of Hezekiah's Independence
by Keith Russell
my deepest appreciation for insightful, supportive response. Your responses like reflex action, are so beneficial to this writer - one stay after another against despair, against dilemma.
Our affair is therefore the exact antithesis as well as antidote to my affair with our country and its people generally. One is saved by the balance produced.
About your book though. I've read it, completed it a few days ago. I read Hezekiah’s Independence after completing Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It did not resist this reader's effort to get through it like the work just before completed, arduous going in places/at times but quite rewarding overall/after all.
It was good to be in a work of fiction. Your sentences were exquisite, the rhythm of your language flawless throughout. What fine art.
I was left to wonder after, if it was too easy to read. In addition though, I know I did not get it all - the generational relationships and not a book just about a son and his dad. I think I failed to perceive the layers. I shall have to go back.
What do I remember of it all, I sat and wondered after. I read it in three goes over a ten day period. This analogy arose.
It was like the fall of snow throughout. Like when it snowed in Memphis where I studied. Often when it snowed in that city, though exquisite while it fell, it melted soon after and would not heap up as it would in Nashville where I also studied at Fisk. Snow would cover everywhere in thick blankets.
Similarly, passages of Hezekiah have for me evaporated though every sentence was enjoyed. What stay in my head are the room the father occupied, confined to bed, the son having to nurse and clean him up and clean him off.
I did not take care of my dad in such ways, my sisters did or persons we hired. Reading therefore, I was caused to feel guilty. The barber shop also was very strong and vividly drawn and the language spoken influenced by time spent by these men in the U.S.A.
The presence of men and their relationships and the absence of women was also palpable, different, in juxtaposition with the role of romance in our culture, its entertainment, arts, its literature.
I begin to remember more than I thought I could or had at present: the black man's white wife who went missing on the beach, murdered or abducted in her son's presence. Then the husband's retaliation, murdering who he concluded was responsible.
There are those places as dramatically wrenching as Greek or Shakespearian tragedy and the suspense or suspended event of the son smothering his father with a pillow with his funeral to attend afterwards.
That pillow from Othello, with which Desdemona was undone but in Hezekiah is it coup de grace or euthanasia, with the father's agreement.
Sigmund Freud invited his loving daughter's assistance similarly. When the end comes he said, do not prolong it. His death was therefore morphine assisted, an overdose which the agreement between his daughter and himself made possible.
The poems I expected to go back in time. They were found after their author had passed away but instead they seemed more modern than anywhere where the prose parts took us. I do not find them to contain the complications, the social and psychological complexities of any of these past lives. The air and light in them, the elegance of the language of them, like someone who spends week-ends in Fluid Lounge at present might pen.
I'm groping here. This is not as accurate as what I wish to convey, only the milieu in the poems seems avant guard rather than old like paper yellowing upon which they must have been found.
In a workshop in Barbados at UWI with Merle Collins, we stumbled upon this paradox, real fiction. Your works most certainly are, real fiction, what Hemingway aimed for, what Baldwin and Richard Wright were capable of cooking up. That truth which fiction is and produced.
I enjoyed getting my teeth into Hezekiah therefore, biting in and swallowing. Edgar Mittelholzer, Earl Lovelace, V.S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris, whom I've not yet read, is definitely the company in the Caribbean to which you belong. I thank you. Your contributions make this poet for whom fiction does not come easily or naturally, very proud. OB
© Obediah Michael Smith, 2006
Saturday, August 26, 2006 1:41 AM
by Keith Russell
my deepest appreciation for insightful, supportive response. Your responses like reflex action, are so beneficial to this writer - one stay after another against despair, against dilemma.
Our affair is therefore the exact antithesis as well as antidote to my affair with our country and its people generally. One is saved by the balance produced.
About your book though. I've read it, completed it a few days ago. I read Hezekiah’s Independence after completing Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It did not resist this reader's effort to get through it like the work just before completed, arduous going in places/at times but quite rewarding overall/after all.
It was good to be in a work of fiction. Your sentences were exquisite, the rhythm of your language flawless throughout. What fine art.
I was left to wonder after, if it was too easy to read. In addition though, I know I did not get it all - the generational relationships and not a book just about a son and his dad. I think I failed to perceive the layers. I shall have to go back.
What do I remember of it all, I sat and wondered after. I read it in three goes over a ten day period. This analogy arose.
It was like the fall of snow throughout. Like when it snowed in Memphis where I studied. Often when it snowed in that city, though exquisite while it fell, it melted soon after and would not heap up as it would in Nashville where I also studied at Fisk. Snow would cover everywhere in thick blankets.
Similarly, passages of Hezekiah have for me evaporated though every sentence was enjoyed. What stay in my head are the room the father occupied, confined to bed, the son having to nurse and clean him up and clean him off.
I did not take care of my dad in such ways, my sisters did or persons we hired. Reading therefore, I was caused to feel guilty. The barber shop also was very strong and vividly drawn and the language spoken influenced by time spent by these men in the U.S.A.
The presence of men and their relationships and the absence of women was also palpable, different, in juxtaposition with the role of romance in our culture, its entertainment, arts, its literature.
I begin to remember more than I thought I could or had at present: the black man's white wife who went missing on the beach, murdered or abducted in her son's presence. Then the husband's retaliation, murdering who he concluded was responsible.
There are those places as dramatically wrenching as Greek or Shakespearian tragedy and the suspense or suspended event of the son smothering his father with a pillow with his funeral to attend afterwards.
That pillow from Othello, with which Desdemona was undone but in Hezekiah is it coup de grace or euthanasia, with the father's agreement.
Sigmund Freud invited his loving daughter's assistance similarly. When the end comes he said, do not prolong it. His death was therefore morphine assisted, an overdose which the agreement between his daughter and himself made possible.
The poems I expected to go back in time. They were found after their author had passed away but instead they seemed more modern than anywhere where the prose parts took us. I do not find them to contain the complications, the social and psychological complexities of any of these past lives. The air and light in them, the elegance of the language of them, like someone who spends week-ends in Fluid Lounge at present might pen.
I'm groping here. This is not as accurate as what I wish to convey, only the milieu in the poems seems avant guard rather than old like paper yellowing upon which they must have been found.
In a workshop in Barbados at UWI with Merle Collins, we stumbled upon this paradox, real fiction. Your works most certainly are, real fiction, what Hemingway aimed for, what Baldwin and Richard Wright were capable of cooking up. That truth which fiction is and produced.
I enjoyed getting my teeth into Hezekiah therefore, biting in and swallowing. Edgar Mittelholzer, Earl Lovelace, V.S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris, whom I've not yet read, is definitely the company in the Caribbean to which you belong. I thank you. Your contributions make this poet for whom fiction does not come easily or naturally, very proud. OB
© Obediah Michael Smith, 2006
Saturday, August 26, 2006 1:41 AM
posted by Obie Quiet at 3:06 AM
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