March Book Reviews: International Women’s Day
By Bethany & Lily from The Student Team
We’re really excited to share our very first batch of monthly book reviews, brought to you by two members of our Student Team! As we celebrate the power of women’s stories, they have dived into the pages of two captivating books. Happy International Women’s Day!
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Book Review by Bethany Webster
The coming-of-age story is a well-known narrative, from Anne of Green Gables to the Perks of Being a Wallflower, generations have related wholeheartedly to the deeply emotive writing of the personal experience and feeling spoken to and represented by a character, even when you’ve never met them. Yet, none of these have ever felt quite as provocative as reading Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. A story told using 44 detailed vignettes, through which we follow a year in the life of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl, during a pinnacle period of her youth as she moves from Mexico to a Latino neighbourhood in Chicago. This 1984 novel provides a powerful story, portraying the Mexican-American experience against the setting of a hostile America, and the unique circumstances this can impose for a young girl in an unfamiliar society. We follow Esperanza from the funny and exciting to the deeply emotive snapshots of a child, to the fierce and inspiring person she becomes, and the excitement yet also fear and challenges that she must persevere along the way.
“You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are”
Moving onto Mango Street is an improvement for our protagonist from her last residences, but yet there is an evident sense of lack of belonging that reverberates around Esperanza throughout this book. Belonging being a key theme of this novel, that which attends strongly to the complexities of becoming and identity formation, particularly within a childhood made more challenging by the complex politics and societal constructs of race that are so prevalent within the region of Chicago that her family begin to call home. Through interactions with friends, and difficult experiences with school and neighbors, as well as life-altering ordeals, Esperanza takes our hand and guides us through her world, within which she garners understanding of the poverty within which she lives, alongside facing the harshness of racism.
“The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours”
In a book telling stories through the eyes of a young girl, gender narratives take strong importance within the novel’s formation and our understanding of her desires for freedom and how Esperanda, and many women just like herself, may pave the way for their identity formation in the midst of troubling environments. She lives surrounded by women who are trapped both literally within their homes, and metaphorically by the wider patriarchal systems within which they live. Rafaela is locked away by her husband who feels she is too beautiful for the world. Alicia stays up all night studying in the hopes of graduating with a good education to make her way in a successful job, but is also confined to her father’s expectations to help with the family business. It is through these connections Esperanza situates herself as a fierce female protagonist, wishing to break free of and avoid the confines she believes men place unfairly upon women in society, yet also realizing throughout the story that this is easier said. There is also a hopeful narrative of women supporting each other, and despite her struggles at Mango Street and her desire to one day leave, Esperanza is also strongly motivated to come back to help the women there, to see their own power as she herself has.
“Those who don’t know any better come into our neighbourhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake”
Through her deeply informative and inspiring writing, Cisneros has been a key figure in paving the way for other Latin American writers to express their stories and give their voices to literature that can widen the understanding of others. In her own writing, she gives light to voices often pulled into the dark and underrepresented within contemporary narratives, and within that we are able to obtain eye-opening messages and expand our worldview. Messages, told by someone whose own upbringing was tainted by struggles of feeling different due to her gender and culture and moving between homes frequently, which shows through in the depth of detail and emotion that is conveyed through the first-person narrative of Esperanza. The story highlights the barriers faced by many Mexican-American communities in trying to formulate their identities in a place where they are seen as foreign and made to feel that they don’t belong. Yet, there is the beauty here in Esperanza’s use of creative means to exercise her freedom and to create understanding out of her struggles. Art is so often a means through which we can begin to make sense of our experiences and our feelings towards it, and to convey a struggle that cannot always be defined by words. Esperanza’s aunt tells her, “you must keep writing. It will keep you free”, and her writing is almost a gateway to Esperanza’s gaining of autonomy as a woman in the world, accepting her cultural identity and how she sees herself against a prejudiced society.
Only 110 pages long this book is accessible even to the most infrequent of readers, but not to be missed if you love stories with social narratives that open your eyes to the depth of experience, and also contain strong and inspiring female leads! It is not necessarily an easy read, dealing with complex and difficult societal topics, but as long as you feel able to, I feel that people can get a lot out of reading this book, and could benefit and maybe even relate to the stories that it tells.
TW — book deals with narratives of racism, sexism and sexual assault.
