If You Want to Make God Laugh

I wasn't aware of Bianca Marais' second novel until my re-read of Hum If You Don't Know the Words. That was a wonderful book so I immediately requested If You Want to Make God Laugh from the library as soon as I read about it.

If You Want to Make God Laugh did not disappoint. Another truly wonderful novel. Once again, the setting of the novel is Marais' birthplace, South Africa. It takes place in the early 1990s, just as apartheid is ending. That's more of the backdrop of this novel. It's much more a novel about the lives of the women, the three main characters of the novel, Delilah, Ruth, and Zodwa. Each one is facing really dark days and  all are dealing with their own demons and disappointments. It's a novel about acceptance of life and moving forward. It's also a novel about love and commitment. The novel deals with other things - power, wealth, racism, AIDS, sexuality. But I can't say too much more without spoiling the novel for anyone who might read it.

Just know that I highly recommend this novel - and this author - to anyone.

Born A Crime

I know Trevor Noah from The Daily Show. I know his humor, I appreciate his humor, I knew he wasn't born here but I couldn't quite figure out what his accent was. I had no idea that he was truly born a crime!

Trevor Noah was born to a black, Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father in South Africa at a time when such a partnership was considered illegal and punishable by imprisonment, with the resulting child placed into an orphanage. He was literally born a crime. His parents never married which brought with it its own set of challenges.

Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is Noah's coming-of-age memoir. It was a fascinating book, at the same time a personal story as well as about a category of people, colored people, that I never was aware of at all. There were black people, there were white people. And colored people were basically the mixed race. Noah falls into that category.

Even though his mother was black, the two of them seemed to go amongst the different races pretty comfortably. During apartheid, Trevor, his mother and his father all kind of lived in the shadows. But after apartheid, they lived openly. His mother really was quite bold. As a result of all this, though, young Trevor always felt like an outsider. He didn't fit in with the whites, he didn't fit in with the blacks - although he identified as a black, and he didn't fit in as colored since the colored kids he came in contact with were the children of parents who themselves were mixed. It was legal for a mixed race person to mate with another mixed race person and give birth to colored children. Mind boggling!

Many of the stories are horrifying while others are heartwarming. But Noah's signature sense of humor is apparent throughout the book. It's probably what allowed him to survive. The only thing I felt was missing from the book was an epilogue. Now I'm curious as to how he got from where he was in South Africa to touring as a comedian throughout Europe to The Daily Show. This memoir does paint a picture of what life was like for a child coming of age in South Africa after the end of apartheid.

I want to end with my reflections on a quote from the book:

In Germany, no child finished high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it - what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer having over the whole thing. "Well, that was shameful, now wasn't it?"

In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren't taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it's taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done." It was the same for us. "Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let's move on." Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. "Whatever you do, don't make the kids angry." 

This made me think about the way I taught about social justice - and injustice - while teaching fifth grade in New Jersey. I wanted the kids to feel the injustice. To know that it wasn't over. That it wasn't time to move on. Getting the kids angry was a way to get the kids to think.

I'd recommend this book.

 

Hum If You Don't Know the Words - Take Two

Here's just a quick update to my post about Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Biance Marais that I read prepublication in June 2017.

I finally got to discuss this book with my community book club. If you've been following me, you know that I don't like to reread. Anything. I will admit to having a hard time getting into Hum If You Don't Know the Words this second time around. I was afraid that I might not be able to finish it in time to lead the book club discussion yesterday. But once I got into it, like the first time, I couldn't put it down. I loved it as much the second time as I did the first.

I was really happy that most of the women at the book club meeting liked it as much as I did. Only one person was a little on the fence about it because she found that so many of the characters were cliches. I think when you're trying to make statements about society, cliches might be the way to go.

One of our members heard a rumor that Marais plans to write a sequel at some point. For now, I look forward to reading her next novel, If You Want to Make God Laugh, which has a publication date of next week.

Hum If You Don't Know the Words - a book to look for

Hum If You Don't Know the Words, a debut novel by Bianca Marais is the second goodreads giveaway I won recently. Here's the description that motivated me to enter.

Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy.
Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred . . . until the Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built, and shatters their worlds when Robin s parents are left dead and Beauty s daughter goes missing. 

After Robin is sent to live with her loving but irresponsible aunt, Beauty is hired to care for Robin while continuing the search for her daughter. In Beauty, Robin finds the security and family that she craves, and the two forge an inextricable bond through their deep personal losses. But Robin knows that if Beauty finds her daughter, Robin could lose her new caretaker forever, so she makes a desperate decision with devastating consequences. Her quest to make amends and find redemption is a journey of self-discovery in which she learns the harsh truths of the society that once promised her protection. 

Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the interwoven narratives create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid-era South Africa. Hum if You Don t Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

Here is my review from goodreads.

"When was the last time I picked up a 400+ page book on a Saturday afternoon and didn't go to bed until I'd finished reading? The publication date for Hum If You Don't Know the Words isn't until the middle of next month but I believe at some point in the not too distant future this book is going to appear on so many "best book club titles" lists. It's a multi-layered book with much to talk about. But unlike some other books I've read recently that begged to be talked about, this book can be read alone. Without added benefit of a book club discussion. Just be prepared to do a lot of thinking about what you're reading while you're reading it - and after you've finished the book. I'm going to be thinking about what I read for a long time to come.

I was able to read Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais prior to publication thanks to an ARC from Penguin Random House and G.P. Putnam's Sons. What a wonderful book. So thrilled that I will be able to say I read it before it becomes one of this year's most talked about books.

I thought I knew a lot about apartheid and I thought I was able to adequately imagine what life must have been like in South Africa in the late 1970s. I was a college student, witnessed protests on the streets of Philadelphia against apartheid. Had been an overseas student at Tel Aviv University side-by-side with many students from South Africa. I knew all those students had household servants. That's what I thought was different between "us" and "them." I never imagined that those household servants weren't allowed to use the bathrooms - or even the dishes and silverware - of the family that they worked for. On an intellectual level, I knew how horrible apartheid was. I knew it was on par with the United States South in the days of Jim Crow. But I simply didn't know on a real level what this translated to in everyday life. This book gave me a window into that world. Into South Africa of the 1970s, at a time when real change was on the verge of taking place.

Why is is that I never thought to ask those South African students in Tel Aviv about their Jewish lives back home, since I presume many of those students were Jewish? One of Robin's closest friends is a Jewish boy who is forced to be home-schooled because of anti-Semitic bullying at the school he had attended. Were my former fellow students bullied like that? And how is it that I didn't realize that these same fellow students didn't grow up watching television the way we did in the United States? Once a week, a group of us would go down to the lounge in our "F" dorm and watch The Muppet Show. Television had only come to South Africa a few years prior. Was being able to watch something like The Muppets a big, huge deal to those who had only started watching television? How did I not know?

When I think about the Civil Rights era in the United States, I think of something that happened before I was born (even if that's not quite true). But this story took place at a time when I (thought I) was aware of what was going on in the world around me. We boycotted companies that did business in South Africa. We protested. We signed petitions. My contemporaries marched. This was a horrible period of history in my lifetime. I likened the stories about the activists in this novel with stories I'm familiar with about our Underground Railroad.
 
Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a complex, rich novel. It's a story of apartheid. It's also a coming of age story. It's a story of creating family from the people you choose rather than those you are born to. It's a story about motherhood. And finally it's a story about love. It's a story of hope in a world where violence and hatred have taken a firm hold.

I try not to read reviews of books prior to picking up a book so it wasn't until after I'd finished reading that I explored some of the reviews on goodreads. Overwhelmingly, readers loved the book. A few people complained about the telling of Robin's story. She's telling the story of the year she turned 10 from the perspective of an older person. Her narration alternates between sounding like it's being told by a child and being told by adult Robin. I had no problem with that. Or the ending of the book? That it was just too neat and pretty (Did you really think for a moment that I am going to tell you how it ends?) The book wasn't perfect, but none of those issues detracted one moment from my full immersion and enjoyment of the book.

Bianca Marais' language is delightful. Her storytelling is seamless. I look forward to reading more of what she chooses to write. I will recommend this book to anyone, the highest compliment I can give to an author."