Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah/Anna Badkhen

I had said, about this blog, that I would reduce my frequency. Posting just Mondays and Thursdays now (unless there was personal book news to share). Making more time for Time. Easing away from increasingly desperate sense that more was expected of me than I could ever adequately deliver.

But yesterday and today, reading Anna Badkhen's memoir, Walking with Abel, I realized that there will be some days, some books, that will require an interlocutory post.

I can no longer read everything I'm sent, write about everything I read, respond to every package that arrives on my stoop.

But I must write about books like Anna's.

I've written about Anna here before—the day I met her, in the living room of the home of the documentary photographer Lori Waselchuk. I have written of her Afghanistan narrative, The World is a Carpet. I have come to know her—only occasionally, but always meaningfully—in the time in between. We have discussed self-compassion. Bigotry. Chromites. New books due in August, about love. I was prepared, in other words, for Walking with Abel, her story of living with a family of Fulani cowboys and starwatchers as they move herds across the country of Mali in West Africa. The wisdom of the Fulani is earth wisdom. It is in the sand they cross, the rivers that rise, the frogs that sing, the constellations that guide, the nudge of a cow. It is in the stories they ask for, and the stories they share.

Into their wisdom came Anna.

Here, in the early pages, she tells us what she seeks:

To enter such a culture. Not an imperiled life nor a life enchanted but an altogether different method to life's meaning, a divergent sense of the world. To tap into a slower knowledge that could come only from taking a very, very long walk with a people who have been walking always. To join a walk that spans seasons, years, a history; to synchronize my own pace with a meter fine-tuned over millennia. For years I had wanted to learn from such immutable movement.

Anna's immersion is uncompromising. She sleeps beneath a tree on blue plastic tarp, her backpack at her head. She wakes, one day, to a goat standing on her knees. She bathes in rivers. She churns the buttermilk. She holds the babies. She learns (perhaps I should have started with this) that language. She finds breathtaking beauty in her hostess:

She had no front teeth left and the remaining teeth were rotted and brown. She was narrowboned and gracile and she wore her long gray hair in cornrows woven so that two thin braids ran down in front of either ear and the rest bunched at the back of her head. The tattoo that once had accentuated her whole mouth and blackened her gums had long faded except for an indigo shadow on her full lower lip.

This is Anna making room for astonishment in the world—Anna who is both a migrant and an immigrant, a former war reporter who is capable of seeing beauty and who ponders, out loud, in Abel, this: "Maybe a true writer of conscience was one who never put down a single word."

I am glad, we should all be glad, that Anna puts down her words (and her pale, evocative sketches of the homes she made on that swatch of earth). I am grateful that this book leans into memoir, yields Anna's own vulnerability as she tries to live in the aftermath of an ended love affair, that she uses both her heart and her eyes to see, that she writes, or seems to write, this book for the man who, in transient moments, made her happy, the man she carries forward, memories now, interludes, words. Who was he? Who were they? She tells us:

My beloved and I had been comrade voyagers before we became lovers, footloose storytellers who shared a supreme reverence for wordsmanship. We filled our notebooks with the beauty and the iniquity with which the world branded and buoyed us. We wished our stories to bring it to some accountability, some reckoning.

Anna, the world is better for your reckoning.

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Boy, Snow, Bird: Helen Oyeyemi/Reflections

So many unread books stacked on my floors, on my shelves, on the couch, and still I bought a new one—Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. I blame Porochista Khakpour's review in The New York Times. It was smart; it was seductive.

And so is this book. The story of a run-away, a rat-catcher's daughter (her name is Boy), who arrives in a place called Flax Hill, marries a widower with a fair daughter named Snow, and discovers, when she gives birth to a girl she calls Bird, that the family she has married into has masqueraded all along: they are light-skinned African Americans. The fair, sweet Snow has (unwittingly) allowed this family to live their lie, to hide, to elegantly pretend. Boy will have none of that–or of Snow—once the darker-skinned Bird arrives. Snow is banished. Bird grows up. Weird things happen with spiders, with storytellers, with (but of course) mirrors.

Boy, Snow, Bird must be trusted. Its readers must relinquish their hold. Don't try to guess where this is going. Don't look for Dopey. Don't think Oyeyemi is actually going to chant "Mirror, Mirror on the wall." Don't read thinking that this is all about race or all about fairytales, because it's bigger and more wild than that. Boy, Snow, Bird is brand-new country. It's a young writer (Oyeyemi is not yet thirty but already a veteran of publishing) inventing her own kind of fiction. Her sentences and images, often, are beguiling. Here is Bird, imagining herself in a spiderweb hat:

No, a spiderweb hat is a better warning to beware. Bird would look out from under this hat with the watchful eyes of a girl from long ago, each pupil an unlit lamp, waiting for the magic ring to be rubbed, for the right words to be said. She'd give a lot to know why she and her mom have those eyes—the eyes of people who come from someplace strange they can never go back to. Bird and her mom and that servant-of-the-lamp look they go around giving people. Bird can't think of a single excuse for it.

More and more, I think, we are seeing writers who are willing to go to the edge, to carry us forward, to take daring risks, to suggest that we set aside our expectations and follow along. We see critics embracing the brave and tangled; we see other readers not so sure. There are new fractures breaking in the land of literature. Personally, I'll always be grateful for the sure-footed flights of fancy that abound in books like Boy, Snow, Bird.

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Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest/Jen Doll: Reflections

I'm pretty sure you all know how I feel about Jen Doll.

