If you get in contact, I would be happy to help sort through/read any romance novel donations and pull out ones that contain anything that might be triggering, and I'm sure there would be other people willing to do the same in other cities, including some of your current workers and patrons. Maybe that's not the best answer - I don't know - but surely it's better than completely removing choice and agency from your clients, as you are currently. After all, the entire purpose of your organisation is to counter the dehumanisation that can occur when people sleep rough, and yet you are treating your clients in a paternalistic and infantilizing manner. Unless you have asked your customers if they would like to read romance and chick-lit, and the vast majority said no, in which case I apologise. But somehow I suspect you haven't.

I still greatly admire the work of your organisation, and, although I can't make a donation without spending a sizable amount of time re-sorting my books, I'll send my serious literature friends your way.

Sincerely,
Dani

P.S. You'll never see this, of course, and I'll never be brave enough to send it to you, so...I guess we'll never know what could have been. Keep up the otherwise good work.

Non-Fiction Review: The Rescuer by Dara Horn

Recommended

Dora Horn's The Rescuer is a short non-fiction piece about the efforts of an American, Varian Fry, to save cultural and intellectual luminaries at risk from the Nazis, either because they were Jewish, dissidents, or both.

Churchill once said that "great and good are seldom the same man", and Horn illustrates his meaning almost perfectly. Varian Fry was a great man, and he worked within a system governed by great people, all the way up to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The people he saved were also great people: Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss, to name only a few. But Horn highlights that - no matter how history has recorded these people and their deeds - the term good is sometimes ill-fitting.

Unlike the more familiar story of Oskar Schindler, who, throughout the 1960s, was propped up financially by donations from the people he had saved, those rescued by Fry did not wish to maintain contact with him after the war. Nor did many demonstrate any gratefulness for the immense risk he had undertaken; several even put his operations in danger with their vanity and self-absorption.

And, even though Fry was doing good work and ultimately saved over 2000 people, he was a troubled man, so much so that one of his children still refuses to discuss him. Another ascribes his erratic behaviour to bipolar disorder. As Horn also points out, there is also a certain irony in his position as a Righteous Gentile. He helped people to escape the Nazis' brutal eugenics programmes, but, in order to do so, subjected these people to another form of eugenics; only people making the most important contributions to the "culture of Europe" would be considered. 

As for the statesmen of the American government, they tried to have Fry recalled when his work was no longer in line with their politics (i.e. when they realised they were actually going to have to take in all these people Fry was saving!). When Fry refused to cease and desist, the State Department tipped off the Vichy regime about Fry and his team, leading to their arrests. 

Going in, I thought Fry's story would be presented in a self-congratulatory American-saves-the-world manner, but I couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, for Horn and other who have studied Fry, this is why is story has received so little attention, comparative to those like Oskar Schindler. It blurs the black-and-white binaries through which we see the Second World War. Whereas normally we have the good, heroic Americans (and other Allies) as the counterpoint to the evil Nazis, here the Americans do not come out smelling so fresh. Not only did they dob Fry in to the Nazis' puppet government in France, their actions make a mockery of our two core narratives when it comes to the Holocaust: that we didn't know a genocide was occurring, and, that, even if we had known, we would have been powerless to stop it. This second assumption rests on the fallacy that people would want to do anything, which then, as now, is not necessarily true. 

We like the story of the Righteous Gentile, but the truth is that most Gentiles were decidedly unrighteous, even when they had a level of awareness of what was happening to the Jews across Europe. And, make no mistake, Fry's experience demonstrates that the implementation of the Final Solution was an open secret.

In 1935, Fry witnessed a pogrom along the Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin, which, according to one of his co-rescuers, contributed to his decision to go to France years later. At the time though, Fry reported on the violence for The New York Times. In 1942, he wrote another piece, this time for The New Republic, in which he chronicled a 1935 meeting with Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Nazis' chief foreign press officer. Hanfstaengl told Fry, quite plainly, that he and the 'moderate' Nazis wanted to expel the Jews, while Hitler's 'radical' wing had their hearts set on mass murder. Neither was Fry was not the only person reporting these developments to the American newspapers. 

As for the American government, they agreed to Fry's presence in France, if only tacitly, because they knew that the alternative was losing these great brains to extermination camps. But, even so, they took almost few actions to offer refuge to other European Jews because both the government and the general population were scared of opening the door to 'floods' of Jewish refugees, as the case of the SS St. Louis shows. 

