simplyann

List of Books - Literature

I would like to own all of Octavia E. Butler’s published writing, including the anthologies in which her writing appears.

I’m also building the same sort of thing with James Bladwin, bell hooks, C.S. Lewis and Toni Morrison.

I’d like to continue paying close attention to Tricia Rose’s critiques of culture and Zadie Smith’s work as well.

This is a snapshot of my Literature library.  I’ll have another one for my geeks and geekettes as soon as I remember the name of that one guy who wrote about presenting data.

Whose body of work are you following closely?

“I was beginning to feel like a traitor,” I said. “Guilty for saving him. Now…I don’t know what to feel. Somehow, I always seem to forgive him for what he does to me.  I can’t hate him the way I should until I see him doing things to other people.” I shook my head. “I guess I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black.”

Carrie made quick waving-aside gestures, her expression annoyed.  She came over to me and wiped one side of my face with her fingers - wiped hard. I drew back, and she held her fingers inf ront ofme, showed me both sides. But for once, I didn’t understand,

Frustrated, she took me by the hand and led me out to where Nigel was chopping firewood.  There, before him, she repeated the face-rubbing gesture, and he nodded.

“She means it don’t come off, Dana,” he said quietly.  “The black.  She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”

This passage is between Dana, the Black protagonist from 1976 and her Alice, her ancestor. One Black woman to another.

I shrugged again, refusing to argue with her. What could I win?

She made a wordless sound and covered her face with her hands.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said wearily.  “Why you let me run you down like that? You done everything you coudl for me, maybe even saved my life.  I seen people get lockjaw and die from way less than I had wrong with me.  Why youlet me talk about you so bad?”

“Why do you do it?”

She sighed, bent her body into a “c” as she crouched in her chair.  “Because I get so mad…I get so mad I can taste it in my mouth. And you’re the only one I can take it out on - the only one I can hurt and not be hurt back.”

“Don’t keep doing it,” I said.  “I have feelings just like you do.”

I have feelings just like you do.

From “The Fight”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.  “You want to marry me?”

“Yeah, don’t you want to marry me?” He grinned. “I’d let you type all my manuscripts.”

I was drying our dinner dishes just then, and I threw the dish towel at him.  He really had asked me to do some typing for him three times.  I’d done it the first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I hated typing, how I did all but the final drafts of my stories in longhand.  That was why I was with a blue-collar agency instead of a white-collar agency.  The second time he asked, though, I told him, and I refused.  He was annoyed.  The third time when I refused again, he was angry.  He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave.  So I went home.

When I rang his doorbell the next day after work, he looked surprised. “You came back.”

“Didn’t you want me to?”

“Well…sure. Will you type those pages for me now?”

“No.”

“Dammit, Dana…!”

I stood waiting for him to either shut the door or let me in.  he let me in.

And now he wanted to marry me.

Kindred…

I’ll post a few of my favorite passages here. This tumblr auto-posts to twitter, but I can’t use twitter right now, so if you’re here from twitter, please use tumblr to respond.

I’m healing. And re-reading “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler. And an American Black woman has to make this into a movie. I can’t do it, but I’ll pay for it to get done.

for freedom, not yet gotten.

what happens when the uniforms come off and humans emerge? broken systems submerge the best of intentions underneath a waterfall of lies, generations of deceit and two mothers’ defeated hopes. justice? no, peace. peace? no. justice.

but sometimes it seems it’s just this struggle that holds us too closely. just this fear that binds us too nearly and we suffocate, choking on realities of our own making, faking happinesses that were meant to be more than just smoky mirrors on revolving doors and emptying our souls with longing.

what would it take for that moment to be reversed? for a life to be gotten back from pools of spent bullets and a regretful heart? there aren’t enough tears to wipe the blood off your hands. there aren’t enough tears to make your kids understand what happened to their uncle so and so is what has been happening to someone’s uncle so and sos since so and so had tactics to spare, powers to bare and wicked intentions to move capitalism along its merry path.

our lives are meaningful and our souls are sacred and if we came into this world butt naked why are we trying to sell the only infinite things we have for these mere moments that define “making it?” are we really lost souls? sometime we were laughing, somewhere we were laughing, somehow we are moving these mimed moments across an unseen axis of ticking time.

i love. you love. we love. we move, searching for our pure harmonies between the currents of faint melodies that once raked our bodies with sweet tendrils of music. divine. heavenly. music that was meant to move mountains, to shake down fears and to bring death crumbling to its knees.

but we forget. we forget that we are eternal beings made for love and made for making, in the image of one great creator. and because we choose not to remember we let our lives live us instead of the other way around.

love is forever but this moment is not. live love today with all that you’ve got.