january 17
hello again, my friends! another week has flown by, frankly. I am having a hysterectomy this coming Tuesday (!) and so this past week has been trying to get everything in line and ready for my upcoming week of recovery, and wrap up any loose ends I have—I finished the job I’ve had since late October, for example, and am back looking for employment after my recovery. It’s a very weird thing, and a weird moment to be sitting in, in addition to the general weirdness that has been the not-peaceful transfer of power and the fear about what will happen come Wednesday (while I am hopefully on pain meds and mostly resting.)
I don’t know that I have many answers, except that I hope you keep yourselves and each other safe on Wednesday—have a safety plan, check in with your friends on their safety plans, and try to make sure your basics are accounted for (good food, hydrating every day, taking meds if that’s part of your health plan.) All of that stuff is what we can do to put us in the best place to be safe regardless of what happens. (Of course, I say this and I will be temporarily off my meds, but I made that decision with my providers for my overall health and pain management! So if you’re gonna go off, consult someone about it please, thanks!)
And with that anxiety and also the fact that I’ll be recovering from a procedure, I’m not sure if I’ll have a newsletter out next week—I have at least one more book review that I haven’t written yet, from books I finished last week, but while I always dream of recovery time as this beautiful space in which I will read SO MUCH, the reality is I’m probably going to sleep through most of the next week and stare mindlessly at my computer the rest of the time. So if you don’t get this newsletter next week, no fear! I am probably asleep. But since I HAVE stuff I’ve written about this week, let’s move to
Books I Wrote About This Week
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Have you ever read a book where you notice something at the very beginning, and then nothing is said about it, but then it keeps appearing and you're like "clearly we see this is going on right?" and nothing is said about it and you're like "is its appearance supposed to speak for itself? what is happening here?" and then it's never addressed and you're like "oh my god"?
That's kind of how I felt about this book and colonialism. Very early on in the text, (at 5% of the ebook, according to the notes I took on it,) as Keefe is describing the segregated world of Belfast, he notes the streets that made up the "Catholic enclaves"--"Bombay Street, Waterville Street, Kashmir Road." I immediately went "oh holy shit the geography of Belfast is so colonial, that's bonkers." Like yes objectively I know a republican Ireland is and was an anticolonial effort, but to see the British empire be so explicitly inscribed on Belfast through the street names was so startling to me. And it's just... there, no comment. No real comment on colonialism and empire when we discuss that one of the primary architects of the British military response to the IRA developed his theories while suppressing the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, no comment when the last viceroy of Indian, was killed by the IRA. By that point I felt kind of insane, very "hunt for Pepe Siliva," as I looked at all of this stuff that made me start screaming "EMPIRE" at my book every time I read it, including the fact that apparently the British military referred to west Belfast as "the reservation"????? Which Keefe follows up as (obviously) alluding to Indian country, which is a US-specific term (and is, for folks who don't know, a legal term; it's not specifically racist, which I saw some people claim at some point last year.)
Me compiling a lists to all references of other British imperial holdings or former holdings, and looking for any use of the word “colonialism” in the text to describe Britain’s relationship to northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. [image description: Charlie from the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a white man in a blue shirt and brown and black striped tie, stands in front of a board with papers covering it. Some papers are connected by string or red lines, and in the middle in messy black writing reads “PEPE SILVIA.” Charlie is holding a cigarette and looks fairly crazed]
And I understand that every book has its limitations; this one did a lot already, and I can't exactly fault it for not reaching there when the book itself is really framed more as a true crime piece than a history piece, and Keefe in fact insists he's not a historian. But there hit a point in the text where I was like "are we just. not going to talk about colonialism explicitly at ALL?" when clearly it's a huge part of what is going on in the book. And maybe Keefe thought that just by naming some of these things, he was doing the work of naming colonialism, but given that like. I don't think many US readers even know that Britain was in Kenya at all, much less about the Mau Mau uprising (which I only learned about in college because I wrote a paper about it for a historiography class in undergrad,) I'm not sure how much it really would hit home with most US readers.
Like all of this being said, I did enjoy the book and learned a lot from it; it just also made me feel kind of crazy/crazier as I saw all this stuff that was just never commented on! If you have recommendations for books that talk about the IRA as an anticolonial group, especially if there are any political or ideological ties to other anticolonial movements, that's what I'm most interested in reading next, based on this!
