Serendipity

A rare joy in life - and surely the Germans have a word for this - is reading two or more texts close together and finding that they're speaking directly to each other, arguing or positing contending substrates upon which worldviews might be built.

This happens most typically at school or university, I think, where reading lists are closely curated by people who read professionally. 'Themes' and 'motifs' seem to develop spontaneously (or not), even between separate classes or subjects.

But the best and most satisfying close encounters must naturally happen unexpectedly in the wilderness, when you're caught blindside and only in retrospect understand how lucky you've been.

I felt this way recently, upon finishing Speak no evil, by Uzodinma Iweala.

It was a short, quick read, but not an easy one. It dealt with Niru, the child of black immigrants from Nigeria, who's fully acculturated - but can't tell his conservative parents he's gay. Written in the first person, it experimented really successfully with a direct mode avoiding the need for speech marks, which was honestly quite a feat in a book ostensibly full of direct speech and action.

Niru struggles, and internalises, and makes good and bad decisions, and makes decisions that are neither good nor bad but have painful ramifications. It felt like the type of book that will be studied in Year 13 English classes - for its brevity, richness and that strange feeling of bringing what is exotic (to the lived experience of most of us) home to roost.

The other book I read recently that captured this same feeling was Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. Rather than dealing with a singular narrative, the book was broken into 12 chapters, each dealing with a separate person - almost all of them black women in the UK. Many of them know each other, or become interconnected through the course of their lives. It's interesting too in that it doesn't use capitalisation or full stops. In the hands of a less experienced writer, this conceit would feel incredibly put-on, or just fall flat. Instead, it feels apt: like the lives of the women it describes, each chapter isn't broken neatly into discrete units, from which meaning might be dutifully extracted. Instead, like a prose poem, there's an underlying structure but an overlying chaos that better reflects the lived realities of how each of us goes about the world. Our episodic lives never quite start or stop where we expect them to.

It's interesting Evaristo uses the term 'Other' as part of her book's title (it's also one of the few nods to  BA-speak 'othering' or 'othered' jargon in there, thankfully), given that for some characters, they feel fully integrated into the white mainstream. I think it reflects on the fact that whether or not you're black, if you're a woman, you're still certainly not considered part of the default - you're something extra, something that has to be parsed separately. Perhaps more hopefully, if the stories of our lives were each considered with the sensitivity Evaristo does, we'd all fall into that category, and the space between the other and each of us would collapse entirely.

The treatment of queerness in each of the books is at once completely divergent but also, somehow, in agreement. In Everisto's book, it's rarely considered a curse or moral failing (a great many of her characters are lesbians, or are involved in same-sex entanglements). In Iweala's you get the sense that though most of his American classmates wouldn't much care, because his homosexuality takes on such monumental importance to his parents, his world becomes dominated by it, distorting the other aspects of his humanity. It's a fucking bleak read, so I'd only recommend it if you're in a good headspace.

As a complete outsider to black experiences anywhere, and female experiences everywhere, these books both provided fascinating and occasionally competing insights that I couldn't put down and that also felt compulsively familiar. Like all the best books, I think they'll make you a better person for having read them.