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books

Friday Beauty – The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

by Nadin Hadi 26 June 2020

It’s rare to find something that is exactly what it says it is. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a delight. Delightful. Delight full. Delight filled. I smiled so much reading this book. It felt like sitting in spring sunshine after a long cold winter dark.

Ross Gay, the poet and author of this collection of essays, set himself a task, a practice. Starting on his 42nd birthday, he would write about a delight every day for a year, draft them quickly and write them by hand.

I rememberthe book drift through my awareness. It popped up in Brain Pickings, and I’d see sections quoted in some of the poetry blogs I follow. I loved the joy and the generosity in them.

I thought I was going to read one a day, after breakfast before I started work, a simple read for my jittery attention shot pandemic brain.

I read the whole damn book in two days.

Writing is always an invitation, a way of sharing. This is how I see the world. Come sit by me for a while. The essays invite you into Ross Gay’s delights, into his world and invite you to consider your own, to pay attention, to cultivate delight.

One of my favourite questions I’ve been asked is a simple one. What is it like to be you right now? Gay’s essays are luminous with this, an embodied aliveness, rooted in who he is, noticing delight, and what that means for him as a black man in America.

They shine with tenderness, the quiet act of choosing to notice beauty, in every day ordinary life, in a complex and difficult world. They’re wry with humour and so generous. There’s a blend of memoir, biography and reflection that I love in writing, similar to why I love Maggie Nelson’s work. The anticipation of a vegan donut, the community garden he works in, the satisfaction of pulling up bindweed.

Woven through his observations is a point he makes in Joy is Such a Human Madness

“And given as I am writing a book of delights, and I am ultimately interested in joy, I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight… I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.” And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy”

A few sections from my favourites:

Loitering

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands NO SOLICITING / NO LOITERING stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: ‘to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,’ and ‘to travel indolently with frequent pauses.’”

Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygaggle, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (‘Lollygagger!’ or ‘Loafer!’).”

Is “lollygag” a Minnesota thing? Because my mom says that all the time.

Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering.’ Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception.

A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book not the Bible, and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, ‘Lord.’)

It occurs to me that laughter and loitering are kissing cousins, as both bespeak an interruption of production and consumption. And it’s probably for this reason that I have been among groups of nonwhite people laughing hard who have been shushed — in a Qdoba in Bloomington, in a bar in Fishtown, in the Harvard Club at Harvard. The shushing, perhaps, reminds how threatening to the order are our bodies in nonproductive, nonconsumptive delight.

The moment of laughter not only makes consumption impossible (you might choke) but if the laugh is hard enough, if the talk is just right, food or drink might fly from your mouth, if not — and this hurts — your nose. And if your body is supposed to be one of the consumables, if it has been, if it is, one of the consumables around which so many ideas of production and consumption have been structured in this country, well, there you go…”

Joy is Such a Human Madness

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be. She said, ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

I mentioned this last week, but it’s worth mentioning again. Krista Tippett did a gorgeous interview with Ross Gay which brought me so much joy.

26 June 2020 0 comment

Friday Beauty

Friday Beauty – A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

by Nadin Hadi 1 November 2019

written by Nadin Hadi

A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

Lost, losing, letting go, standing in a threshold, between the known and unknown, I picked Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost out from the shelves in the house I’m staying at. I’ve always reached to books, to story, both as escape and a doorway into new worlds. Rebecca Solnit was a name I’d known but not read until and the book is a beautiful exploration of lost, loss and through it, finding and discovery, the geography of spaces and selves, who we are in relationship to a place, to people to others.

I’m in the unfamiliar now. Terra incognito, walking towards the unknown. I stay in a different part of the city, streets and Tube stops unfamiliar. Where the hell is Wapping? The train stutters and disgorges me in strange places, outside of the familiar patterns and places of my old life in East London. A temporary suspension of a life, before a move somewhere yet not known, not yet decided, in transition, being with losing, loss, grief. I feel unrooted, outside my routine, my space, unwilling to invest into new patterns for a temporary place. Curious at what I still carry in me as things are stripped away.

Solnit says, to be lost, is to go beyond what you know. That involves growth but also decay, death, transformation.

“The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterﬂy, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you ﬁnd a rotting caterpillar. What you will never ﬁnd is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterﬂy, a ﬁt emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. But the butterﬂy is so ﬁt an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a ﬂower blooming.”

I travel for work and I’m back in the familiar. I know hotels, planes, in between spaces. How to bounce between countries. I have been someone who travels. When I’m stopped by the airport for yet another random screening, I think how a sense of belonging is often predicated on others responses to you. How my face marks me as foreign to be questioned, my Pakistani and Irish name. A woman between cultures, between lands. “Where are you from?” people ask. “No, where are you really from?” In the days post Brexit, there are the yells and whispers in the street. “Go back to where you came from.”

“There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

The policeman flicks through my passport, my past ports. “A lot of travel,” he notes and I’m grateful the old one, with its stamps from Sudan, Lebanon, and Malaysia amongst other places sits in a drawer. I think of the different people I was in those places, a life lost, left behind.

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names.

This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

This week, my former love reaches out. “It would be nice to know how you are.” and I hold the needed silence between us. If I could, I would say, the woman you knew no longer exists in the spaces we shared. She is gone. You cannot know her anymore. She doesn’t exist because the shared story, the shared places and spaces are lost and I have not the space or the desire to reweave another between us.

“The stories don’t fit back together, and it’s the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt… The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else.”

I’m travelling now through lostness. My teacher and I talk about surrender and loneliness this week. Loneliness as something to carry, how embracing it teaches you compassion and how to bless others. How surrender can open you up to grander landscapes than you can possible imagine. The life you dream for yourself is nothing compared to what God imagines and dreams for you if you can let yourself be in that unknown.

1 November 2019 0 comment

Friday Beauty Uncategorised

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

by Nadin Hadi 11 October 2019

written by Nadin Hadi

Sat in front of a fire, with a black cat nestled beside me, who insisted on gently resting his paw on my arm to cuddle, I finished up this book this week. It is exquisite. I know Vuong’s work as a poet. His collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds left me breathless and his debut novel is just as devastating beautiful.

Part memoir, part fiction, it tells the story of a young Vietmanese gay man, writing a letter to his mother that she will never read, a coming of age story about being immigrant, being gay, living in America, about his grandmother who fell in love with an American GI in Vietnam and bore him daughters, his mother who works as a nail technician, and his own life.

It is stunning and layered and he combines vivid sensuous language with simplicity. It’s a story about immigration, surviving violence, surviving poverty, about growing up, about America, about grief.

Some books break you open. It’s that Kafka line “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” When I read Vuong, I read him as someone who loves poetry, in wonder at his incredible talent for distilling complex ideas into simple devastating sentences.

I read him as a mixed race woman who has her own experience of immigration and outsider, who had to be both guide and map for parents who don’t know how to navigate this world, who wrote letters for her own mother aged nine, and is being asked to do so again faced with dementia and a fracturing family.

I read him as a girl who grew up in violence, who grew up in a family that carries trauma like dark hair and eyes, who knows love and family can be complicated things. The first time I read anything of his was in the New Yorker. It was called A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read and I read it and then closed the computer screen and wept.

A few lines from the book, but they cannot touch how his language and images deepen and grow with each chapter, how they sweep you away.

“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

“I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

11 October 2019 0 comment