In 2002, having married a Jewish man and had a baby, I finally “got around to it” after a few years of study. At this point, I was no longer surviving on Skor bars, but bacon cheeseburgers. As I tried to formulate a Jewish practice, I added Shabbat to the rotation, and, along with it, a weekly kosher dinner. We toyed with the idea of keeping kosher all the time, but never took it seriously, for several reasons:

1) The health reasons given for keeping kosher were made obsolete by such modern innovations as refrigeration and the FDA.

2) The ethical justifications for kashrut — that kosher animals are killed more humanely — were offset by the fact that most kosher meat still comes from factory farms.

3) It seemed like a gigantic hassle.

4) Our rabbi said we didn’t have to.

5) Bacon cheeseburgers.

No, we didn’t think about it very hard. But very few people we knew kept kosher. It seemed archaic. And we didn’t have to. So we didn’t.

Over time, however, the idea of keeping kosher began to represent the gold standard of Jewish observance for me. I think it has something to do with my perfectionist streak. Despite the fact that raising two children in a Jewish household and sending them to Hebrew school while studying for my own bat mitzvah was far above average Jewish observance, I wanted more. I secretly read the blogs of kosher housewives. I still didn’t want to keep kosher. But now I felt bad about it. (Insert Jewish guilt joke here. I would suggest: “I am my own Jewish mother.”)

Also, I attended a family bat mitzvah several years ago, where the new Jewish adult explained, earnestly, her personal reasons for keeping kosher, paraphrased as “Every time I think about what I eat, it reminds me that I’m Jewish.”

Enter Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of Jewish Renewal, and his book, Jewish With Feeling.

Rabbi Zalman suggests moving away from traditional kashrut and toward  “eco-kashrut,” a term he coined. In my understanding, eco-kashrut makes explicit the justifications for “regular kashrut,” incorporating our modern attitudes towards the food chain and our environment. In other words, instead of keeping kosher because it’s safer (it’s often not), we would make food choices that are safer for our families — buying locally and patronizing restaurants that buy locally. Instead of keeping kosher because it’s more humane for animals (again, not necessarily), we would buy markedly less meat because the production of meat is so hard on the environment, and then, when we do buy meat, make sure we are comfortable with how the animals were raised and killed.

Even if one chooses not to follow the injunctions to separate milk and meat and the various food prohibitions, eco-kashrut requires eating very thoughtfully. Would we merely buy hormone-free milk, or organic hormone-free milk? Which is better for the earth; which is better for the cow?  Every eating choice becomes a tiny step towards tikkun olam, the Jewish goal of repairing a broken world.

I am going to try this and see where it leads. I even have an action plan!

* Join a CSA to get fresh, local produce every week

* Prepare a vegetarian Shabbat

*Look into joining a meat CSA

* Develop a policy for eating out/take-out

And, finally,

* Start fleshing out (pun!) what is and is not eco-kosher, and whether it includes a Niman Ranch bacon -  Cowgirl Creamery cheese – Prather Ranch beef burger.

The (food) revolution will be blogged. Watch this eco-kosher space.

These Malabrigo mittens will save the world.

Over the last two decades, an entire industry has sprung up around the notion of packaging the products of Third World craft collectives to sell to the First World. Let’s examine the ways in which First World advertising both misrepresents and romanticizes the work and lives of these collectives to encourage First World consumers to buy their products.

Advertising encourages consumers to bolster their sense of identity by purchasing certain products. An increasing number of Americans are being swayed towards buying handicrafts in particular. “Labeled cultural creatives [emphasis in the original], these individuals are college educated, in their early 40s, and with average household incomes of $52,200. Six out of 10 are women. Values of community building, ecological sustainability, abhorrence of violence, and attraction to the foreign and exotic guide their lives” (Litrell and Dickson 1999, 52). Authenticity, uniqueness, and the hope that the item’s value will increase over time are important factors in the cultural creative’s decision to buy a handcrafted product. This kind of consumer purchases items with a story she can relate later. She is the prime target for an industry that produces handmade items.

This typical American consumer feels that, in purchasing a handmade item, whether imported or through tourism, she is in some way participating in the culture that produced it. In her social circle, the handmade item awards her cultural capital. She is like a representative for the culture the item represents, along with the exotic knowledge that position suggests. She also likes the idea that buying the item does good in the world; buying from a craft collective is appealing to her. Therefore, advertising intentionally builds a narrative around the collective and its products. The general storyline involves a population in crisis, who, usually thanks to the intervention of kindly Americans or Europeans, develops a small industry, producing handicrafts imbued with exoticism.

