Taiye Selasi’s “Ghana Must Go” is exactly the kind of debut novel I love—ambitious in scope and distinctive in performance. Free of strict chronology and structure, and master of story and emotion.
In it, warring cultures breed tragedy of personal and global proportions. A husband and wife’s scarred pasts, unspoken even to one another, unsettle their union. An unjust professional failure precipitates an unnecessary familial one. A father’s absence leads to a son’s distance. A mother’s choice steals her twins’ innocence. An insecure daughter falters in the long shadow of her siblings’ gifts. All set against backdrops as far-flung as Accra and New England, Lagos and New York.
Selasi’s precision in describing the physical, spiritual and psychological terrain of six members of the Sai family and several supporting characters is a marvel of both imagination and execution. The author’s success in knotting each narrative thread to the others with an air of inevitability is a credit to her congruous vision and technical skill.
After reading the novel from cover to cover, I found myself flipping through its 300 pages and pausing at random to reconnect with the family and their multifaceted immigrant saga. I wanted more of them. Their varied, grasping foibles resonate. Wherever I landed, I found sentences captivating enough to plunge me right back into the heart of a scene, an emotion, a character. Selasi’s writing is that luxuriant.
An Artist’s Touch
Selasi handles punctuation and line breaks like a poet—or perhaps like the novel’s carpenter, Mr. Lamptey, wields his tools—eschewing rigid rules in favor of striking, evocative construction.
His house.
His beautiful, functional, elegant house, which appeared to him whole, the whole ethos, in an instant, like a fertilized zygote spinning inexplicably out of darkness in possession of an entire genetic code. An entire logic. The four quadrants: a nod to symmetry, to his training days, to graph paper, to the compass, perpetual journey/perpetual return, etc., etc., a gray courtyard, not green, polished rock, slabs of slate, treated concrete, a kind of rebuttal to the tropics, to home: so a homeland reimagined, all the lines clean and straight, nothing lush, soft, or verdant. In one instant. All there. Now here. Decades later on a street in Old Adabraka, a crumbling suburb of colonial mansions, whitewashed stucco, stray dogs. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created—
except Taiwo, he thinks suddenly, a shock of a thought. Whereon Taiwo herself—with black thicket for eyelash and carved rock for cheekbone and gemstone for eyes, her pink lips the same color as the inside of conch shells, impossibly beautiful, an impossible girl—sort of appears there in front of him interrupting his performance of The Considerate Husband, then goes up in smoke. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created alone, he amends the observation.
The fragments, idiosyncratic line breaks, streams of consciousness captured in type—they all work to punctuate the unfolding drama with rhythm and light and particularity. The writing’s lush bravura elevates the action beyond mere plot and makes quirky individuals of a diverse contingent of first- and second-generation African immigrants—a group too often stereotyped, masked and generalized into obscurity.
Selasi vividly details both people and places, but her real achievement is the interplay between the two—how the places constrain, even define, the people and how the people tint and interpret, but seldom transform or transcend, the places.
Black Like Me?
What I’ll remember most about this book is its variations on the theme of dislocation, cruel breaks that are hard to set right. The Sai children, like the author who created them, have a tenuous relationship with Africa. Their parents are from the continent, but the children were raised in the U.S. with a veil of shame between them and the history that might root them, wherever they may travel.
That’s a heartbreak I can relate to. Thanks to my Kentucky-born mother who goes to Africa every chance she gets, Africa has always been a part of my aesthetic. Art from her recent trip to Ghana adorns walls in my home now, just as drawings and sculpture from her time in Sierra Leone in the ‘60s colored my Ohio childhood.
But Africa has never been a direct part of my experience. Haven’t set foot on its rich soils. Can’t tell you who in my bloodline was last born there, when, or where. I imagine that he or she arrived here by way of the Middle Passage.
Though black, I’m as American as fast food and hip hop. Or, on a good day, as American as jazz—inventive, optimistic, creative in the face of adversity, a charged fusion of folk and pop. And so for me, “Ghana Must Go” expressed a yearning for home that I share and a reverence for Africa that I appreciate. For me, that personal resonance leant extra depth to a book that was already a wonderful read.
