New Fiction by Women and Non-Binary PoC Summer Reading Series - Book Club News!
I’m thrilled to be hosting a ‘New Fiction by Women and Non-Binary PoC’ Summer Reading Series with The Reader Berlin. It features novels and novellas by Akwaeke Emezi, Hanya Yanagihara, Diana Evans, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Meena Kandasamy, Sayaka Murata, Leila Slimani, Celeste Ng, and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.
We are now three books into this bi-weekly online Book Club of dreams! We’ve been looking at issues of craft, style, language, authorship, as well as the politics of reading, including questions of methodology and alternative literary canons. I support the reading experience in-between our meetups with an ongoing online Slack forum, which I host, curate, and moderate, using articles, reviews, author interviews, podcasts, and more, to create an immersive feel throughout.
My heartfelt wish for this series has been to create a soft, safe, political, and fun space where readers can exchange ideas on the texts in whichever way they wish to. There are no rules other than warmth, generosity, and a very deliberate focus on craft (because nearly all of the readers are writers too).
I get so excited and nervous before our online meet-ups because the engagement is always enlightening, absorbing, and generative. We laugh a lot too! I run fortnightly groups on Wednesday and Thursday evenings and maybe it’s a bit dorky to say so but I always light a candle for the duration of each meetup. (It reminds me to put the right sort of energy into moderation, a ritual I began during my Short Story & Flash Fiction Workshop here in Berlin’s Covid-19 lockdown.) It is evident that readers care for one another’s ideas, and, as they are all writers from very different backgrounds, it feels very unlike a university seminar or regular book club.
Illustrator News!
The novelist and artist Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has agreed to add more imagination and colour to the Reading Series with watercolours paintings. Rowan is the brilliant author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days, and editor of the Go Home! anthology.
I emailed Rowan after asking talented Berlin-based writer and artist May-Lan Tan. I have now commissioned Rowan to create whatever she wishes inspired by our Reading Series, in a time frame that suits her, and with a focus on joyful process, play, and experimentation. So far, Rowan has responded by paintings that are in dialogue with the authors, texts, and our rich and expansive Reading Group conversations. I am in love with her new paintings, as are members of my Book Club. See below for Rowan’s first image, a response to Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, which she converted into a very cool Gif that had everyone rushing to her Instagram page! Follow @RowanHisa on Instagram for images related to Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara, Ordinary People by Diana Evans and more. Watch her beautiful experiment unfold as our Reading Group journeys into new story worlds …
Image by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. A response to Freshwater, the debut novel by Akwaeke Emezi and the first book in our Reading Series. See @RowanHisa on Instagram for more images in conversation with authors, texts, and readers.
Book 1
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Ada has always been unusual. As an infant in southern Nigeria, she is a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents successfully prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry, as the young Ada becomes a troubled child, prone to violent fits of anger and grief. But Ada turns out to be more than just volatile. Born “with one foot on the other side,” she begins to develop separate selves. When Ada travels to America for college, a traumatic event crystallizes the selves into something more powerful. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dangerous direction.
Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author's realities, this raw and extraordinary debut explores the metaphysics of identity and being, plunging the reader into the mysteries of self. Unsettling, heart-wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: “I’ve been doing some illustrations for @divyaghelani and @thereaderberlin. So here’s my second Freshwater outtake. It’s of Akwaeke Emezi—the author. The illustration is based on publicity photos at the time. But their hair has changed since I believe. In any case, one of the things that is lovely about this book club is that @divyaghelani selects quotes from interviews as well. And so I thought I’d share one that I found particularly beautiful. “I realize that for me I only belong in places I create and that has been, I think, the most important thing I have learned in my brief life so far. I can make worlds. That’s literally my job, to make worlds […] Instead of searching for people to give me a place to belong, I just bent one into existence myself.” —@azemezi #illustration #freshwater #watercolour #authorportrait #bookstagram” - Follow @RowanHisa on Instagram
Emezi’s Gifts (What We Discussed in our Book Club)
Freshwater explores Emezi’s Igbo heritage; concepts of gender; Western and indigenous constructions of mental health; and the issue of ontological ‘being’ in the world. Ada is an ogbanje (a child who has a connection to the spirit world and usually dies young only to return to earth and repeat this cycle). In one of her interviews, Emezi describes Ada as “a plural individual and as a singular collective.” The multiplicity of selves that exist within the Ada confronts readers with their own colonization, not just in terms of gender, but the ways they experience their own realities.
In our Book Club, prompted by an author interview, we talked about marginalization not just in terms of skin colour but that of our own inner worlds and experiences. Which aspects of our mental landscapes are allowed to exist as ‘real’ in which societies and why?
We read the story as a profound and surreal questioning of gender binaries, Western and indigenous ideas of mental health, concepts of embodiment, neuro-divergence (as opposed in madness), and an exploration of Igbo cosmology. We found Emezi’s decision to write a spiritual novel from the point of view of a plural self (and later selves that are precipitations of that plural self) to be breathtaking and creatively exciting.
Freshwater confronted us with our own binaries, our own limitations, but it also opened us up to our multitudinousness; the ways in which we are mysterious to ourselves, and many.
Writing Exercise
Imagine there are spirits in and around you, based on aspects of your personal histories. Who they are, why they are there, and what do they want? Write from their collective ‘we’ perspective …
Book 2
The People In The Trees By Hanya Yanagihara
A powerful work of visionary literary fiction from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award-nominated modern classic, A Little Life.
