In her debut book, Shooting Water, Canadian-Indian writer Devyani Saltzman chronicles the personal and political tumult she endured during the making of Water, the third film in the Indian trilogy, along with Earth and Fire, by her director mother Deepa Mehta. As her mother faced death threats from Hindu nationalists and the disappointment of shutting down filming, the young author found an uncommon opportunity to reconcile her mixed heritage and the emotional rupture left by Mehta’s divorce from Saltzman’s father, Canadian filmmaker David Saltzman. Recently, InTheFray Magazine’s Anju Mary Paul took part in a group interview with Saltzman.

The interviewer: Anju Mary Paul, InTheFray Travel Editor
The interviewee: Devyani Saltzman, author of Shooting Water

Do you think that the upheaval that took place in the 2000 shoot brought you two [Mehta and Saltzman] closer together?

Absolutely. I was excited by the three months of being with her, and those three months were cut short when the film was shut down. We were in Varanasi for a month and a half total. I was in the room answering the phone when she got death threats and staying with her and watching her go through something very painful. And I think it definitely brought us closer together because we had to support each other because all of a sudden, her country and a country where my grandparents live, a country I love, was turning against us. So it was a very violent time and it definitely made us stronger as mother and daughter. But it also cut short our reconnection. So I actually left for Canada and she went to West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, two different states, to try to make the film, though it didn’t work out. We left with these two minutes of silent footage that have never been seen, that are in our archives, with the original cast. And I was there on the day we shot those two minutes and a mob was outside chanting, “Water picture murdibad!” (Kill the Water picture!)

You acknowledge in the book that George Lucas supported the film. Were you disappointed that not many people in India itself spoke about your right to make the film?

There were a few artists, maybe not enough who supported it. The government at the time, which was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu right, was strong enough to drown that out. There were actually a lot of lay people who stood up in support in Calcutta when we were shut down. A whole number of sex workers, women, marched the streets of Calcutta with black cloths tied around their mouths, symbolic of the suppression of freedom of speech…. One of the big things for me was that the BBC, the Guardian, the American press all reported, “Controversial film shut down” in 1999. But nobody asked the deeper question: Why? So, for me, and with my writing background, this was the opportunity to go into depth about Hindu nationalism, and what happened with Fire, which was her first film in the trilogy. And there’s a great quote — do you know Pavan K. Varma? He’s a writer and member of the Indian Foreign Service and he once said, “All nations indulge in a bit of myth-making to bind their people together.” And I love that quote because I think Water was one of the casualties of maintaining this myth of a Hindu India, an India without widows, an India without this really dark side of its history — especially in terms of its women — and so I wanted that story out there.

Why do you think the state government cleared the script in the first place?

Because I think that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which any foreign production has to give their script to, genuinely loved it. I think it was really a ruckus started through the RSS and then it just snowballed…out of being just about the content of the script and into this idea of Hindu nationalism and purity and preserving the Ganges.

The writing is so lucid and so emotionally confessional. Did you keep a running diary or did you just recap how you felt?

A mixture of both. I’ve always been a diary writer so I did have a diary and research going back to press from the time — the Indian press and foreign press for 1999 — and photography and memory. I work through visual imagery so, when I wrote, I just tapped into that.

So it’s not like you went back every night and …

Not at all. I didn’t know I was going to write this book until 2004. The book that inspired me to be a non-fiction writer was Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families. When I was 18, I worked at a photo agency in New York and I called up the New Yorker from a street corner and said, “Can I speak to Philip Gourevitch?” thinking that nothing would happen, but they put me through! So I said, “Hi, I’m a student. You don’t know me but I loved your book and I want to meet you.” And he met me for two hours and we had coffee on Columbus Avenue and we talked about writing. I’d thought he was a Ph.D. with a specialty in African politics. And he was like, “Yeah, I studied art but I dropped out, went to Cornell, worked as a waiter.” He showed me that you don’t have to have that credential to write. You just need your eyes and a pen.

What was the actual impetus to write this book?

It was two-pronged. For many years, I’d been feeling this is a great story and this film is finally out there. And emotionally, I talk about there being this existential weight, years of having to deal with being an only child and the guilt of divorce and it had to go somewhere. And so I just started writing. But I don’t know why that particular confluence of timing worked. A Canadian publisher said, we’re interested but you’ve only written 5,000 word articles. This is a 90,000 word book. Do three test chapters. And I did and they bought it. That’s just incredible luck but I had an editor who believed in me, so it kind of came together.

Given that your parents were filmmakers, were you ever tempted to go into movies?

If anything, it would be documentaries. But I’ve never wanted to be a filmmaker; I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

How do you think your mother transcended her anger through this film?

She basically went away and did Bollywood/Hollywood, and I think that was how she released her anger about the film, to go do this really irreverent comedy. And then she always said that she couldn’t make Water until she didn’t feel any anger because she didn’t want to taint the purity of the script. And Sri Lanka (where the film was eventually shot) gave us the distance, because it was a Buddhist-Sinhalese country and we were removed from India. It gave her a little more space to approach the film.
In terms of us, I had to deal with the guilt of a daughter choosing a father, and she had to deal with the guilt of why I chose him. As you know from reading the book, I never write about it in a linear fashion, it’s more of an emotional, literary experience. But it was realizing that I always loved her, that divorce tears people apart but, ultimately, underneath it, there’s a love, and it’s about finding that love again. And that’s the emotional journey. I learned to respect her, watching her as a director. And she learned to respect me as an adult, starting to work in photography and writing. So we just learned to find that love underneath the choices we all make.

You introduced yourself as half-Canadian, half-Indian. Is that really how you see yourself? Fifty-fifty?

Do you know Pico Iyer’s Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home? It sounds corny but I like the words “global soul” because I did grow up that way. My father’s Jewish. His parents — my grandparents — emigrated from the Ukraine, escaping the pogroms. My mother’s Punjabi. I was born in Toronto. I went to Oxford. I lived in England for three years. And I’d like to think of a world that’s borderless. People are always scared of their identity not being one or the other. I went through a little bit of that confusion but ultimately, it’s what made me a writer. That in-between space enriched me. So Canadian is the passport I carry, but I’m a global soul.

To read Anju Mary Paul’s review of Shooting Water, click here.

Anju Mary Paul

Marriages break apart so quickly and so often these days that we too easily forget how traumatic a divorce can be for the children caught in the crossfire. Devyani Saltzman’s first book, Shooting Water — a memoir, serves to jog our memories in a terribly effective manner, leaving readers heart-bruised and aching for the girl she was when her parents divorced.

An only child, Saltzman was asked to choose which parent she wanted to live with. She chose her father, Canadian filmmaker and producer David Saltzman. “As an eleven-year-old with a child’s instincts, it seemed only natural to choose him over my mother,” she writes. “I felt safe with him, while my mother’s pain and anger sometimes scared me.”

Saltzman’s mother, acclaimed Canadian Indian film director Deepa Mehta, never forgave her. And even though she knew instinctively that she had made the right choice, Saltzman never forgave herself either.

For the next eight years, Saltzman drifted anchorless through life — torn between her mother and father, their two homes in Toronto, and their two countries, India and Canada. On the surface, she was the good daughter: studious, polite, and docile. But inside her, there was “a lonely space filled with guilt and with the fear of disappointing my parents,” she explains early on in her book. “I wished more than anything to escape this vicious cycle and somehow break free.”

Saltzman’s chance came in 1999, when Mehta, who was about to start filming the first installment in her elemental trilogy on India — Water, Earth, and Fire, invited her then-18-year-old daughter to work with her on the set as an assistant cameraperson. Shooting Water is, above all else, the personal story of their reconciliation. But it is also an eyewitness account of the struggles Mehta encountered in making her film.

Water focuses on the widespread problem of Hindu widow abuse that existed in pre-Independence India. Many people know of the now-outlawed practice of sati, or widow burning, an ancient Indian tradition where a dead man’s wife is placed on his funeral pyre to burn to death alongside his corpse. But few are aware of the equally ancient tradition of widow abuse and neglect that is still very much present in modern-day India. Many widows are cast out or exploited by their families for the bad luck of having had their husbands die. Often they travel to holy cities like Vrindavan, dubbed the “city of widows,” by the banks of the Ganges and settle in ashrams where they must beg daily for alms to survive.

