black friend: baited with ziwe, rated by emilie
a funny, snappy, delectable read. razor-sharp!!! i read this because ziwe is coming to town in 5 days through the Phil Lind initiative. this year’s theme? “What It Means to Be ‘American’: Navigating Identity in a Changing Nation”.
but - why centre American identity at a Canadian institution?
is this, in any way, reinforcing American cultural dominance in discourse?
is our identity merely reactive to that of the United States?
the United States is definitely a changing nation, within itself, and with how it relates to others and positions itself.
INTERESTING. timely. outsider-looking-in pov.
are we looking at the source of a… scattered echo? is that us?
the last time i sat in the Chan Centre, i saw Viet Thanh Nguyen with my two friends (whom i ran the cutest, most wholesome book club with). we had just read The Sympathizer. being present in the room while listening to him speak was such a transformative experience. my mind was opened in ways that i could not fathom, with what felt like expansive concepts branching out of my being. i thought about what i stood for, and then we immediately zoomed out to expanses of time, war, trauma, our memories looking back at the same events, and paraphrasing Viet Thanh Nguyen, what constitutes the immigrant experience, which seems like it occupies a core personality trait of ‘American mythology’, but swinging between accepted and rejected depending on the country’s mood. he spoke about the influences and pressures of writing for the majority, as a so-called minority, stemming from his identity as a Vietnamese refugee. and how trauma is often too recent to write about, to hold weight. any piece of film/art/literature on the most recent and still-ongoing tragedies are likely to be rejected by the public and not sell off the charts, because it takes at least a few decades for the public to process and reflect on something so burning and sharp, especially war, for our mainstream subconscious to even come to approaching to the topic, to be incorporated into the classical scope of literature. these experiences are not less profound. we are slow. therefore, we find that the literary canon lags behind the real world by a few decades.
as a product of that, our western media ignores/filters certain tragedies. ongoing, heartbreaking tragedies. in the context of imperialism and oppression. in the context of Palestine. as if we can erase or sanitize or emotionally remove ourselves from devastating realities, or suppress suffering.
“stories have the power to save us and destroy us at the same time.” at the Chan Centre, Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke about how formative movies and media are to our collective narrative. from The Sympathizer directly, “I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.”
apologies.
this review is about ziwe!!!
i digress.
eek i’m so excited to see ziwe.
and be present and zone into her words.
she will have so much quick wordplay.
her brain runs so wicked fast.
(rachel webster’s letter of recommendation puts my feelings into words perfectly, towards the end of the book, if you know you know.)
back to ziwe. i especially loved her first few chapters (her essays are so digestible, and there is not a ton of chewing required but i do think for unpacking racism, sometimes a more mechanical breakdown of concepts is required and that responsibility is frequently bestowed upon the reader, but the magic of ziwe is that she makes these concepts so alive and and so relevant. it felt like such a brain break for me just running through her words, in between my tackling gunky concepts of physiology that gets gooed together (although it remains a wonderful, wonderful pursuit to dissect). i love her essay ‘airbnb’ especially. i was almost giggling in the library. and ‘wikifeet’ is funny. it’s smart. she’s wicked. i was annoyed that my apple books app chunked ziwe’s fun footnotes together at the end of each chapter, compared to regular paperbacks where i can dart my eyes down. a lot of the humour in this book i think will resonate with a certain audience (coughs my bf). i sent intriguing/interesting screenshots of her essays. my mom responded with a tears of joy emoji 😂 and i count that as a mission accomplished. funny, tossed concepts, relatable on a few levels. but i think all of it is understandable, regardless of your palate.
ziwe’s acknowledgements at the end, just “thank you”, shows how much appreciation ziwe has to her readership for taking on this book, and just taking on the initiative to engage with racism in an accessible way.
thank you.
