A Literary Gift Guide: Challenging the Narrative

2016 has witnessed a President being voted into the White House on a mandate of hate. And while we gawp disbelievingly over the Atlantic, remember, we’ve gone and severed our continental ties in tandem. A stagnant world understandably wants change, but to turn the clock back is not to reset to simpler times, but to return to less tolerant ones. The books below combat the current political narrative, providing the opportunity to experience the lives of others and understand where our troubled world is and how we got here. These Christmas book gifts offer insight into the issues currently facing us and let some light into 2017.

Race & America

The US is currently divided. The man elected to lead wants to build walls. He wants the physical embodiment to snake across the country’s southern border – a monument which would shame a nation – but also to build division within society; between genders, races and sexualities; between the health and wealth haves and have nots. The outragous truth, brought back to public knowledge by the 2016 film Loving, that interracial marriage was not legal across the US until 1967, demonstrates that divisions have not only run deep; they have been enshrined in law.

In 1960, 18-year-old African American George Jackson was handed an indeterminate one year-to-life sentence for the second-degree robbery of $70. He spent over ten years in San Quentin and Soledad prisons before being killed by guards in the latter in 1971, allegedly trying to escape. Over these years, George had written letters to his family, posthumously compiled into a collection entitled Soledad Brother [Chicago Review Press, £11]. They reflect anger, discrimination, the brutality of prison; a place ‘no one escapes unscathed’. It also chronicles the blossoming of a powerful political consciousness trapped behind bars.

Angela Davis is the 1960s radical, linked to Jackson through a tragic courtroom hostage situation where his brother Jonathan was killed shortly after shouting 'Free the Soledad Brothers'. She is known as a brave and eloquent campaigner for racial equality and feminist issues. Perhaps her most famous work is the 1982 text Women, Race & Class [Random House, £15.50], tackling the three major fault lines across which the ruling classes still divide and conquer. In some ways, it is dated – arguments move on – but also a document of the struggle at a crucial point in time.

Fiction should not be ignored on this subject and there are many to recommend, from Clarence Cooper Jr’s harsh prison tale The Farm [WW Norton & Co, £12.99] to almost any work by Chester Himes. Perhaps the most criminally undiscovered is Herbert Simmons’s searing tale Corner Boy [Andesite Press, £19.95], the tale of 18-year-old pusher and sharp dresser Jake Adams. A young man who survives street gangs and the dope game, only to be undone by an interracial relationship. It has pitch perfect dialogue and poetic prose. Imagine The Wire set on 1950s corner stoops.

Colonialism & Empire

While many wish to look away from the current refugee crisis, it is important to remember that the British Empire ploughed turmoil across the world with actions which reverberate to this day. There are many tomes plotting this history from the colonial power perspective. Far more important to hear from the previously colonised. Chinua Achibe’s Things Fall Apart is perhaps the most famous. Now with a 50^th anniversary re-issue and sitting quite rightly in the Penguin Classics series [£8.99], Achibe’s tale is of an Igbo leader and the influence of British Colonialism on his community. A study of tradition brought down by cultural imperialism. To quote Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’

Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance [Faber & Faber, £8.99] plots the history of India from independence in 1947 through to the tumultuous time of 'the Emergency' in 1975. Indian history is rarely studied in the UK; a strange and insulting truth considering we helped forge the nation through force. Why not learn more through Mistry’s visceral and vivid novel of these times, shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1996.

For bold, furious and often funny reflections on the current experience of BAME writers on these shores pick up a copy of The Good Immigrant [Cornerstone, £8.99]. Life changing essays from a diverse group including the actor Riz Ahmed and the poet Salena Godden. Place yourself in their shoes and change your perspective on life.

Heroes

Ours may have fallen in 2016, but thankfully many still exist in prose. Malcolm X is an idol to many; still a menace to some. The key theme of The Autobiography of Malcolm X [Penguin, £8.99] is transformation. Malcolm Little underwent a complete U-turn from coke addicted hustler into one of the most prominent and controversial black voices of 1960s America. His second transformation was from segregation towards inclusion, for which he was silenced by the gun – his message too powerful for those preaching intolerance from either end of the racial spectrum.

The family history of Jung Chang is the tale of three daughters of China; living through imperialism, revolution and the horrors to follow it during the ideological excesses of Mao Zedong’s reign. The power of her words is in their popularity; by becoming an international bestseller and publishing phenomonon, Wild Swans [Harper Collins, £9.99] opened the lid on the hidden experience for a large percentage of the world’s women. For a more current take on the escape from totalitarian rule, try Hyeonseo Lee’s The Girl With Seven Names [Harper Collins, £8.99]. An account of life in the hermit kingdom of North Korea and how escape is never the end of the struggle.

Politics

While the world seems to have been dragged dangerously right this past year, here is a reminder of past struggles, in both fact and fiction. Emile Zola’s Germinal [Oxford University Press, £8.99] depicts the grim struggle against the psychic and economic effects of capitalism on a coalfield in 1680s France. Harsh and grim but with raw and biting social commentary which shows just why it is one of France’s most significant novels.

In it the miners dream of a better future: ‘Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth.’ Zero hours, gig economy Britain take note. Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists [Wordsworth Editions, £1.99] has the corrupt and greedy firmly in its sights, yet more so those workers who are brow beaten to disbelieve a better existence is both possible and deserved. The workers themselves are presented as philanthropists, grafting purely for the benefit of their rulers.

Revolution

Change is now largely delivered through protest and the pen, yet stories of the past still offer insight. John Reed's 10 Days That Shook The World [Penguin, £6.99] is the essential report of the Bolsheviks' October Revolution. American journalist, socialist and poet, Reed is one of only two Americans to be buried at the Kremlin walls and was immortalised by Warren Beatty in the 1981 Oscar winner Reds. Apart from this, the US (for some reason?) seems to have forgotten him.

If intoxicated by the romance of revolution be sure to balance your reading out with either Solzhenitsyn's classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [Vintage, £8.99] or Anne Applebaum’s Gulag [Penguin, £12.99], an extraordinarily human history of the inhuman: Russia’s prison camp system. The idealism of revolution can be so easily soured.

Sally Heathcote Suffragette [Vintage, £16.99] is a gripping interpretation of a different revolution; the campaign for Britain's women to win the vote, vividly realised in this fine graphic novel. A fictional character is woven in with fact to tell the story of a fight still being undertaken on different fronts. The full vote was won in 1928 yet misogyny is just this year being validated by the actions and words of the leader of the free world.

The final suggestion covers all the bases previously discussed here. The late 60s is so often spoken of as the key period of 20^th century revolution, but '56 was far more significant. Simon Hall plots this most revolutionary year in 1956 [Faber & Faber, £10.99]. Colonial powers are beaten back – France in Algeria, Britain with Suez – while the US burns with racial protest and Eastern European states attempt to break themselves off from the edge of the Soviet monolith. Most affecting, and perhaps most prescient of a modern America pulled tight with racial tension, is the damning yet inspiring story of Autherine Lucy.

She was the first African American student to attend the University of Alabama, in the face of violent protest. Lucy’s is a story of unimaginable bravery and quiet dignity. Of seeking out a basic human right to education and equality in a society ‘simply unwilling to give up the economic and political power, and the status, that they enjoyed as a result of institutionalised white supremacy.’ Now, just listen to that statement echo down through history.