The great strength of Horn's writing lies in her ability to make the reader examine these things in a new light, and she does so by conveying her own conflicted feelings. In one instance, she writes: 

The inevitability of murder...is the premise of all narratives of Holocaust rescue - and part of what makes me so uncomfortable with them. The assumption in such stories is that the open maw of death for Europe's Jews and dissidents was something like a natural disaster. These stories, in some sense, force us - people removed from that time by generations - to ask the wrong questions, the kind of questions we might ask about a tsunami or an epidemic. Someone has to die, the thinking goes, and the only remaining dilemma is who will get the last seat on the lifeboat or the last vaccine. But these questions fall short by assuming that the perpetrators were irrelevant. As long as we are questioning the choices that are made, shouldn't we be considering the possibility of the Holocaust not happening at all? If someone was in the position to choose whether to save person A or person B, shouldn't whole societies have been in the position to reject the notion of genocide altogether? Why didn't everyone become Denmark? (Loc. 387-396)

I read The Rescuer in the first days of the new year, but Horn's rendering of Fry's story and the Holocaust in general have stuck with me these past months, invoked by things I come across in my everyday life. First of all, there are the people Fry saved, who have been popping up everywhere, even though Levi-Strauss was the only one I had any awareness of before starting this book.

But then, there is also something greater, something I sometimes wonder when I open the newspaper and read about Europe's current refugee crisis, Australia's despicable treatment of asylum seekers or Trump and the rise of the far right in the United States. If we tell ourselves these comforting fictions that we didn't know, that we were powerless, are we more likely to ignore the cries for help that are occurring now, or in the future? After all, as George Santayana said, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.".  

Review: Switch by Janelle Stalder

3 stars

Maybe it's my secret desire for a catastrophic event that mysteriously wipes out people who can't queue, but I've developed some strange need for dystopic romances during these last few weeks of travel. Switch by Janelle Stalder was my most recent indulgence, read while navigating the Peruvian rail system. It was a mixed bag (Switch, that is; the Peruvian trains have actually been very nice), but it was intriguing enough overall that I instantly downloaded the sequel, despite having the wave my Kindle around to get the necessary bars of 3G. 

Switch take place in 2035, after some guy called Ludwig has taken over the world (or at least Europe). Mind-reading Charlotte-slash-Dinah is drawn into the politics of it all at sixteen, when her house is raided on the suspicion that her father is involved in the resistance movement. She accidentally lets Ludwig's second in command know about the whole being able to hear thoughts thing, and when we flash forward a few years, she's become the autocrat's mysterious and feared 'Weapon X'. 

Ludwig sends Dinah to spy on a rebel faction, because we know that always works out a treat. Sure enough, she meets Pete McKay, a rebel leader with secrets. Pete was a decent hero, but it was hard for me to get past the most overdone Cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Seriously, the guy referred to everyone - even his brothers - as 'mate'. 

But back to the storyline. Or the would-be storyline, since the constant changes between four different narrators mean it's not apparent that Dinah and Pete are the protagonists for the first third of the book. Neither was this slow start filled in by detailed world-building; I still have no clue how or why Ludwig decided to take over the world, for example. 

If it's becoming clear that I have a bee in my bonnet about this whole world domination thing, it not just because it was all very flimsy.  It really pissed me off that, in the absence of any overt motive for Ludwig or any explanations of his ethnic or national affiliations, London had been renamed 'New Berlin'. Because using Germans as inexplicable and one-dimensional villians is not at all a lazy trope-tastic cop-out! I hope that Ludwig will be fleshed out in the second book, which features the other two narrators from Switch, who actually captured my interest more than Dinah and Pete. 

However, I was drawn into the book as it gained momentum, and it ultimately found its feet in the moral ambiguities of the second half. Ironically, however, the reason I liked it is also the reason I come down so harshly on Ludwig as a villian; his charisma was supposed to contribute to the moral confusion of it all, but in the absence of detail, it actually detracted from it.

Reflection: #WNDB & Beyond a Single Story

Whether they realise it or not, most Australians are familiar with the concept of a single story. It's when foreigners ask us, unironically, about keeping kangaroos as pets. Its the entire sub-genre of Australian Outback romances. I've been polling all my romance reading friends about these, and none of them have ever read an Outback romance. Even though these books are (sometimes) made and distributed in Australia, they are primarly meant for external consumption. It's the advertisements on my cable television provider for a program in which some minor British personality goes bush to search the "real Australia". Cue images of horse-wrangling, cattle stations and crocodiles, and British Guy patronisingly explaining everything despite having a day's experience of the place. It's not that the stories of rural Australians aren't worthy or important - in fact, in our internal media these are often sidelined - but their presentation to international audiences invalidates the 85% of Australians who live in urban environments. 

And countries and regions all around the world have similar experiences. Often, we even encourage the stereotypes of the outside world to brand ourselves for tourism and business purposes, Australia's Where the bloody hell are you? ad campaign being a prime example, but this doesn't make them any less alienating or dangerous.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talks about how we are often lead to believe that one story about a particular place or people is the only story in her influential TED talk entitled The Dangers of a Single Story. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching it, or reading the transcript.