The Mirasol Yarn Project is one such example. The Peruvian collective, which produces yarn for export, manages every aspect of production, from alpaca herding to marketing. Perhaps to make consumers feel at home, the website emphasizes the actions and perceptions of American and European visitors to the project site over the experiences of the Peruvians who make the yarn. Profits from every sale of yarn fund childhood education in rural Peru. The website makes sure to mention that the idea for the school “came from a visit made to the ranch by Kari Hestnes and Per Svendsen who run Du Store Alpakka in Norway.” The product line itself “was initialized by Peter Mulley from Diamond Yarn in Canada, and he then set about contacting other distributors to make sure the Mirasol Project was supported worldwide with contributing companies in the United States, Europe and the UK.”

There is little mention of the agency of individual Peruvians in the collective itself, other than a biography page for Mirasol herself, the little girl who is the company’s namesake. The biography page, despite being called “Meet Marisol,” contains no biographical information about Mirasol, only photographs and a first-person description of her from Kari Hestnes: “Mirasol is beautiful, but she is marked by the life she lives, the skin is darkly tanned and cracked, her clothes are trashed, but she still radiates something beautiful and very feminine that touches my heart deeply […] I get a strong need to give something to these children, but the only thing I have in my pockets is lip gloss with sun block” (The Mirasol Project). This narrative emphasizes the cultural creative’s need to “do something” when faced with the crushing poverty of this region of Peru. The unspoken answer to the yearning is, of course, to buy Mirasol Yarn.

Marketing photographs of Third World collectives frequently show small groups of workers – usually women – working in a bucolic, often outdoor, setting. The workers smile, projecting satisfaction in their work. Purchasing the products, it is strongly implied, will keep these workers happy. Manos Del Uruguay, another collective producing garments and handmade yarn, offers up several such photographs. Unlike the Mirasol Project, Manos was founded by an Uruguayan woman, Olga Artagaveyta, in 1968. (Durbin 2005) Manos’ website emphasizes the empowerment of individual women through collective action (Manos Del Uruguay). The site even provides photographs of some of the 17 collectives the group boasts. The American influence is not mentioned, although Durbin’s article refers to the grants from NGOs that make the collective possible. They are beautiful photographs of Uruguayan locations, although they do not offer any information about actual working conditions or wages.

In general, the producers who belong to craft collectives are assisted by government agencies, NGOs and outside nonprofits who try to organize the artisans to make products that can be successfully exported. The typical artisan working for such an organization is also female, but, there, her similarity to the American consumer ends. She is usually part of a household, making handicrafts while tending to household tasks. Her goal is to make money to maintain and ultimately raise her family’s status in the community. So it is that, for example, the money made by small artisans who borrow from the Grameen Foundation goes almost invariably to educate the borrowers’ children. (One of the “Sixteen Decisions” chanted by members is “We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.”) Ironically, while the artisan’s handcrafted item appeals to the “cultural creative,” such items do not have the same cachet in the artisan’s community. Frequently, artisans use the money they make to buy items imported from America and elsewhere, such as appliances, electronics, and, in one example, Stallone T-shirts.

When these projects are successful, women’s lives improve dramatically. As the Grameen Bank publicizes, women overwhelmingly educate children of both sexes, which, in turn, uplifts an entire family. Women also delay marriage and childbirth when they have financial independence, and their families support them when they see the clear economic benefits. This can have tragic results when the community sees this empowerment as a threat to the male status quo. In one Chiapas village, the female organizer of a pottery collective, Petrona Lopez, was murdered. “Petrona was clearly a threat to a patriarchal order of households wherein women’s production was controlled by their fathers or husbands. All men in the community were threatened by the autonomy women gained in the cooperative and condoned the act that released them from the threat” (Nash 1993). Marketing certainly does not emphasize the risks female workers accept when they band together to form collectives.

There are many other pitfalls on the way to becoming a success story like Mirasol or Manos Del Uruguay. First and foremost, producers of handicrafts are dependent on the global market. They do not produce a “necessary” product, and in an economic downturn, demand for their products will by necessity decrease. When a market is developed for a product, that market can become suddenly flooded with inexpensive, mass-produced knockoffs from, generally, Asia. As well, tastes change quickly; if there is suddenly no demand for an item, a collective is left with equipment and raw goods but nowhere to unload them. There is constant, ruthless competition in the global market from East Asian countries. Chinese yarns and other textiles are produced much cheaper than the handicrafts, which is, of course, why advertising must be used to explain or justify the higher cost.

When men in a community realize the craft collective has a potential for success, they often become involved in the management of the collective. Because they are not artisans and are primarily concerned with increasing the collective’s bottom line, they frequently reorganize in ways that increase profits but are detrimental to workers. One common tactic is to divide artisans in to “pieceworkers” so that each worker specializes in a tiny portion of production. No one woman gains the knowledge to assemble an entire item, so each woman is dependent on the collective. If the collective disbands, the women may not have transferable skills.

