An inventive and astute dissection of Haiti’s evolving notions of sexual identity.
A debut nonfiction book explores the effects of imperialism on Haiti’s sexual landscape.
A rash of homophobic violence erupted following the debilitating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This tragic aftereffect was a result of accusations from some of the country’s evangelicals that God was punishing Haiti for the behavior of its queer community. After the earthquake, evangelical churches in the United States poured millions of dollars of aid into the nation while a much smaller stream of support arrived from American LGBTQ+ organizations. These latter resources helped transform Haiti’s sexual identity politics, creating an aspirational LGBTQ+ social movement in the country, complete with advocacy organizations, artists, and activists. Since then, both evangelical and LGBTQ+ communities have gained greater influence in the country, leading some Haitian commentators to variously assert that either gay sexuality or homophobia are foreign imports. With this work, Durban analyzes the extent to which the “homosexual/heterosexual” framing is indeed an import from Europe and the United States as well as the imperialist discourses regarding Haiti that make the country ripe for foreign intervention. The author is a deliberative and incisive writer, adeptly weaving history and politics together with the many layered traditions of Vodou and the concept of the zonbi (a spirit of the recently dead). Durban writes of a queer Haitian artist, the founder of a theater troupe, who performed a zonbi-inspired piece at the 2009 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince: “He, like others who had grown up in evangelical Christian households, was particularly zealous when it came to the subject of Vodou, which he considered to be a radical space of belonging that was distinctly Haitian. Vodou, moreover, informed his queer, anti-imperialist politics.” While too academic for a general audience, the book is more than a primer on the status of LGBTQ+ issues in Haiti. It’s a captivating work of cultural history, offering a window into how the nation is perceived by foreign powers as well as how it perceives itself.
An inventive and astute dissection of Haiti’s evolving notions of sexual identity.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780252044755
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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