I have walked by Barkley Hendricks’s painting “Sisters (Susan and Toni)” in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts more than once. But I never paused long enough to fully consider it … until today.
Its subjects always struck me as cool—fashionable and aloof, but not much more than that. They are two black women, set against a matte black background, in not-quite-life-sized proportions, with only the glimmer of jewelry and some pops of blue and green to draw notice. I saw the women, but I didn’t appreciate their painter’s artistry. That’s the trick of photorealism: the beauty’s in the details.
This evening, I saw the acrylic and oil canvas anew as I read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” to the painting, museum-goers and the curator who acquired it. I presented Angelou’s work (published in ‘78 a year after “Sisters” was painted) in the gallery as a part of the African American National Read-In. The 25-year-old event is led by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English and aims to engage hundreds of thousands of people in the simultaneous celebration of black writers.
Continue reading “National African American Read-In VMFA Style”Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” came out last March, and has won praise and ire ever since. Some love it for its call to ambition. Others take issue with its focus on internal barriers to women’s success rather than institutional ones. And a particularly vocal throng savage Sandberg herself–her privilege, her preternatural stores of energy and her presumption that her rich girl ways are relevant for the rest of us.
“Sheryl Sandberg is hazardous to women,” wrote Andrea Peyser in the New York Post during the book’s launch. “Those who follow Sheryl’s lead are bound to be disappointed–bitter, broke, unemployed, and perpetually single.”
“Sheryl, have you ever stopped to consider that all this ‘leaning in’ is ruining life for the rest of us?,” echoed Rosa Brooks a year later in a Washington Post piece, titled “Recline, don’t ‘Lean In’ (Why I hate Sheryl Sandberg).”
Me? I liked the book at first. I thought its recommendations were practical (if not revolutionary) and its author was clever and well intentioned.
But as the groundswell of haters rose, I gave “Lean In” a second read, and fell in love. Sandberg did what a first-time author should do: She announced a destination, stayed in her lane and arrived there without too many pit stops or detours. She observed a dearth of women in senior leadership in every industry, offered some straightforward explanations of why that’s happened and offered some advice to those who want to take some personal initiative to reverse the trend.
Folks who wanted a memoir, a self-help book or a career-management guide can be disappointed in what she delivered but they can’t claim to have been misled. Within ten pages, she announces that the book’s a “sort of feminist manifesto.” Manifestos are more declaration than detail, so it’s safe to assume that a “sort of” manifesto will be just as vague.
Even those who long for sock-it-to-The-Man invective about the institutional blockades to women’s advancement at work must acknowledge that Sandberg’s not qualified to tell that story (yet). If she came out of the gate with a book of concrete corporate or public policy recommendations for bringing gender parity to corporate America, she would have had about 300 readers and zero credibility.
I like to read books by people who know what they are talking about. Don’t you? Until Sandberg transforms Facebook into a model of diversity, equity and inclusion (which I hope she will), I don’t want to read 200 pages of fairy tales from her on that subject. She’s trying to launch a social movement from a corporate perch, but she’s no dummy. She’s an executive, not a scholar, and has wisely chosen to hammer away at an insidious social problem from a position of strength.
Publishing thoughts on how to thrive as a woman in business amid significant workplace discrimination and inflexibility is well within the billionaire executive’s authority. That’s a book with teeth, written by a master of the disarming corporate-ladder-climbing smile, and many ambitious women would do well to mark her words.
Her central premise is that women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers, and that resonated with me. After reading “Lean In” the first time, I could clearly pinpoint critical junctures when I made choices about my work and my life without fully grasping their long-term consequences. And in many cases without even acknowledging that there was a choice at all.
I’m guilty as charged when it comes to making a slew of career-limiting choices. As soon as I got engaged, I narrowed job searches to cities near my then-fiance. Once married, I settled too quickly into a trailing-spouse mindset. After having a child, I became a maternal gatekeeper at home and hoarded household responsibilities.
Perhaps that’s why I had a positive but not effusive reaction to the book at first. I felt like it was too late for me to benefit from its wisdom. Forewarned is forearmed, but I’m in my 30s and already committed the missteps outlined in the “Don’t Leave Before You Leave” chapter. I had opted out of the traditional workforce so evidently that a local commission seeking my help wasn’t ashamed to list my title as “Shaka Smart’s wife” on its contact list. (Infuriated, I declined that inept invitation to serve.)
