Belonging

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug

While a graphic memoir as opposed to a work of narrative political nonfiction, Nora Krug’s Belonging still reminded me at points of Masha Gessen’s The Future is History. In both books, the authors attempt to reconstruct the histories of their countries— histories rife with atrocity, oppression, authoritarianism, and mass murder—after these histories are suppressed. Whereas Gessen performs this reconstruction through a combination of interviews with Russians born during Perestroika, after the fall of the Soviet state. These Russians, too young to know the way the country used to be, still feel the tremors of the past running through their lives: through the silences of their parents, the opportunities they find available or lacking, and the way the country begins to shift and spiral in their adulthood, as Putin is elected.

Krug, born in the late 70s in Germany, charts a similar pattern. She grows up in a liberal, penitent Germany; she is taught about the Holocaust and the Third Reich in school, knows that it is socially unacceptable to wave a German flag, and feels deep shame at being German. And yet, for all the outward acceptance of the country’s complicity in one of the world’s most horrific genocides, Krug finds that within her family, her town, and maybe throughout the country as a whole, a great silence and refusal to look closely at each individual’s complicity in the past is also present.

Through family photo albums, clipped conversations, investigations into town archives, reunions with long-estranged family members, and plumbing her own memories, Krug begins to fill in the silences. She uses the graphic novel format to great effect: the multimedia combination of comic strips, scanned photographs, and scrapbook style meditations on everyday symbols of German culture (from bread to hot water bottles to a specific brand of glue) is able to hold a vast array of emotions, from stark horror at violent, racist atrocities committed to an ambivalent melancholy at the cohesive sense of self and family that was also lost as a result of the War.

Ambivalence, regret, and a guilty sense of loss pervade this memoir. Rather than making one cohesive argument through the course of her memoir, Krug instead lingers in the uncertain, broken spaces. While I found myself longing for some kind of more conclusive or triumphant climax, the absence of such a resolution felt pointed to me as a White US American descended from Puritan settler colonists: in seeking to understand both the human failures and the deep cruelties perpetrated by our ancestors, what we should be looking for isn’t any sort of conclusion or absolution. What we should be looking for is further understanding of where and who and how we come from, understanding that is dimensional, complicated, thorny, and probably very hard, so that we can carry this understanding forward to help us change where we’re going.

How We Get Free

How We Get Free edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Compiled by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective statement, How We Get Free gathers together the statement itself as well as interviews with CRC founding members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, an interview with Alicia Garza, founding member of Black Lives Matter, and a speech by scholar and activist Barbara Ransby. These texts are drawn together and contextualized with an introduction by Taylor.

I first read the Combahee River Collective statement in 2012, when facilitating a Young Women’s Feminist Leadership Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio. Reading it was a revelation then, and has become even more so each time I’ve returned to it in later years: the clarity, the path-making, the way so many threads of truth and experience are held together as simultaneously distinct and inseparable—this statement is a profound example of Black feminism, of speaking for yourself in a way that is collective, loving, unflinching, and intersectional. I was impacted by all of these qualities upon my early readings of the CRC statement, just as I was impacted by the anti-capitalist critique fundamental to this document—a critique I’d never found in the works of White feminists whose work I read. I was impacted and impressed, yes, but neither did I follow the thread of this inspiration to more deeply research the CRC or to pursue the works and writings of its founders. This was my shortcoming alone, and indicative of the way White feminism had raised me: I was in fact breaking out of the White feminist tradition I’d been brought up in to be reading the CRC statement and passing it along to young feminists at all. I thought reading this document, admiring it, and allowing myself to consider it alone and out of context, was enough to be a “good” White feminist.

How We Get Free, while by no means collected for the edification of White feminists, pushed me to reconsider my entire relationship to this document. No longer do I think of this document as an almost disembodied/dematerialized outcome of the 70s and the consciousness raising movement. Instead, I know it to be a deeply contextualized and material outcome of Barbara Smith’s experiences organizing in the anti-war movement from the vantage of overwhelmingly White Mt. Holyoke, Beverly Smith’s connection to her sister and alienation in the movement spaces of the academy, the two sister’s upbringing in a woman-led household; it is the outcome of Demita Frazier’s own student activism, her refusal to believe she did not belong in anti-capitalist/socialist spaces, even when the overwhelmingly White organizers wanted her to think White people were the only ones who had theorized against capitalism. It is the outcome of Boston and the consciousness raising and collective movement there. It is the outcome of Black feminism. It is the outcome of Harriet Tubman’s liberatory raid on the Combahee River, where she facilitated 750 enslaved people’s self-emancipation.

The interviews in the book are at turns funny, profound, incisive, rambling, revealing, and at all points inspirational. They are personal. They are political. They are not screeds, but reflections upon a past—and the way that past spirals into and through the present towards the future—that is inseparable from political life and activism undertaken to end capitalism, end racist oppression, and end misogyny and homophobia. This physically compact little book is expansive in its content, historical importance, and ability to inspire.

Kiss of the Fur Queen

Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway

I had never heard of this novel, first published more than twenty years ago, until I read Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed. Whitehead’s tale of processing daily life, memory, and connection to the world and community centers around a young indigiqueer man and glitter princess who is finding his way in the city while simultaneously preparing for a return to the Rez where he grew up. While the reference to Kiss of the Fur Queen made in Jonny Appleseed is only a passing one, following this line of connection proved rich and revelatory.

Kiss of the Fur Queen is humorous, visionary, profound, modern, timeless, and full of heartache. At the heart of the novel is the Okimasis family, Cree Indians who live in Northern Manitoba and provide for themselves through their connection to the land: hunting caribou, fish, and other animals for fur. Abraham Okimasis, world champion dog sled racer, and Mariesis Okimasis are the roots of this family, who not only bring it into being but also attempt to hold it together even as the violent, assimilating forces of White colonizers insinuate over the years, tearing it almost inexorably apart.

This novel is “about” a lot of things: what it’s like to grow up in a tight-knit, rural, majority Indigenous community; the trauma of boarding schools for Indigenous youth; the alienation of feeling one’s culture denigrated, suppressed, and disrespected; the simultaneously healing and damaging possibilities inherent in making art and being family. The way these threads of content are woven, through dream and vision, through the voices and appearances of trickster godxs, through a narrative that appears chronological on its surface but ultimately reveals itself to be something much deeper, a gleeful and glimmering snow-spiral of fate, identity, spirituality, and family.