Anthropologies: Relating to her recounting and reliving

I am a slow reader with this book. Perhaps it is my own withdrawal from eight years of smoking cigarettes, that slowing of life when the body yearns and aches for something. I admittedly cannot even read the book in a linear fashion. I read it all. But I would read ten or fifteen pages, mark the page I stopped at, then skip ahead and do the same. I read the book like a person kicking a bad drug habit: without focus, without patience, caring so deeply and then not caring at all. The funny thing is, even when I filled in the missing pieces, added them to my notes on the book so that it fit into the organized chaos of understanding her life, her memoir, I feel like I read it exactly the way I was supposed to. I feel like I read it the way she may have wrote it. I read fragments, pieces, juicy details that were refined through time and the need to tell it to others.

Perhaps I read this book slowly because of the way Alvarado sketches out her world. The way that her details situate us, the readers, in her memories and thoughts. Alvarado does this in so many ways. She has these short sentences that situate us in time or in a state. “I’m eighteen.” And “It’s 1972.” These short sentences are almost always contextualized with more. Alvarado is long winded as hell and I love it. So when she gives us these short nuggets, I take them and let them sit with me. It makes you slow down and breathe. “So it has come to this. The human body, a shell.” Her moments of brevity are followed up with how she was a very old, a very tired eighteen, or about a memory that makes her never be able to forget what year it was. 

Another one of the greatest examples in the book is “Behind me, the baby grand piano; behind her, the gilded mirror.” We are given the kind of layout, set up, that a camera would have, some cinematic staging of her piece. 

But what settled deep into my body is the way Alvarado gave us long, descriptive sentences that wrapped us into her world. In the beginning, the following passage made me feel as if I was living the dream with her. The list-making is an effective way of showing the character her thought process of recounting during the dream (or in it’s recollection) but also is structured with a very interesting use of punctuation that allows us to flow effortlessly from one strain of thought and list to the next. 

“what haunts are not the dead. but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others. once, feverish with pneumonia, i left my body. and floated down the long hallway. past my parents’ room. past he bathroom. past my sisters. all empty. i had come loose in time. no one else was home: the kitchen, empty, counters clean, mail stacked neatly on the island, grocery list, tomatoes, bread crossed out, milk; my father’s office, no one, sheets of paper littered across the top of his desk, maps rolled up. the family room, tv off. the pool dark water on the other side of the glass doors. glass like pools of black and its night, late, late, and my little sister and I hear piano music coming from the living room. faint music like a song heard through a window on a summer night. 

Although I believe that this is the best way she stages the reader as undoubtedly there, as a key figure in the making of her own memory, a later section demonstrates the importance of the readers felt presence, too. When she is recalling the experience with the mysterious man from her dream, where she questions whether or not he is a ghost or if he is a metaphor for the evil that is sudden loss, she does a great job of putting the reader into an eerie setting of feeling like they are experiencing this mysterious man. The readers feeling the tingling sensation of a surprising whisper in your ear. But I cannot leave out the amazing passage of her detailing the feeling of realizing she must quit dope. 

“but then I love that way when it happen, how it happened, when it's no longer something you want something you need something need to quit. what are the dividing lines? How did this happen to us, that's what you wonder. How could we have been so stupid? Time to quit, that’s what you say. Over and over again you say this: when your arms get sore; when you no longer get high, you only get well; when everyone is looking to rip you off; when you have no money; when you’re getting evicted; when your car won't start or you run it out of oil (because who can afford oil?); when the cops come to your house in the middle of the night, the light on the helicopter so bright, it may as well be noon, when the junkie who’s selling to you tells his kid to watch the TV but the kid hears the match and turns his head and sees the flame underneath the spoon and there his mother is, standing up against the wall, checking the veins on her arms, and the dad stands up walks over to the kid, all of five years old, and slaps him, hard, and says, I told you not to look. And you think, what the hell am I doing? Living in a bad movie? Or maybe it’s the day the Diane, just out of the hospital, her fourth miscarriage, overdoses, and you have to put her in the bathtub, run cold water over her to bring her out of it. And then you watch her get on the motorcycle behind her boyfriend and you know that could be your future. You could be Diane.”

She draws us in by recounting and reliving these fragments of her life, these various moments, quite like her memoir, that create the whole story of her thinking its time to quit dope or thinking its time to tell her story. She uses second person point of view to ground us in these moments, let us relive them with her (hell, on our own). I feel as if we go through the motions of her thought processes and memories that inform this decision in such a way that the decision is created in us (and not just a simple: the narrator announces she wants to quit dope because of these listed moments). No, the reader makes the decision with her. We get find it in us to need there to be more for her than just cold bathtub overdoses and junkies beating on their kids to avoid shame. 

