Memories of racism
Sue Monk Kidd's novel tells the stories of a white girl, 11, her slave, 10, and their relationship over 35 years
"As a white person, I think it is daunting... I've always felt a responsibility to write about what I saw, to redeem some of that through storytelling. It's part of my history too."
SUE MONK KIDD, on being hesitant to write about the violence of racism. Memories of growing up in a town where racism was a fact of life have led American author Sue Monk Kidd to write best-selling stories about strong black women.
The author is known for the word-of-mouth hit The Secret Life Of Bees (2002), about a motherless white girl and the black women who raise her. The author's third and newest novel, The Invention Of Wings, returns to the theme of civil rights through the story of two sisters who campaigned to abolish slavery in 19th century America.
The book was released last Tuesday and is Oprah's book club pick for this month, an accolade likely to send sales skyrocketing, especially since the influential celebrity calls it "a conversation changer".
Kidd's most famous novel, The Secret Life Of Bees, was published in 2002 by Penguin - the first publisher she showed it to - longlisted for the international Orange Prize for women's fiction and made into a 2008 movie starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah. It has sold about eight million copies worldwide.
The Invention Of Wings, published by Hachette in the United Kingdom and Viking in the United States, is based on the lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, 19th-century activists from Kidd's hometown, Charleston. It also brings in the voice of female slaves such as Sarah's maid Hetty, known to other slaves as Handful.
In a telephone interview from her home on the Florida coast, the 66-year-old author says: "I was certainly drawing on memories of growing up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a lot of racism and segregation at that time. Those memories are very vivid and painful."
She was 54 before she turned her memories into fiction, in part because she was daunted by her race.
She studied nursing at Texas Christian University, later taking creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College. She spent her 30s and 40s writing non-fiction articles for magazines such as Reader's Digest to supplement the family income.
Her husband Sandy is a Baptist minister and they have two grown children, daughter Ann and son Bob.
The Secret Life Of Bees is set in 1960s South Carolina and features some of what the author witnessed as a child growing up in the area.
As she says in the reading guides to her books, white supremacist members of the Ku Klux Clan policed her hometown and balled-up paper was thrown at the black students in her school, one of the first in the country to have an "integrated classroom" featuring students of all races.
On the telephone, she recalls feeling hesitant to set this down on paper. "As a white person, I think it is daunting. I can't say it didn't cross my mind and cause me to pause. I felt I was embarking on new territory but I was very compelled to it.
"I've always felt a responsibility to write about what I saw, to redeem some of that through storytelling. It's part of my history too."
In 2009, Singapore's National Library Board chose the book as one of the must-read titles for annual literacy campaign Read! Singapore. The author's other books have sold at least 25,000 copies here in the past decade, according to one distributor, Pansing Singapore.
A second novel, The Mermaid's Chair, about a woman questioning her marriage even as she cares for her deeply ill mother, was published in 2005. It won the consumer-driven Quill Award for fiction that year, and was made into a 2006 television movie starring Kim Basinger for the Lifetime Channel.
Kidd next wrote a travelogue with her daughter Ann, then in her 20s: Travelling With Pomegranates (2009) was about their travels through Greece, Turkey and later France between 1998 and 2000.
While writing that book, Kidd encountered the story of the Grimke sisters during a visit to the Brooklyn Museum.
Surprised that she knew so little about these women from her own hometown, she began researching their story and decided to write a novel based on their lives.
"It was challenging. I was trying to write from this intersection of imagination and history, that can be very difficult. I really revered Sarah Grimke's life and history and I didn't want to deviate from it very much," says the writer.
However, it was even more difficult trying to get into Hetty's head, given her concerns over whether she could accurately represent the plight of such a character.
"This novel, it's even further out on that literary limb. I'm writing in the voice of an enslaved African-American woman," she says with a laugh.
"In the end, my larger feeling is that I'm not as worried about appropriation, I'm more concerned about closing these divides. This woman, Hetty Handful, is not unknowable to me, not inseparable and I could inhabit her heart and mind."
So what would the author like readers to take away from the book? She takes a while to choose the right words.
"My first thought is, I want the reader to learn something new about slavery and history. More than that, I want the readers to take away a felt expression of this story.
"I hope the reader can experience empathy, what it might have been like to be an enslaved woman in the 19th century or to be a woman in the 19th century, what it feels like to be denied rights.
"I think that is really the gift of fiction. It's the ability the reader has to feel the characters' lives."