Saltzman writes about visiting a widows’ ashram hidden in the basement of a guesthouse soon after arriving in the northern Indian city of Varanasi, where Water was to be filmed. “They all wore dirty white saris and heavily darned shawls,” she notes. “Their heads were shaved … The room was freezing, but there was no direct sunlight or heaters to keep them warm.” These conditions were pretty much the same as those Mehta wanted to depict in Water. But two days into production, the film set was burned to the ground by Hindu fundamentalist protesters who accused the film of being part of a foreign conspiracy to besmirch the image of Hinduism. Mehta and her cast received death threats and the state government that had initially cleared the script retracted its permission.

The outcry against the film reflected the tumultuous changes India was going through at the time. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) controlled the government, and Hindu militancy and fundamentalism were on the rise even as India as a country was modernizing and Indians were growing more self-confident as citizens of a rising economic powerhouse.

Saltzman ventures into stormy waters (pun intended) when she takes on the topic of the destructiveness of blind nationalism in the book, using the reception her mother’s film was given to illustrate her point. “You can’t pollute the Ganges! The Ganges will not tolerate your dirty Water!” shout female protestors waving their rolling pins in the air outside the film crew’s hotel in Varanasi. Saltzman says the women had never read the screenplay, nor did they know the plot of the movie; they were protesting simply because they believed their religion, and their nation, to be under attack. Both in her book and in an interview to promote the book, Saltzman cites a quote from Pavan K. Varma, a noted author and civil servant in India: “All nations indulge in a bit of myth-making to bind their people together.” According to Saltzman, “Water was one of the casualties of maintaining the myth of a Hindu India, an India without widows, an India without this really dark side of its history — especially in terms of its women.” That troubled period in India’s history has since passed but there are many other sacred cows that still exist within the country. (Recently, the Congress Party threatened legal action against a proposed biopic on Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the political party and the most powerful woman in India.)

But even as the political terrain was changing under their feet, mother and daughter were not able to change enough individually to reconcile. Saltzman recounts their struggles to heal their broken relationship: the tentative overtures toward one another, the lapses into shouting matches and bitter accusations of “You never loved me!” The conflicting demands on their time fuel this disconnect: Mehta is busy trying to salvage her film. Saltzman, meanwhile, is falling in love — for the first time in her life — with a young man who is so right (and so wrong) for her that you cringe following the progress of their affair, already seeing its inevitable conclusion. But the 19-year-old — so desperate to belong to someone — is blind to all of this and moons over her love when she should be with her mother.

So mother and daughter separate once again, their issues unresolved. Mehta travels to other parts of India, to search for alternative locations for filming. Saltzman returns to Canada, and then to Oxford University, to study anthropology.

Four years later, in 2004, the two receive a second chance at reconciliation when Mehta secures sufficient funding from the Canadian government to film Water in Sri Lanka. She invites her daughter, fresh out of college, to join her during the filming.

Everything is touch-and-go once again. Both India and Sri Lanka are in the middle of national elections. In India’s case, it appears the BJP will win a second term, putting an end to the country’s experiment in secularism. And in Sri Lanka, the outcome of the elections will determine the fate of the ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers. Fear that word of the film might torpedo it again results in the replacement of all the major actors and the film being given a fake name — Full Moon. And mother and daughter start their reconciliation almost from scratch again.  

The film is completed as Saltzman and her mother continue to oscillate between healing and hurting each other. But when, during yet another argument, her mother shouts at her, “Why don’t you just call your father. You chose him,” Saltzman is able for the first time to break the cycle of recrimination. “I looked at her sitting on the couch, rigid with anger. My own anger was numbed, but it was tinged with a clarity I hadn’t felt before. I didn’t run away to cry, or to call my dad.” Instead she tells her mother, “Mom, I chose Dad because it felt safer. I was 11. I’m 24 now.” And the process of forgiveness on both sides begins.

In Shooting Water, the parallels between the rebirth of the film and the rebirth of the mother-daughter relationship are as stark as can be, but so are the differences. In life — unlike in film — you can’t edit out the sad or painful scenes; there are no retakes. Saltzman chronicles all of the arguments, misunderstandings, betrayals as only the daughter of two filmmakers can: steeped in the aesthetics of film, with an eye for tight scenes and an ear for crisp dialogue. She writes with a deceptive simplicity — keeping her descriptions as spare as her mother’s screenplays — that reveals a deep, personal understanding of loss, guilt and the need for belonging. In a telling scene, she describes, how her parents flew from Canada to London when she suffered a nervous breakdown before her final examinations, undone by the realization that she could no longer be the perfect A-student for them. “They had sat together, side by side, on the itchy red synthetic seats of the Oxford Tube, an express bus service between the city and the university. And they had talked about me. They had talked about me as parents are supposed to talk of their children, perhaps for the first time.”

Perhaps the only flaw with Saltzman’s book is that it’s more descriptive than analytical — once again, very similar to her mother’s films. She does not discuss in great depth the rise of Hindu nationalism in India: When and how did it start? How does one combat it? What does it mean for minorities in India? This is a disappointment since patriotic hubris is an issue that will only become more important as India and other Asian countries continue to rapidly modernize their economies.

Equally, Saltzman’s disarming honesty about her own thoughts and actions doesn’t extend to her mother. She never quite explains why Mehta was always so angry or what caused the break-up of her marriage in the first place. Was it because Mehta’s start as a director was on the ascendant, causing professional tensions with her husband? Or something else? We aren’t told. There is a sense of conversations not yet attempted between mother and daughter — a distance still not bridged — and the story is weaker for it.

Despite these lapses, working on and writing about Water helped Saltzman carve out a new identity for herself, one no longer at war with her complicated heritage. When asked recently if she thinks of herself as more Canadian than Indian, Saltzman replied that she sees herself as a bit of a “global soul,” after the essayist Pico Iyer’s book Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. “I’d like to think of a world that’s borderless,” she says. “People are always scared of their identity, not being one or the other, or how can you be this or that. I went through a little bit of that confusion but, ultimately, it’s what made me a writer. That in-between space enriched me. So Canadian is the passport I carry, but I’m a global soul.”

And with that, Devyani Saltzman leaves listeners heart-warmed that this child of divorce and difference can so confidently claim a space in this world — even if it is an “in-between space” — as her very own.

To read Anju Mary Paul’s interview of Shooting Water author Devyani Saltzman, click here.

Anju Mary Paul

Arak is a clear, aniseed-flavored liquor consumed throughout the Middle East that drinkers typically dilute with water to create a cloudy white concoction. In Gate of the Sun, the 11th novel by Lebanese novelist and critic Elias Khoury, meals are often accompanied by a glass — or three — of arak, and the author manages the same alchemical transformation with his book, pouring one story into another to create a murky, rambling account of Palestinian villagers living in exile.

Eight years after it appeared in Arabic, Khoury’s tome, in Humphrey Davies’ English translation, is a cavernous monologue of more than 500 pages. Khalil, our narrator, tells the story of the Palestinian people since the Nakba, or “disaster,” as they refer to the founding of the state of Israel, through a disjointed stream of consciousness, waxing philosophic at each twist of his conflicting memories. One moment, he recalls figures of the resistance, big and small, in anecdotal digressions that take the reader through painfully vivid background. In another, he delves into the minutiae of a Palestinian family’s escape to the Lebanese border, citing each village through which they passed. Roughly 80 percent of the Palestinian population left Israel during al-Nakba (though exactly how many were forced to flee and how many left voluntarily remains a sensitive question), and the event has had a profound effect on Palestinian identity, most visibly in the demand for the Right of Return, one of the main tenets of the Hamas platform, and a non-starter in Arab-Israeli negotiations for more than 50 years. The overall effect of Khalil’s meandering yarns is a story more interesting and important for its view onto the Palestinian experience than it is consistently enjoyable to read.

Khalil is a peasant doctor in the Shatila refugee camp outside Beirut, site of a 1982 massacre perpetrated by Lebanese Maronite Christian militias for which Ariel Sharon, among others, was later found indirectly responsible. He has sequestered himself in a dilapidated hospital with his old comrade, Yunes, who lies unconscious and dying. There Khalil reminisces ad infinitum in a one-sided discussion. In his unorthodox medical opinion, storytelling can sustain and even resuscitate Yunes where conventional medicine has failed. It has kept the Palestinian struggle alive, though Khalil points out that the videotape has come to replace the storyteller. “We sit in front of the small screen and see small spots, distorted pictures and close-ups, and from these we invent the country we desire,” he says. “We invent our life through pictures.”

