Tonguebreaker

Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This book is a soft, wild, aching spell. It is glitter and guts. It is relentless...and restful. It is unapologetic, yearning towards the future, and also deeply meditative upon and informed by the past. After reading Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work for years in various magazines, zines, and collections, it was incredibly satisfying and enriching to read an entire book of their poetry and performance pieces—I felt extremely moved emotionally and also moved (politically) to action, expansion, and deeper listening and consciousness as I eagerly read these personal, communal, generous, and unflinching poems.

This book is aching with grief and loss, particularly the loss of BIPOC femme disabled/crip/crazy elders who made so many ways for revolutions both intimate and massive. This grief and loss is bound together with other traumas and pains experienced by Piepzna-Samarasinha personally, and magicked into something powerful and transformative: “At 42 I make a beautiful dress of all my scars / Scar tissue is the strongest tissue in the body / Maybe you are unlucky if you do not have a card to its library” (85). I felt opened, reading this book. I felt Piepzna-Samarasinha asking more of me and the world, a call to devote our energy and love towards a more creative, inclusive, and caring future. I felt opened to the simultaneous possibilities of always seeking to avoid causing harm and remembering that harms, struggles, pains, and traumas can also bring us great strength, be beautiful, honored, celebrated, and help connect us to others in a web of sparkling interdependence.

God's Shadow

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhail

Sultan Selim I

Though God’s Shadow is the first book I’ve read by Alan Mikhail, I know from listening to an interview with him on the Ottoman History Podcast that it’s something of an aberration: usually a chronicler of the common people and environmental history, this is Mikhail’s first book following an elite figure. That elite figure is none other than Sultan Selim I, ruler of the Ottoman from 1512-1520, whose legacy—as an incredibly successful expansionist sovereign and the first Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to also hold the title of Caliph—far surpasses what might have been expected of his brief reign. While making Selim’s life events and undertakings as sovereign vivid and coherent, it is nonetheless evident from God’s Shadow that Mikhail feels no particular preciousness or adulation towards royal or powerful figures. The book uses the life of Selim more as a skeleton around which to drape the layers of muscle and flesh that are religious, economic, military, and cultural context on a global scale, beginning before Selim’s birth and proceeding up to and beyond his death to craft a new argument for how 1492 should be understood.

In conventional Western accounts of 1492, the Ottoman Empire—and, indeed, the entire Islamic world—is absent, as if it had no bearing on the events of that history-altering year. In fact, Mikhail explains, the Ottoman Empire was a driving force behind European embarkation for the “New World.” When Selim’s grandfather, Mehmet II, took Constantinople in 1453, this was yet another crippling blow delivered to Christendom by a Muslim power. Hemmed in territorially and politically by the massive power of the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires alike, Columbus first journeyed across the Atlantic in search of a mystical Eastern Christian King who he thought would come to the aid of Christendom in Crusading against the Muslims, which they’d been doing for centuries with little success.

The hegemonic power of the Muslim world—and the way it was perceived by Christendom as an existential threat—also informed the way early Christian Crusaders/Conquistadores (for they were usually one and the same) understood the Americas and the people who lived there. Mikhail details how these Christian invaders of the Americas understood Indigenous Americans through their lens of Muslims as both the ultimate other and the ultimate evil. He also explains how the early years of the transatlantic slave trade were inflected by this same fear of Muslim power, as Christian slavers attempted to either convert enslaved Muslims before transporting them to the Americas or avoid their importation altogether, so terrified were they that these enslaved Muslims would “infect” this new “promised land” with Islam.

In addition to this powerful re-framing of 1492 and its surrounding years, Mikhail also crafts a fascinating and informative account of Selim’s expansion of the Ottoman Empire across the Middle East and North Africa, the differences between the Ottoman’s style of ecumenical imperial administration and European Christian kingdoms’ monocultural Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and how the enmity between the Shiite Safavid Empire and the Sunni Ottoman Empire deepened fragmentations that continue to deepen to the present day. This book is invigorating, engaging, and necessary for a more fully informed understanding of how our world came to be the way it is today.

Big Friendship

Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

When, in the course of one week, this book appeared all over my Goodreads page’s ad spaces, was featured or mentioned on a couple of podcasts, and came up in conversation with numerous friends, I took it to be a sign that this was indeed the serious book about friendship I’d long been looking for and went out to buy it right away. Of course I now feel naive: I should have taken such sudden and pervasive flooding of awareness to be an indication of the success of the marketing plan behind the book and little more, and stuck to my tried and true routine of checking every book out from the library prior to venturing a purchase.

