As a shy, dreamy teenager who wrote poetry and often lived more fully with the fantasies in my head than in the real world, I could easily relate to Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical Another Brooklyn. The opportunity to talk about the book with a diverse group of paraprofessionals from two suburban schools intrigued me. Would they take to a book with such a poetic, impressionistic writing style?
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“I was not sorry when my brother died.” So begins Tsitsi Dangarembga’s semi-autobiographical novel Nervous Conditions, the story of Tambudzai, a teenage girl in the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who lives in two worlds: that of her parents, poor farmers who earn a meager living, and that of her aunt and uncle, whom the British colonists have chosen to receive an education in England and eventually to run the missionary school. I fell in love with Tambu in the first few pages, and as I introduce her to more readers, I have discovered that they take her to their hearts as well. This includes participants in a Books@Work group as well as college students in a “Questions of Identity” seminar.
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For Books@Work professor Gail Arnoff, James McBride’s The Color of Water is more than a memorable family story. It’s an opportunity for conversation, for exploring identity, family and history in the Books@Work seminar as well as in the traditional classroom. As she writes, “We talked about Ruth’s refusal to reveal anything about her background; childrearing; and racial and religious exclusion. In the last session, we discussed the burden of family secrets – in the book as well as in our own families. Most of all we talked about our identity, and the places from which it comes. So many passages in the book triggered discussions, including McBride’s own declaration: ‘Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul….[When] I look at Holocaust photographs…I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.'”
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