Khalil’s story bounds back and forth over the last 60 years, threading vignettes together in an attempt to capture the Palestinian experience as lived and remembered by the people themselves. He was born in a village in Galilee but grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon. The physical and psychological wounds inflicted by the Nakba feed Khalil much of his material. He populates his narrative with mothers, grandmothers, husbands, sons, and fighters — all attempting to live a life on hold. They cannot return to their homes in Israeli territory, and the Lebanese won’t grant them work permits (a policy guided by the quixotic belief that the Palestinians would soon be able to return home, turning them into permanent refugees).

The tales begin with the death of Umm Hassan, a childless midwife in the Shatila refugee camp. From there it roams through the Palestinian resistance under the British mandate in the 1930s to the forced evacuations of Palestinian villages after the founding of Israel in 1948, to French actors looking for inspiration in their production of Jean Genet’s Quatre heures à Chatila, but always returning to the women in their lives. Khalil is fascinated by the story of Yunes and his wife Nahilah, who met only in secret over the decades of their marriage because he was wanted by the Israelis as a “saboteur.” Again and again, Yunes would sneak to his wife’s village in Israel over the mountainous border from Lebanon. They would meet in Bab al-Shams (Arabic for “Gate of the Sun”) to make love and talk of the resistance. The Israelis, who are trying to capture Yunes, harass Nahilah. She resists in the only way she can, insisting that she is pregnant because she is a whore rather giving up her husband. Khalil retells these stories to the comatose Yunes while contemplating his own tragic affair with a sensuous, iconoclastic woman who murdered her husband but suffered his family’s ultimate revenge.

The power of these stories lies in their mixture of tragic hardships with Khalil’s frank criticism of himself, the Palestinians, and the feeble attempts by Arab armies to repel the onslaught of the Israeli army in 1948. Each is revealed in the spiraling, sometimes confusing patterns of oral storytelling. And in retelling the stories of other refugees Khalil weaves his own life into the patchwork fabric of the Palestinian refugee experience, replete with worn threads, holes, and loose endings.

The literary model for Khoury’s work may be 1,001 Arabian Nights, but whereas Scheherazade told her stories in order to escape her own death at the hands of her listener, Khalil regales Yunes in order to keep him alive. “I’m trying to rouse you with my stories because I’m certain that the soul can, if it wants, wake a sleeping body.” He keeps Yunes alive because he’s not sure what would become of him without his fallen comrade, a hero of the Palestinian resistance. Yunes’ coma gives Khalil an excuse to wallow in a state of suspended animation, of permanent reminiscence. “If you die, what will become of me?” he asks.

To recreate the Palestinian experience in the Galilee and Lebanon — thus far told to the outside world almost entirely by Israeli historians — Khoury purportedly conducted extensive archival research and interviews at the refugee camps outside Beirut. While those same Israeli historians have disputed some of his accounts, Khoury’s narrator admits his claims of atrocities and hardships are unsound. Khalil is retelling second- and third-hand stories that he might not believe in the first place. They aren’t necessarily fictional, but the same story often has multiple variations depending upon the teller. It is in the accumulation of these tales, full of contradictions and half-truths as much as shocking accounts of injustices and injuries, that Khoury/Khalil builds his Palestinian epic. “Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I’m playing with your memory and mine.”

Gate of the Sun takes on the individual stories of refugees who cling to hopes of returning to their villages that have become Israeli suburbs. But more enlightening are the issues of memory, identity, truth, and how the storytelling process itself affects all of these issues. The end result is profound and haunting (the description of “sun baths,” a torture tactic used by Israeli soldiers, is horrifying), but it also feels slightly hollow. The reader is left with an impression of little more than a permanent state of suffering among the Palestinians. Lamentation is rarely balanced with stories of humor, of life lived in between the tragedies and the disappointments.

But in his nuanced description of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Khoury is able to escape political rhetoric and touch on the truths so often left out of the headlines. “Palestine was the cities — Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre. In them we could feel something called Palestine. The villages were like all villages. It was the cities that fell quickly, and we discovered that we didn’t know where we were. The truth is that those who occupied Palestine made us discover the country as we were losing it.”

In The Fray Contributor

Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton rode into office with the promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Now, a decade and a half later, the first complete, non-partisan review of his efforts — and those of opposing party leader Newt Gingrich, whose Contract with America offered his own party‘s version of welfare reform — has appeared in Jason DeParle’s American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare.

DeParle, a senior writer for The New York Times who reported extensively on welfare in the 1990s, takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of welfare at the federal level, beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt’s original initiative to provide benefits for poor (and, implicitly, white) widows to care for their children and racing up through the 1980s, when welfare was viewed as a national apology for the abysmal conditions of 1960s housing projects and the social maelstroms they had created. By 1996, when Clinton, himself a lower-income success story, and Gingrich were in power, public approbation for “ending welfare” (a phrase whose genealogy DeParle also traces) was at an all-time high, and Congress sought a solution that would empower states to cleanse their own rolls. While Clinton”s plan emphasized federal job creation as a way to cushion the transition from welfare to work, Gingrich’s placed the burden of planning on individual states to decide how they would reform their own programs.

In the end, the country ended up with an amalgam of the two plans and DeParle’s book follows three different women from Milwaukee who found themselves on the welfare rolls in the early 1990s. The choice of Wisconsin was not accidental; Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, a nearly unknown candidate for public office, emerged in the late 1980s using an anti-welfare platform to end decades of Democratic governance in the state, and was held up by Clinton as a leading light of welfare reform.

Wisconsin was the site of an early skirmish over welfare in the 1990s after a wave of Chicago recipients moved to Milwaukee, where the benefits (under the then-Democratic government) were better and the cost of living was lower. Three of those Chicagoans — Angie, Jewell, and Opal, all cousins — form the meat of DeParle’s narrative, and provide a narrow but useful portrait of the welfare system as it stood when Clinton took office. All of the women came from families who, within the space of a few generations, migrated north from sharecropping farms in the Mississippi Delta. DeParle wisely steers away from comparing the patronage system of Jim Crow farming and the mechanics of the welfare state, emphasizing instead the drive of Angie’s grandmother and her siblings to make a better life on Chicago’s South Side. It is that same spirit that drives Angie, Jewell, and Opal to Milwaukee, where they find a house with a forgetful landlord and, with their welfare checks, settle in with their children — until the state’s W-2 Welfare to Work plan disrupts their comfortable lives.

Or that’s how conservative critics might have pictured it. The most surprising finding of DeParle’s book is that, while the three women continued to draw welfare checks until the state directly cut them off, they were often employed part-time, if not full-time, on the side in order to make up the difference between their check and their family’s needs. When job-oriented counseling started to take the place of classical check calculations, recipients would often omit jobs from state-reported forms — but would continue to work instead of just relying on their benefits. Angie, for example, was enrolled by the state in the employment-search program JOBS (Job Opportunities and Basic Skills), where she diligently recorded businesses she called and job contacts she made, without divulging her temporary nursing work.

In Jewell’s case, only five months passed before the state “found her second job” (thanks to better software), but her enrollment in the JOBS program wouldn’t have provided a stable welfare check for long anyway; the specific classes she was required to take were continually cancelled, making it impossible for her to matriculate into an actual job with this state-mandated training hanging over her head. All three women rejected the “community service jobs” — wageless work designed by Wisconsin administrators to give welfare recipients the impression of working for their benefits as, not surprisingly, a waste of time better spent at a job with take-home pay.

The book’s last third describes the welfare bureaucracy in Milwaukee as it existed in the late 1990s, focusing on the for-profit administrator Maximus, whose financial malfeasance would later make headlines. These private agencies were responsible for the implementation of Wisconsins welfare reforms, for better or (usually) for worse. Maximus represented a triumph of bureaucracy over positive individual change: Opal, for example, was asked about her “employability plan,” not about whether she had a job. Case workers, who were often more adept at paperwork management software than at real-life advice, felt no pressure from the state to cut welfare rolls once they had already fallen some 90 percent, and would frequently cut their clients a check rather than pursue them individually to make sure they were following through on their job search objectives. Ironically, this is just the kind of abuse W-2 was designed to prevent. With five private welfare-implementation organizations in the metro Milwaukee area in the late 1990s, graft and mismanagement of funds were easy to hide even as case workers couldn’t get equipment and training for their clients.

