WASTE

 

 

Brief Review

 

 Memoirs are in vogue.  Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir (2018) has garnered critical praise for the bold weight of its masculinity. His book sparked  many unrecorded private conservations among those who know Laymon's mother in real time.  The private consumption of his memoir is saturated with uncertainty.  Likewise, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House (2019), the book chosen for  2021 citywide reading in New Orleans under the One Book, One New Orleans project, promotes more than a slight degree of indulgence.  It exposes the necessary quirks in the writing of memoir as an act of discovery.

 

Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson's Bridge Across Jordan  (1991) set a model for how an activist might write herself into histories of struggle. Robinson was strident in proclaiming she was a very special person. , Catherine Coleman Flowers' Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret  (2020), on the other hand,  is an example of what memoirs about environmental injustice render American history to be.  And in its own way, Waste is a textbook for unsung  people who struggle to broadcast the authority of their voices in the endless reconstructing of American histories. It is model  of invention  to think about as we continue to learn how to write or how to teach the art of writing. Were I using the book to help students develop writing skills, I would identify two minor flaws: ( 1) in writing about environments and dirty secrets,  more attention should be the legal dimensions of the subject than to fame by association with people who have power and influence; (2)  the memoir writer must know when to step back from narcissism  and know how to use documentation and pointed analysis to make a case persuasive. The editors at The New Press bear some guilt for not giving Flowers better advice.

 

Flowers' exercise of discovering self and purpose is very readable. The prose is not tormented  with complex sentences which require three readings to unpack; the book is far less class-conscious than Robinson's Bridge, and Flowers ' rhetorical strategies of truth-telling resonate the power of the vernacular story one finds, for example,  in Hollis Watkins' Brother Hollis: The Sankofa of a Movement Man (2015). If we listen attentively to stories of activism, we discover what is constantly  unsettling in the quilting of American histories.   Despite their quirks, these are truly the stories we need to avoid bad faith dealing with  systemic  features of poverty in America  and inequity in making public health care available for citizens. Waste invites us look carefully at the future and the past in the making of dirty secrets.

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 1, 2021

 

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