A side effect of pieceworking is to reduce the pride of craftsmanship that brings enjoyment to artisans. Further reductions to this enjoyment can occur when artisans find themselves producing to North American tastes, at the expense of their own, culturally dictated aesthetics. In one situation, Guatemalan weavers were upset when told that North American consumers did not like the “hot pinks, limes, and oranges” they traditionally wove into their hangings (Lynd 2000). Some even continued to weave with traditional colors, despite being paid a discounted price for items that “did not meet quality standards.” Clearly, it was a difficult situation, as expressed by the American who was overseeing the collective: “On the one hand, we want to help the women succeed in the international market. On the other hand…we do not want producers to lose the integrity of their weavings” (Lynd 2000).

Worst, wages may be disproportionately low. In the production of Peruvian sweaters in one male-run collective, “in a classic example of middlemen reaping disproportionate profits, knitters earn between US$5 and US$20 for a sweater, while the garments may sell in the U.S. for as much as US$200 or US$300” (Page-Reeves 1998). One USAID program not only underpaid workers, but actually left participants worse off than before. They encouraged a collective to take out loans, then used information gleaned from the collective to actually develop factories to undercut the market (Page-Reeves 1993).

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, advertising often must project an additional cachet to get the consumer’s attention. So it is, for example, that Campbell Soup produced special pink “breast cancer” cans of soup for a limited time; by purchasing a can of soup that contributed a tiny fraction of sales to breast cancer research, consumers could sate their guilt over not financially supporting the race to the cure. Ben and Jerry’s ill-fated Rainforest Crunch convinced shoppers that a purchase would help save the Amazonian rainforests. Consumers like to buy products that make them feel good about themselves. Buying “breast cancer” chicken soup implies that the consumer is a good person who cares about breast cancer.

Although the goal of helping individuals parlay often ancient skills into modern financial success is laudable, it may minimize help for more widespread solutions. This makes the consumer force complacent. My buying a skein of organic yarn spun by a Tibetan refugee is very nice, but it does not lead me to lobby Congress to put pressure on China. Nor does it encourage me to seek information on how my purchase really affects the man or woman who spun the yarn. We have the power, as consumers, to ensure that “voting with our pocketbooks” makes the lives of individuals throughout the world better. Looking beyond advertising to the realities of production can be the first step.

Works Cited
Durbin, Paula. “Manos Del Uruguay: The Bottom Line.” Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter-American Foundation 26, no. 1 (2005).
Ghista, Garda. “Towards Economic and Women’s Liberation Via Grameen Bank.” ProutWorld.org. (Retrieved May 9, 2010.)
Litrell, Mary Ann, and Marsha Ann Dickson. Social Responsibility in the Global Market: Fair Trade of Cultural Products. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1999.
Lynd, Martha. “The International Craft Market: A Double-Edged Sword for Guatemalan Women.” In Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy, edited by Kimberly M. Grimes and B. Lynne Milgram, 65-84. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000.
Manos Del Uruguay. (accessed August 13, 2008).
Nash, June. “Maya Household Production in the World Market: The Potters of Armantenango del Valle, Chiapas, Mexico.” In Crafts in the World Market: The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans, edited by June Nash, 127-154. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Page-Reeves, Janet. “Alpaca Sweater Design and Marketing: Problems and Prospects for Cooperative Knitting Organizations in Bolivia.” Human Organization 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 83-93.
Page-Reeves, Janet. “Sweater-Knitting and Project Aid in Bolivia: A Critique.” Anthropology of Work Review 14, no. 2 (Winter-Spring 1993): 34-36.
The Mirasol Project. (accessed August 13, 2008).

One source suggested we begin the Sabbath meal by reading each other biblical praises. This is an excerpt from Proverbs 31 that a husband is supposed to read (or sing) to his wife every week:

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
(Proverbs 31:10-15, King James Version)

It made us feel squicky, somehow. We didn’t bother to examine our feelings much; by tacit mutual agreement, we just never did it again.

Having had at least one child  (or one adult incapacitated enough to count as a tall child) home sick every day last week reminded me of that odd Shabbat episode. When I am not writing fiction or crafting or running or blogging or (shudder) part-time bookkeeping, all that remains is “housewife.”

If my husband were a nineteenth-century subsistence farmer, I don’t think I would mind so much. (That is, I would not mind the title “housewife.” I would definitely mind if my husband were a nineteenth-century subsistence farmer. Or at least be very confused.) In such a situation, the “housewife” has a huge and important duty. Without her, the farm can’t run. In the Little House on the Prairie series, for example, the author’s father never minimizes her mother’s work. And there is a lot of it: canning, butchering, making cheese, sewing everyone’s clothes and bed linens from scratch, knitting socks and other clothes, cleaning, washing clothes by hand, growing most of the family’s food, cooking, bearing, nursing, and teaching children, and that list is by no means exhaustive. Because the entire family lives and works together, the housewife’s work is very visible.

(And, yes, I am obsessed with Little House on the Prairie this week for some reason.)