Woven through the women’s stories are those of their boyfriends and husbands, whose instability often contributed to financial insecurity. Angie’s boyfriend was in jail awaiting trial when she moved to Chicago, and Jewell’s drug-dealing boyfriends were unwilling to commit to her except when serving short prison terms. In Opal’s case, her spiraling addiction to crack cocaine was aided and abetted by a sometime boyfriend and dealer. DeParle notes that while almost 75 percent of women leaving the welfare rolls worked at some point in the next year, by the end of the 1990s, only half of lower-income black men were similarly employed. The booming economy may have lifted Angie’s and Jewell’s boats but it left behind the men they loved, creating an ironic commentary on the original intention of welfare.

Yet just getting a job — the effect of “ending welfare as we know it” — didn’t necessarily change these womens lives as people might have expected. Gingrich conservatives who tout marriage as a social stabilizer would be disappointed to discover that of the three women, only Jewell saw getting married as a solution to her financial problems, and continued to manage alone when a nuptial opportunity never arose. And Opal, whose drug problems seemed evident to everyone except her case worker, drifted in and out of jobs, staying just long enough to make a little money and then disappearing on two- or three-day drug binges. Even Angie, a nursing assistant and the longest employed, didn’t see herself as a champion of the W-2 system. She might have seemed like “that American hero, a working-class stiff to proclaimers that welfare reform had worked” — Angie did leave the rolls, after all — but she tells DeParle, “I never think about shit like that! It means I be a broke motherfucker for the rest of my life!”’

DeParle makes it clear that welfare neither solved the women’s problems, nor exacerbated them with its absence. But the margin by which it improved the lives of Angie and Jewell is an important one for policymakers to take note. It’s hard to challenge DeParle’s math when he figures that, because of payroll taxes and food stamps, Angie only made $3,400 more off welfare than on, even though she was earning almost $10,000 more per year. And that measurement didn’t take into account work-related expenses like uniforms and transportation, or the loss of her health insurance (although her children were allowed to stay on Medicaid).

As Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed exposed, the minimum wage in most states can’t realistically keep a single-income family above the poverty level. As a piece of social engineering, then, the minimum wage can be a great upward mobilizer; as a viable “minimum on which to live” it makes a mockery of women like Angie who, without their GEDs, can’t expect to get a higher-paying job. When Clinton said, “People who work shouldn’t be poor,”’ he made a promise that has yet to be fulfilled by state help.

American Dream is so crammed with history and narrative that DeParle leaves little space to offer a full prescription for remedying what welfare reform has wrought. But the federal and state systems of aid that have “replaced welfare have never lacked for prescribers” — only for a complete description of symptoms. In the end, policy wonks from both sides of the aisle should find in DeParle’s reportage lessons which may be applied to any aid implementation, from how to quell the furor over the new Medicare prescription plans to the joint federal and state efforts it will take to rebuild the Gulf Coast after last year’s hurricane season. “

In The Fray Contributor

Jonathan Kozol is pissed off. In his new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, the prominent author and activist is angry at federal courts for slowly chipping away at the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, thereby reinstating a system of apartheid in the nation’s public schools over the last 12 years. He’s enraged by elected officials and school administrators who have implemented a militarized curriculum in inner-city public schools that revolves around standardized tests and vocational training for mediocre, low-paying jobs that will forever trap children in a cycle of poverty. And he’s ticked off at white liberals who, while dedicated to the ideals of integration in theory, send their own children to expensive private schools or elite public schools that are notably devoid of color.  

Apartheid is a strong word, usually reserved for describing South Africa’s late system of racial segregation, coupled with extreme political and economic discrimination. But this is an apt description of the state of public education Kozol paints. After a brief period of progress in the decades following the 1954 Brown decision, most cities have reverted back to a dual system of education — one for whites, and one for children of color. Citing dozens of cases, Kozol argues that courts at both the state and federal levels have waged what is essentially a war on school desegregation since the 1990s. “The proportion of black students in a majority white school has decreased to a level lower than any year since 1968,” he writes. “Almost three-fourths of black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority,” and more than two million attend schools in which 99 to 100 percent of students are nonwhite.

In virtually every instance, courts have upheld the ability of middle-class white parents to “carve out almost entirely separate provinces of education for their children.” Legal advocates for children seem to have entirely abandoned the goal of integration, asking merely for “adequate education” on behalf of poor children rather than “equal education” — something Kozol, a Civil Rights movement veteran, believes should be a guaranteed constitutional right. Perhaps most shockingly, considering the history of segregation in the United States, this new era of separation is largely being played out in the north and west rather than the south. The four most segregated states for black students are New York, Michigan, Illinois, and California, while Kentucky has the most desegregated schools in the nation.

Despite the force of his big picture argument, Kozol is strongest when he is speaking with individual students at troubled inner-city schools — and he visited 60 schools in 11 states while writing this book. What these young people tell him, and what is confirmed by his own observations, is that our schools are failing to provide the essential resources to grow educated, thoughtful citizens capable of succeeding in the larger world. Kozol describes a strict, militarized environment in which teachers use stick-and-carrot methods to prepare students for high-stakes standardized tests, the results of which determine each school’s future funding — or even existence. Such schools do not encourage creativity or independent thinking, do not offer music, art, history, or science, and do not allow students to have a recess break or even talk at lunch. Many of the schools that Kozol visited are housed in buildings that should be (or have already been) condemned, are infested with vermin, contain toxic levels of lead paint, and are so overcrowded that there are not enough desks for the students.

In classrooms around the country, Kozol meets students who are known by their teachers and each other as their test scores and not their names. “There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old “accountable” for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam,” he writes, “but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids.” What they give their own children is a world of opportunity that is systematically denied to poor children of color. Their own sons and daughters receive, at virtually any cost, an education wholly sheltered from the complexities of real-world problems like race, class, and injustice — problems that poor children of color do not have the luxury of ignoring.  

Kozol excoriates as well those white liberals who literally lie, cheat, and steal in order to garner their children spots at elite, overwhelmingly white, public schools. These institutions, such as Stuyvesant in New York City, often require prohibitively expensive testing and the advice of an admissions coach to gain entry. It is no wonder that these schools, though public, have virtually no black and Latino students, though many of them are situated in racially diverse neighborhoods. For Kozol, who worked for 40 years in urban Boston schools, the choice is clear: If an education isn’t good enough for your own children, then it isn’t good enough for anyone’s children.

As Kozol argued in his National Book Award-winning precursor, Savage Inequalities, access to education remains, ultimately, a question of economics. How can you expect two children to have the same opportunities when there is a tremendous gap in the amount spent on them? In the Chicago area, for example, kids in the wealthy, overwhelmingly white Highland Park and Deerfield districts are lavished with $17,291 in resources per pupil per year, while their darker, poorer neighbors within the city of Chicago (where I attended public school) receive less than half — only $8,482 per pupil per year. The numbers are similar in metropolitan areas across the country, as Kozol shows in a detailed appendix.  

Kozol notes that the same people who lavish their children with $30,000 tuitions at private institutions argue passionately that spending more money on inner-city children won’t improve their educational predicament. Rather they blame public education’s failure on unmotivated teachers, uninvolved parents, and ill-prepared students. Yet how do communities galvanize teachers, parents, and students without sufficient resources? “That which cannot be named as a potential cause [for the failure of public education] cannot be touched upon in looking for a plausible solution,” Kozol argues.

Kozol points out that these disparities send the message to inner city children of color that they are simply not worth as much as their white counterparts. Unfortunately, they are hearing this message loud and clear. “You’re ghetto, so you sew!” a student told Kozol regarding the sewing classes that were offered in lieu of college preparatory courses at his predominantly Latino high school in Los Angeles. Another student, an astute fourth grader from an all-black school in the South Bronx, asks Kozol, “What’s it like, over there where you live?”

Kozol constructs a convincing case that something must be done to equalize education, but this book is a call to action with no game plan. “‘A political movement is a necessary answer,’” Kozol quotes Harvard education professor Gary Orfield. “‘There are people right here in this room who could begin a movement if they have the will and the resolve.’” Indeed, many of Kozol’s readers might be inspired to found a movement, but after reading this book they will still not have the faintest idea how to get started.