Other books I recommend reading for International Women’s Day:
- Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Your Silence will not protect you by Audre Lorde
Educated by Tara Westover
Diary of a void by Emi Yagi
Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone by Minna Salami
Book Review by Lily Pearson
Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone is a captivating and thought-provoking read that convincingly argues for the centring of a Black feminist perspective in our attempts to understand the world. This book not only explains the values of taking such an approach but educates the reader on the cultures from which this perspective is inspired. Salami writes in a way that is engaging but also informative and allows the reader to reflect on their own experiences and what this approach would look like in their own lives. It also challenges them to consider the assumptions that inform their own perspectives, and this was one of the biggest takeaways from the book for me. It really made me think about the perspectives which shape society and my own thinking, as well as making me realise how much I could benefit from an approach to life that focuses more on seeking out joy and beauty as well as placing value on emotional responses.
Salami introduces the concept of ‘Europatriarchal Knowledge’ and the importance of being aware that this is the position from which many of our assumptions and perspectives are based. ‘Europatriarchal Knowledge’ is a term that Salami has created to describe the Eurocentric and patriarchal perspective that dominates global politics and western popular consciousness that revolves around whiteness and maleness as the central position. She does not say that this perspective is wrong, but convincingly argues for the need to recognise that this is only one perspective, as well as the need to challenge the fact that this is almost always the assumed or dominant view.
To combat this, Salami offers the alternative approach of ‘Sensuous Knowledge’. Salami makes it clear that this is not simply an alternative to ‘Europatriarchal Knowledge’, as that would still centre whiteness and maleness as the ‘axis around which everything else must turn’. Instead, this approach seeks to disrupt ‘one-dimensional thinking’, develop new models of thought and centre often hidden or overlooked perspectives.
The book begins with the story of ‘The Mountain’ which really effectively demonstrates its central message about the importance of considering the ‘hidden’ perspectives alongside the dominant ones that are habitual to many of us. In this story, contrasting reports of a legendary mountain by two different explorers cause confusion and mistrust and lead to the integrity of both explorers being questioned. This was despite the fact that ‘both explorers were telling the truth; they had just viewed the mountain from different perspectives’. Crucial to the story is that the first explorer who was disappointed that the mountain did not live up to its legendary reputation was a man, whilst the second explorer who was not believed when they returned with stories of a luscious and thriving mountain was a woman. Salami presents this book as coming from the second explorer’s perspective, the Africa-centred black feminist perspective, outlining the importance of centring this ‘hidden’ perspective rather than the Eurocentric one in order develop ‘a view of feminism as one in which humanity and nature live in a reciprocal relationship’.
Sensuous knowledge seeks to move away from a purely rational type of knowledge that values logic over feeling or moral values. It combines both the intellectual and the emotional, as ‘without feeling, knowledge becomes stale; without reason, it becomes indelicate’. Taking inspiration from African feminism, sensuous knowledge is a knowledge that not only uses all of your senses, but affects ‘your entire being- your mind, body and soul’. Salami uses the example of a book to demonstrate this, explaining how books are not only tangible objects that you can interact with in various forms, but they are also ‘mentally stimulating, therapeutic, and they potentially transform your deepest thought patterns’.
Using a wide range of case studies from Yoruba traditions to Beyonce, Salami delves into the different ways that a sensuous knowledge approach could benefit our lives, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own views and what this means for them individually as well as in relation to wider society. Each chapter covers a different topic, including ‘knowledge’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘beauty’. This allows for the thematic chapters to be self-contained, making it really easy to read a chapter at a time or to pick out specific sections that are most relevant or interesting to you.
The writing style made the book really enjoyable to read and it didn’t feel like I was reading dense theory or complicated academic language. It was still challenging but communicated its ideas in an accessible way. The book introduces complex ideas and is thought-provoking throughout but is written in a way that these ideas and concepts are explained clearly without being over-simplified. The use of the case studies really helped with illustrating practical examples and providing example stories to demonstrate the key ideas.
I would recommend this book to anybody, regardless of their personal identity or perspectives. It is not necessary for you relate to one or both of the Black or female identities centred in this book in order to gain something valuable from it. Regardless of your identity, this book will demonstrate the value of centring these perspectives in our approach to knowledge and our understanding of the world around us as well as the importance of challenging the dominance of Europatriarchal outlooks, societies and institutions. We can all take inspiration from Salami’s convincing articulation of the benefits of centring joy and beauty and listening to our emotional responses as well as our more rational thoughts.
