Review: Long Walk to Freedom and Some Thoughts on Racial Injustice

On the cover of Long Walk to Freedom is a quote from the Boston Sunday Globe. It says this book “should be read by every person alive,” a statement with which I am tempted to agree. Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is required reading.

The struggle of apartheid was something that happened before my lifetime. When the country was casting its first ballots in an open and democratic national election, I was only three years old. South Africa and apartheid was something that was on the fringes of my consciousness. It was hardly touched on in school. It was something I always had a vague idea of: I knew there was an injustice and it was “corrected,” quote unquote. It was just never something I knew that much about.

I first became interested in gaining more insight into this section of history and part of the world after listening to the radio piece Nelson Mandela: An Audio History, produced by Radio Diaries. It is an incredibly moving and visceral radio hour and it sparked in me a desire to learn more. I found no better place to begin than with Nelson Mandela himself and his account of the events in his own words.

The book itself is beautifully written. Mandela’s cadence is melodic and thorough. He writes about an incredibly troubled time in a clear but rousing manner. I never found my attention waning once in the over 600 pages. It is a fascinating account, beginning with his boyhood in the Transkei and ending with his election to the presidency of a free South Africa. It goes into great detail of the inner workings of the African National Congress, their protests and fight against injustice and the move to a more violent struggle. It recounts his twenty-seven years in prison for freedom fighting and the strain it put on himself and his family. The atrocities committed by the South African government against Africans made my stomach turn, at times having to physically put down the book. It boggled my mind that any one could treat human beings in such a way, that democracy and justice could be so flagrantly ignored and abused.

American Born Shortcomings

I am a big fan of graphic novels. I think it is an underutilized and underappreciated literary medium. I just finished two novels back to back on Neil’s recommendation: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. They are two very different novels in terms of style, illustration, and the way the content is handled, but they had many common themes that makes them great complements. As a warning, there will be mild spoilers below.

American Born Chinese (ABC) is about Asian American childhood. The protagonist Jin Wang is the American born Chinese character. It explores the discomfort he feels with classmates that refuse to understand his culture and the cruelty of school children. The story of his evolution through grade school and high school is juxtaposed with two counterpoint stories:  that of the Monkey King, a lesser deity who in his arrogance flouts the will of Tze-Yo-Tzu, the god of all, and also that of Danny, a white American student whose life plays out like a bad sitcom with the alarming and appallingly racist depiction of his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee. The three stories in the beginning seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but as the story continues on they interconnect in a masterful and ingenious way to relate a story of friendship and self-acceptance in an increasingly unaccepting world. The novel is a winner of the Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

Shortcomings also focuses on Asian American characters, but in a much harsher way. The main characters of the story are Ben Tanaka and  Miko Hayashi, who are a couple that have been together for quite some time. Their relationship is destructive and overwhelmingly unhealthy. They fight all the time about petty differences. Most of the characters in the novel are not very likeable. They are fairly self absorbed. Ben is consumed by his own misery and has a very negative outlook on the world. He seems to want what he thinks he cannot have and has no sense of real conscience about his actions and how they might affect people. Miko tells a very big lie, but she also seems to just be looking for a way out from under Ben’s negativity. Women Ben interacts with are not any better. While he and Miko are on a “break,” he fools around with two white women: Autumn Phelps, a young performance artist who is a complete tease, and Sasha Lenz, who leads Ben on and doesn’t really know what she wants. The only redeeming character in the novel is Ben’s friend Alice Kim, a lesbian and immigrant from Korea, who struggles with the demands of her conventional and restrictive family. The novel is not a happy one and ends on a sad note, but is interesting to read. There is a distance within the novel that doesn’t allow you to get too close to the characters. Rather you observe them and their actions as if from a great height.

Review: A Lost Lady

I’ve just finished A Lost Lady by Willa Cather. The book was suggested to me by my boyfriend who knows how much I love classic literature. I was very skeptical about reading this particular novel though because it’s American lit. The only American literature I have a tendency to be fond of is the contemporary sort and men who became expats in the 20s. It’s nothing personal, it’s just how my taste falls.