Tuesday
The indispensable “By the Book” column in the New YorkTimes recently interviewed Michelle Obama about her favorite books, and her answers are fascinating. I’ll list them and then discuss the patterns I see:
Novels she’s currently reading
–Zadie Smith, White Teeth, which Malia also loves
–Tayari Jones, American Marriage
–Mohsid Hamid, Exit West
–Anne Patchett, Commonwealth
Novels she read along with her daughters for schoolassignments
–Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, which she’s read three times
–John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
–Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Her childhood books
–Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
–Ezra Jack Keats, A Snowy Day
Non-fiction
–Tara Westover, Educated
–Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself
I am first struck by the exuberant multiculturality of the books she has chosen, especially Smith’s White Teeth, whose central character lives in London, is the daughter of a white father and Jamaican mother, has English-Bangladeshi friends (one of whom rejects his father’s heritage, becoming more English than the English, while his twin brother becomes a fundamentalist). About the book Obama writes,
I love the way the story weaves together so many complex and powerful forces that affect our lives and our relationships — family and parenting, religion and politics, and so much more. Plus, it’s just plain funny. I love books that make me laugh every now and then. It’s something I hoped to do with my memoir, Becoming, because even if a book takes on serious topics, I think it should still be fun to read.
Others also fit the mold, including Life of Pi, whose protagonist claims a Hindu-Muslim-Christian identity and must figure out how to share a lifeboat with a tiger. And Exit West, which I haven’t read but which is about two migrants fleeing from militants who “embark on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.”
Because Trump’s white nationalism soaks up much of the attention these days, we must remind ourselves about the powerful energies when people of different cultures feeding off each other. The arts, including novels, thrive on this energy and show us a way beyond Trump’s vision.
In a second grouping, there are the books Obama uses to explore her African American identity. These include Tayari Jones’s American Marriage (which I haven’t read), in which a newly married African American man finds himself falsely accused and imprisoned.The New York Times review sums up the work:
[A]s Roy discovers, his good parents, good choices and mostly good fortune do not shield him from the pain and caprice of the world. He becomes someone society dismisses, another down-and-out, snaggle-toothed, unemployed ex-con. But Jones declares that maybe Roy doesn’t have to stay that way. Nearly every inmate nowincarcerated in America will join us on the outside someday, and An American Marriage reminds us of this fact. It also warns us to awaken our compassion and empathy. This can be you, the story whispers. Forget that at your peril.
Song of Solomon, which is Barack Obama’s favorite novel, also deals with African American identity issues, especially the tension between assimilation and separatism. I’ve explored why it is Barack’s favorite novel: the alienated protagonist (Milkman) goes on a roots quest, as Obama went to Africa, and finds a new purpose in life. In the end he takes a daring and exuberant leap into the unknown. Song of Solomon is one of the few Toni Morrison novels with a male protagonist.
So why would Michelle like it so much? Perhaps she identifies with Milkman’s aunt Pilate, a magnificent woman who grounds Milkman as Michelle has grounded her husband. At one point in her memoir, pushing back against his presidential ambitions, she writes,
Barack had always had his eyes on some far-off horizon, on his notion of the world as it should be. Just for once, I wanted him to be content with life as it was.
Michelle may also like Pilate’s immense love for the world, as well as her ability to stand up to anyone who threatens her loved ones.
Earlier in Obama’s life, Pippi Longstocking, although white, bolstered her sense of self-esteem:
Pippi Longstocking was my girl. I loved her strength — not just her physical power, but the idea that she wouldn’t allow her voice to be diminished by anyone.She’s independent, clever and adventurous — and she’s clearly a good person, someone who always does right by her friends. What I loved most was that she was a girl, and she was a little different, and she was still the most powerful character in those books.
Maybe some people find it odd for Pippi Longstocking, with her red pigtails and freckled skin, to be a role model for a black girl on the South Side of Chicago. But when I was young, there were so few prominent characters who looked like me. There was no Doc McStuffins on TV, no “Black Panther” on the big screen. So once I had kids of my own, I liked to find stories with characters who looked like my girls…
The mention of Pippi’s freckles reminds me of a biracial student I had many years ago, Eleanor Miller, who as a girl bonded with Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles in the novel by that name. Eleanor, who is half-Filipino, half-African American, said that the freckles spoke to the way skin color bestowed an identity upon her.
Obama adds that the stories she loved “didn’t have to be centered on race.” It was enough if they acknowledged her. Therefore a favorite story, one that she read to her girls, was
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. It’s a simple story about the adventures of a boy on a snowy day. He makes snow angels, slides down a snow pile and gets smacked by a snowball. It’s a boy who happened to be black and who happened to live in the city. He’s a kid just being a kid, and that’s enough.
Obama and and my former student Eleanor demonstrate that, when we read, we symbolically project our own issues into the stories. It isn’t only English teachers who read between the lines.
Turning to Obama’s other books, Grapes of Wrath and Tara Westover’s memoir Uneducated touch on the lives of poor whites, some of whom are undoubtedly Trump supporters. Yet like the Joads, Obama’s parents were also part of a great migration—in fact, America’s greatest migration—in which six million African Americans moved from the south to the north (1916-1930).
Meanwhile, like Westover Obama too moved from relative poverty in Chicago to an Ivy League school, although Obama did not have an abusive and bigoted Mormon father who kept her out of school. The similarities, however, shouldn’t hide the fact that Obama also wants to understand people unlike herself. Her generous spirit understands and celebrates how America contains multitudes.
Perhaps her generosity also draws her Patchett’s suburban drama although Commonwealth may also appeal because of her own extended family network and her desire to set up a stable family. The novel is a series of stories about siblings finding ways to stay connected, or to reconnect, despite divorce, death, dislocation, and other complications.
And finally there is Mandela, whose belief that South Africa could move beyond racism is a version of Obama’s own dream. As Mandela well knew from his experience with Shakespeare in prison, books help keep that dream alive.