Still, Shame of the Nation is required reading for anyone interested in the future of race relations, public education and civil rights in the United States. We are fortunate to have an activist as engaged and unrelenting as Kozol to remind us that separate is never equal — not in 1896 when a post-Reconstruction Supreme Court declared it to be with Plessy vs. Ferguson, not in 1954 when the same court declared it never to be with Brown, and certainly not in 2006 when our public schools have regressed back to a de facto system of racial apartheid. Like Kozol, readers will be pissed off — and ashamed — to discover how far we’ve fallen.  

Michelle L Caswell

(Perseus Books Group)

This guy ain’t a mother-fuckin MC,
I know everything he’s got to say against me,
I am white, I am a fuckin’ bum, I do live in a trailer with my mom,
My boy future is an Uncle Tom …
And never try and judge me dude
You don’t know what the fuck I’ve been through.
But I know something about you,
You went to Cranbrook, that’s a private school,
Whats the matter dawg you embarrased?
This guys a gangster?
His real name’s Clarance.
And Clarance lives at home with both parents,
And Clarance’s parents have a real good marriage,
… fuck Cranbrook.
Fuck the beat I go accapella,
Fuck a papa doc, fuck a clock, fuck a trailer, fuck everybody,
Fuck y’all if you doubt me,
I’m a piece of fuckin’ white trash I say it proudly,
And fuck this battle I don’t wanna win I’m outtie,
Here tell these people something they don’t know about me

—Eminem

In the climactic scene of Eminem’s biographical epic film 8 Mile, Rabbit, a white rapper, wins a freestyle battle against a rival black rapper. To the racially naïve, the color of the winner’s skin might come as a shock. But as illuminated in this contest, where the winner acknowledges his own whiteness and then reveals that the black rapper attended a private school, skin color alone no longer decides the champions of hip hop’s future. It’s a magnificent moment in the history of hip hop: In this brave new world, class trumps race as an overwhelmingly black audience ushers Rabbit into victory because they identify with him, socio-economically speaking, more so than his black counterpart. This is, of course, part of the mythology Eminem has created for himself, one that has made him the bestselling hip-hop artist of all time and immensely popular with whites and blacks alike.

Class act

In Bakari Kitwana’s new book, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, the former executive editor of The Source projects Eminem’s narrative onto all of hip hop’s white listeners: White kids love hip-hop because it addresses their increasing alienation from mainstream society. Citing a host of statistics ranging from growing unemployment rates to the rising cost of higher education, Kitwana argues that an increasing number of white youth are facing the same problems that African Americans have faced for decades: a lack of economic opportunity, deplorable school systems, the inability to earn a living wage. And then he asserts that hip-hop engages these issues more seriously than any other popular art form today.

Unfortunately, this argument loses sight of a few crucial facts. For one, there have always been a substantial number of broke white folk, and not all of them have turned to African American culture to vent their alienation (though many have, as evidenced by the early days of rock n’ roll). There are certainly other cultural outlets for alienated white people that do not involve direct appropriation of black culture. Punk, rockabilly, heavy metal, and grunge, to name a few, have all provided alternative vehicles for poor whites to voice their anger about class-based oppression. How the decline of these genres coincided with the rise of hip hop’s popularity is a fascinating topic, but unfortunately Kitwana does not fully explore the subject in his book.

Kitwana’s analysis of hip-hop as a tool of resistance for young whites also doesn’t fully take into account that poverty does not negate white privilege. Whites, as a racial group, cannot be alienated from mainstream society thanks to the very fact that they, as a racial majority, define mainstream society. While a host of class, gender, sexual, cultural, and personal issues may alienate them (or at least make them feel alienated), their race does not alienate them from the mainstream.

Compounding his book’s troubles, Kitwana asserts that “white youth’s love for hip hop, more often than not, extends beyond music and pop culture to the political arena.” Contrary to what Kitwana would have readers believe, most white kids who love hip hop are not urban, active in leftist politics, and immersed in black culture like Eminem; they are suburban, affluent, politically apathetic, know few, if any, black kids, and have much to benefit from preserving the racial and economic status quo. That is precisely why the idea of the white hip-hop fan is so fascinating: How can hip hop appeal to those who are divorced from the reality it reflects? How can a rich white kid decked out in FuBu, for example, recite every word of 50 Cent’s oeuvre while driving across the Long Island Expressway in a Lexus sport-utility vehicle?

Instead of addressing this inherent contradiction, Kitwana wastes a considerable chunk of time trying to debunk what he sees as the myth that white kids constitute the majority of hip hop’s audience. Whether whites buy more hip-hop music than blacks is irrelevant; majority or not, white audiences are responsible, at least in part, for hip hop’s tremendous explosion over the past decade. This fact, I suspect, is less the result of the politics of alienation than a long history of whites constructing black music as “cool,” dating back at least as far as the first half of the 20th century, when throngs of whites would flock to Harlem to hear all-black jazz ensembles, only to return to the world of white privilege and de facto segregation when the performance was over. Then, as now, affluent white kids construed black culture (and black people, for that matter) as dangerous, unruly, and transgressive, and observed and emulated black culture as an act of teenage rebellion. Today, however, whites are increasingly able to filter their exposure to black culture through music videos and other media, which both renders unnecessary any direct interaction between people of different races and promotes the skewed version of the culture that appears on television. In this way, white kids who grow up in a segregated environment think “acting black” means drinking 40s, packing a gun, and acting like a pimp or gangster, just like 50 Cent, Game, and Snoop (among others) do every night on MTV. Of course, such imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery and reinforces age-old stereotypes and prejudices.

In with the old, out with the new?

While Kitwana fails in his assessment of white alienation, he succeeds in asking some provocative questions about the future of hip hop: Will hip hop, like rock n’ roll before it, be completely divorced from its black roots, abandoned by blacks as the popular cultural vehicle, and reappropriated by mainstream white America? As absurd as an all-white future for hip hop may seem, one need only listen to Gwen Stefani’s recent hit “Hollaback Girl” to get a glimpse of what a predominantly white hip-hop future would sound like. One of last summer’s biggest hits, the song got equal airplay in black and white markets and was produced by the Neptunes, the ubiquitous behind-the-scenes duo whose work has defined the sound of Top 40-hip hop for years.

Though partially nonsensical, the song’s lyrics draw heavily on hip hop’s language and attitude, including the use of clever word plays to disrespect rivals — a device that hip hop inherited from the longstanding African American verbal tradition of “playing the dozens,” or taunting an opponent with a series of increasingly insulting (and humorous) accusations in front of an audience. In this case, Stefani’s unnamed opponent is grunge icon Courtney Love, who publicly denounced Stefani as the music industry’s “cheerleader.” Stefani sets the record straight, challenging Love to an after-school fight, during which she is “gonna make you fall, gonna sock it to you,” until “that’s right, I’m the last one standing, another one bites the dust.” It’s an old school hip-hop battle between two former alternative rock queens and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the future of pop music.

To complicate matters, Stefani’s song illuminates the difference between what Kitwana terms “old racial politics” and “new racial politics.” According to Kitwana, the old racial politics is “characterized by adherence to stark differences — cultural, personal, and political — between black and white,” while the new racial politics is “marked by nuance, complexity … and a sort of fluidity between cultures.” By extension, Stefani, in the terms of the old racial politics, is a white person trying to be a Japanese person trying to be a black person. But according to the new racial politics, there are no fixed rules and everything is fair game.

While mainstream hip-hop, as seen nightly on BET and MTV generally reinforces the stereotypes of black men as armed, dangerous, and oversexed — and black women as dumb, materialistic, and promiscuous — Kitwana offers another possibility: hip hop as a tool for social change. Calling for a hip-hop underground movement, Kitwana advocates the political mobilization of hip hop’s listeners and creators “to correct social ills that are negatively affecting all Americans, including young whites.” These “hip-hop activists” abide by Kitwana’s new racial politics, with “the vision and capacity to leave the old racial politics on the pages of history where it belongs.”

Kitwana goes as far as declaring that “Em[inem] represents the new racial politics,” though he admits that “in a society where the caste system of whiteness often prevails and bestows privilege, he’s a part of the oppressor class.” What’s so new about that? Even Kitwana’s subtitle, “Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America”, reinforces the old racial politics by evoking racist stereotypes. (“Wigger” is a particularly egregious offense. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been called a “Whafrican American”.)

A world where a white musician appropriates an African American art form, adds his own white twist, and makes millions of dollars while many of the art form’s pioneers die broke sounds suspiciously familiar. Today’s incarnation of Elvis is Eminem. That is not to say that Elvis and Eminem are not true artists who transcend race. But in the making of these powerful cultural icons, we must acknowledge what was lost, and from whom, in the process. If Eminem represents the new racial politics, as Kitwana claims, I’m not sure I want to say goodbye to the old.