The “woman of valor” verse reminds the reader of this kind of hard work. After the excerpt above, it continues to praise her for buying and tending land, spinning, giving good advice, and making her family’s clothes, in short the work of the farmwife.

I’m not a farm wife. We have exactly 0 cows. Everyone in my household leaves in the morning at around the time I am a third of the way through my first coffee. (I could not tell you what all three of those people are wearing today if you paid me, though you are welcome to try.) They return, in the best of all possible worlds, to a beautifully-appointed, immaculately-cleaned flat filled with handcrafts and organic foods, or, barring that, to a house that is clean enough to not give them hookworm or sleeping sickness and something to eat that is definitely edible and untainted by malevolent bacteria. I am a machine that turns chaos into clean socks. I am our household’s last bulwark against entropy. I am Wall-E.

My work, like Wall-E’s, is largely invisible, though not for lack of complaining loudly. I don’t think it usually occurs to my family that I do this work, in the same way it does not usually occur to me that the sidewalk is largely free of refuse or that the train is driven by a human and arrives reasonably on time. Just as I only think about the train driver when the train is late, they only think about housecleaning when it’s not done. By default, most of my feedback is, thus, negative: “I don’t have any clean pants/there’s no turkey for my sandwich/Mommy, I can’t find the floor.”

I am, by default, a kind-of-housewife. I do my work (and, mostly, my trying-to-get-work) from home, so I’m obviously well-situated to popping a load of laundry in the washing machine between sentences and then forgetting it for two days. I pick up children between paragraphs and pop them in the bathtub and forget about them for forty-five minutes. I have a husband who expects to have deodorant when he needs it, and this benefits us both. But I’m very resistant to describing my primary role as “housewife.” I don’t think the word accurately describes what a 21st century woman with an Internet, a credit card, a master’s degree, a DVR, and a craft supply addiction does with her day.

I mean, I can do some of the things on the “woman of valor” checklist. I have been specifically asked to stop seeking wool and flax. I don’t do evil, mostly. I buy food, if Trader Joe’s counts as “afar” (I prefer the one in Daly City). I get up when it’s dark (in the winter). But the “woman of valor” in the verse is a farm wife, and, I’m afraid, I’m not a very good farm wife: despite my best, caffeinated efforts, I am a miserable wreck when housewifery is my full-time job. And, when I’m forced to be in full-time housewife mode, I feel that failure acutely.

So, next Shabbat, instead of Proverbs 31, I’m going to have my husband read to me from the Book of Cake:

I want a girl who gets up early
I want a girl who stays up late
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity
Who used a machete to cut through red tape
With fingernails that shine like justice
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass

She is fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack
She’s touring the facility
And picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long, long jacket

Cake, “Short Skirt Long Jacket“

Short Skirt, Long Jacket from Anna Gustafson on Vimeo.

“Gangsta rap” came along when I was a young teen. Everything changed! There were cusses everywhere, especially this word “ho” that I repeated blithely until it occurred to me that it had nothing to do with Santa’s merriment. At first, I mocked the people who criticized this new, very popular, very open misogyny. Sometime around college, however, I realized that I was both enchanted by the music and deeply troubled by a lot of its content.

At that point, I realized rap music at large wasn’t talking to me: I was not the target audience. The self-aggrandizing lyrics, swagger and casual violence towards women were meant to invite the (male) listener to join a fellowship of powerful, desirable male peers — and to exclude me.

So why was I still listening? Why do I still listen to rap music, even now? Well, I’m not unaccustomed to being “othered” by the media I love.

Even the earliest books I read contained hints that I was not their target audience. Several Oz books contain references to Hottentots (renamed “Tottenhots” because that is clever), complete with unflattering illustrations:

Tottenhot! Get it?

In case we were confused about Baum’s feelings concerning the “Tottenhot,” this particular image illustrates a storyline in which Glinda the Witch has to put an animal through a succession of transformations, each time bringing him closer to humanity. “Tottenhot” is two transformations removed from a human being.

I definitely remember having seen these images, decades later; they have since been expurgated from more recent editions, causing something of a controversy in the “Oz community.” (You can see the other scanned pages at the link.)

Meanwhile, the author who continued the Oz series after Baum’s death, Ruth Plumly Thompson, added a popular character, Jinnicky, the Red Jinn, to the stories. Jinnicky  is served by a cast of chubby black slaves. At one point, a rebellion among the Red Jinn’s slaves is actually suppressed by Princess Ozma.

And then there was the first time of many I read through Little Town on the Prairie and fetched up against the charcoal drawing of Pa Ingalls and three friends in blackface (Wilder refers to them as “darkies”). Again, I remember this cognitive dissonance. I didn’t ask an adult what was going on; I didn’t even know what blackface was. I only knew that there was something creepy about Pa dusting his face with soot and speaking in a fake black vernacular.
Once I moved on to my ten-year Sherlock Holmes obsession, I learned pretty quickly to avoid the latter-day mystery  “The Three Gables”:

The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.