I wasn’t aware of Aminatou Sow’s and Ann Friedman’s career as co-hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, or read anything else either or both had written. I’d heard Sow on Danny M. Lavery’s podcast Dear Prudence and thought she gave good advice, but I had little else to go on and should’ve probably reined in my wild expectations in keeping with the amount of information I had. Instead, I was hoping that this book would be something like the friendship version of bell hooks’ All About Love: spiritual, serious, flexible (i.e. expansive enough to hold many kinds of friendships without being completely abstract or vague). I expected it to theorize friendship and the way it’s held/constrained/made possible by race, gender, mental and physical health, capitalism, creative acts (of resistance), love, and more.

Instead, I found a book that read more like an extended behind-the-scenes tell-all for fans of the authors’ podcast (despite the fact that the book does not actually tell all and repeatedly skims where it could’ve deeply investigated moments of conflict, love, and succor between the two authors). Written in a style that is breezy to the point of ostentation, rife with extraneous millennial parentheticals and peppered with some inane transcribed text threads, the book was really disappointing almost right away. Of course there can be value in including emails and texts in books and literature, and a breezy affect can perhaps support or make inclusive serious conversations, but here I was not convinced. So much of the book is about Ann and Aminatou (the authors also write about themselves in the third person throughout the book, which has a grating, distancing effect) and their particular brand of millennial, upwardly-mobile, yuppie/bougie, “feminist™” friendship that I came to feel they couldn’t see the forest for the trees: were they really investigating and honoring friendship and all its possibilities, or were they just consolidating their personal brand?*

It is not hard to answer this question: the book is extremely limited by its failure to take a critical approach to capitalism, its failure to ask more of itself, its readers, and the world in its discussion of race and interracial friendship, and, broadly, its inability to reach the unguarded, actively loving, honest, sometimes-uncomfortable-but-always-fertile space that I, at least, aspire to in my friendships.

The book spends a lot of time narrating the two authors’ career trajectories and financial status. Perhaps the authors’ thought this a relevant throughline because of the way their friendship and financial lives are entangled (see: Call Your Girlfriend, this book), but I found it disappointing. The best we can hope for is not that our friends will help us network towards “shining” in this White supremacist capitalist system, which is effectively the argument Sow and Friedman make. The best we can hope for is that our friends will join with us to bring this system down and create new possibilities in its place, will help us imagine big and small ways to fight this fight even when all the battles seem like foregone conclusions. Sow and Friedman’s argument also rests, morally, on the assumption that everyone reading this book is in some way marginalized (if two White cis men friends, for instance, were reading this book and they followed the advice in the chapter “I Don’t Shine If You Don’t Shine,” the result would simply be a “boy’s club”), and while they pay lip service to the fact that all forms of marginalization aren’t equal, the more inclusive and radical approach would have been to imagine aloud possibilities for friendship that invite all friends to support each other, even in small ways, towards creating a world where everyone has enough, rather than a world where just your friends do.

The chapter about interracial friendship was also disappointing. Citing Wesley Morris’ concept of “The Trapdoor”, the authors’ acknowledge that, in a friendship between a Black person and white person, there is always the possibility of a situation arising in which “The Black friend is forced to reevaluate the friendship based on an incident that can, on the surface, seem relatively innocent” (119). They acknowledge that “Race plays out differently in every friendship. And not all interracial relationships involve a Black person and a white person…” (118). They share an anecdote where Aminatou feels unseen and unwelcome in Ann’s home when she arrives at a party to find that all of the other guests are White: Aminatou has to bring the matter up to Ann later when she realizes Ann isn’t going to, Ann demurs by saying she didn’t create the guest list, says she’s sorry that Aminatou felt that way and sorry that she wasn’t more conscious and proactive, and that Aminatou is always welcome in her home. While they do go on to share informative and relevant quotes and research about race and interracial friendship (though focused only on Black and White interracial friendships), the fact that this anecdote they share asks and imagines so little is important. The anecdote is an opportunity to be honest about all the trauma, alienation, discomfort, solidarity, productive critique, creativity, and love that is possible in interracial friendships/relationships. Instead, it seems to linger in the category of “discomfort,” joking about how they were given free shots at the bar in which they were discussing their feelings about the party because they both looked so miserable. The chapter ends with the sentences “We know that we are never going to stop having hard conversations about race. The best we can hope for is that there’s always a sympathetic bartender in the vicinity” (138). Emphatically—no. Again, this is not the best we can hope for. Such a concluding sentence to a chapter that should have been momentous and challenging felt disappointing and even damaging.

There are parts of this book that are funny, interesting, and informative. The historical facts, research, and insights gleaned from interviews with other authors and experts were often fascinating and useful. But if you are interested in reading and thinking about friendship in a way that you feel in your gut and your heart and your spirit—that asks you to really get honest and imaginative about its potentialities—as opposed to being interested in Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman and their glossy brand of friendship, Big Friendship is not the book you are looking for.

*Christina Cauterucci also makes this point in her review of the book for Slate.