To go back to the slowness in which I read this book: “Or maybe something sad had already caught up with him and, as kind as he was, had sucked everything out of him and now there was only a paralysis, inertia, the inertia that was dope because, even when you weren’t doing it, it was all you wanted. The inertia of absence, like the gap a lover leaves where nothing else matters.” I have had lovers hitting rock bottom from heroin. My father has been doing heroin as long as I’ve been alive. And there is a slowness in the way we think of a life, when we are taking on this impossible feat of trying to talk to readers, I mean pull up a chair and have a heart to heart with these strangers reading your work that will somehow help you deepen what you’re talking about. 

I am also thinking about this same slowness within the intimacy in which she writes about her family. I have plenty of things that I relate to Alvarado with. But we do not have the same mommy issues or daddy issues. They are quite different and yet I feel like she was able to place us within the stories of her family enough to make us feel the type of understanding, to get the type of impact, needed to, again, deepen what she is talking about. It’s an emotional depth, a journey in the readers’ bodies that goes elsewhere, goes somewhere conceptual/intellectual pathways just don’t. 

Let’s go there: 

“Every time I want to talk to him, a little voice in my mind, my mothers?, always ask, does this matter, does this really matter, is it important enough to disturb your father?” She paces this sentence so that she can pack it full of the pauses and breaks that make her own thought processes. She thinks this, and then that, thinks about that, thinks about something else, and then finishes the thought about this. And those branching thoughts are all to contextualize the initial thought. Another example of how she is able to speak to an emotionally charged, intimate thoughts regarding her family: 

“There was something fragile in my mother, something that mad me want to protect her. even when i was very young. i knew she was afraid, afraid of loss. her life had been defined by loss. i shall not want. i imagined her saying this every night as she fell asleep, everyday as she walked around the house. i shall not want. i shall not want, i shall not want.” Here, we sink into the place she once was. Choppy sentences and thoughts, gathered from the same parts of her mind, give us both the fragments of stories about a young Beth, an older Beth, her mother in her youth (experiencing such loss), and her mother older (more jaded). The repetition of “I shall not want” makes me wonder if who and when is saying “I shall not want.”`It is the slowness of time passing.

The Creditably is in the Details

When I saw “a family memoir on the front cover of Beth Alvarado’s Anthropologies I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Aren’t all memoirs some sort of history of a family, or at least of one member of that family? Then I wondered how she was going to be able to speak for her family, do them justice, my own anxieties as the writer in my family were already clouding my reading before I had even started.

Once I got into the book it became clear how she was going to do this. From the first page she says about her mother, “she wants to tell me her stories, and every time I come to bring her groceries or make her soup or take her to see a doctor, she revises them.” This sets up everything. It shows us a pattern that is seen throughout the memoir. The narrator is being told these stories, especially the ones that do not involve her, and is sharing them with the reader. And as she shares them with the reader she has the ability to set the circumstances of a situation in a very concise way, letting the reader in subtle on what is happening and making us feel like we are there. She does this a couple of different ways but here it is through listing the activities she does for her mother: grocery shopping, cooking, doctors’ appointments. As readers we now know she is at least in part taking care of her mother, but she didn’t have to tell us it out right.    

Later in the memoir we see she is not only the receiver of stories in her own family but in Fernando’s as well. She says of Dora, “I think Dora tells me these stories simply because I am a willing listener.” The pattern is shown again, and now as readers, because this isn’t the first instance this has happened, Beth is given the credibility to speak about a family she wasn’t born into.

If there was any doubt about the reliability of the narrator, Beth has some interesting ways of grabbing hold of credibility. First off when she isn’t sure of a detail she states that she isn’t sure like she did in the scene when her and Fernando are riding home from dinner with her parents, “Look, he says, I don’t need a white savior. (but maybe that was on another night.) thanks anyways, he says.” This is a very tense scene, and Beth risks interrupting it to stick to the “truth” that makes the narrator creditable. As a reader now we will take what she says as “truth” because if it wasn’t she would state the uncertainty.

If as a reader you were still wondering how she is able to render such lively details of the lives of people who lived generations before her, like her grandparents and great grandparents, Beth subtlety gave the reader the answer to that question in more than one place.