“Which of you gen’l'men is Masser Holmes?” he asked.

Holmes raised his pipe with a languid smile.

“Oh! it’s you, is it?” said our visitor, coming with an unpleasant, stealthy step round the angle of the table. “See here, Masser Holmes, you keep your hands out of other folks’ business. Leave folks to manage their own affairs. Got that, Masser Holmes?”

“Keep on talking,” said Holmes. “It’s fine.”

“Oh! it’s fine, is it?” growled the savage. “It won’t be so damn fine if I have to trim you up a bit. I’ve handled your kind before now, and they didn’t look fine when I was through with them. Look at that, Masser Holmes!”

He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. Holmes examined it closely with an air of great interest.

“Were you born so?” he asked. “Or did it come by degrees?”

It’s actually really hard for me to read this quote, given how many of my junior high school daydreams took part in the Victorian London Holmes inhabited. Now, let’s be honest: that world was not racially inclusive. There are plenty of other racist assumptions in the Holmes canon — the Welsh are dark and emotional, the Southern Europeans border on hysteria both comic and murderous, Indians are invariably shady and the poor are either noble or felonious.

I suppose it’s that the black buffoon Doyle serves up is alarmingly similar to the sort of Stepin Fetchery that’s still on offer today — and still just as offensive. I knew, by the age of eleven or twelve, that I was supposed to be offended by that. Instead, I remember feeling ashamed. I wonder if the shame stemmed from this proof I was unworthy of participating in my Victorian fantasy?

I can’t answer that honestly from an adult perspective. All I know is that, despite knowing most Holmes stories practically by heart, I could not tell you what happens in The Three Gables if you put a gun to my head; one of my favorite Holmes stories was “The Yellow Face,” in which the truth about an interracial marriage comes out, without negative consequences; and that for some reason I have spent the last thirteen months building a Victorian alternate universe in which people of all hues mix pretty freely. Hmm!

The point of all these sad little vignettes, I suppose, is to prove that I’m well accustomed to the point at which an author waves me aside, saying, in effect, “I’m not talking to you.” I rail against it, but I can’t say it never happens, even today. However, I can’t just stop reading books, or only reading the books that make me feel great about myself. Some of the best and most important books were and are written by people with really backwards notions of race and gender. That doesn’t discount the fact that these books are good or important.

In the same vein, when rap is good, it’s very good. For every time Kanye West rails against gold-digging baby mamas

18 years, 18 years/ and on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his

he also produces something like the last verse of “Gone,” perhaps my favorite set of Kanye rhymes –

What the summer of the Chi got to offer a 18-year-old/sell drugs or get a job, you gotta play your role/my dog worked at Taco Bell, hooked us up plural/fired a week later, the manager countin’ churros/sometimes I can’t believe it when I look up in the mirro’/how we out in Europe, spendin’ Euros

Kanye rapping ridiculous pop culture things (churros) with real-world things (Euros) never fails to make me smile.

Of course I’m against misogyny in music, of course I constantly question the relationship between the misogyny of rap music and the culture of violent sexism among young people. (I also am against the use of the word “Hottentot” outside a critical discussion of the media’s obsession with Black women’s bodies!) But I’m not going to stop listening to all rap music, any more than I’m going to torch my Oz books.

I avoid music that is actively vile, just as I avoid books that are consciously attempting to be racist. I try to find mainstream rappers who are doing something a little different from the norm, whether musically or lyrically. (Yes, Mos Def, I know, thanks. :) I get excited when a new female MC appears, then get disappointed when, almost inevitably, everyone loses interest in the “novelty.”

I wince, when an otherwise fantastic rapper describes his coterie of willing groupies in the same verse in which he enumerates his other possessions, because I know he’s talking over my head to the men in the room. But I keep listening.

I had lots of baby dolls. Orange Blossom I received the Christmas my little sister turned one; when you squeezed her stomach she “blew” orange-scented kisses. And Martha Jean (renamed after my grandmother), my first treasured Cabbage Patch Kid.

Eventually, these dolls were lost to history, so to speak. I don’t have any of my old dolls. I’m an adult woman with two children. Kids play with dolls to prepare for parenthood, after all.

Or do they? Is something infinitely weirder going on?

Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll series (recently reissued) followed the richly photographed adventures of the author’s own childhood doll, Edith (named after the author’s mother). Dare Wright, herself, sometimes coddled but mostly smothered by her mother, never stopped playing with Edith; the books were born of her already obsessive hobby of photographing herself and her doll in various handmade costumes.

Jean Nathan’s meticulously researched Dare Wright biography, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright,” argues conclusively that Dare Wright explored her sad childhood and stifling adulthood in her photographs and stories. According to Nathan, “Edith became a lonely doll, as Dare once had been a lonely little girl, wishing for a brother, however naughty, to play with, and a father who might be enlisted as a reliable parent to care for them both. In this rendition of the story, Edith’s wish comes true” (163).

