The book is arranged in five sections; the first three are the strongest and make for delightful reading. Unlike Lena Dunham’s character in the TV series “Girls,” who seeks out misadventure to help fill up a memoir while she is still in her 20s, Bell’s early life is extremely eventful and required no extra effort to find anguish. Her mother battled prescription drug dependency; Bell is a rape survivor who occasionally binged alcohol. At the end of the memoir readers may wonder how Bell emerged from it all so strong and capable.

I read the book around the time the TV series “13 Reasons Why” was released on Netflix, an adaptation of the young adult novel by Jay Asher, in which a teenage girl named Hannah narrates the reasons for her suicide in great detail. It struck me that that Bell’s narrative was the exact opposite of the fictional events depicted in the “13 Reasons Why”: her anger and despair were hard to put into words or make sense of. The inability to explain things seems more relatable, more realistic somehow.

Halfway through the memoir Bell befriends a guy named Cash. They grow close because of their mothers’ drug habits. She breaks down in front of him at one point:

I finished telling Cash how I’d thought about killing myself. I blamed it, out loud, on not being able to deal with my mum’s behaviour. But when I uttered those words, it felt like a mammoth lie. Mum’s behaviour was not the reason I wanted to kill myself. Yes, it may have heightened it, but it wasn’t the reason. I didn’t know the real reason why. Was I mad?

Can one really quantify a suicide like Hannah does in “13 Reasons Why”? Bell feels desperate like the fictional character Hannah and wonders how the world around her would react like after her death. Yet Bell lives on. Her story ends on a note of optimism, of finding a sense of self amidst extreme chaos, a dysfunctional family, teenage rebellion, and isolation.

Bell guides us through her life by talking to her reflection in the mirror and voices in her head. The “reflection” pieces are more introspective and read as if they serve a therapeutic function for Bell herself. Bell’s main narration style is precise and succinct, without the use of flowery language or overt emotional indulgence. It’s a breeze to read.

That is not to suggest that the text lacks depth. The relationship between Bell and her struggling mother is rich and remains at the heart of the story. It is their relationship that drives the narrative of Dear Reflection forward. The book includes an epilogue, a letter written by Bell’s mother about certain prescription drugs.

Bell moved from Australia to Greece after university, to be with the family of her partner. Her mother followed her to Greece eventually. In many ways the Mediterranean becomes a place of calm, of healing and starting over for Bell and her family. Moving from one side of the equator to another, as if mirroring the rhythm of the climate, changed the pace and tone of Bell’s writing about her life.

Readers do get some answers and clarity, eventually. By the end of the memoir Bell’s teenage life doesn’t really look like a string of unintelligible choices, but tell the story of a girl trying to fit in, find a place and people to belong with.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Jessica Bell’s Memoir “Dear Reflection”: Self-Discovery Amidst a Dysfunctional Family appeared first on Newfound.

It seems that statements like Fahey’s are becoming more correct with each passing day. The issue of equality, what it means, who gets it and who has the power to hand it out is ubiquitous because contemporary technology allows us to see, in real-time, the unfair disparities between certain peoples, while allowing us to voice our opinions more efficiently than ever. It is an incredibly relevant issue because despite its ubiquity, it’s a problem that’s not going away.

The collection allows itself to meander in and out of the political and the personal, the joyous and the angry, the optimistic and the pessimistic, while not letting one reign supreme. This is a testament to the freedom Fahey, the editor, has obviously given his contributors. It also gives the collection a full, energetic feeling, as you do not know where you will be taken next.

Take Christopher Bram’s essay, for example, which takes no prisoners as it dismantles the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. As Bram states, though “all men are created equal” and endowed “with certain inalienable rights” this didn’t seem to apply to slaves, women, or anyone who wasn’t a white male. In fact, it seemed to be just a fleeting mention of equality to allow these slave-owning leaders to brag that they were just as free to do what they wanted as any king was. That’s the kind of honesty we need in political debate nowadays.

