Behind the Beautiful Forevers: A Reflection

Globalization is a huge talking point and issue that has been discussed ad nauseum for years, but not until Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers have I seen someone actually look at the people who are affected by it with such depth and consideration.  Often in class, we mentioned how much this book played like a film.  The visuals were so striking and clear. I could see it playing out in front of me, either in documentary or feature form.  I’m currently taking a documentary film course, and I can see following Katherine Boo around Annawadi and Mumbai, interviewing Sunil and Abdul and Asha and all the others.  I find myself wanting to tell their stories, as well.  That said, this book has everything a feature film needs to be intriguing: suicide, false imprisonment, police corruption, intense family struggles.  The opening alone sounds like a treatment for a movie, with Abdul running frantically for his freedom, out of breath, hiding in a storage room of found objects, then making the ultimate decision to turn himself in to the police to spare his father.  A story could not be more compelling than this.

One of the most admirable qualities of Boo’s is her depth of knowledge on her subjects.  “Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road.” I think this description here is brilliant.  Imagine the emotional connection that had to be reached for her to get this kind of perspective from Sunil.  He had to be completely honest and raw with her to tell her that the image he projects to outsiders is “pathetic,” that he’s worked up his pride to defend himself–to project an image of “a boy on his way to school, taking time, eating air.”  Seeing this kind of introspection from Sunil is what makes him such a fully developed character. All of the characters being so fully developed certainly contributes to this book’s novelistic feel.    One would think only made-up characters could be so well-known by their authors.  Not so, and Katherine Boo proves that.  I love that about this book.  The human perspective is so important.  It’s easy to forget that individuals are affected by buzz words like globalization, industrialization, economic liberalization, and the like.  I appreciate Boo’s efforts to remind us of that.  This reminds me particularly of Hersey’s Hiroshima.  I wrote that one of that books most powerful effects was humanizing the “enemy” America was facing at the time: Japan.  I wrote that it is often to easy to forget that a country is not a single entity, but a geographical location populated by a collection of individuals, not too unlike us.  They have jobs, families, hopes, frustrations, compassion.  Of course, there are cultural differences between any two peoples, but essentially we are very much alike.  We see that here in Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  Manju had dreams of going to college just like I did.  She read Mrs. Dalloway as part of her studies, just like I did.  Now, these are superficial similarities.  Higher education was readily available to me and people across the world read Mrs. Dalloway, but they’re similarities nonetheless.  Like the Japanese in Hiroshima, the slum dwellers of Mumbai now have names, personalities, and emotions.  This makes the piece very powerful.

Throughout this course, the ultimate question has been: Is this journalism? Katherine Boo’s immersive reporting is, to me, undoubtedly journalism.  She uses the same tactics and skills as “everyday journalists” but for longer periods of time and to deeper ends.  Daily journalists, who write on deadlines and keep viewers/readers/listeners “in the know” with up-to-the-minute news, have a just the facts mentality.  This is necessary, both for time constraints and concerns of bias.  It’s impossible to tell the complete story, however, with just the facts.  There is so much more to any event or situation than who, what, where, when, why, and how.  Literary journalists, particularly Boo, are adept at painting a stronger portrait.

This novel seems to be a combination of what we’ve read this semester.  It’s a humanizing and in-depth report of an issue affecting a population, just like Hiroshima.  Boo researched and produced copious notes of events she could not witness but were integral to the telling of the story, just like Capote, Wolfe, and Didion.  She was also a witness, spending great amounts of time in the slums with the people she was profiling, like Wolfe and Frazier.  Definitely a good end to the semester 🙂

Travels in Siberia – A Reflection

Ian Frazier was traveling in Siberia in 2001, and as his trip was coming to an end, the terrorist attacks of September 11 occurred in his homeland.  In Chapter 22, we are privy to some of his recollections and feelings about the attacks and his being so far from his family when they took place.  “When I called my wife the next morning, September 12, I checked first to see what new punch lines Bill had emailed me; there were none.  Instead I found a message from my wife saying she and the kids were all right.  Then the call went through and I learned what that meant.”  I think this is such a poetic way of orienting the reader to what is happening.  It’s personal, yet still distant.  It’s the kind of distance that comes from tragedy that cannot be fathomed or accepted.  He goes on to say that “as the lone American in this obscure corner of Primorskii Krai I constituted a nation of one.”  During a time regarding by most as a moment the nation really came together, Frazier is in Siberia (literally, though it could almost be argued metaphorically, as well).  He notes the irony of this, which I think is very important.  While he’s on his “dangerous” adventure to Siberia, the most horrific attack on American soil in more than half a century is happening on his doorstep.  His body is safe is the vast Russian landscape.

This chapter led me to consider the various ways September 11 has been portrayed in literature in film in the last decade.  Unlike the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Americans watched as the destruction occurred—in real time.  That day I remember seeing a clip from Good Morning America in which Diane Sawyer and her co-anchors watched and reacted in horror as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.  I can still hear the gasps as if I just watched them on the air.  I remember sitting in my middle school homeroom, eyes glued to the television as the first tower came crashing down.  And I’ve seen those clips countless times since then.  I know I’m not alone in this.  Everyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001 remembers it vividly.  Any writer or artist who wants to broach this topic is facing a particularly difficult task.  A certain amount of respect must still be paid, but artistic boundaries should still be pushed to make the story compelling.  The raw emotion has to be captured but not exploited.  It has to be real and not sentimental.  Sentiment can be cheap.