Outside her home, Dare was a successful author, a sophisticated and beautiful sometimes model, pursued (hopelessly) by wealthy men; inside, Dare reenacted her traumatic childhood events with a cast of two teddy bears and a doll.  Dare never married or had children — she was too damaged for that kind of emotional intimacy — but I don’t think having a child would necessarily have changed her relationship with Edith. Dare didn’t see Edith as a baby, but as her own mirror image. With Edith, Dare could forever relive childhood, always closing with a happy ending.

I was left unsettled by the end of the biography, not thinking of Dare, but of myself. It had never occurred to me that, as a child, I might have thought of the baby dolls as versions of myself, not merely babies to play with. It makes a lot of sense though — children stop playing with dolls around the age they are beginning to craft what will ultimately be their adult identities.

I stopped playing with dolls around fifth grade, when I started being aggressively bullied. At about the same time, I developed a rich and detailed fantasy life, inventing stories where isolated young people found companionship, bullies were vanquished, and everyone lived happily ever after. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still writing stories about loners making good.

Dare Wright played with dolls well into her sixties. I don’t play with dolls — I write stories with characters.

That’s very different, right?

There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there are myriad reasons he hasn’t picked a boll of cotton since.

Children know when something is wrong with their world. And the little boy in the picture knows something’s not right, as small as he is. You can see it in his little face, the frown in his forehead.

Children — before they learn that it makes adults uncomfortable — can’t ignore when something is not right. They pose simple questions: why do some people think one person isn’t as good as another, because of the color of their skin? Why hasn’t a woman been president? Why did my grandpa die? The simplicity that kills me, because my convoluted answers are never as good as their questions.

Children are so direct. When they see something wrong, they can’t figure out why the adults in their world — who they see as all-powerful — won’t fix it. I’m drawn to stories of children who take matters into their own hands, and Bayou is such a story.

What happens when you cross Jim-Crow-era racial tension, two little girls, and a Southern mythology as creative and beautiful as it is terrifying?

You get Bayou.

A deservedly acclaimed graphic novel, told from the perspective of a little black girl in 1930s Mississippi, Bayou is equal parts beauty and horror. Bayou contrasts the very real and terrifying world — in which a little boy can be lynched for whistling at a white woman — with an equally chilling fantasy world, in which benevolent spirits and talking animals flee from bloodthirsty golliwogs and murderous Jim Crows. It’s not always clear which world is scarier.

Little Lee, growing up on the banks of the bayou, must descend into its malevolent waters to save her best friend, a white girl, and, in the process, free her father from a trumped-up kidnapping charge. So far, it’s touched on racism, “good hair,” religion, gender roles, and provided new looks at a whole host of stereotypes and problematic representations of Africans and African-Americans. If it weren’t a big spoiler, I would add — jumping up and down in my seat — that a major character is the demonic personification of one of my favorite Blues tropes.

Lee is strong, smart, and unflinchingly committed to the task of saving her father, no matter how frightening the journey may be. I loved her at once, and have added her to my small, growing collection of tough-cookie little girl heroines.

The first five chapters (and a bit of the sixth) are available online; Vol. 1, comprising the first four, is currently for sale, and Vol. 2, offering the conclusion, will be published next summer. In the meantime, the website keeps posting updates to the story, and I, for one, am completely hooked.

Bayou is just lovely and harrowing and deeply upsetting, and most emphatically not for children.

If you haven’t read it yet, you should. (If you have, feel free to read it again.) But be warned: you won’t accomplish much until you fetch up, full of questions and predictions, at the beginning of chapter 6. And you’ll probably make a childish sound of disappointment when you realize you’re going to have to wait months to find out how it all ends.

She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, difficult woman who despised many people, including her near neighbour Enid Blyton whom she called a “vulgar, curled woman” (The Guardian).

I was not shocked by this, but that is because I recently picked up a stack of Uttley’s books at Savers.

Every evening this week, my son has walked over to the bookcase in his room and selected the next book in the Gray Rabbit series for me to read at bedtime. Every evening, I read a lengthy and meandering story about how a few well-meaning but daft animals spent a regular day in their lives, rendered in excruciating detail:

Grey Rabbit sat at her cottage door one fine morning with her work-basket at her side and the scissors on the doorstep. She was making a night-cap for Mrs. Hedgehog out of a little pink handkerchief. Hare had picked it up on the common, dropped from somebody’s pocket. Grey Rabbit decided it was just right for a night-cap. She snipped the edge neatly and sewed a hem, shaping it to fit Mrs. Hedgehog’s head. Her little needle flew in and out of the linen and her stitches were so small they were almost invisible (Little Grey Rabbit Makes Lace).