Once you’ve experienced this kind of affront to your existing knowledge of what equality means and who cares about it, seeing the writers chisel away at one’s image of a tolerant society becomes a sort of guilty pleasure. Guilty, because with each essay one sees the struggles of individuals that one likely has been oblivious to or has been able to ignore. Pleasurable, because experiencing viewpoints that one doesn’t often experience should always be relished. If that were a more common thought, then there might not be as great a need for books like this. Minds and prejudices are only changed by the free flow of information, from one person to another, from the oppressed to the powerful.

There are too many highlights to list in this book, and too much talent and passion to cover with any review, but one moment that did make me wonder if I had hit upon the feeling that the book intended for me was in Barbara Abercrombie’s essay, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” Her words on how people are happy to stereotype and disregard the elderly without the equivalent guilt that comes with racism and sexism, for example, unsettled me. I hadn’t given any worthwhile amount of thought before to the inequality that older people must feel, and, as the author says, their invisibility. But greater than this realization was my own inclination to disagree with some of her essay.

The accusation she makes concerning the way advertisers define her age group “by our health problems, our infirmities” seems unfair to me. Without deliberate assumptions and stereotypes, advertising would cease to be able to exist, surely? Can it be discrimination when advertisers have to show older people as infirm? If the advert showed a woman using her bath-with-a-door-in-the-side-of-it with ease, then it wouldn’t work as a sales pitch. If it’s the infirm and, statistically, elderly, who need it, then can you argue with that portrayal? Can you? Once my inner monologue had finished, I reflected that perhaps it is causing these inner arguments that is the book’s raison d’être. Perhaps the greatest review I can give “Equality” as a result is that it has made me bring my own opinion into question. The greatest consequence any book can have.

And that’s the crux of it. A white, straight male myself, I don’t have to think about equality. I must be confronted with it in order to realize that my opinion is fallible. “Equality” is this confrontation and an effective, charming one at that. Because of the book’s inspired use of story-telling, there are no rants here. No soap boxes or declarations of war. “Equality” is not a celebration of difference or a judgement or an offering of consolation or reprieve. It is stories, told by those who want to tell them and are driven by that writer’s desire to disturb the pond water and reveal the murk, mud and tangled weed beneath the surface.

Only once or twice did “Equality” fail to stop itself becoming too self-accusatory and unfocused. Some authors slipped into indulgent self-criticism in a way that seemed to this cynical reader like egoistic intrusions into space which could have been better used (by disabled writers, perhaps, because the references to disability, for a book of this length, are fleeting). Some seemed to trivialize the larger battles people must fight by comparing them with their own, relatively unimportant struggles with personal prejudices. Perhaps it’s my own politics interfering, or the inevitable side-effect of a twenty-five essay collection, but begging forgiveness for one’s impulse to make judgements about another driver for speeding seems out of place in such a sincere and important book.

For the fight for equality to mean anything, surely, it has to be focused and outward-looking, which this book, as a general rule, is. The moments of powerful research and frank confession that go into the best of these essays, and the genuinely moving advice that comes from those with first-hand experience of the worst kinds of unequal thinking, more than make up for the questionable moments. This book is a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to be unsettled, prodded and pained by. What we need is more like this, bigger and stronger, growing more demanding each time.

The message of “Equality” can be best summed up by a line from Victoria Zackheim’s essay, “Stirring Frustration Stew”: “As much as I’d like to write about equality in a positive way, I’m finding it difficult.”

And it is difficult, but she writes in spite of that. Doesn’t that say it all?

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, non-fiction and drawing comics.Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, drama and drawing comics.

The post Equality, A Collection of 25 Personal Essays: What Do You Think Of When You Think Of Equality? appeared first on Newfound.

I find poets and writers who emerge out of or are associated with writing programs in the West to be distant, with their concocted vocabularies and morphological structures. I rarely feel anything from their works. Much like the art-house cinemas of the world, the writers from university writing programs live in their own little cocoons. They neither display the concerns of the masses nor do they display an affinity with the Philistines on the street. Faris’s work traverses from high culture of Spinoza and Walter Benjamin to Eminem and Katrina Kaif, the everyday life that has no inkling of romanticism for the bygone era.