The Invention Of Wings is available at major bookstores and retails at $27.06 before GST.
akshitan@sph.com.sg
Copyright © 2014 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
SUE MONK KIDD, on being hesitant to write about the violence of racism. Memories of growing up in a town where racism was a fact of life have led American author Sue Monk Kidd to write best-selling stories about strong black women.
The author is known for the word-of-mouth hit The Secret Life Of Bees (2002), about a motherless white girl and the black women who raise her. The author's third and newest novel, The Invention Of Wings, returns to the theme of civil rights through the story of two sisters who campaigned to abolish slavery in 19th century America.
The book was released last Tuesday and is Oprah's book club pick for this month, an accolade likely to send sales skyrocketing, especially since the influential celebrity calls it "a conversation changer".
Kidd's most famous novel, The Secret Life Of Bees, was published in 2002 by Penguin - the first publisher she showed it to - longlisted for the international Orange Prize for women's fiction and made into a 2008 movie starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah. It has sold about eight million copies worldwide.
The Invention Of Wings, published by Hachette in the United Kingdom and Viking in the United States, is based on the lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, 19th-century activists from Kidd's hometown, Charleston. It also brings in the voice of female slaves such as Sarah's maid Hetty, known to other slaves as Handful.
In a telephone interview from her home on the Florida coast, the 66-year-old author says: "I was certainly drawing on memories of growing up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a lot of racism and segregation at that time. Those memories are very vivid and painful."
She was 54 before she turned her memories into fiction, in part because she was daunted by her race.
She studied nursing at Texas Christian University, later taking creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College. She spent her 30s and 40s writing non-fiction articles for magazines such as Reader's Digest to supplement the family income.
Her husband Sandy is a Baptist minister and they have two grown children, daughter Ann and son Bob.
The Secret Life Of Bees is set in 1960s South Carolina and features some of what the author witnessed as a child growing up in the area.
As she says in the reading guides to her books, white supremacist members of the Ku Klux Clan policed her hometown and balled-up paper was thrown at the black students in her school, one of the first in the country to have an "integrated classroom" featuring students of all races.
On the telephone, she recalls feeling hesitant to set this down on paper. "As a white person, I think it is daunting. I can't say it didn't cross my mind and cause me to pause. I felt I was embarking on new territory but I was very compelled to it.
"I've always felt a responsibility to write about what I saw, to redeem some of that through storytelling. It's part of my history too."
In 2009, Singapore's National Library Board chose the book as one of the must-read titles for annual literacy campaign Read! Singapore. The author's other books have sold at least 25,000 copies here in the past decade, according to one distributor, Pansing Singapore.
A second novel, The Mermaid's Chair, about a woman questioning her marriage even as she cares for her deeply ill mother, was published in 2005. It won the consumer-driven Quill Award for fiction that year, and was made into a 2006 television movie starring Kim Basinger for the Lifetime Channel.
Kidd next wrote a travelogue with her daughter Ann, then in her 20s: Travelling With Pomegranates (2009) was about their travels through Greece, Turkey and later France between 1998 and 2000.
While writing that book, Kidd encountered the story of the Grimke sisters during a visit to the Brooklyn Museum.
Surprised that she knew so little about these women from her own hometown, she began researching their story and decided to write a novel based on their lives.
"It was challenging. I was trying to write from this intersection of imagination and history, that can be very difficult. I really revered Sarah Grimke's life and history and I didn't want to deviate from it very much," says the writer.
However, it was even more difficult trying to get into Hetty's head, given her concerns over whether she could accurately represent the plight of such a character.
"This novel, it's even further out on that literary limb. I'm writing in the voice of an enslaved African-American woman," she says with a laugh.
"In the end, my larger feeling is that I'm not as worried about appropriation, I'm more concerned about closing these divides. This woman, Hetty Handful, is not unknowable to me, not inseparable and I could inhabit her heart and mind."
So what would the author like readers to take away from the book? She takes a while to choose the right words.
"My first thought is, I want the reader to learn something new about slavery and history. More than that, I want the readers to take away a felt expression of this story.
"I hope the reader can experience empathy, what it might have been like to be an enslaved woman in the 19th century or to be a woman in the 19th century, what it feels like to be denied rights.
"I think that is really the gift of fiction. It's the ability the reader has to feel the characters' lives."
The Invention Of Wings is available at major bookstores and retails at $27.06 before GST.
akshitan@sph.com.sg
Copyright © 2014 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment