Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
Several years ago, I said this about a previous selection of the Beer & Books Club, namely Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings: "I see myself as blameworthy, to some extent, in James' powerful objections that writers of colour have had to satisfy white readers in order to say obliquely the kinds of things they should have been able to write about directly.... I'm pained by the possibility that I'm just a parochial whitey with no more than misguided good intentions."
I had admired that novel, even though I hadn't enjoyed the experience of reading it, and my estimation of it has gone up over the last eight years (wait, I'm HOW OLD?!?). Still, A Brief History of Seven Killings wasn't my novel, and that's fine. There's absolutely no reason that Marlon James should be aiming to satisfy every potential reader, and I'm also not going to read the Russian classics any time soon, or go deep into Australian fiction, or or or or.
This book did have me thinking of Seven Killings a lot, though, because it's also intensely Jamaica-driven fiction. It's set almost entirely in the United States, but much of the point is that over the decades, the characters never do get accepted into American culture, instead continuing to eke out all kinds of marginal existences that lead to varying degrees and moments of success and failure.
Jamaica is a not-place for the family's youngest son, Trelawny, and his father or brother don't consider going back there, either, but it's also a place that matters deeply to him and to the rest of his constantly fracturing family. Because of the ways in which the family's rejected from American culture, too, it's clear that Jamaica (as not-America, where "you people" maybe belong) matters deeply to everyone around Trelawny and his family, too.
The book's depiction of race relations in America has me thinking, though, and I'll have to keep thinking about that.
I say this in part because at the time of my writing, the American political class's current spasms of undigested idiocy are engaging with the race identity of Vice-President Kamala Harris. Trump and his whatevers are busily saying that she's not really Black, she's Indian; or that even if she is Black, she never used to say she was Black, instead calling herself Indian. But as her birth certificate notes, her father was born in Jamaica, and in Escoffery's stories, Jamaicans are subject to constant scrutiny along the "what ARE you" lines: is your skin brown or black, what kind of brown, how black, are you sure you're not Dominican or Puerto Rican or Cuban or something else. So, I found Escoffery's discussion of how people perceive and interrogate Trelawny's possible race identity instructive.
And as I said about James' book, quoted in my first paragraph above, it's not inaccurate to call me a parochial whitey. As a white Canadian, who has rarely travelled to the US and who lives in one of Canada's less diverse cities, I'm deeply ignorant about the minutiae of race relations in America. I'm absolutely not spending a minute more in the US than I have to, either, but even if I visited, the fact is that I'd never get the kind of access to these issues that Trelawny has (or, of course, that Escoffery himself has).
Is it normal that a person like Trelawny would end up--because of his skin colour--in multiple situations where white Americans are performing or acting out their sexual kinks with and for him? All of the other race-centric experiences: how nonfictional are they? Does race really define literally everything for Trelawny, for Escoffery, for Americans?
(As an aside, gosh, American politics is SUCH a disgusting mess.)
Even if I'd wish otherwise, this apparent centrality of race seems likely to be true, at least from my perspective on the American political process (a term that reminds me of the digestive process). That's shocking, and it means that I may well be even more parochial than I think I am, but maybe it's true. Probably it is. I'm in no position to say otherwise.
All of which means that If I Survive You really might be for me after all, precisely to the extent that it's not for me, so it's a good thing that I enjoyed Escoffery's stories.
But I'm very curious how discussion will go at book club.
Comments