Are you still awake? My son isn’t. And these are the opening lines of the story. This is the hook that is supposed to keep the reader turning pages. This is an accurate synopsis of the 62-page book:  Grey Rabbit is sewing a night-cap. Grey Rabbit wants to finish the night-cap with lace. She does not know how to make lace. Eventually she will make lace. I no longer need ply my son with Benadryl on flimsy excuses. He sleeps the deep sleep of the profoundly bored.

Grey Rabbit and her friends, Hare and Squirrel, live in a two-story house near a farm, where they serve as the social and emotional center of their anthropomorphic animal community. Whereas, in Beatrix Potter, the stories underlying the community are often dark — the story, for example, where enraged mice trash a dollhouse because it turns out the food on the table is fake — in Uttley’s works, there really aren’t any stories, just a bunch of animals hanging around washing clothes and making lace.

Are the works classist? Of course they are. Classic English literature for children is always about reinforcing the status quo, whether Beatrix Potter or Tolkien (there’s an excellent and very funny essay about Lord of the Rings that brilliantly tears Tolkien to pieces on this and other points.) Most children’s literature is. We’re not raising revolutionaries; we’re educating them about how their society works and where they fit into it.

(In classic American children’s literature, for example, we teach children that if you give and give without asking anything in return, all that will remain of you is a sad stump in a forest, and that, when your parents leave you at home, you should never admit manic felines who obviously follow the Grateful Dead and own many Phish albums, especially if a talking goldfish warns you not to. No hippies!)

No, my criticism of Uttley’s Grey Rabbit series is not that they advance a very specific class consciousness — with stern, paternalistic Owl, essentially the Lord of the Manor, at the top of the pecking order; Grey Rabbit’s household as comfortable country squires; Hedgehog the milkman, with his inexplicable broad accent, playing the faithful peasant; and characters like the “gipsy rabbit”, who “was very brown, and her hair was rough and tousled, with thorns and leaves sticking in it,” and is unquestionably the rabbit equivalent of a Magic Negro.

Can you guess what Grey Rabbit is making? SPOILER ALERT it is lace.

Nor is it that it is possible that a person who wrote books for children hated not just children, but everyone she knew, and was consumed by loathing for people like her illustrators (who, I am sure, dreamt of doing something grander than coloring pictures for a mean lady of rabbits making lace). She also bristled with jealousy of Beatrix Potter and Enid Blighton, female contemporaries who were far better writers.

Imagine that. A woman, who should have been nice in real life, was not! Though no one ever said Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were nice. [Perhaps Lewis Carroll is a bad example :'( . And J.M. Barrie was not rumored to be mean, but weird.]

No, it is that they are boring, and that I cannot forgive, because there are tons and tons of beautiful, hilarious, fascinating, educational books for children that are amusing to read, and I am trapped reading these instead.

But they are peerless at putting children to sleep.

P.S. The worst part is: I actually like making lace.

I read an interesting post on Racialicious last week, from the point of view of an MFA student who has realized that writers of color are, largely, not being taught to new practitioners of the craft. Even blockbuster authors like Toni Morrison are relegated to Ethnic Studies curricula:

To me it feels like writers of colour are being made homecoming queen, but never getting invited to a single party.  Lit of colour is celebrated in the awards circle, yet its continuing ghettoisation despite the prizes is puzzling and depressing.

Is the literary colour divide wider than we thought?

This is certainly food for thought. It’s one thing (a great thing!) to win awards and sell novels. It’s another thing entirely to be, as the author puts it, “ghettoized”. Very telling was a conversation she relates:

In conversation with Mat Johnson earlier this year, he told me that he likes teaching at VONA* because he feels that sometimes writers of colour don’t get as much out of creative writing workshops as their non-POC peers. This is because the level of critique they get from said peers is thin, Johnson says, with the justification that people are loathe to critique writing that describes an experience they themselves haven’t had.

This really, really threw me for a loop. This is advanced as a reason not to read or critique writing by authors of color — because the reader hasn’t shared the author’s experience?

Do some people only read books that confirm their own experiences and world views? Of course. But it’s just lazy to assume that a book can’t possibly jibe with one’s own experience just because the author is not exactly like the reader.

Case in point: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It begins in a Dominican-American family in the 1970s, and weaves in and out of time, place, and perspective. I have no personal connections to that community, and yet I could not shake the feeling that Diaz was telling huge chunks of my own story.

But I really don’t need to come up with specific examples, do I? Because the argument that books by writers from other cultures are inaccessible is a flimsy excuse for exclusion. After all, there are entire genres that depend on creating a world within a completely alien culture. (See: science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, et cetera.) Also…AARGH!

the hotness...the hotness...

Dangerous Liaisons — I’ve recently re-read the novel and re-watched the movie — insists that love is all about control. The story plays out through the eyes of two consummate players, the Marquise de Merteuil (played by Glenn Close in the film version) and the Vicomte de Valmont (movie: John Malkovich). At first, they appear to join forces to pull the strings, but soon they realize neither can tolerate the other’s dominance.