But on the second read, I focused less on the symptoms of leaning back and more on the characteristics of leaning in. I realized that though my career path has been far from traditional, it hasn’t exactly been laid back either. I’ve hopped from investment banking to PR, to journalism and entrepreneurship, to wifedom, to motherhood, to volunteering and philanthropy. Through the years, there have been periods of intense focus and great accomplishment despite the absence of a high-profile leadership role.
“Lean In”’s message is that such a jumble of activity is fine if that’s what you want, but if you actually want a top job you’ve got to be extremely intentional in its pursuit. Leading a country or a company (yes, Sandberg urges women to aim high) doesn’t happen by accident, given all of the social, cultural and even biological obstacles to staying fully committed to the workforce.
One personal takeaway is that in order to attain my biggest career dreams, given my particular circumstances, I have to make some tough choices about what I’m not going to do at all, what I’m not going to do well and how I am going to make those choices work for my family. I have to draw the lines. My work, volunteering and family will make endless demands on me, but I have to exert control and make conscious decisions about what I’m going to do, with what intensity and for how long.
Another idea I’ll carry with me is that if a top job is what I crave, I’m not just doing myself a disservice if I don’t go for it. I’m missing a huge opportunity to make the world a better place for women who don’t have the educational and economic opportunities that I have. “While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry,” Sandberg noted in a Barnard College commencement address. “This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, women’s voices are not heard equally.” I hear you.
The Sandberg haters like Brooks who say the book compels women to play Superwoman at home and at work clearly missed the chapters on “Making Your Partner a Real Partner” and “The Myth of Doing It All.” “Counterintuitively, long-term success at work often depends on not trying to meet every demand placed on us,” Sandberg argues. “The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately–to set limits and stick to them.”
In short, each of us has to put our big girl panties on, define what we want and go for it, knowing there must be boundaries and there will be sacrifices. Unlike some disgruntled readers, I don’t expect Sheryl Sandberg (or anyone else for that matter) to write a field guide detailed enough to instruct me in the intricacies of managing my own personal life and career. Yet I appreciate the subjective examples and insights she offers. They reveal something universal about making one’s way in the world. Ultimately, it’s my job to author the details of my particular work and will to lead.
A year after the publication of the book that launched a thousand women’s support groups, a stock photography collection and a screenplay, I got it. I’m leaning in… my way.
I’m reminded of my dad as I watch the #banbossy and #bossyandproud hashtags fly on Twitter. He was committed to cultivating my leadership potential and I’m sure that if he were still alive, he would be on Team Bossy and Proud. More importantly, he would expect me to have my own opinion on the subject and to put forth a well-reasoned defense of my view, whether I agreed with him or not. He was that kind of a father–and lawyer.
Team Ban Bossy led by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and “Lean In” author, posits that the term “bossy” is disproportionately applied to girls and inhibits their leadership aspirations. Her BanBossy.com website, launched in conjunction with the Girl Scouts of the USA, offers tips and tools for fostering ambition in girls.
While the literal notion of outlawing the word “bossy” is absurd, the underlying call to be conscious and intentional in the labels we apply to ourselves and others is spot on. As the mother of a daughter, the spirit of the Ban Bossy campaign resonates with me. Upon hearing of it, I immediately (and only half jokingly) began referring to my 2-year-old’s incessant demands as “displays of executive leadership potential,” instead of something less complimentary. So, hat tip to Sandberg and the Girl Scouts for raising the issue of gender bias in a catchy enough way to engage the public.
Continue reading “Bossy: The Other B Word”If today, I follow death
go down its trackless wastes,
salt my tongue on hardened tears
for my precious dear times waste
race
along that promised cave in a headlong
deadlong
haste,
Will you
have
the
grace
to mourn for
me?
–Mourning Grace by Maya Angelou
Recently I was invited to address the Richmond Chapter of Executive Women International (EWI) at its annual scholarship dinner. I decided to use the opportunity to share some of my ideas about one of life’s most underutilized power tools: storytelling.