In a section in part two at Johnny’s funeral it says, “I was a traveler, only half in the world, recording, remembering what I could see, relying on images.” She is referring to her not speaking Spanish, but it is a wonderful metaphor for someone who collects people’s stories. Collecting them isn’t enough; one has to be able to render them to life. In the conversation with Dora, Beth as the narrator explains to the reader how she is able to render them to life and how a “family memoir” is even possible to write, “I love the way whole histories open up before my eyes, one or two details and I can imagine a life.” She managed to imagine several.

Best,

CF

Anthopolgies: A Family Memoir

If you have experienced the truth, joy and pain of listening to the words from your favorite story spoken by a trustworthy voice , you will appreciate Anthropologies: A family Memoir by Beth Alvarado.  Beth Alvarado evokes comfortable and uncomfortable emotions by crafting relatable environments that hold readers in time and place as if we were there experiencing the turn of events first hand. The question is how does she do it?

The book is divided into three parts, Notes on Silence, Notes on Travel and Notes on Art. The parts function to frame the reader thus the relatable environment begins.  In Notes on Silence, Alvarado immediately makes the reader feel comfortable by telling the story in first person. Its as if we are sitting in the small dinning room with Alvarado and her mother listening to the story, savoring the words one by one, anticipating the arrival of the next word before the first one is complete. Additionally, rather than showing us what the environment is, she shows us what the environment isn't.  She writes about her mother, "She no longer plays golf. She no longer plays the piano. She no longer paints Chinese watercolors or plays bridge with her friends...she is still beautiful." By telling us what her mother isn't, we get a vivid image of what her mother was and what she is now.   In place of long, descriptive narrative about her mother's condition, Alvarado uses concise sentences that tell enough to make the point and create intrigue while making space for the reader to participant in the scene by imagining everything that is not said, For example, "The oxygen machine hums in the background."

Again, When she introduces her drug addition, Alvarado employs the craft of placing the reading in the story.  She writes, "There are marks on my arms, but my mother never mentions them." As I read, I imagine myself there in 1972 watching Alvarado in her "black tee shirt, baggy bell bottoms" with marks on her arms wondering how silence can speak so loudly.  Admiring the economy of words.

In Notes on Travel, Alvarado uses more description mixed with concise sentences.  The concise sentences remind us that we are included in the story.  "We plan our extravagant dinner. I will drink a crisp white wine. A grilled artichoke with aioli for starters.  Then for the gentleman, sea bass wrapped in a potato crust, tiny spring asparagus on the side."  The description is so well done, that I can smell the sea bass and taste the asparagus.  Words like "we plan" and "for starters" create a slower pace and allow us to take our time enjoying the environment Alvarado creates.  Rather real, dreamed or imagined, its as if we are there as silent observers taking it all in.

Stacy Johnson

Below the Ironing Board

The first thing that I notice is that the narrator, Elizabeth, recognizes her mother’s despair from a young age. While she doesn’t fully understand the depth of it, because her mother doesn’t speak much of past things, she understands that her mother is affected by the loss in her life. On page 4, the narrator talks about the twenty-third Psalms (“The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want…”), and the affect it has on her mother. Instead of the scripture being a comfort to her, the words are a reflection of sorrow to her mother. She associates the words with death because they’re repeatedly spoken at funeral services. While Elizabeth (child’s view) views the manuscripts as “beautiful,” they are a reminder of tragedy in her mother’s eyes. As a result, the narrator wants to protect her mother because she senses “something fragile” in her (9). The narrator can also see the disintegration of her parent’s marriage, 1968. She acknowledges the fact that it may have already been falling apart before, but this is when she begins to notice (12).

            I also see two or three separate perspectives of the child’s eye. Two from the children who have grown up in nuclear homes, at some point, have different viewpoints from that of the children who live in foster care. (This is something that is repeated in time). In Hayward, Elizabeth’s mother’s childhood was somewhat magical. Although Aunt Dorothy later reveals her father’s infidelities to Elizabeth, her mother adores their father. She has good memories in a home where there are “treasures in the attic…” and she and her sister can jump “from the barn roof with umbrellas, hoping for flight (12).” Although the children may have had opposing viewpoints of their father, at least one (or maybe both girls, we don’t get much of Dorothy’s childhood perspective), was able to dream and the other able to distinguish. (Distinguish referring back to the counselor remarks about the “Care kids” being unable to express their emotions. Happy, angry, sad, etc.) At The Shelter Care (84-85), the children are described as “lost” and “thrown away” as a result of their circumstances (molestation, physical and mental abuse, etc.), which cases their mistrust of adults. “It’s a matter of survival. It’s dangerous to get attached, to open up, to confide. Everyone must first be measured. Everyone is found lacking.” The children who have been cast away can only see as far as their hurt, because that’s all they know.