(If, by chance, you've missed out on my Jen Doll love, this post is for you.)

You can imagine then, how happily I have anticipated an early copy of this remarkable young woman's first book, a memoir called Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (Riverhead, May 1). I know how witty wise Jen is, for I read her blogs, reviews, and stories. I know how crackerjack smart; plug into her Twitter channel and find out for yourself. But I also know, because I have met her and corresponded with her, because we have talked at length about memoir by phone, how much she cares about her work, her words, her living. Jen may be hysterical, in many hours of many days. She may be totally plugged into The Now. But she is also intelligent and searching, thoughtful and grammatical, richly in tune with the cosmic wonder of a chaotic universe.

All the radiance of Jen is right here, in her book.

Save the Date, a book described as "a hilarious and insightful examination of the search for love and the meaning of marriage in a time of anxiety, independence, and indecision" is not thwarted by bitterness, not slight in its purpose, not mired in revenge—all the things such a book might have been in the hands of another writer.

It is, instead, a real memoir—the sort of story that pulls the reader up short with memories of her own decisions and indecisions, her own false tunes. We all grow up wondering if we will meet the one. We all pretend, sometimes, to know what we are doing. We are all happy for our friends, though sometimes we feel excluded by their joy, and perhaps we embarrass ourselves and at our best we apologize and because we must, we start again. We need advice. We give advice. We let the wounds heal, we lick the wounds. Maybe we haven't confessed all the sloppy muck of it to others, and maybe we've been less than honest with ourselves. In Save the Date Jen Doll tells the truth. She does that thing that great memoirists do—makes sure we're not alone.

I loved learning, from Save the Date—about the family Jen loves, the humor that shaped her, the nicknames she gave her younger brother. I loved seeing glimpses of her at work, glimpses of her in the mirror in fabulous shoes, glimpses of her working through the many gears of many friendships, glimpses of her at so many weddings. I worried for her sometimes. I rooted for her, always. I was brought in close, by quiet moments such as these:

The decision not to be together forever means, to each other, you become nothing more than a memory, a series of photographs, some stories, and, of course, whatever you've learned and will take with you to the next relationship. Those things are not nothing. Yet there was love there once, and then there's not, I wonder where it goes.

I have a very good feeling about Save the Date. And I have an even deeper affection, now, for Jen.

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The World Is a Carpet/Anna Badkhen: Reflections

This past Sunday, an entire community gathered in the home of the generous documentary photographer Lori Waselchuk (whom I wrote of here) to celebrate the release of Anna Badkhen's new book, The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village. Cilantro humus, hot peppers, spiced cheese. Artists, intellectuals, neighbors (mostly one in the same). Children and old people like me. Two friends—Lori and Anna—whose friendship ripened in New Orleans in the days following the devastation of Katrina. It was a book party like few others. Lori's entire home was filled. When Anna stood on the stairs to read four pages of her story, Lori's pride in Anna's work was as moving as Anna's astonishing prose.

That kind of pride. That kind of love.

And the children were spellbound.

This is a book (exquisitely packaged with velvetish cover paper on the outside and Anna's own ink drawings within) that evokes an off-the-map village in Afghanistan called Oqa, its door-less homes and sand-roughened people. It's about a place where time doesn't matter but seasons do, where boys marry girls they are not ready for, where imperfection is celebrated as if a carpet's beauty mole. It's about a Russian-American journalist who finds her way not just to this village but into its very soul—into its weddings, its private conversations, its dreams. Over the course of four seasons a carpet will be made—its threads carted home, its weft and warp deliberated, its colors dropped into the dung on the makeshift floor or powdered with the dust of a broken roof. A carpet will be made and carted away, and maybe this very carpet lies now in your living room, and if it does, every knot contains a secret, and it is those secrets, or the intimations of those secrets, that Anna carries forward with her prose.

The book is a fugue—a composition of rare words, future imperfects, irregular verbs, remarkable histories, fragments of Rumi poems, small interludes of the personal I, discrete returns to the making of that carpet. It is tender where tender lives and terrible, too; the deliberate poisoning of a crane, for example, broke my heart, as did the opium doping of babies, and the stagnant arc of lives, and the joyless face of the young bride. Anna's primary companion is a man named Amanullah, whose dreams of being elsewhere are palpable, and sometimes comic, and sometimes not, for not having choices is hardly the thing we want for the people whom we love. The skies are gorgeous, Anna tells us. The sand composes itself into something almost unearthly. Laughter rises up from bare kitchens and from behind the dunes where the townspeople go to relieve themselves. And color. There is color her, in Oqa, and there is color in that rug.

A favorite scene, simply and magically told, concerns a bed brought to Oqa by old Baba Nazar, the only bed in the town. In winter it lives in Baba's room. But look what happens in other seasons:

In warm months the hunter and his son would drag the bed into the sun and anchor its uneven and hollow rusted legs on three clay bricks. Then the bed would become the village centerpiece, teh Oqa equivalent of a town square, or of a mosque. Men would lounge on it as they would on a takht and talk. They would gather around it to listen to newscasts on Baba Nazar's thirty-year-old transistor radio and discuss dispatches from the world beyond their desert, even beyond the serrated Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. Children would hide under it, run around it in circles, chasing one another, and, when Baba Nazar was not looking and when no adults were sitting on it, bounce on the squeaky springs.

Anna Badkhen writes with transporting authority and poetic license. When she told me that her editor was Rebecca Saletan, I was not surprised. Becky publishes beautiful books.

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