Customer Reviews

Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent

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Thomas Glave seems like a righteous guy, a gay Jamaican academic who was instrumental in setting up J-FLAG, the gay & lesbian Jamaican rights group; a thinking human being concerned with injustice based on skin-colour, gender and sexuality; and someone deeply reflective on the multivalent identities of the immigrant. So I was set up to like this book. But on the whole I didn't. It's a collection of essays, but some (like the one reflecting on the resurgence of gung-ho American patriotism following 9/11) are simply dated & should have been excluded. Others are cute but slight nostalgia pieces about Glave's childhood in the States, or romances about his Jamaican heritage. There are stream-of-narrative poetic reflections on obscure novels - & indeed stream-of-consciousness reflections on lots of things. These always feature comparisons to the sea, & go on for pages & pages without illuminating anything - except that Thomas Glave loves the sea & is a sensitive soul. I can read & enjoy quite difficult & demanding prose, but I found myself skimming paragraph after paragraph of this book to try to get to the point. The academic stuff's often not very academic - for instance the chapter about trying to imagine a black gay Monica Lewinski (a notion which apparently made his students' chins hit the floor) - and the personal stuff is buried under a slurry of lyricism. The most interesting parts of this book are those which are acute about the nuances of being a migrant with dual nationality - but to my mind even these tend to creak under the weight of poetical 'fine writing' larded on top of them. If you enjoy a consciousness displaying its own sensitivity in a poetical vein then perhaps you'll love this book. I'm afraid I just find it tiring.

WORDS TO OUR NOW is a stylistically innovative, powerfully written collection. Sometimes a writer's exploratory prose style marks his literary difference. Glave's prose has a recursive effect as if his language requires both writing and re-writing--incessant, jeweling, ornate construction--to be adequately heard.

To my ear, Glave's stylizations seem like explorations of expository "beauty". The essays seem to be asking how can the lyrical, iridescent syntax and diction counter and augment the often painful concepts of LGBT and black liberation that the essays take on?

Extreme rhetorical stylization like this is so different that the usual literary fare that some readers may give it pause. But the style does not diminish the substance of Glave's meaning or the excellence of many of these essays.

Hi. I'm find this book hard to read. It seems to be going on and on, using out landish words and not getting to the point. But, i'm still reading so well see.