In contrast, the narrator gives us a rundown of names that connect husband to wife on both sides of her children’s family. (Her mother and father, her grandparents, Aunt Dorothy and her husband, Dora and her husband, Grace and Rodrigo (Fernando’s grandparents), Norma and her husband Poncho, etc.) While there may have been some issues within the family, the narrator provides a history of relationships, many of which standing the test of time. These are positive examples that, for instance, the “Care kids” don’t have. “He is the only one they trust,” is how the narrator describes the children in relation to her 2year old son Michael. The images they see looking up from the ironing board have all been distorted, because adult = hurt and mistrust to them. This is why Michael is favored because they view him beneath the ironing board where it’s safe.

            Finally, dreams, illusions, and foretelling of the future occurs below the ironing board. Dora sees her Aunt’s death as a child before it occurs, and her mother slaps her for it (22). Fernando sees his wife in a dream before he ever meets Elizabeth. “It was in a vision,” he says (47). Fernando’s tata Rodrigo knows from childhood, he will marry Grace. He is twelve at the time and Grace is just a baby. “Daughter of a schoolteacher…he would marry her (69).”       

Britney Hill (Brit)

Bone Black Response

Without a doubt, I can certainly relate to the tales portrayed in Bone Black. Because I am last to post, I made a point of trying NOT to read the responses of my cohorts, so that my responses will be exactly that, my own and without influence. Much of story reminds me of my upbringing, and especially that of my grandmother’s country upbringing. Because many of the details in the book ring true in my own life, these kinds of stories are dear to my heart and seem to act as windows to view past and present African American culture. 

Hooks’ craft technique of giving readers chapter by chapter of shorter sections (vignettes) was affective for me. This always left me wanting more information and excited to flip to see what the next chapter had to offer in reference to the last. Right off I asked myself, “What is the author trying to accomplish here?” Many of the chapters seem to be singular, in that each was a tale of it’s own. One chapter didn’t necessarily have to do with the next, but Hooks’ would find one intricate detail that connected each chapter to give the overall book a more rounded out feel. For instance, one chapter would end discussing something red, and the next chapter would pick up talking about the importance of a “red” wagon. (The wheelbarrow that the narrator and her brother loved so much.) Another chapter would end discussing a man, who ended up being the landlord’s son, before the next picked up on that “man” having a car. (Further, this being the same “car” they, the narrator and her sibling, loved to hid and play in). This craft technique is interesting and something I would be willing try.

However, the POV switched back and forth, which did bother me at one point. At the beginning of chapter 33, “It may have been the pretend Tom Thumb wedding… (97).” This really took me out of the storyline for a minute. I actually stopped for a pause, and began again. I think this is because it was the fist time in the story that the main character was not the narrator. I don’t necessarily think those types of shifts sour the overall book, but here, it was annoying for me because of how late in the book the shift came.

Some of the smoother narrative shifts, to me of course, occur when they happen earlier on. Like in Toni Morrison’s “A Mercy,” for instance. Each chapter is narrated by a different character from the beginning, so I knew earlier on what type of ride the book was going to be like. This doesn’t mean that I like predictable books. As a reader though, I would just prefer a more distinct pattern.

There were many evacuative things in this text that sparked my interests; the spankings with the switches and the ethnic dialog that came along with it, the differences between the lye soap and Ivory (being poor and having money), the wood burning stove, etc.) What stood out most to me was the hot comb, pressing hair in the kitchen, and the narrator’s meaning behind all of it. This was an important part of the story because, I think it really revealed a piece of the narrator’s character. While others, like her mother and sisters, may have thought she wanted her hair straighten to look a certain way, she was more concerned about crossing over into womanhood. The symbolism behind the straight hair was more important to her than anything.

Also, the age of discovery was big in the scenes where she and her mother interacted. She realized that they differed, and that she didn’t need to be married or a man’s approval at the risk of humiliating another. (This is in reference to the narrator’s father slapping her of course, and her mother portraying a look of pride in her husband’s actions). Lastly, the pace of the lines really helped in placing the reader into the narrator’s young mind. Shorter lines created a shorter thought process. This in comparison to compound phrases when adults were being portrayed.