I thought a “What’s Your Story?” theme could speak compellingly to both the businesswomen of EWI and their young college-bound scholarship recipients. I mentioned Maya Angelou (storyteller extraordinaire) during my remarks, not knowing that she was on her deathbed and would pass away soon thereafter.
In retrospect, I can imagine no better way to honor her, a preeminent interpreter of the human experience, than encouraging people to tell their own stories.
Continue reading “The Power of Story”Sometimes a book just beckons you. It calls you to pluck it from the shelves, even when what lies between the covers isn’t your slice of Brie. Months ago at Barnes & Noble, I glimpsed a pile of Kate Gosselin’s “Love Is in the Mix: Making Meals into Memories with Family-Friendly Recipes, Tips and Traditions.” The glossy hard cover–designed to endure cooking splatters and grubby kids’ hands, I presume–reeled me in. I had to have it.
Seeing the reality TV starlet surrounded by her eight smiling kids struck the mama chord with me and made me want to buy. My subconscious seemed to be saying, I don’t care how fake the smiles or how crappy the recipes, I am going to buy this book so this single mom of eight (of eight!) can get 50 more cents in her quarterly royalty check.
I skipped my typical close reading of the front and back covers, table of contents and introduction. I knew, without flipping a page, what I was getting. Sure enough, the collection proved to catalog some of the most humdrum recipes known to the American kitchen.
But that’s the beauty of the book and its author. They make no apologies. One “recipe” calls for making two boxes of store-bought macaroni and cheese according to the package instructions and then dumping in a bag of frozen peas and two cans of white albacore tuna. I doubt that even the accompanying anecdote, revealing that this is the kids’ “all-time favorite,” could redeem it for many cookbook readers, but I appreciate its practicality and lack of pretense.
Alicia Silverstone’s “The Kind Diet,” this is not. “Love Is in the Mix” is a real slice-of-life cookbook. I buy it 100%. I believe this mother of many who packs 40 lunches a week actually cooks this fanless fare on the regular. What else could she possibly do with nine mouths to feed? Of course, she’s cooking Memorable Pizza Meatballs, Kate’s Fish in Paper, Happy Face Hash Brown Casserole and “Sorta Healthy” Cereal Treats.
The cookbook gives all of us in the I-Don’t-Know-How-She-Does-It Club yet another voyeuristic view into her bulk-sized household–albeit without the husband drama this time around. I had no intention of ever actually cooking anything from it, but last night, in a fit of mommydarity, it beckoned me again. I found myself flipping through the pages, looking for something that would pass muster with my husband and daughter. Later that night, I served up some Gosselin-inspired herbed chicken with steamed broccoli and brown rice. It was a hit.
Taste-wise, the bird was just okay, but as I stood over the stove, which has been a rare occurrence the last few months, something special happened in our kitchen. The very act of home cooking–browning the chicken; sautéing shallots; mixing wine, stock and garlic; whisking half-and-half and mustard–can elevate even average food to an experience to be savored. My husband’s work-related text messages seemed to lose some of their urgency amid the sizzle and aroma of pan sauce thickening on the range. He settled into a chair, gave his phone a rest, inquired about my day. I need to cook more often, I thought. My curious toddler edged near the stove, too short to peer into the pan. Can I help you, mommy? I handed her some placemats to shuttle to the table.
“Nothing that comes from the kitchen is a mistake when you add love to the mix,” Gosselin wrote. One Creamy “Herbie” Chicken later, I concur. This was originally published on Book Riot. See Gosselin’s meal prep in action when a new Kate Plus 8 special airs June 25, 2014 on TLC.
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found El Dorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.”
–W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
“Posing Beauty in African American Culture,” a photographic history of black beauty, starts with the 1890s, after the period Du Bois describes. But it speaks to the same issues of ascendance from the unconscionable depths of slavery–how black people, a nation within a nation, assert themselves in American culture and make a way forward. How we insist upon our own subjectivity–in this case, literally, while posing for photographs. How we stake claim to our beauty–and our humanity.