After all, genuine progress in the racial arena will only materialize when we recognize the history of injustice against racial minorities in this country and vow never to repeat it.  

Hope for hip hop

An even more pressing question remains: Is a new racial politics possible in a world steeped in old racialisms? While it’s true, as Kitwana aptly points out, that the hip-hop generation is the first to grow up entirely in a post-civil rights era, with youth from all races “socialized around the dream of an inclusive America”, inclusion remains elusive. Racial inequalities proliferate in virtually every field of American life, from de facto segregation in public education to the racist response to and media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Quite simply, given the large role played by racism and racial identity in contemporary American society, it’s difficult — almost impossible — to conceptualize a new, large-scale rainbow coalition whose members, like Eminem’s 8 Mile audience, rally around issues of class, rather than race. It’s even more inconceivable that hip hop, with its racist archetypes, will be the driving force behind this revolution. But still, Kitwana’s ultimate assertion that “against all odds we must organize across race” remains compelling, even though his claim that “hip hop is the last hope for this generation and arguable the last hope for America” is exaggerated.

Amidst the larger question that Kitwana raises about the reality of race in America, his reduction of hip hop to a mere tool for political change precludes him from exploring hip hop as an art form. As a result, he overlooks the elements of hip hop that transcend race and class — namely addictive rhythms, clever word plays, and life-affirming beats. In other words, the main reason why white kids and black kids (and everyone else in between) love hip-hop: Like its predecessor, roll n’ roll, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

Michelle L Caswell

(The Penguin Press)

For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith — herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother — returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism.

Her tool for this project is the skeleton of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, restyled by the liberal, chaotic family of Howard and Kiki Belsey, residents of the imaginary college town of Wellington, Massachusetts. As with Forster’s story, On Beauty opens with an awkward sexual meeting of two families of different ilk — the Belseys and the Kippses. An unlikely friendship grows between Mrs. Kipps and Kiki, resulting in one secretly bequeathing an invaluable object to the other. But whereas Forster focused almost exclusively on class and sex, Smith takes the plunge into the messy nexus of every potential category of identity and difference. Howard is a white British art history professor who escaped working class London for the almost ivy halls of Wellington University. Kiki, his intuitive and (now) obese black wife, grew up in rural Florida and works as a hospital administrator. At first glance, the Belsey family’s most glaring difference is written in black and white. But Howard, Kiki, and their three children navigate an array of cultural confrontations within their own home: intellectual versus intuitive, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, British versus American, secular versus Christian, and so on.

Each of the three children has latched onto some piece of what he or she perceives as the family’s true heritage, and has generally rejected the rest. Jerome, the eldest, has found God and turned to Monty Kipps, his father’s neoconservative nemesis in the culture wars, after a stint in London and a leave from Brown University. A Caribbean-British public intellectual and a famed man of faith, Monty has recently published a bestseller on Rembrandt — also the subject of a sprawling, perpetually unfinished treatise penned by Howard. Zora, the middle child, is a self-absorbed overachiever. She has taken the intellectual route, joining her father at Wellington, where she’s fast become an outspoken figure on campus, crusading for whatever may further her academic career. Levi, the youngest, has renounced his middle-class upbringing for the streets of Roxbury, where he swaggers under too-big hoodies and sagging denim, feigns poverty, and “hustles” DVDs alongside the truly desperate.

This already fragmented household is roiled by the revelation that Howard has had an affair. To add insult to injury, his lover is Kiki’s exact opposite: a white, exceedingly thin university colleague. Things get rockier still when Monty Kipps is invited to be a visiting scholar at Wellington, threatening Howard’s tenuous untenured position on campus, challenging affirmative action programs, and generally upsetting the college town’s (and the Belsey family’s) progressive equilibrium. The utopian ideals of the Belseys are further tested by a social experiment with Carl, self-taught poet/rapper, who is charitably folded into academic life, for a time.

In this fractured world, identity is an unpredictable and highly malleable phenomenon. Despite whatever ostensibly unites people — the same shade of skin, the same faith or lack thereof, the same aesthetic or intellectual mien, the same politics, the same weight, the same income or need for it — all of these only thinly connect one person to another in reality. Nothing is universal.

Again and again, characters are faced with embarrassment, rejection, or awkwardness when they assume too much likeness or difference based on outward appearances. Almost every character adjusts his or her language or manner to negotiate emotional situations and relationships, both intimate and distant. When Kiki gets ruffled over her kids’ behavior, she takes on the no-nonsense Southern parlance of her own mother. Likewise, when Howard visits his father, a butcher, in the drab old neighborhood of his youth, he hears “his own accent climbing down the class ladder a few rungs to where it used to be.” This mimicking of elders extends to the next generation of Belseys when Levi attempts to organize his co-workers against working on Christmas day at a music megastore. His normal voice dissolves into an urban drawl to woo LaShonda, an African American single mother of three. Unlike the mostly middle-class white kids who join the protest, Levi is shocked that LaShonda is eager to pick up the extra shifts at time-and-a-half.

Levi in particular collides with the world in his search for an authentic sense of self. In Wellington, he assumes every passerby is eyeing him suspiciously because of his skin color. And some are. However, even in Roxbury, where he at least externally fits in, he is divorced from those around him: “How strange it was to see streets where everybody was black! It was like a homecoming, except he’d never known this home.”

Smith often blunts these interactions with curious humor. In one scene, for instance, Levi is taking a break from protesting for fair wages for his “crew” of mostly Haitian immigrants who work $4-an-hour jobs or hawk knockoff purses on the street. When his brother Jerome appears walking the family dog, Levi introduces his friends, who’ve “got his back.” He then says of the dog, a Wienerschnitzel, “And this is my little foot soldier. He’s my lieutenant. Murdoch always got my back.”  

Ironically, the weakest and most tedious moments occur where Smith attempts to bend her characters, particularly Kiki and Mrs. Kipps, into Forster’s scenes. The too close adaptation of Forster’s dialogue between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox seems out of step with Smith’s otherwise cleverly updated story. The book would likely have worked just as well without the overly obvious nods to Forster.

Smith is strongest when she orchestrates jarring social interactions: Howard’s sexual exchanges with a student or his meeting with his racist father, and the Belsey children’s slow awakening to the politics of suffering. Despite the creeping sadness and depravity of such scenes, Smith does not leave the reader with a completely bleak outlook on this jumbled landscape. There are no clear or tidy answers but, like Forster, she shows that as long as one deals with others in good faith, one can find unbounded beauty in differences.

Nicole Marie Pezold

(HarperCollins)

Two sights illustrate the gentrification that has crept into New York’s East Harlem: On one block in the neighborhood, known as El Barrio by its largely Puerto Rican residents, a Starbucks has opened and welcomes white newcomers and Latinos who choose the trendy cafe over the old corner bakery. Up the avenue, the Salsa Museum attracts tour buses full of outsiders eager to discover the neighborhood’s musical gift. It seems that El Barrio has become known as a “cool” place to visit and live.

The Starbucks and the tour buses, both unthinkable in the area until a few years ago, provide context for Ernesto Quiñonez’s new novel, Chango’s Fire. Much has changed since the author’s first novel, Bodega Dreams, garnered acclaim upon its release in 2000. That book was set in an East Harlem where the hulks of apartment buildings burnt down for profit still laced the streets. They had done so since the 1970s in many New York neighborhoods, as a physical reminder to residents that their community and even their lives were expendable to authorities and absentee landlords alike.

By the time Quiñonez’s latest novel was published a mere four years later, much of the arsonists’ work had disappeared from East Harlem. In its place is gentrification, and Quiñonez is there to breathe life into this troubled phase of his neighborhood’s history. As in his first book, he does not simplify events; there are no clear good and evil forces here. While at one level the story is charged with politics, it is also a very personal tale about one man’s drive to be true to himself.

The story’s narrator and central figure is Julio Santana, a young man who works on a demolition crew by day to pay for college and the mortgage on his family’s condo. At night he supplements his income by setting fires, usually to vacant suburban houses whose owners want to collect the insurance. Downstairs from Julio, a white woman named Helen moves in, and soon she and Julio are a serious item. With their divergent views of the changes in the neighborhood fueling tension between them, Quiñonez cleverly brings them together to mirror the larger drama playing out in the neighborhood with the onset of gentrification.