She recounts how, on coming to America for university, she realised that people saw Africa as a place of "beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS", and related to her through this lens. It was not their fault; this is what the media and popular culture presented to them with little differentiation between nations, regions, cultures and religions. Adichie, however, was not in the same boat. She says:

...because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

I thought of this quote when I was reflecting on my #WNDB Challenge as it comes up to the end of the year. Despite the fact that I had sought out books featuring characters of varying ethnicities, religions and sexualities, I have realised that 14 out of the 20 books I read were set in the US, and all but two took place in either the US or UK (and when I say the UK, I really mean England with the odd Scottish setting thrown in; Wales and Northern Ireland don't get a look-in). I undertook the #WNDB Challenge to counter hegemony, but ended up perpetuating it in another form. Unless they had immigrated to the US or UK, the people of the periphery were still silenced. No doubt about it, the fault was in my selecting skills, but this also reflects what I was exposed to on Goodreads, Amazon and other blogs.

I'm always loath to buy into romance/'light' fiction vs. 'literary' fiction binaries, but I do feel like the romance world is dragging its feet in this regard. The Man Booker prize has opened itself up to writers from all over the world and novels from all over the world are feted as literary masterpieces (this is has it's own set of problems as well, don't get me wrong). In contrast, all of the 2015 RITA Winners were set in the UK or US. 2014 had more diverse settings: one Outback, one partially set in Bangkok and one set in various European locations (but with the characters based in London). In 2013, we were back to all US or UK, excepting two fictional locations.

I have no doubt there are many romance novels set outside these conventional locations out there, but they are not making it past the literary gatekeepers and so languish in the dusty corners of the Kindle Store. In 2016, I'm making it my mission to find them. The aim is to review books from countries around the world in an aim to help myself see beyond the single story, and I would be grateful for any recommendations. 

As always, there will be an element of working this out as I go along. For example, should the author have to be from the country in which the book is set? The only things I'm sure about is that I would like to read more than one book from each country. After all, it would be pretty useless to counter a single story with a single story.

Review: True Pretenses by Rose Lerner

4.5 stars

The hero of True Pretenses, Ash Cohen, and his brother Rafe are successful con men, so it's a surprise when Rafe decides he wants to live an honest life. Ash is upset and perplexed but he starts looking for a way to give Rafe what he wants. When he comes across Lydia Reeve, she seems like the answer to his prayers. With her father dead and her brother uninterested in the family's patronage of the local town, Lydia desperately needs her marriage portions released to her so she can continue to fund her charitable and political work. All Rafe has to do is make her like him, and then propose a marriage of convenience. But things become complicated when Lydia decides she would rather marry Ash, and Ash is forced to reveal a long-held secret that sends his brother running.

Even though Ash is the thieving son of a Jewish prostitute (his words, not mine), and Lydia is a aristocratic lady and consummate hostess, the two have a lot in common. They've both spent their lives dedicated to their younger brothers, and are cut adrift when their brothers no longer want such a close, quasi-parental relationship. Both also are used to working hard to ensure that people like them, and are unsure of who they are beneath this. Their interactions were witty and touching and, overall, they were one of the best couples I've read in a long time. I found their honesty with each other particularly refreshing. Unlike many characters, particularly heroines, both Ash and Lydia were mature, sensible and did not dissemble.

However, the stand-out aspect of this book was, for me, Ash and Rafe's Jewish heritage. It places them a precarious position, so much so that Ash has banned them from speaking Yiddish even when they are alone, and stays celibate so that no-one will know that he is circumcised. It was another stark reminder to my privileged little self how the long and bloody history of the European Jews neither starts nor ends with pogroms and the Holocaust. Lydia is forced to confront her prejudices; when speaking to Rafe, she makes a comment about blood libel, the persistent rumours and accusations that Jews stole Christian children to use for nefarious purposes in rituals. Rafe angrily replies:

"Stories like yours aren't real. They're an excuse to murder Jews in the street and feel good about it. What would we want your children for, when we can barely feed our own? If that filthy slander gets out in the town, they'll hang Ash to a lamppost." Loc. 1332

A few days after I finished True Pretenses I came across an article on We Need Diverse Books where 7 Jewish authors speak about their experiences of anti-Semitism, and together these two texts made me re-think the way I thought of anti-Semitism. When there was a prominent incident of anti-Semitism against schoolchildren in Sydney last year, I was befuddled, unable to understand how people could be holding this ugly sentiment when I had never seen or heard it, but I now realise I've just never noticed it before, because it wasn't directed at me and so I was oblivious to the micro-aggressions happening around me, or that I perpetrated myself. 

