GLR May-June 2023

C ARY A LAN J OHNSON WHEN THEY TELL YOU TO BE GOOD: A Memoir by Prince Shakur Tin House Books. 296 pages, $27.95 I N THE NEW MEMOIR When They Tell You to Be Good, au thor Prince Shakur explores a slice of America that’s seldom visited: first-generation queer Caribbean immigrants growing up in the Midwest. He invites us to bear witness as he negotiates the often treacherous borders of race, sexuality, and Jamaican cul ture. Much of the book revolves around his journey to uncover the truth about his father’s death and to reimagine what his life might have been like had he received the parenting that he needed. There’s an adolescent angst and young adult pathos in the mem oir to which we can all relate. Shakur reminds us that there is no guidebook for young, queer Black boys and men. In this memoir, Shakur searches for emotional and political meaning in a country that can no longer hide from its racist past. We follow his political and personal journeys from Ohio, back to Jamaica, to the Philippines, to France, and to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His dramatic disappoint ment at the lies and compromises that ripple through the Amer ican Dream, particularly for immigrant families, is lamented in ways both poignant and painful. Accounts of childhood can be tedious for older readers un less they tell us something important about how they shaped the narrator as a person. Shakur offers tales of younger years that are both mundane and life-changing. Children play, parents scold, but in the first section of the memoir, Shakur is deeply moved by the passing of his friend’s mother, the only person in his life who (sort of) accepted his queerness. Writing a memoir with broad appeal can’t be easy, particu larly for a young person. (The author is not yet thirty.) The work must be personal and true, but must also evoke shared experi ences of joy, grief, and understanding that engage a reader of easy read. The quotations of classical Greek philosophy, the ater, and dance, and the various Latin quotations, tend to be in the original language, and the references to creative women stretch from Sappho through the 20th century. But readers who have the erudition or patience to wade through will be rewarded with all the lovely, wanton variations of human sexuality that the heteronormative, binary world tries to ignore. The fact is that lesbians have never had the freedom to ex plore their sexuality in the ways that gay males have through out history. Gay women have never been free to roam the streets and bars in sexist America or anywhere else. Even so, lesbian sexuality today is quite different from what might have been considered hot and juicy in the past. After Sappho demonstrates that Sapphic love has undergone numerous transformations over the centuries. ____________________________________________________ Cassandra Langer is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life . No Country for Odd Men

C ASSANDRA L ANGER An Outer Orlando

AFTER SAPPHO: A Novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz Liveright. 272 pages, $25. A this author feels the need to confess that she’s bisexual, as if being 100 percent lesbian feminist is too dangerous for any woman in these times. But this confession does not undermine Schwartz’ imagined and historical Sapphic fantasy. Her ex perimental novel is a philosophical portrait of woman as cre ator. The novel’s homocentric text digresses, entangles, and slides down a rabbit hole into the lives of queer women from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando , After Sappho forces the question of female creativity in literature and art: is it equal in originality to male creativity? Schwartz’ female heroes exist in twilight zones where non conforming women find their creative voices and speak their truths. In using fictionalized real-life women as characters who voice the contradictions of living a lesbian life in a heteronor mative, binary, patriarchal society and culture, these embodied voices courageously critique the misogyny and sexual politics at play in undervaluing women’s creativity. Schwartz’ novel moves us forward through time from the 1800s, in Italy, where a baby is born who will grow up to be Italian poet Lena Poletti, whose first act of rebellion is kicking off her swaddling blanket. Poletti takes a leading role in the charge for women’s liberation, and she’s Schwartz’ most important literary discovery—a con stantly shifting visionary who apparently seduced most of the great women of her age. We are then swiftly transported to 1920s Paris and London. Here we meet Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Sarah Bern hardt, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Gertrude Stein, and Rad clyffe Hall. The fragments in Schwartz’ narrative are discreet but cumulative: plays performed, love affairs begun and broken off, and babies left behind. History brutally invades the charac ters’ lives, promising political progress only to revoke it frus tratingly. Feminism as a movement is born, and lesbianism is recognized and then condemned: “we still lived in a little hol low between laws.” The unrivaled French-Jewish master of the novel form, Marcel Proust—who inspired Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and so many other literary lights—is very much alive in the author’s free-flowing tribute to Sapphic creativity as it moves through the ages. Nevertheless, readers unfamiliar with the heroic characters in Schwartz’ narrative may feel a little lost. After Sappho is not for casual readers or those looking for an entertaining afternoon. Unless one is familiar with the historical Sappho and the novel’s numerous references to lesbian, Sapphic, and sexually fluid women throughout history, the novel will most likely not be an CCORDING TO Selby Wynn Schwartz, the day of the Amazon is here! Writing a Sapphic, feminist novel takes imagination and nerve, and it’s worth noting that

May–June 2023

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