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Bader, illustrations by Rovina Cai
Oh folks this book was so much fun. There was so much in the worldbuilding that was done with so much care and also just like. Really incredible thought and creativity that boggles me. RAISING THE GHOSTS OF DINOSAURS?? I love that! VAMPIRES AND SETTLER COLONIALISM?? I mean I love the intersection of the mythology of vampires and how Little Badger got wildly creative with it. MAGIC?? We love that too!
Just so much about this book was super creative and branched out in ways that straddled like Native stories but also speculative fiction stories (is it fantasy? is it like alt-history fantasy? idk it's a World Like Ours But There's Magic and Stuff.) It has all this space for fun but also is like. Sometimes kind of brutal and grapples with serious narratives--settler colonialism is present (AND NAMED, which, as we know from me reading Say Nothing, matters a lot to me,) and anti-Native racism rears its head occasionally, and the primary arc of the book deals with murder and death, but there is also a lot of fun in the creativity of the world and Ellie's relationship with her GHOST DOG (DID I MENTION THERE'S A GHOST DOG???) It just hit so many sweet spots at once, so if you can pick up a copy of this from your local indie bookstore, a non-local indie bookstore from their website or bookshop.org, or your local library, definitely do.
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, by Tiffany Lethabo King
Oh folks it's been so long since I got to read an academic book that delighted my brain in the introduction. "ai you read academic books all the time" like yes and no. I think there's a specific... vibe? To books I consider Academic, or at least the kinds of Academic Books that I Like (which are usually like interdisciplinary works, lol, this is why I call myself not really a historian, because I think history books are usually... pretty boring.)
But Indigenous studies is my minor field (theoretically, if I were still in school,) and what I liked about it so much is the refusal to engage with the US state and inclusion into said state as the Ultimate Goal of history, something I struggled with when it came to many works of African American history in the class I took in grad school. But Black studies obviously is a much broader field with far different stakes than Black history in the ways I've encountered it, and though I find some of the major trends in the field to be not exactly my jam (I don't think I understand Afro-pessimism enough to like Get It, but I find it personally to be kind of an intellectual dead end,) this book opened up so much more for me in thinking about Black studies. (I also, as I noted in my review, have SO MUCH to read--like I guess now I have to read the entire work of Katherine McKittrick, because the way King cites her is so fascinating and I want to learn more! Should I probably have already read her work? Yes probably, but hey, as Lowly Worm says, better late than never!)
Anyway I'm sure that previous paragraph made you want me to never read an academic book again because I just babbled with no real end and if you don't know what I'm talking about, then it's like "why," but I guess know that like... this work was really a joy for me to engage with and read and think about. It's these kinds of things that make me miss grad school so much--the very cool and creative work that takes the intellectual work of these two fields seriously and combines them in really fascinating and wonderful ways. It was just delightful to get to read that, and I'm glad and hopeful that with the power of ILL I'll keep getting to read work like this soon in the future, because it really does delight me to read a good book like this. And I could say more but I feel kind of self conscious about babbling about academic work so much like this!
The Reading Situation
100 book count: at the time of this writing, I’ve finished 6 books out of 100, keeping up my track of being 2 books “ahead of schedule,” whatever that means (but hopefully that will cover next week’s suspected 0 additional reads!) So far I’ve also finished 6 books in January which is pretty good!
Author identity challenge: still at 3 out of 18 prompts, because some of the books I finished this week were holdovers from last year so I didn’t count them towards this year’s challenge (I’m not a cheater!) Plus so far I’ve read books by TWO Black nonbinary authors so they don’t count towards the total, but it’s still nice to keep track of that!
Current reading: I started Chaos Rising, a Star Wars book, yesterday; still chugging along slowly on Living a Feminist Life, and am a hunk of the way through Love WITH Accountability, which I’m really looking forward to writing about! Also slowly going through Foundations of Christian Faith, and VERY VERY CLOSE to finishing Plain Bad Heroines! So we’re getting there!
HMU
And that’s it for this week! As I said above, I hope you can stay safe and keep other folks safe this coming week; let me know if there are ways I can support you in doing that, be that making safety plans or reminding you to drink water. Hopefully I’ll be doing some of the latter over on twitter @fadesintointent; I might be posting some stories over on instagram @sonofahurricane, and if you have any recommendations for books about the IRA and colonialism, please let me know—you can comment or reply to the newsletter! Thank you, as always, for reading, and please take care of yourselves and each other. <3