price of the ticket/cost of the prize


Price of the Ticket/Cost of the Prize

"On December 9, 2018, I received the New Academy Prize for Literature in Stockholm, Sweden, the award set up last year to replace the Nobel Prize, which was cancelled after a scandal and dispute at the Swedish Academy.

Maryse Condé, "Giving Voice to Guadeloupe"

Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir.  New York: Scribner, 2018.







You  imagine that setting the opening sentence of an acceptance speech by Condé in proximity with a bibliographic citation for Laymon's memoir, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence (2019) from the American Library Association is a meaningful gesture.  A gesture can have meaning without being especially meaningful. It can mean simply that you made a gesture. It can mean, truth be told, that you are pleased a larger world of readers acknowledged the merits of work by the two writers.  It does not mean you regard the awards as more than confetti in a parade that never happened in the republic of world letters.



You appreciate Condé's works for deepening your understanding of literature and international politics, especially imperialism.  You appreciate Laymon's writing for tormenting you with thoughts about the implacable horrors of systemic racism in the United States of America, the psychological costs of his negative justifications of benign genocide in the name of fat, his extreme efforts to make certain truths about addiction, mutilating love between mother and son, the fragility of race-based  will power, and  domesticated dysfunctionality topics of a conversation   -----     topics of a conversation which, to be candid about the shape (constructed dimensions  of  the 21st century), it  is most unlikely  American citizens can or want to have.



Your soul is sickened by the race-stinky vomit Laymon's unfettered honesty  brings into sharpest focus. You are undone by his final comments to his mother:



"I wanted to write a lie.  You wanted to read a lie.  I wrote this instead to you because I am your child, and you are mine.  You are also my mother and I am your son.  Please do not be mad at me, Mama.  I am just trying to put you where I bend.  I am just trying to put us where we bend." (241)



If this capitulation to a defensive posture  is the cost of the prize, the prize is naught but dross! Truth ought not cheapen with dross.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            February 11, 2019






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