Walk A Few Hundred Pages in Someone Else’s Shoes https://ift.tt/fDroC7m
Distance breeds suspicion; proximity, empathy. As divisions widen among us in a seismic society, story offers what it long has: the opportunity to step inside the mind of another and find comfort and camaraderie and to develop empathy for those with a lived experience different than our own. Here are seven that have resonated with me deeply, chosen because of how people with stories like these are being targeted today by hate and intolerance.
It’s difficult to recommend a book when its selling points read like reasons to avoid it. When D. Esperanza lost his caregivers at thirteen, he and his younger cousin decided to migrate to the United States from Honduras to reunite with his parents, who had migrated themselves when D. was a baby, in order to support the family. After a five month journey, Esperanza arrived at the height of the first Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy and was held in a makeshift tent facility in a Texan desert. Detained is the journal he kept of his experience of this harrowing time in U.S. history.
Our places of origin often contribute to who we are as people, and author Taylor Brorby connects his experience growing up as a sensitive kid man in the fractured lands of North Dakota to the coal mines and oil fields for which the area is known, where gritty masculinity and hard-line religion found him isolated and ostracized, eventually cut off from his family. Broby’s vulnerability and transparency offer safety and solidarity for those feeling out of place and unseen.
This two-part novel begins with a fictional recount of the gang rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert in 1949, known as the Nirim Affair, and then follows a modern-day (pre-genocide) Palestinian woman from Ramallah as she seeks to learn more of the incident after reading about it in the newspaper. Frigid and detached — which enhances the weight of living in traumatic circumstances — Shibli exemplifies what’s changed (or, what hasn’t) in 70 years of occupation.
Oakland-area characters with Native American ancestry grapple with the pride and pain of their Indigenous heritage in land that was once their own. Spanning decades, including the Occupation of Alcatraz, twelve stories converge at the Big Oakland Powwow, ending in suspense. Orange pens emotion in the vein of Toni Morrison — lyrical, affecting prose warming the stock pot water until the reader can’t recall a time when everything wasn’t burning, no longer able to turn their eyes from the suffering of those most oppressed in our society. My favorite line? “We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything.” And don’t miss Orange’s follow-up, Wandering Stars, which serves as both prequel and sequel.
Kaveh Akbar steps out of the poetry genre, notably with the encouragement of writing buddy Tommy Orange, to create a complex narrative exploring what it means to live and die with purpose. For me, the most notable threads were of addiction recovery and troubled family origins. Akbar’s poetic style in long form prose is a philosophical garden hose spraying relief on the desert.
The trajectory from innocent teenager to convicted drug dealer is fast and curvy when life throws trick pitches, and Salahudin strikes out when he’s left to pay off debt to keep the family business that doubles as their home after his mother dies and his father slips further into alcoholism. Tahir crafts a true-to-life you’d do it, too, story where loyalty and friendship come through, but none escape unscathed.
Marisel Vera explores little-known elements of U.S. history by spotlighting its well-worn foreign policy and the way colonialism preys on the vulnerable. A young Puerto Rican family was already struggling when a hurricane decimates their coffee crop, leaving them with no other option but to take advantage of America’s offer to relocate to Hawaii with promises that are left unfulfilled. The tropical climates, gorgeous landscape and enduring hardship become palpable in Vera’s words.
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