It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders but for Perina himself. Disquieting yet thrilling, The People in the Trees is an anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide.
Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221628/the-people-in-the-trees-by-hanya-yanagihara/
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: “Some little illustrated excerpts from my work on the @thereaderberlin New Fiction By Women & Non-Binary People of Colour summer reading group. They’re read the People in The Trees for their second week. This quote is from an @guardianbooks interview with her about her second novel A Little Life, though I personally think it applies equally well to either book. She is one of the most divisive authors I know. My feelings about her books are too intense and personal to go into on an Instagram post, but I will leave it that I admire deeply her comportment in the world. (Also for anyone with a soft spot for peering into other people’s homes, google hers. It’s beautiful.) Thank you again @divyaghelani for commissioning this.” #illustration #hanyayanagihara #watercolor #thepeopleinthetrees #alittlelife #bookstagram Follow @RowanHisa on Instagram
Yanagihara’s Gifts (What We Discussed In Our Book Club)
We discussed what a visceral reading experience this was, how the novel unsettled, dazzled, and pulverized us. We discussed themes of racism, child sexual abuse, neo-colonialism, the concept of moral relativism, as well as anthropology and science in the 1950s and now. We talked about the many ways in which academic language has been used to collude with violence. We also considered the character of Norton Perina in relation to Daniel Carlton Gajdusek but also to modern-day celebrities like Michael Jackson or R Kelly: ‘great men’ whose moral failings have brought their achievements into question.
It was fun to consider this novel from a craft perspective. We spoke about how the story was book-ended by press reports and prefaced by the sycophantic Ronald Kubodera (who introduces us to the equally unreliable and highly suspect narrative of the Nobel-prizewinning Norton Perina). We marveled at how Yanagihara could maintain our interest in accounts written by deeply abhorrent white male narrators, the level of skill involved in this suspension of belief. We were shocked and amazed by the novel’s ending, which felt like it came from nowhere, and yet had been seeded into the story all along. Yanagihara unsettled us, amazed us, devastated us, and she blew our minds with her skill and unflinching multi-layered look at difficult subject matter.
Writing Exercise
You are deep inside a forest. Describe the various shades of green, the quality of light as you move through the landscape, the different types of plants, fruits, and animals. Why are you there? How does your description of the forest relate to and reflect your feelings? Write in first person point of view. What happens to you there?
Book 3
Ordinary People by Diana Evans
Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning. Melissa has a new baby and doesn’t want to let it change her. Damian has lost his father and intends not to let it get to him. Michael is still in love with Melissa but can’t quite get close enough to her to stay faithful. Stephanie just wants to live a normal, happy life on the commuter belt with Damian and their three children but his bereavement is getting in the way.
Set in London against the backdrop of Barack Obama’s historic election victory, Ordinary People is an intimate, immersive study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and ageing, and the fragile architecture of love.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: “As mentioned before, I’ve been doing some illustrations for @divyaghelani and @thereaderberlin for their New Fiction By Women & Non-Binary People of Colour summer reading group. They’re reading Diana Evans’ Ordinary People. A book I highly recommend if you like books about marriage, homes, love and families. It is smart and political about the truly ordinary parts of life. (And yes for those of you wondering it did come out the same year as Normal People. The two books do have some cross over material—difficulty in love, questions of the role you want to play in life, by Evans’s characters are older and more deeply entrenched in their chosen lives.) The quote is from an essay she wrote called “Racism 2020: The heart of the matter.” It’s up on the @bazaaruk website. I know a lot of people dismiss what a fashion magazine can do. But this is as smart and thoughtful a piece of writing as any you could find in the broadest of broadsheets. Also please scroll for a little rodent—who has scuttled out of the infestation that causes one of the characters in Ordinary People quite a lot of stress. In other Diana Evans news, I believe she has just signed a two book deal with Chatto & Windus (a branch of Penguin) for a new novel and an essay collection so we all have that to look forward to.” #illustration #dianaevans #bookstagram #watercolor Follow @rowanhisa on Instagram
Evans’s Gifts (What We Discussed In Our Book Club)
Our Book Group used the Obama-victory-party opening scene as a springboard to discuss themes present in other parts of the novel: success versus ordinariness, fashion, class, gender; the deliberate, specific focus on everyday Black metropolitan lives (juxtaposed alongside global Black success). We also talked about the strangeness of reading that Obama victory from today’s point of view, the ways in which the novel itself might be remembered in light of changing global politics.
I like to break up our conversations with videoed author interviews. We watched one such interview wherein Evans talks about only knowing her book would be a success in the sixth year of writing it. We talked about trusting our own writing processes in relation to this, the bravery required to complete, the daily leaps of faith.
We admired how layered and intricate Evans’s ‘crystal house’ of a novel is. We were enamored of the supernatural element, which we all felt gave the novel a real feeling of ‘lift’ and moved it out of the territory of traditional realist fiction. We talked about the building and destruction of the Crystal Palace, which inspires and frames this remarkable novel, and we spoke about the many ways in which Ordinary People, in its specific, beautiful, and detailed focus on Black Londoners’ lives, touched us all.
Writing Exercise
Create your own party scene linked to a significant moment in history. Depict the host(s), partygoers, fashion styles, conversations, music, politics, and flirtations. What happens to your central character(s) during the party and/or soon after they leave?
Our next book in the Reading Series is ‘the things i thing while i’m smiling politely’ by Berlin-based author Sharon Dodua Otoo. Can’t wait to tell you about it and to see what Rowan produces by way of response!