A strange and uneasy transition

When the first white people start venturing north of 96th Street to fix up and buy condos, the reaction from the locals is often openly hostile. People who have lived through disinvestment know it wasn’t their own people who arranged for their homes to burn. But that isn’t why they’re angry at the newcomers. They are angry because many of the gentrifiers show little interest in or respect for the customs brought from the island by Puerto Ricans in the 1950s. In fact, many whites seek to bar the old culture from invading their new enclaves, socializing inside, rather than on their front stoops, and building gates to privatize these spaces.

But not all the new folk are oblivious to or uncaring about the hurt their arrival causes. Helen, for instance, knows the culture shock her family experienced when they moved from the liberal college town of Ithaca, New York, to a small rural community, Howard City, Wisconsin, where their foreign cars and Helen’s mother’s protest of the arms race aroused suspicion. Helen, then, is not wholly ignorant of what her presence in East Harlem implies. She wants to meet people in the community, partly because she wants her budding gallery to fit into the neighborhood’s Latin-inspired art scene. Still very much an outsider herself, she is also far more sensitive to injustice. But she still doesn’t see the animus she encounters as justified.

Here Quiñonez tries to show how underneath the surface, outsider and native-born have quite a bit in common. Helen brings her feminist sense of outrage with her into a culture where machismo has always ruled, but then observes a crowd of women who attack a child rapist in the street with their brooms. Curiously, Quiñonez stops short of making his point in this scene, sidestepping what seems to be Helen’s moment of awakening, her entry point into what is otherwise an unfamiliar culture. Instead, he dwells on her inability to grasp why no police car appears to take control of the situation. Julio is then able to educate her that the people in El Barrio do not share her assumption that cops serve and protect. Quiñonez does give Helen credit at many points in his book for making sense of the community’s problems. In this scene Helen might not only understand the problems, but have her own insight on how to address them.

Meanwhile, another wrinkle appears in the gentrification tale. The whites with money aren’t the only new faces in the community. Immigrants from Mexico have arrived, too, opening restaurants on avenues once dominated by the Puerto Ricans, and they board, 10 to a room, in hovels that have been subdivided several times over. They take the jobs on construction sites that the Italians (who were poor immigrants in Spanish Harlem before it was Spanish) see as beneath them. The Mexicans’ presence doesn’t seem to throw the neighborhood into a fit the way the whites’ does, but their arrival could mean just as significant a shift in the population.

Eddie is one of the few Italian holdouts who didn’t flee to the suburbs or Queens when the Puerto Ricans arrived after World War II. He has made a living over the years burning down people’s homes, sometimes with people still inside. He probably burned down Julio’s first home, forcing him and his family to move into the projects they occupied for the rest of his childhood.

Interestingly enough, Julio goes to work for Eddie as a young man, since the pay from construction work is insufficient to pay for his condo and get him through college. Like the Bodega Dreams lead character who was employed by a drug hustler who doubled as a housing developer, Julio has a job people in so-called normal neighborhoods can only wonder about. The arrangement works well for Julio until he slips up, leaving behind evidence that one of his house-burnings was no accident. Then, as in the first book, the illicit nature of the local economy shows its true colors, as Eddie forces Julio to pay dearly for his mistake.

Here Chango, the Santeria god from the book’s title, comes into play. One in a pantheon of deities of both African and Catholic origins worshipped in parts of Latin America, the god is represented by fire and lightning. The proprietor of the neighborhood botanica tells Julio a legend about how Chango made a great error and, realizing this, hung himself to extinguish his fire. But Chango lived on because he was not in the fire itself, but in the heat it generated. As Julio’s nighttime profession gets him into trouble, he looks to Chango to teach him how to compensate for his transgressions and give himself a life beyond the flames.

The politics of politics

Quiñonez’s artistry in depicting the sudden changes in his neighborhood adds context to the stark public policy questions being raised in East Harlem and other gentrifying communities. Should a percentage of housing built by developers, scrambling to respond to the influx of yuppies, be set aside for people who have been there through the bad times? If so, should there be a racial component to this set-aside? Should local community boards ask developers to build their courtyards and entryways in a way that respects the cultural traditions of the low-income and non-white groups?

Puerto Rican residents have yet to respond to this challenge, Quiñonez suggests. Day by day, they watch as newcomers stream in, and some grit their teeth, but they don’t get organized. This inaction isn’t uncommon; local groups often don’t begin to seek political solutions to gentrification until the population has been transformed and the storefronts appear unfamiliar.

Quiñonez is responding to that lack of action. At a 2004 book signing at East Harlem’s Carlito’s Café, he characterized his book as a protest, a way of bringing attention to gentrification. At the same time, he wants to point to positive examples from that community, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of ghetto life. As a comparison, consider Jonathan Lethem’s lead character of color in Fortress of Solitude, who went to prison and couldn’t fit in when he returned to his gentrified ‘hood. Quiñonez is drawn to Puerto Rican characters who are ambitious (like Julio and the narrator of Bodega Dreams, both college-educated) or entrepreneurial (like businessman Willie Bodega). Julio and Bodega suggest that prosperity can be found without gentrification.

It is probable that many residents of East Harlem would have trouble relating to Julio, however. For them there would not be a question, as there is for Julio, whether to enter the Starbucks or the bar where whites gather — they simply can’t afford to.

While Julio has dreams that may take him out of East Harlem, he also feels a strong attachment to the neighborhood. Perhaps the most authentic aspect of his character is his nostalgia for the days when he played on abandoned cars in vacant lots. Just as the neighborhood is spruced up, it feels somehow alienating to its own people. Besides, moving out would mean a tremendous loss for him and others who have made their own world within a few square blocks. As Julio says, “Helen’s people don’t seem to have mystical places like ours. They don’t have poor, holy places that speak to your soul …”

In The Fray Contributor

Always remember. Never forget. These seem to be the unwritten tenets of Judaism, not just when it comes to the Holocaust, but when it comes to embracing one’s Jewish identity. (How can one forget her Judaism when she smells gefilte fish or watches a Woody Allen flick?). Thanks to a series of coincidences — the reviewer who vanished, along with the review copy of Nick Ryan’s Into a World of Hate that I had sent her, the last minute collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that resulted in a special issue of ITF concerning “home” — that left me frantically searching for a topical book to review for OFF THE SHELF for our July 2004 issue, these maxims are also what drew me to David Bezmozgis’ recently published Natasha and Other Stories.

There were plenty of other newly published books, both fiction and non-fiction, concerning migration and citizenship that I could have reviewed instead. Perhaps I would have chosen the one concerning immigration along the U.S./Mexico border had I felt a deeper personal connection to Mexico or the Texas valley, or had the book’s synopsis not sounded so trite. But instead, I chose a collection of short stories about Latvian Jews struggling to fit into the North American Jewish Diaspora. At first, it was just the emigration tale of the Soviet Jewry that attracted me; when I became a Bat Mitzvah more than a decade earlier, in the midst of the Jewish exodus from the U.S.S.R., I was paired with a Soviet “twin,” a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl living in the Soviet Union whose government prohibited her from becoming a Bat Mitzvah. Though she and I exchanged numerous letters about our families and schools, we barely discussed Judaism, much less her experience with it in the Soviet Union, for rather obvious reasons. Peculiarly, at that moment when I was directly encountering another’s religious persecution and becoming an adult in the eyes of my religion, I don’t think I grasped, not even remotely, the direness of my twin’s circumstances, the importance of free expression, or the disparate experiences of Jews in other parts of the world.

My naïveté didn’t stem from too much focus on the social aspects of becoming a Bat Mitzvah or a failure of my elders to educate me about the Jewish experience in other parts of the globe. The mere existence of the twinning program and my participation in it were, of course, steps in the right direction. But simple statistics and even the occasional, dry letter from a young Soviet girl couldn’t really put a human face on these alternative realities. Even now, years after the collapse of the Communist bloc, persecution of Jews under the Soviet regime is still unimaginable in ways that the Holocaust never can or will be — this despite the fact that countless survivors of the former persecution still wander the earth while the number of Holocaust survivors is rapidly dwindling. So as clichéd as it sounds, I selected the autobiographically informed Natasha and Other Stories to better understand the predicament faced by Soviet Jewry, to understand what it was like to be prohibited from choosing, much less practicing, your religion and carrying it on to the next generation, to relate to those who were not entirely unlike myself.