Moving back to True Pretenses, I felt the ending was not as strong as the rest of the book, but that could have been because it was past midnight and I was bleary-eyed and yet still didn't want it too end. I can't put my finger on what could have been done differently or better, I just felt like it was a fairly standard ending didn't conform to the rest of the book, which had been so devoid of tropes. However, the effect on my enjoyment of the book was negligible, and I'm only really bringing it up as a justification for not giving it 5 stars. I have dilly-dallied between giving this book 4.5 and 5 stars for the last week, and it's made me realise I should probably codify my rating system somewhere, so I'll be working on that next.

Overall, True Pretenses was the second of Rose Lerner's books I've read, and the first, A Lily Among Thorns, was equally wonderful. I'm excited to see what she produces in the future, and I really hope that Ash's little brother Rafe gets his own book.

Reflection: Don't Judge a Culture by its Cover

My awareness of the ways book covers can reflect and reinforce stereotypes of gender - which I touched on in the last post - has come largely from those who seek to point out the way race or 'foreign' locales are represented on book covers.  The cover of a book tells somebody what to expect in reading it, but what happens when the cover doesn't reflect the content, but rather a preconceived stereotype of the setting, characters or content?

Here are two specific examples where entire cultures have been essentialised down to a single image or trope.   First, we have the classic I'm-a-book-about-an-Arabic/Islamic-woman-therefore-I-must-be-oppressed-and-have-no-individual-identity:

Source: arabglot.com

There are some excellent discections of the 'Veiled Woman' cover, including 'Translating for Bigots', 'Don't Judge Books By Their Cover - Especially Arabic Works in Translation', 'Why So Many 'Saving Muslim Women' Book Covers?' and 'Book Covers Promote Orientalist Portrayal of Muslim Women'.  All of them touch on the book covers as a vehicle for Orientalism, which: 

"...considers the way that the Middle East and Asia are represented in Western novels, biographies, and artworks.  Commonly, these depict places lost in times past, inclined towards despotic rule, and prone to odd cultural rituals that can be both pleasurable and symptomatic of weakness....The Orient was a powerfully pictured but vague location that the Westerner believed he could control and enjoy, penetrate and posess, and  hide in....The implicit goal, which repeats across time in politics, media and the popular imagination, was to reaffirm cultural difference and render things 'Oriental' marginal to the West and subordinate to Western international relations."   

-- Extract of 'Post-colonialism' by Christine Sylvester in The Globalization of World Politics, edited by Bayliss et al.

The ways small cultural artifiacts, such as book covers, can reinforce hierarchies of power between countries, communities and individuals in the international arena can be demonstrated using the I'm-a-book-set-in-Africa-so-I-must-feature-a-sunset-over-the-savannah:

Source: 'The Dangers of a Single Book Cover:The Acacia Tree Meme and "African Literature"'

The 'Acacia Tree' covers exemplify Sylvester's first example; that Africa exists within a timeless bubble of primitiveness (none of the examples feature any buildings other than small, mud huts).  As with the Arabic example, this image is developed prior to knowledge of the book's content and the views of the author (both often trying to subvert stereotypes, not reinforce them).  With regards to Africa, this is sometimes called 'Black Orientalism' or 'Afro-Orientalism', but it can also just be classified as Orientalism because of its commonalities with the ways Asia and the Arab world is stereotyped.  No matter what the region, these stereotypes have real-world effects.

In this case, they establish Africa as a homogenous place and thereby illegitimate the experience of being Xhosa or Yoruba, Shona or Kikuyu, from urban Africa or a particular region of the continent.  As a prime example, I just googled Kikuyu to make sure I was spelling it right, and except for one Wikipedia page listing all the pages that Kikuyu might refer to (5 out 7 were related directly to the ethnic group), all of the other options on the first page of my Google results refered to a species of grass.  The Kikuyu make up 22% of Kenya's population - the largest of any single ethnic group - and yet the Western world is more concerned with a native Kenyan grass that was named after them.  

Ebola illustrated the real world implications of such ignorance beautifully.  Although Europe was closer to the Western African outbreak than Southern Africa, tourism in the South took a seroius downturn.

Secondly, the Africa-as-timeless trope denies the reality of the continent's colonial history and the impact this continues to exert today.  Surely, if a Western country doesn't recognise the Rwandan genocide as a partial byproduct by colonial hierarchies that turned Hutu and Tutsi from fluid ethnic groups to castes, then making a decision about whether to intervene becomes simpler.  Ditto the coming African Debt Crisis and many other international affairs issues.  The flip side of this, I suppose, is that the depiction of Africa as primitive and backward allows for neo-colonialism; the West (and other powers, such as China, which has developed massive oil, crop and other interests in African nations) can intervene without international condemnation.  

So, while it might seem that covers featuring acacia trees or veiled women are fairly unimportant in the scheme of things,they are one small cog in a very big machine that determines the way we think about the world.