on 2021 in books (a best of)
I’m reflective about many things in the interim between Christmas and New Year’s. I didn’t read as much as I normally do, but here are some of the books that haunted me:
1. The Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi
How else could that scar have entered the world on flesh if it had not left in the first place? A thing cannot be in two places at once.
Vivek’s lifeless body was delivered on the doorstep of her mother’s house, carefully wrapped in a bundle of fabric. So begins the novel that unravels the life of the gentle, enigmatic, titular character. Set in Nigeria, The Death of Vivek Oji is familiar and unfamiliar to me all the same: The voices of Vivek’s friends and their African fathers, the dwelling in a universe that doesn’t understand what or who you are…it’s refreshing to see transness reflected in an African context, where so many of our loved relatives shun it or disregard it. This book wrecked me (and will wreck you) with honest, painful of revelations.
2. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Saenz
Maybe moms and dads forgot about this one small fact: being on the verge of seventeen could be harsh and painful and confusing.
The summer before his junior year of high school, high-tempered and lonely Aristotle (or Ari, as he’s known) meets the intrepid, ever-curious Dante. The two boys develop a friendship that grows into a deeper tenderness. I cried a lot during this book, which I read over the course of an August morning. It’s so honest and sweet and love-filled. Not just with the love between Ari and Dante, but with the acceptance and support that both of their parents deliver. The world is a shithole but sometimes, you remember how good it feels to emote. Even when it hurts and especially when it doesn’t.
3. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness - Da’Shaun L. Harrison
As the Black is the Beast, the Black fat is always already criminalized and engaged as something, and some Thing, that needs to be neutralized, euthanized, put down.
In case the title isn’t direct enough, Da’Shaun Harrison makes it clear very early on: this is a book about the fat Black body. It’s about the violence that the fat Black body subjected to, what it means to navigate desire/ability, and how thin people and diet culture are complicit. This is all delivered in a concise, highly accessible text. I was introduced to Da’Shaun’s brilliance through Justin James, and I’ve since begun to reckon with my own internalized anti-fatness and the own comfort I gain from having a body size deemed as desirable. It’s uncomfortable. But that’s how the learning works.
4. Even This Page is White - Vivek Shraya
the truth about the race card
is that even before i knew what it meant
i knew not to play it refused
to spin brown into excuse let it hold me back
believed you when you said we are the same
Even This Page is White is an interrogation. Of self, of culture, of whiteness and of wanting to find a place in it. Many things I already relate to. I love random bookshop purchases that end up being surprisingly satisfying, which this was. Vivek nails an economy of language without frills, but it’s language that’s moving all the same. She doesn’t absolve herself of her own guilt, her own benefits from colorism and her own anti-blackness.
5. Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi
The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?
Gifty is a candidate for a PhD in neuroscience. She is also her mother’s daughter and her brother’s sister - her mother being a fierce, deeply religious Ghanaian woman who struggles with her mental health, and her brother being a fallen high school basketball star who became addicted to opiates and died from overdose. There’s something in me that cracks when I think of being a daughter of African immigrants in America. To watch your parents suffer small and large indignities, to grow up in a culture that sees you as less than and yet, to still be expected to overcome. Even though I read Transcendent Kingdom so many months ago, the understanding of Gifty’s story is still fresh. I don’t think it ever won’t be.