The worst thing either can do, in such a game, is to lose control. Ironically, the Marquiseuses Valmont’s fear of that very event to control his behavior, manipulating him to destroy his lover while parroting the phrase “it’s beyond my control” (in the novel, this takes place through letters).

I am fascinated by the interplay between Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. What is so inspiring for me (for my writing, not my ethics!) is the way in which their ultimately deadly game is played within the constraints of their society. They do not openly flaunt the rules; in fact, part of the fun, for the Marquise in particular, is to appear to enforce them upon others.

The Marquise appears to decide, early in life, that the one real power a woman has is within sexual and romantic relationships. Her goal is to ensure no man has ultimate power over her, and she is willing to sacrifice her own happiness to secure it.

I really appreciate the novel’s frank treatment of the position of women in her society. We see the option the Marquise has — to be Madame de Tourvel or Madame de Volanges — and her rejection of it. What’s unforgivable, I think, is her utter callousness. She wants to live as men do, live the way Valmont does. It annoys her when Valmont finds a woman like Madame de Tourvel lovable, I think — in part because she rejected becoming that woman.

In the movie version, the Marquise is further motivated by jealousy — jealousy of the younger woman Valmont prefers, in particular. At some point, she realizes that Valmont actually does love Madame de Tourvel, and that revelation hurts her, since, until that point, she thought they were in love with one another.

On his deathbed, Valmont insists he was the Marquise’s pawn. Perhaps he is, but, in the end, a woman’s reputation is everything, and the Marquise is shunned by polite society. Valmont wins, after all. Great read, great movie, disheartening moral.

I’ve been pondering otherness in romance novels a lot since the RWAs. I have a project on the backburner that explores racial otherness, among other things, that had its genesis after I attended a reading by Beverly Jenkins. In the meantime, however, I’m content to read new books dealing with the subject and reread some older ones.

I read The China Bride when I was a new bride myself — married for around two years, and in grad school, with an infant daughter. I was only twenty-two or twenty-three, all my friends — fresh out of college — were working, and I had just discovered romance novels.

I immediately discovered a predilection for single title historicals; after all, I basically grew up at 221B Baker Street. I inhaled every Amanda Quick novel I could get my hands on, scouring the shelves at Goodwill and, sometimes, new book stores. (It’s embarassing for me to admit it now, but, back then, I had a special shelf in our spare room for my romances, I guess so they didn’t sexify Foucault, because he never writes about sex ever). My family thought it was hilarious that someone pursuing an MA in Literature — who aspired to be a Writer, for goodness’ sake — would be reading romance novels.

Anyhow, back to the halcyon days when I was pretending not to care about the ribbing. The China Bride is an excellent example of the best historical romance: the kind that creates a world so absorbing that it is actually impossible to put down. (Rereading it in its entirety yesterday, at one point I sat in a parking lot with the car motor running, reading it, until an impatient parking space vulture started laying on the horn.) The emotional conflict between the characters is believable, and the stock romance shocker — husband of convenience! back from the dead! — is handled without melodrama.

Well, without too much. I need my melodrama.

I should clarify that I tracked down and reread The China Bride so I could revisit how the book handles the racial difference between the hero and the heroine. I didn’t read the flashback chapters that build the romance between the characters, although of course I have before. I was more interested, this time around, in how a mixed-race woman from Macao is shown navigating Regency England.

Troth is half-Scottish, half-Chinese, living in the kind of border society where she could learn about both cultures. She has also lived as a man and a woman. In short, she knows a lot about blending but nothing whatsoever about belonging. An interesting character to watch when she falls in love for the first time.

People’s reactions to Troth (in England and Scotland) are idealized but at least varying. Although she makes several allies, it’s definitely implied that she will have a task ahead of her in finding her niche. It’s also implied that some will never accept her, and that she’ll have an easier time of it with the men of her society than the women, which is realistic.

Putney does, I think, a good job of creating a heroine who could, plausibly, in a very, very nice corner of England and protected by a powerful and slightly eccentric family, make a place for herself. I appreciate that she comes to terms with her difference on her own terms and in her own time. Even when Troth is very self-doubting, the reasons are clear and understandable. I’m the sort of reader who usually likes to identify with the hero, so she’s a special character for me.

That being said, I’m not a fan of Kyle, who she falls in love with. I prefer heroes and heroines who are disenfranchised in one way or another, and learn to accept their true destiny as alpha males or awesome social dragons or whatever. Kyle’s difference from other men of his society is very, very internal and involves a lot of soul-searching; in some ways, he reconciles that difference by being with Troth, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. “You complete me” is fine, but “you calm my curious and restless spirit by being exotic” may be problematic.

I still think it’s a great book though, a fast and enjoyable read, with some unusual stylistic touches like the pacing and a great deal of research and historically accurate detail.