I have no idea how many books and films have been made about September 11. It’s not a subject toward which I gravitate, precisely because of what I mentioned in the previous paragraph.  I’ve seen two 9/11 movies and don’t care to watch either of them again.  Remember Me was a vehicle for displaying Robert Pattinson’s non-vampire non-wizard talents and used 9/11 as a means to a surprise ending.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was okay, but too far-fetched to be taken seriously.  It was also rather soapy.  Both featured such superficial emotion.  I couldn’t connect with either.

In an article for a web-based Cleveland newspaper, Karen R. Long notes that “Some of this rawness will recede.  Nobody reading now is injured by artistic use of the Civil War dead.  Still, the sense that opportunism animates a good chunk of Sept. 11 literature is hard to shake.”  Right on the nose.  I feel like so many authors and artists are trying to capitalize on that rawness and it feels so manipulative.  For a piece in the New York Times about literary novelists writing about the attacks, Edward Wyatt writes, “Using fiction and imaginary characters can sometimes make on overwhelming event feel human.  But with so many people personally connected to those who were killed on Sept. 11, taking a reader inside a World Trade Center tower…can evoke hostile reactions.”

I don’t feel manipulation from Frazier.  He’s writing about his own feelings and experiences, and I appreciate his candor.  Nonfiction is far less incendiary.  I can read what he writes and appreciate the emotion without being forced (or made to feel like I’m being forced) to feel as he does.  That is one beautiful thing about this type of literature.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: A Reflection

Joan Didion is one of the mid-century writers who make up the New Journalism movement, along with Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, as we’ve discussed.  With the latter writers, we’ve had to ask ourselves at various times, “Is this journalism?”  In the traditional sense, neither really was.  Their writing was more descriptive, more subjective—hence the need for a new moniker.  Joan Didion falls into the same trap.  Is Slouching Towards Bethlehem really a work of journalism?

Subjectivity is evident in Didion’s work.  She is not only reporting on subjects but commenting on them.  You can feel her fear as you read these essays.  As Michiko Kakutani writes in a New York Times profile of Didion, “Joan Didion’s California is a place defined not so much by what her unwavering eye observes but by what her memory cannot let go.  Although her essays and novels are set amid the effluvia of a new golden state peopled by bored socialites, lost flower children, and unsentimental engineers, all is measured against the memory of the old California.  And in telling what has happened to California in the past few decades, Didion finds a metaphor for some larger, insidious process at work in American society.  The theatrics of James Pike, Episcopal Bishop of California, became a parable of the American penchant for discarding history and starting tabula rasa; the plight of a San Bernardino woman accused of murdering her husband, a lesson of misplaced dreams.”  Didion finds distressing meaning in a drive that takes you “past the Sante Fe switching yards, the Forty Winks Motel.  Past the motel that is nineteen stucco tepees: ‘Sleep in a Wigwam—Get More for Your Wampum.’  Past Fontana Drag City and the Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop A Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee  Shop…”  What I see here is a loss of authenticity.  As we discussed in class, the state is being partially consumed by kitsch.  Everything is a commodity—Native American culture, Hawaiian culture, religion.  It’s all something to be bought.  This is all part of a breakdown of the American cultural fabric.  History and tradition are all but forgotten—unless they can be sold for profit.

This perceived breakdown of American culture is made explicit in the title essay: “Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed.  This was not a traditional generational rebellion.  At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.  Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game.  Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.  These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced society’s values…They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it…”  Americans have become more insulated and individualistic.  The group dynamic that has kept each member in check is disintegrating and, therefore, so are the good old-fashioned values Joan Didion is mourning.

I have to say, she’s right to mourn those lost value if they prevent scenes like the following: “The five-year old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten.  She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach.  She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket.  For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.”  What Didion does here is quite crafty.  She is describing a scene—reporting information—and proving critique without explicitly stating, “This child should be removed from this home,” as I’m sure she was thinking.  When we meet the child, we know she is on acid.  Otto tells us so.  As Didion describes her, we see that this five year old is much like any other.  She wants a bicycle, she likes sugary drinks and treats, and she recently recovered from an illness so many children get.  She loves the beach.  A little girl like this could come from any community in any state in the country.  Then we hear how this little girl is truly a product of Haight-Ashbury and the hippie movement.  She’s been fed psychedelic drugs for months.  At a time in her life when most children wouldn’t even know that drugs exist, she’s been “getting stoned.”  We are aware of Didion’s feelings about this when she writes, “I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.”  She is so affected by what she is hearing, she can hardly speak to do her job as a reporter.  This is very subtle and powerful critique.  This vignette is followed by another involving a child: “Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done.”  We are immediately led to believe that this boy’s caretakers are irresponsible; they don’t wake up with the child to make sure he is safe and, through some neglect, I’m sure, leave him in a position to start a fire.  Later, when Sue Ann screams at her son for chewing on an electrical wire, we learn that the other inhabitants of the home “didn’t notice…because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.”  God forbid they lose their hash!  This scene reminds me of the line from the Yeats poem.  “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”  Sound becomes white noise in the indifference caused by this obsession with nothing but drug use. This is a home filled with chaos, and the chaos comes from that tear in the American fabric—that loss of traditional values.  “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Though the subject matter of these essays is more closely related to Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I am more reminded of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.  Just as Didion uses the “new face” of California as a metaphor or allegory for Americans at large, Capote used the Clutter murders as a warning for our society.  The “other” is representative of a threat—a sharp pin gliding over the edge of a balloon.  With just the slightest pressure of that pin, the balloon will pop.  Didion is afraid of this.  As Kakutani writes, “She has created, in her books, one of the most devastating and distinctive portraits of modern America to be found in fiction or nonfiction—a portrait of America where ‘disorder was its own point.’”