Good evening!
I hope everybody had a lovely Christmas -- I certainly did, even if I had to go for a 3 hour nap in the middle of the day because I was ill. This is the last ‘What I’ve been reading of the year’, but there will be another newsletter coming out on Sunday detailing my favourite things of the year (not just books but mainly books). Thanks for sticking with me and reading this, it does mean a lot. I like to think of this as an informal space where I can ‘dump’ a lot of thoughts and feelings, but it is also something I like to imagine that sometimes throws a shoe at people’s heads and asks them to think critically and to read with intention.
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I wanted to spend time with Jason Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts (out in March with Faber) and so I wanted to finish it before I gave it my full attention on this platform. This is both a truly extraordinary book, as well as a remarkable history text. As you’d expect from Jason, the writing at a line level is excellent, but what really bowled me over was its structure. It is split into themes like ‘care’, ‘liberation’ and ‘the scene’ as he interviews and befriends several Black gay men who have (sometimes slightly, sometimes very) different perspectives on the Black gay scene in Britain, from the mid-twentieth century onwards. These themes allow him to not do a chronological history, or even an account of each man in the order that he interviewed them, but to bring together and separate the threads in this culture as and when he needs to. It reads really smoothly, which is no mean feat considering the amount of information these men are sitting on.
‘The amount of information these men are sitting on’ is one of the key premises of Revolutionary Acts, which is at pains to point out that much of history is kept by the people who made it and lived through it, and is at real threat of disappearing if we don’t seek it out. This is especially true for those who are part of an ethnic and/or identity minority, who don’t get prioritised as the subjects of archives. It’s amazing how many materials and how many stories the men in this book have, that could very well have disappeared if they weren’t deliberately passed on and recorded. Another strength of Jason’s approach to this is how he clearly sets this out as an issue that pertains to Black gay men, and how he is going to fill the gaps in historical research. Identifying an issue then going on to rectify it is something I think a lot of writers can learn from, as simple of a premise that sounds. And I’ll leave that at that!
I could write out many, many passages as ones that I particularly enjoyed reading, but one I will share is the way that Jason receives and thinks about the mundane in larger movements. In the chapter ‘Care’, he mostly talks with and about Dirg Aaab-Richards, an ‘unsung hero’ of the Black, gay liberation movement. Dirg is reluctant to talk about himself in positive terms, believing that his role in local organisations was minimal when in reality he had (and continues to have) a huge impact on others. Dirg highlights how he took care of making and distributing flyers and invites to events and groups and that he made sure to leave meeting spaces clean and tidy so that they could continue using them. He sees this as something small, but Jason writes that:
Dirg’s ‘modest revolution’ is at the heart of what it means to build community and community infrastructure. Quieter, laborious actions are too often left out of the narrative of activist history because as audiences we want to imagine more sexy and thrilling times, of great public spectacle, demonstrations on the street and direct clashes with the state.These events certainly occurred, but the everyday reality of organising for Black gay men like Dirg were those late nights staying behind in venues and offices, cleaning and sweeping and cutting and pasting and typing and printing and photocopying. Having known the pain of isolation in his youth, Dirg was committed to facilitating and maintaining spaces for Black gay people to thrive, to bring them together and make sure they knew each other. In times where mass communication was not enabled by the digital technologies we enjoy today, Dirg’s skills and commitment to work made a world of difference.
I think this gives a good feel for what Revolutionary Acts is about -- it’s personal to the individual men that makeup the book’s fabric, while also looking at Black gay culture and activism on a bigger scale, as well as challenging how we see and receive history itself. This challenge is one of the book’s (many) strengths, because Jason is at pains to point out that romanticised views of movements are not realistic, as is viewing and presenting individuals within it as completely innocent heroes. The men of Revolutionary Acts are presented as who they are, which is often gossipy, flirtatious and bitchy. This makes them all completely endearing, and I often felt like I was entering back into a conversation with new friends every time I picked it up. I hope you’ve pre-ordered it by now.
Next I picked up Selva Almada’s Not a River, translated by Annie McDermott which is out next month with my beloved Charco Press. Not a River is similar to Almada’s Brickmakers in that it has multiple timelines going through it, often dipping back into the present. The present centres on three men from mainland Argentina, who go on a fishing trip to an island in the Paraná Delta. They are haunted by the events of another fishing trip years earlier, in which a terrible accident occurred, and they are under threat from the local community who are suspicious of them. Violence bubbles under the surface, coming at the reader from multiple angles and in different forms, which is something that Almada is really good at verbalising in her writing. In Brickmakers there was some focus on the gay community in Argentina and how sexuality sits in the country’s conception of masculinity; in Not a River, there is some focus on pregnancy and motherhood, and how this also sits alongside masculinity. ‘Violence’ becomes multi-faceted in the text, which is impressive considering how slim it is.
I think that some of the issues I had with Brickmakers find a kind of redemption in Not a River, because it gave me the things I thought were missing from the former text. This one really digs under the surface of relationships and character interiority, while also drawing in the social landscape of rural Argentina, whereas I felt both were slightly skimmed through in Brickmakers in order to get a lot of characters and events in. This one is much slower, much more intentional, which I appreciated.
Yesterday I read the small but mighty A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie, which is out in April from Fitzcarraldo Editions (also beloved to me). I think this is actually my favourite of Ernaux’s that I’ve read of hers, which is quite a statement because I’ve loved every thing of hers deeply. This one is about her mother and mother’s death from Alzheimer’s Disease. Ernaux takes the time to detail her mother’s life from childhood up until his death and then beyond, when Ernaux’s grief sees her avoid hospitals and care homes in fear of it triggering memories and a realisation that her mother is no longer there. As ever with Ernaux, she writes about the way that she approaches form, stating that she is in two minds as to whether she should present her with emotion or with facts, which are two different things when it comes to writing a loved one, especially a parent. She does both, sometimes stating the events in her mother’s life and sometimes falling back on how her behaviours made her, as her daughter, feel. Early on, she discussed the difficulties in this when she says, ‘for me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time.’ As with Jason’s book, Ernaux as a writer has a presence in the text,detailing the difficulties she has approaching her subject, which is invariably bound up with emotional complications. This is a sad book, but a cathartic one.
Books on my radar
I’m unsure of what to pick up next to be honest with you. Maybe another slim novel, maybe a big chunky boy -- nothing in between. We’ll see!