Faris, a Kuwaiti poet, brings with her work certain clichéd political expectations concerning pathos of war and migration. The expected themes are touched on without the expected motifs. Instead she paints a picture of a world in transition and contradiction through war, trade, consumption and morality in the everyday life of its people.

Faris’s work displays none of the regionalist aspiration that much of post-colonial academia cherishes as she situates her experiences, her place, within the network of this world. We expect this of an English poet of the post-colony and yet her words appear fresh when Faris articulates them.

In “The Death and Rebirth of Saddam Hussein” Saddam and Eminem share neighborhood;

Al-Jazeera in the background.
This time, we all pay attention
when my father cries, “Mat Saddam!”
But it’s just like every other time.
Wishful thinking on a couch.

March. The 75th Academy Awards.
My brother and I pretending to sleep
on makeshift beds on the floor.
[…] My computer in the bedroom.
Intermittent Internet. When
Souq Sharq was damaged,
I was still thinking of 8 Mile
and of Eminem’s Oscar.

“Arab Poetry of the Hereafter” touches on the contradictions that every post-colonial writer working with foreign languages feels or has at least thought of:

“Take me,” she said,
dabbing her lips with the curse of cognizance
—a second generation Anglophone writer,
the badge built with the labour of her forefathers
glinted with pride, poking holes
into her self-righteous visage.

“I don’t give a damn about your journey
of self-realisation, when your people
import my people as cheap labour,

and while we’re at it,
I would just like to add,
that you don’t have a history to write about.”

My preoccupation
with the language of modernization
was thwarted in one fell swoop
on the night of a gaggling gathering
glinting with dew on temples and brows
of ideological disseminators of truth,
with eyeballs half-watching the backs of their heads,
and half closed.

In “My Uncle Traveled on a Train” the everyday contradiction of ethnic warfare is put ever so succinctly:

He traversed lands that were not his own,
in army uniform, dapper
though creased and crumpled,
his backpack full of energy bars and batteries. My uncle
was ever so polite,
tipping his beige bent hat to strangers,
smiling, he asked about their names and health
                —strangers he would not hesitate to bomb
                                when elevated
thousands of miles in the air, and they
mere insects crawling on the planet that gave my uncle
                his accent, his mustard, his beard.

Beyond these contradictions, Faris’s work also displays a ferocity that is often missing from today’s literature of the gentry. Her work doesn’t just cover the anger or resentment against the political institutions or establishments, but also displays a keen distaste for the optimism (a sort of yuppism) that haunts much of the globalized urban spaces today.

In “Janus/Portunus” Faris doesn’t mince her words;

The selfish soul of man is found
at last in greedy genes disclosed
in cells and coined in labs.

But a fact is a whore
working for the rich and famous,
fearing the cabal of mercenaries,
ready and willing and able to teleport
at moment’s notice at the brothel’s door.
But what do you expect?

In “There is no Better” she hits on the global hysteria of “depression” that has hit all of the world replacing, melancholia and mourning:

          Get better.
          Get better.
          Are you better?
There is no better. Only. There is.

The Middle East in the dominant imagination of the globe today lacks nuance and depth. The television images of war, refugees, bombs and destroyed buildings are generally what comes to mind. Faris, on the other hand, displays how deftly one could write about years lived around the ecology of war. Her words and phrases are simple, some almost rudimentary. That is precisely where the strength of her work lies.

Despite all the negativity of the collection, the book comes to a close with words of wisdom in a couplet, a form which is extremely popular from the Middle East to South Asia.

Where the first poem in the book ends with the lines—

         This is
         a plantation

the last poem ends with—

Know then thyself, presume not God to find.
The proper study of mankind is kind.

In the book Faris covers the cycle of pessimism, nihilism, cynicism, pragmatism (in the poem about Walter Benjamin, for example) and ends with the most minimal couplet wisdom could offer. The dominant cutesy aesthetic of today, “find beauty in small things and memories,” is overturned by Faris for good.

In “Permit Me” she asks;
May I begin our tale with
“Once beyond the end”?

Debarun Sarkar is an alumnus of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and Presidency University, Kolkata where he studied English and Sociology respectively. He currently lives in Calcutta and divides his time between writing and freelancing.

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