It’s the third week of “Chatting One Book,” and this week we’re taking a look at the section, “Whites.” It’s a long section that details the women’s experiences encountering and working alongside white Americans in their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and more. One of the more poignant things I took from this chapter was the utter despair and depression that many of the women found themselves in. Between the fantasies of their new husbands and new lives not matching up with reality and the suspicion and at times outright cruelty they encountered from their white neighbors and employers, the women faced many uphill battles, many challenges to their individual drive and character. I also found it poignant that despite the hostility and disappointment they faced, the women still desired to work hard, to make good lives for themselves—to achieve that elusive American Dream.

What did you take away from “Whites”? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Tags: One Book 2013, One Book One Philadelphia

Welcome to the second week of our blog series, “Chatting One Book”! Have you made it to any of our great One Book programs yet? Events are taking place throughout the city, so click here to find one for you!

In the second section of the novel, “First Night,” Julie Otsuka describes the first nights that the newly arrived Japanese women spent with their new husbands. It’s a short and powerful chapter that captures the excitement, bewilderment, and at-times disillusionment that these women had upon meeting the men to whom they were betrothed. Throughout the book, the author uses italics to differentiate an individual’s thoughts or speech from the group voice, and I thought the way she employed this technique in “First Night” was particularly impactful, as it underscored the unique and wildly diverse experiences that these women had with their new husbands—some more in love than ever, some eager to escape.

What did you take away from “First Night”? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Tags: One Book 2013, One Book One Philadelphia

Throughout these eight inspired weeks of One Book, One Philadelphia, I’ll be blogging about each chapter of Julie Otsuka’s masterful featured selection, The Buddha in the Attic. I hope you’ll join me in conversation in the comments!

In the first section of the novel, “Come, Japanese!”, I was immediately struck by the unique voice that Otsuka uses to tell this story—the first person plural. She alternates paragraphs of prose beginning with “Most of us” and “Some of us,” but never does she go into the perspective of one single woman’s thoughts—it’s always told from the perspective of the group of women. The first person plural voice both indicates to me that these women were having a common, shared experience but also that they weren’t necessarily seen as individuals or that they had lost their unique identity (or uniqueness wasn’t a valued characteristic). What does the use of first person voice do for you as a reader?

What else did you take away from “Come, Japanese!”? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Tags: One Book 2013, One Book One Philadelphia

Over the past several weeks, I have focused mainly on the themes, ideas, and questions brought up by Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously. However, I couldn’t conclude this blog series without discussing her writing style and the art with which she crafts sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

One of the things that immediately struck me about Danticat’s writing was her simple, yet rich and evocative descriptions of landscapes, people, and moments. From the “lime-colored” mountains to the “crystal clear stream, which was stinging cold in the morning and lukewarm in late afternoon,” Danticat is able to paint poignant images with very few words. I think my favorite comes on page 118 in chapter nine, “Flying Home:”

My favorite flights depart in the late afternoon or early in the evening. When on those flights, I always imagine what the plane must look like to a very small child from the ground, a silvered speck racing across a flaming orange sky, nurturing the child’s own dreams of escape…

Danticat also describes her internal struggles with similar exactitude, every word carefully chosen and none gone to waste. I think this passage on page 65 is a great example:

Forgetting is a constant fear in any writer’s life. For the immigrant writer, far from home, memory becomes an even deeper abyss. It is as if we had been forced to step under the notorious forgetting trees, the sabliyes, that our slave ancestors were told would remove their past from their heads and dull their desire to return home. We know we must pass under the tree, but we hold our breath and cross our fingers and toes and hope that the forgetting will not penetrate too deeply into our brains.

As someone prone to using three adjectives when one (or none) will do, I greatly admire her linguistic precision. What do you enjoy about Danticat’s writing style? Share your thoughts in the comments!

And—we’re excited to be gearing up for the kick-off of One Book, One Philadelphia’s 10th anniversary season at Parkway Central Library on January 25! Stay tuned to the blog for more information about our eight inspiring weeks of discussions, performances, and more!

Tags: One Book One Philadelphia

In “Our Guernica,” the final essay in Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat focuses on the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 and destroyed her former neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like so many of her essays, Danticat beautifully weaves together the personal with the universal, extrapolating her own experiences into greater thoughts about politics and the nature of art and artists. In particular, Danticat writes about how the earthquake has forever changed Haiti and its people—and also how it has forever changed the artists living in the Haitian Diaspora.

From now on, there will always be the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. And after the earthquake, the way we read and the way we write, both inside and outside of Haiti, will never be the same. Daring again to speak for the collective, I will venture to say that perhaps we will write with the same fervor and intensity (or even more) as before. Perhaps we will write with the same sense of fearlessness or hope. Perhaps we will continue to create as dangerously as possible, but our muse has been irreparably altered. Our people, both inside and outside of Haiti, have changed. In ways I am not yet fully capable of describing, we artists too have changed. (p. 162)

Have you experienced such a defining “before and after” moment in your life? How did it change you as a person? As an artist? What did you take away from “Our Guernica?” Share your thoughts in the comments!

Tags: One Book One Philadelphia