But as I read Natasha, with its focus on the struggles of recent Soviet immigrants trying to assimilate into North American Jewish society, I didn’t feel like I was gaining a better understanding of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. That was, I realized, exactly Bezmozgis’ point: assimilated Western Jews can’t relate, we have forgotten some of our own, we have failed to always remember. For me, the most poignant aspect of this realization lies in the fact that I have always been a bit disconcerted about my own relationship to the Holocaust. During two class trips to concentration camps — Dachau when I was 13, another on the outskirts of Berlin at 21 — I felt more isolated than ever as my classmates became deliberately more solemn around me, the sole Jew in each group, from the time that we arrived at the camp until hours later. When they did speak to me, it was to offer an, “I’m sorry,” with the understanding that I knew what they were apologizing for. Or to ask if I’d lost anyone in the Holocaust. (I hadn’t, aside from some distant relatives of my long-deceased maternal grandfather.)

Each time, I couldn’t help wondering: Why did they apologize to me? I wasn’t looking for them to be hostile or indifferent, but another six million non-Jews died as well. Were they also going to apologize to the closeted queer in the bunch who would soon make his sexual preferences known? Did they not feel sad for their loss as humans as well?

And why was I perhaps the least visibly moved by the camp? Certainly not because I’m indifferent to human suffering or because I’m an anti-Semite or a Holocaust-denier. When you attend Hebrew School three times a week for a decade and live in a culture where politics and the media refer every atrocity back to the Holocaust, you are reminded to remember at every turn.

But somewhere in the process you do forget — people who have been persecuted for other reasons, at other times, in other places, people like Bezmozgis and his family. And that’s where the problem lies, in focusing so much on remembering one atrocity at the cost of obscuring others.

Reading about characters like the Kornblums, Holocaust-centric Jews who so readily conflate Judaism and the Holocaust, feels like something of a teenager’s homecoming, somewhat uncomfortable, perhaps even annoying. In other words, the perfect environment to rile us up and make us get to know those not much different than ourselves.

Laura Nathan-Garner

(Carroll & Graf)

Keith Boykin has no idea what he has just done. Apparently, he thinks he has written a book about duplicity. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the first chapter of his latest book, Beyond the Down Low: Sex and Denial in Black America, Boykin, former Special Assistant to President Clinton and one of the nation’s leading commentators on race and sexual orientation, writes, “This is a book about lies.”  As a literary device, this statement works as a hook to lure readers in.  But as a summary, it fails to capture both the breadth and depth of the text. Boykin has not written a book about lies. What Boykin has instead created is a book of truths.

Beyond the Down Low: Sex and Denial in Black America stands as the most accurate and informed treatment of homosexuality, sex, blackness, and the AIDS epidemic to date. Previous coverage of this topic by Linda Villarosa in The New York Times and Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine failed to capture the intricate social and political webs buttressing this “phenomenon.”  Just as the title of his book promises to take readers Beyond the Down Low, Boykin goes beyond the sensationalized and, according to him, fallacious media hype about “down low” (or “closeted”) gay and bisexual black men spreading AIDS to black women, to give us the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.  According to Boykin, the truth is that the “down low” phenomenon in neither a new occurrence, nor exclusive to black men.  

Black men lurking in the dark

From racial lynching to racial profiling, the history of black men in the United States is a minefield of stigma and dishonor. And the term “down low,” which refers to black men who secretly sleep with other black men while maintaining heterosexual relationships, is just the latest dishonor to curse black men. Black gay men suffer a double hardship, living as an oppressed minority not only in America at-large, but also in both the gay and black communities. Amidst such doom and gloom, the lyricism of James Baldwin, the activism of Bayard Rustin, and the vocalism of RuPaul serve as beacons of light, flags of hope waving from distant shores. There is, unfortunately, a gaggle of sensationalists and worry mongers who threaten to extinguish these lights. Their tool of choice: the “down low” phenomenon.

Inspired by J. L. King and his book, On The Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep with Men, journalists and other media personalities have flurried around this so-call new phenomena of “straight-acting” black men sleeping with other black men.  The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jet Magazine, and the Village Voice have all run articles alluding to the down low. Many of the articles related the “down low” men with the spread of the AIDS virus.  

According to J. L. King, the salacious and unsafe practices of down low black men are the primary reason for the increasing prevalence of HIV and AIDS among heterosexual black women. “If I was a gay man, I may want to be in a relationship with another gay man and play house,” King told Oprah during his 2004 appearance on her show. “But when you are on the ‘down low,’ all you want to do is have sex.” Here, King reduced gay and bisexual black men to sex-starved, sex-crazed liars, reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 portrayal of black men as villains and violent rapists in Birth of a Nation.  In Griffith’s film, which pays homage to the Ku Klux Klan, an animalistic black character chases an innocent, chaste white woman in hopes of sexual conquest.  The misinformation conveyed in the “down low” media hype is especially deleterious because it fosters the stereotype of black men as devious, sex-starved ruffians, a stereotype activist and civil rights leaders have worked three centuries to unravel.

Let there be light!

In the wake of this skewed portrait of the black male as sex fiend, along comes Boykin, illuminating the intricacies of the down low phenomenon with Beyond the Down Low . Fusing critical analysis with opinionated essay, Beyond the Down Low skillfully deconstructs popular myths about black male homosexuality and bisexuality. In the chapter entitled “It’s Not Just a Black Thing”, for instance, Boykin de-racializes the down low phenomenon by providing examples of prominent white men, such as former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, former Congressman Michael Huffington, and music mogul David Geffen, who have lived on the “down low.”  

In his book’s aptly titled third chapter, “Everybody’s Doing It”, Boykin launches a rapid-fire attack on the term “down low” itself. Borrowing lyrics from TLC, Brian McKnight, Salt-N-Pepa, R. Kelly, and other music artists, Boykin traces the etymology of “down low,” only to discover that the term has heterosexual roots.  In heteronormative discourse, “down low” merely referred to secret intimacy outside a relationship.  This term, whose roots are centered in black pop culture, not black homosexual culture, rose to popularity in the early 90s.  Heterosexual slang evolved, moving on to terms such as “creepin’” and “playin’” to refer to “down low” relationships, while black gay men continued to employ the latter argot.  “Down Low” was not considered a term specific to black gay men, inside or outside of the community, until it was deemed such by the media.  

The chapter entitled “D. L. Detectives” offers a more critical look at J. L. King’s On The Down Low, the book to which Boykin is obviously responding.  Boykin challenges King’s assertion that there are five  “DL behavior types,” (ranging from the “Rough Neck Players” to the “Brooks Brothers Brother”) bringing to light the circular reasoning on which King’s down low book relies.  After delineating the five behavior types, King states, “DL men don’t stand out.”  “But if that’s the case,” Boykin asks, “then why go through the whole exercise of writing a chapter about five behavior types?”

Boykin’s 32-page reproof of King’s down low book, however founded, walks the floss-thin line of exposé, with such statements as “I knew much more about [J. L. King] than I could say on the phone call … I knew men who had dated him and I knew men he had tried to date.”  At points, Boykin clicks his heels on the side of unabashed ridiculing, after which he straightens his tie and resumes his journalistic composure.  “To listen to [J. L. King] on the telephone,” Boykin writes, “I did not get the impression that he was the most articulate communicator …” Despite these minor bobbles, Boykin balances the bulk of the text well, using an effective combination of personal anecdotes and investigative reporting.  Boykin ushers us through his personal interactions with King to chronicle the evolution of King’s contradictory and misinformed narrative on the down low phenomenon.  

In doing so, Boykin acts as a DNA test for an unjustly convicted criminal. With Beyond the Down Low, Boykin reopens the “down low” debate and performs a second, more thorough autopsy. And the verdict?  Sexuality, as postwar sexologist Alfred Kinsey found, is determined by a complicated fusion of biology, psychology, sociology, and politics.  Black men are not the culprits in the war against AIDS, and the fight isn’t as simple as stitching a scarlet “DL” on the label of same-gender-loving black men in America. Tackling the AIDS epidemic requires open dialogue, not scapegoating. As Boykin suggests, “Sex is a wonderfully healthy form of human expression, and we would be wise to learn to talk about it.” And thanks to Boykin, perhaps we — black, white, gay, straight — can finally begin to engage in that conversation.

In The Fray Contributor