Books
Stages of Rot by Linnea Sterte. A breathtakingly gorgeous graphic novel about an alien planet where a whale floats down from the sky, dies, rots, and life grows from the rot. There’s actually not a ton of text in it so it was a quick read but really hauntingly beautiful. I would absolutely adore seeing it adapted into a short film or even a Scanvenger’s Reign- type show. I got it from Desert Island, a really great comics store in Bushwick. Take a date to Desert Island, Quimby’s next door, and then have a picnic in McCarren Park— trust me.
All the rest of my reading time went to Black Jacobins. I’m about halfway through. The class I’m taking on it is excellent. Toussaint L’Overture was a very fascinating guy, and the struggle in what was then San Domingo is not a struggle of colonized vs colonizer. There are many interest groups involved- a nonexhaustive list: white planters and merchants, royalists, sans-culottes, Black enslaved people, “small whites” of less wealth, mixed-race slaveowners, the French people, the French bourgeoisie, the English bourgeoisie, the Spanish kingdom, free Black people, and maroon communities. Each group made alliances along economic and racial lines in very complex and shifting ways. The first half of the first class was spent talking about the context James was writing the book in. James was a Trotskyist (which elicited some grumbles from some in the class) writing during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He wrote in the introduction:
“Tranquillity to-day is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of a seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret. Nor does the writer regret it. The book is the history of a revolution and written under different circumstances it would have been a different, but not necessarily a better book.”
James was writing this book from a seaside suburb. He, a very active leftist who wanted to fight in Spain (and had wanted to fight in Ethiopia against the Italian invasion before that) decided the absolute best use of his talents to the present moment would be to retreat to the burbs and write this book. It’s not just a book about Haiti, my professor emphasized, but a book about the idea of a revolutionary vanguard. His position is that colonization is primary an economic construct, not a racial one— a position that most in the class had issues with. Black Marxism, which I read with the same professor earlier this year, really helped me understand the racial problems inherent in Marxism— problems that James cannot escape even as a Black writer employing Marxism in his analysis. That said, I’ve only been to one class out of four for this book— there’s so much more to go!
I overbooked myself socially this week so I didn’t consume anything else except for the TV adaptation of Interview with a Vampire which I really enjoyed.
<3 ALF