Rosa Parks and Anansi
This morning, before showering, I decided to peak at a couple of my favorite blogs, and immediately learned that Rosa Parks had died. I love this quote from her biography (quoted in the Washington Post):
"People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Until I heard about Parks, I had been planning on blogging about the book I just finished, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I thought about skipping my weekly book review, but then saw a connection between the two. Because Gaiman claims that Anansi stories — stories about the trickster Spider (or about Coyote, or Br’er Rabbit, or whatever name you choose) — were what taught humans that there are ways to get what you wanted without resorting to violence and that brains can be as effective as sharp knives. Those are certainly lessons of the Civil Rights Movement. Anansi stories also teach that making your enemy look foolish is sometimes better than scaring him. And the Civil Rights Movement suceeded in part because it made segregationists look foolish and backwards.
I don’t want to give away the plot of Anansi Boys, but I will say that I enjoyed the book and stayed up later than I should have to finish it. Most of the reviews seem to describe it as a sequel to American Gods, but I thought it had more in common with Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It’s a fable, set in the present day, about someone who thinks he’s quite ordinary (even super-ordinary) and turns out not to be.
One detail that I really liked is the way that Gaiman handles race in this book. Almost all of the main characters are of African or Afro-Carribean descent, but that’s never explicitly stated; a few characters are identified as "white." It made me realize how many books I’ve read where characters are assumed to be white unless stated otherwise.
On a related note, I took out from the library Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock by Eric Kimmel, which is on the list of 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know that Jody at Raising WEG found. I think I liked Anansi Goes Fishing, by the same author, a bit better, but they’re both good.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Gaiman does that a lot; it took me most of American Gods to realize that the main character’s mother was black. It just isn’t made an issue – which is interesting, given his background in graphic novels, where it is all about the visuals and what people look like.