To be seen as beautiful is to possess a certain power. To be seen at all is a triumph for a people who’ve survived a centuries-long assault on their freedom, character and culture. NYU professor Deborah Willis, who curated the exhibition and a book of the same name, makes a powerful contribution to art and to history by tracing the rise to freedom in the faces of so many black men and women, known and unknown, bygone and current.
Collectively, the images powerfully display a multifaceted black America that’s all too often rendered invisible or seen as a monolith. “Posing Beauty” presents shades of time and place, circumstance and culture, color and class that distinguish black people. It offers a fascinating look at individual faces, gazes and postures that together point to the profuse diversity and resilience of the black community.
Continue reading “Posing Beauty”Are you an elite competitor in the Busyness Games? Do you find new and creative ways to divide your time and attention? If so, then “Overwhelmed” is a must-read. It methodically reveals the tangle of unrealistic personal expectations, social pressure, and workplace inflexibility that conspire to push modern American schedules to the brink.
The book documents how, toward the end of the 20th century, busyness took on a kind of alluring high social status, distinct from previous eras. “What changed is the cultural imperative not just to have it all, but to fit it all in on the fast track, packing in a multitude of work, activities, and obligations until life feels, as one researcher put it, like an exhausting ‘everydayathon,’” Schulte writes.
It also illuminates one additional barrier to down time for women–the complete and utter lack of historical precedent for it. “Understand that, for women, there never has been a history or culture of leisure or play, unless you consider sweeping, making cheese, churning butter, quilting, and knitting your kind of fun,” she writes.
And these aren’t just the superficial observations of a harried author-mom. They are the considered conclusions of Schulte’s journalistic enterprise–the synthesis of countless in-depth interviews with time-use researchers, sociologists, neuroscientists, futurists, social psychologists, labor economists, legal scholars and more. Schulte gets kudos for living a scattered, frenzied, exhausting life and making the time to research an antidote to crazy-busy–for us and herself.
One of her findings is that we feel more time-starved than we actually are. We exaggerate how much we work–and how much we need to work to do well. We fail to recognize the leisure opportunities we have, allocating the time to less fulfilling (and sustainable) activity instead. We’ve fractured, fragmented and contaminated our time beyond reason–and at great personal and societal cost. And we’ve done so because of fundamental misunderstandings about leisure and its value for everything from personal life quality to national defense. (Yes, it’s that serious.)
I’ve made a couple of specific behavioral changes as a direct result of reading this book:
Time Tracking: I was intrigued by the work of the many time-use researchers that Schulte cites and began maintaining my own time diary to gain insight into how I spend my days. I use Toggl, time tracking software available online or via mobile app, and simply type what I’m doing, what project it’s associated with, and hit a start button. Later, I hit stop when I’m done and voila–a record of how my time was spent. After timing several tasks over several days, I’ve now got a bunch of data that I can analyze to get a feel for how efficiently–or not–I’m using my time.
Thoughtful Unitasking: Toggl’s simple interface asks, “What are you doing?” As a result, I’ve gotten into the habit of pausing frequently to ponder that question: “What are you doing, Maya?” This helps me hone in on what I really want to accomplish in a particular time frame.
For example, I used to beat myself up about spending too much time in my email inbox. But by asking myself, what are you doing?, I realized I’m not whiling away the days in useless conversation with whoever happens to write me, as I suspected before. Often, I’m doing important work in my inbox, and it’s affirming to pause and consider exactly what that work is. I might be reading messages that directly relate to my core projects. I could be drafting responses that drive the agendas for upcoming meetings in thoughtful directions. I may be connecting great people to one another.
So rather than having a vague sense that I spend too much time on email, I now look at the substance of my activity in the moment and discern when I’m wasting time (needless communication) and when I’m doing my thing (advancing causes and projects I care about). More often than not, I’m doing my thing and it gives me a little energy boost to acknowledge it.
After reading “Overwhelmed,” considering its arguments and applying some of its lessons, I have great clarity about where I spend my time and why. Moreover, I have a new awareness of my power to choose differently and an urgency about doing so. The role overload and task density that plague so many of us felt very optional after reading the book. It bolstered my resolve to relentlessly decline unwanted projects, activities and invitations so I can focus on the vital few. I hope it can do the same for you. Life’s too short to waste being busy when you could be effective instead.
