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In the country of women : a memoir
\"'To understand my daughters and their sisterhood, you have to know the women, and sisters, who came before.' In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and the nation's indomitable women\"-- From publisher's description.
BOOK
The Turn toward the Nonhuman in Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales
This article proposes a reading of Susan Straight's 2006 novel A Million Nightingales in the light of critical posthumanities, focusing specifically on references to nonhuman animals. It does so in order to place Straight's writing within the context of the recent posthumanist debate concerning the distinction between human and nonhuman animals (cf. Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe). I claim that while addressing the \"fused\" discrimination (after Carol J. Adams) of sexism, racism, and speciesism, Straight's prose can be seen as a proposition of a reconfigured subjectivity, one based on \"entanglement\" and \"intra-action\" (Karen Barad). A Million Nightingales, which-together with Take One Candle Light A Room (2010), and Between Heaven and Here (2012)-forms the Rio Seco trilogy, presents characters who migrate from 19th century Louisiana to California. This setting and a choice of characters allows the author to comment on science (biology and medicine) as it serves a racist agenda, and on the subtle forms of protest and subversion available to those silenced and dismissed by the official discourse who turn to animism and materiality to undermine the discriminatory apparatuses of racism, sexism and speciesism which deems them less-than-human. By re-introducing references to animality presented as a subversive strategy used by the disenfranchised characters, Straight deconstructs racist and anthropocentric notions of subjectivity based on narrowly defined belonging to the human species, which I propose to view as a post-anthropocentric redefinition of subjectivity.
Journal Article
Author talk in Claremont promises Straight answers
I haven't presented any literary references to the Inland Valley in a while. Here's an appropriately timed one, from Susan Straight's \"Take One Candle Light a Room,\" the pick for Claremont's community read. The narrator is describing how she developed a habit of taking long, long walks: - Remember the paranormal investigators who examined the Upland Public Library and thought they spotted a time machine materializing in the children's department? (Well, it's hard to forget.) They'll be reviewing their findings in a free event, \"Haunted Upland,\" at 6 p.m. Friday at the Grove Theater, 276 E. Ninth St., Upland.
Newspaper Article
Author talk in Claremont promises Straight answers
I haven't presented any literary references to the Inland Valley in a while. Here's an appropriately timed one, from Susan Straight's \"Take One Candle Light a Room,\" the pick for Claremont's community read. The narrator is describing how she developed a habit of taking long, long walks: - Remember the paranormal investigators who examined the Upland Public Library and thought they spotted a time machine materializing in the children's department? (Well, it's hard to forget.) They'll be reviewing their findings in a free event, \"Haunted Upland,\" at 6 p.m. Friday at the Grove Theater, 276 E. Ninth St., Upland.
Newspaper Article
'Million' author calls writers eavesdroppers
\"When you read all the time, language comes naturally to you,\" Susan Straight said by phone from her Riverside, Calif., home. Her most recent novel, \"A Million Nightingales,\" traces the amazing life of a young slave girl growing up in Louisiana in the early 1800s. When Straight read Louisiana's first slave code, written in 1724, she was stunned at the first sentence: \"All Jews will be expelled from the colony.\" This, even though the rest of the document was about slavery. \"It is a bloodless document,\" Straight said. \"It's so strange to read this kind of thing about human beings.\" Straight plans two more volumes about Moinette's descendants, making the book into a trilogy. But she will never give up her pleasure-reading. She loves the mystery genre, especially Walter Mosley and James Lee Burke, and there's a book she re-reads at least once a year, \"Ceremony,\" by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer from New Mexico.
Newspaper Article
'Million' shows slavery's reality
This may be the most insightful book yet written from the point of view of a woman in slavery. The powerful title comes from the character Jonah Greene, the partner of [Moinette]'s master Antoine, who said, \"I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom. My grandmother knew someone who sang that. So always someone is not free.\" The reader discovers how distressed slaves were then separated from mothers or children -- and how emotionally affected they were when they tried to buy their sons or daughters. [Susan Straight] uses her ability with words both to describe the life of a slave and to render feelings and yearnings from the inside. She succeeds to a remarkable degree in depicting the realities of slave life -- using the vernacular of the time.
Newspaper Article
Straight unshackles historical fiction: Novel tells tale of slavery, racial mixing
[Moinette]'s mother, Marie-Therese, is an African, kidnapped and sold into slavery; her father a nameless white sugar broker who paid a visit to Azure, the plantation where Marie-Therese serves as laundress. Moinette's mother had been a \"gift\" for the night to her master's guest; in the aftermath, she herself was left with another sort of gift, the daughter she loves and lives for, \"a bright hardship\" she will struggle to protect from a similar fate. This is the world that Moinette, 14 years old at the start of the novel, grows into. [Susan Straight] could just as well have called her novel Women's Ways of Knowing, the title of a popular modern book on women's psychology, as she traces the development of Moinette's awareness of her circumstances and the wisdom she gains from a series of female mentors. A slave whose household Moinette joins at a second plantation, where she is set to work harvesting cane, advises the silent, traumatized girl to \"make a new place here or keep a old place in your head. Only two choice.\" Eventually, Moinette chooses to nourish a clan of \"memory people\" who have helped her on her way, some of them white.
Newspaper Article
Comfort food
A few days later, my neighbour Jeannine's husband was killed in a car accident. They had lived across the street for seven years. Jeannine and I laughed and gossiped, and she had given me hand-me- down clothes, a used Barbie limousine and plenty of advice on strep throat, puberty and how to fit three girls into one room. Now she was a widow at 35, left to raise four kids while finishing nursing school. A month later my husband's aunt died of lung cancer. I baked the chicken and potatoes dish again and again, for months, it seemed. But we survived. Jeannine graduated from nursing school. That summer, I had my third daughter. And six months later, my husband moved out. The same month, I found out that the mother of a kindergarten classmate of my middle daughter, someone exactly my age, was struggling to take care of her husband, who was dying of a brain tumour. What can I tell them? Food is one of the few areas I can still control, can still understand, can still use to express my love. So I cook special extra-spicy dinners for my father, who has lost his sense of taste to Parkinson's. For potlucks and holidays at my ex- husband's house, I cook my curried rice with sausage and black beans. (After 14 years and hundreds of relatives, you can't just stop going and bringing your signature dish.) At Easter, I cook hams big enough to share with many neighbours and relatives, thinking the whole time of my mother-in-law. And once a week, I bake the mahogany chicken.
Newspaper Article