Jonathan's review of The Healing (original) (raw)

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Jonathan's Reviews > The Healing

The Healing by Gayl Jones

The Healing
by

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"Norvelle once told me that there were certain African folk tales that never gave you an answer; they only left you with a dilemma. Dilemma tales, he called them. What else had he said about them? They were a way of learning. They were another way of learning. "

On the strength of this book, Mosquito and Corregidora (I am yet to read the rest of her output, though intend to) I happily place Gayl Jones in my personal pantheon. She is a damn genius. Her work is complex, subtle, brutal, funny, devastatingly sad, and smart as hell. Her works are dilemma tales in that they do not move toward trite satisfying conclusions, they do not dictate. They have an amorphous quality, like a cloud you move within. The kind of books you spend a long time looking back on after you have finished. There are no easy answers. No Truth with a capital "T", save for Sojourner. Always exceptions and contradictions. As in life. And as in all great art. And what happens to voice, to the "voice" of a narrator, when that voice has been subjected to racial and gender violence and repression? Does it become performative as a way to dance between the cracks? What would it mean for it to be "authentic"? And when we tell stories of the telling of stories of the telling of stories? When the oral tradition becomes like a russian doll?

Anyway, enough pointless pontificating from me. Suffice it to say, you should be reading her.

""To me the reader is a listener and the listener is as much a part of the story as the teller" - from an interview with the author

Thankfully Virago and others are now keeping her in print, though it seems she has more work to come and has been self publishing (see https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStor... for example). Somebody needs to get in touch with her and get all her work in print so we can have the joy of reading it.

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Reading Progress

June 12, 2020 –Started Reading

June 12, 2020 –1.64% "“I got me a friend nicknamed Mosquito...Her real name Nadine.” - crazy, I did not know when I read Mosquito that she had previously introduced that character, nor that she existed in the same world as others of her books...I adored that book, so am even more excited about this one now!"

June 13, 2020 –13.16% "Oh this is GOOD. And not easy either - her internal monologue just became an imagined conversation between a group of other women about her, with the only indication in the text being that suddenly the “she” being spoken of must be the “I” we were previously with in light of the subject matter...but it just flows in and out"

June 16, 2020 –65.79% "This is just wonderful"

June 19, 2020 –Finished Reading

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