Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life - Softcover

Freeman, Ru

 
9781736494677: Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1736494678 ISBN 13: 9781736494677
Verlag: Etruscan Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Bon Courage is a fierce, eclectic, and intimate collection that encompasses the big questions of our time: what we mean by courage, how we define our world, how we choose to exist in it.Bon Courage is an exhilarating journey through a layered intellectual landscape textured with a range of political and personal enthusiasms, and emboldened by a passionate defense of the disregarded. Wide ranging and inclusive in the essay mode, deep and revealing as a memoir, with the dynamics and layering of great fiction. As if that’s not enough, it sings. Ru Freeman participates intimately while bringing global perspectives to subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, Palestine, 9/11, hairstyles, personal and cultural identity, motherhood and #MeToo. A resplendent and compendious exploration of great empathy, insight, and bon courage indeed. This is a book that is going to make a difference.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of Sleeping Alone: Stories, the novels A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, a New York Times Editor's Choice Book, and editor of the anthologies, Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine and Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She directs the Artist Network at Narrative 4 and teaches creative writing in the U.S. and abroad.

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“My name is not my name. It started at birth. I was drawn tight in the caucasian chalk circle of my parents’ love, trapped between the inner terror of recognition and the larger force of aspiration. “She is everything that is precious,” my mother said, dispatching my father to enter my name into public records a few days after I arrived. In Sri Lanka, where I was born, there was no hurry to name a baby. Many things needed to happen before that weighty burden could be placed upon a newborn: an astrologer had to be consulted, a horoscope drawn, the most auspicious akshara—loosely translated as sound, but more like utterance—had to be revealed, in my case, ‘ru,’ and only then could the parents begin to examine the choices offered by extended family and friends, never mind their own. Everything that is precious is what she saw me as, the longed-for daughter, and her youngest, in a culture that adores daughters, and spoils the last-born. “Ruani,” she said. “That’s her name.” -from Ru(TH)less“How is it, then, that the youth in a country so uncomfortable with death could gather itself together to cheer the death of Osama bin Laden? Is there something about the American conscience, or lack thereof, that makes it impossible for an American to mourn their dead but makes it not only possible but, by some accounts lighting up the blogosphere, positively commendable to cheer the death of someone whose crimes they barely remember? And if, as the American media has repeatedly emphasized, particularly during these last few days, Osama bin Laden was American’s Public Enemy #1, could it be that these kids know nothing of how their obscene celebrations might be perceived abroad or of the people who might support bin Laden, and even less as to the reasons why? Here’s a quick list that I include from the first part of a blog by Asim Rafiqui, an American photographer. The entirety of it is worth reading in full: “We have invaded two nations because we were told that we must. Both illegally and in violation of all known international law. We have murdered possibly over a million Afghanis and Iraqis and Pakistanis and others in the process. And continue to kill them at will in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have displaced and dislocated from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan other millions, forever ruining their lives and humanity. And forever consigning them to the void of suspicion, fear, and prejudice. We constructed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now use them for “forward projection” in the so-called war against a noun. We continue to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and use massive military force to retain our jackboots over their necks while funding and supporting illegal and completely illegitimate governments that we described as “democratic” and “parliamentary.” We have invited private militia and corporate mercenaries to the party and given out contracts worth billions to make it appealing for them. We have detained innocents, including American citizens, indefinitely and still refuse to give them appropriate justice. President Obama willingly continuing the illegal and unjust policies of his predecessors. We have tortured them relentlessly (oh, sorry, we have enhanced interrogated them!) and strong-armed our civilized courts and bureaucratic apparatchiks to justify our actions. We have renditioned them and sent them off to our “allies” in other parts of the world to be tortured, maimed, and killed. And there is no end to this program.”-from Osama Bin Laden & America’s Celebration of Death“Sometimes, on a long drive alone, I find myself singing a song I’d learned as a child in another country, ‘God Bless America.’ Then, it was just a song among many. Now, it carries a resonance I’d not have believed possible. A long time ago my mother made me apply to American colleges by pointing out that Sri Lankan universities had been closed for three years due to political unrest in the country, and, more importantly, that she would let me marry the boyfriend at the time if I just went away for a year. I laughed at her plot and decided to prove her wrong: I’d get that full scholarship, but I’d never changed my mind about the boy. She won. I came, I met another boy. I suppose that is why she, a teacher of literature, underlined a certain quote in one of the texts we studied in school for our high school exams, these words from Benvolio to Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “Go thither; and, with unattainted eye, Compare her face with some that I shall show, And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.” My Sri Lankan swan turned crow in the face of the beautiful all-American boy I met on a college campus in Maine. But setting out on the grand adventure of romance is not the same thing as setting out on the dangerous escapade of marriage to someone from a different culture. My mother loved my husband—he was, without a doubt, everything she wanted in a partner for her only daughter—and he, in turn, cherished her.”-from Marry an American

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Verlag
Etruscan Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1736494678
ISBN 13 
9781736494677
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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