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A review by magpietortoise
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
4.0
In the afterword of her book, Maxine Hong Kingston discusses the classification of the text which was published in 1977, long before personal non-fiction became popular. She answers a common question:
"It is fiction. / It is non fiction. Nearly all reviews in the UK have puzzled over the ambiguousness of its genre...i place myself at the wider border between categories. I've invented a way to write about real people, who talk story and dream."
In the foreword of this book, Xiaolu Guo writes:
"There is something very characteristic about certain female authors— the argot of their childhood is the language of their literature; the politics suffusing their childhood becomes the political drive of their narrative."
In A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe (the final story in the collection) the narrator writes;
"I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."
I loved this book. The delicate and imaginative way it merges surrealism with the memory of oral storytelling against the realities of political context. The writing is excellent and the force of the storytelling has the passion of welcoming the reader into the world of the narrators. A world rich with ghosts, family bonds, love silence and madness. A collection of stories full of resilience in the face of political upheaval and misogny. It is difficult to capture the mind of an individual, yet Hong Kingston does so with eloquence and beauty. The self is personal. After all, why do women have to prove they are warriors?
"It is fiction. / It is non fiction. Nearly all reviews in the UK have puzzled over the ambiguousness of its genre...i place myself at the wider border between categories. I've invented a way to write about real people, who talk story and dream."
In the foreword of this book, Xiaolu Guo writes:
"There is something very characteristic about certain female authors— the argot of their childhood is the language of their literature; the politics suffusing their childhood becomes the political drive of their narrative."
In A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe (the final story in the collection) the narrator writes;
"I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."
I loved this book. The delicate and imaginative way it merges surrealism with the memory of oral storytelling against the realities of political context. The writing is excellent and the force of the storytelling has the passion of welcoming the reader into the world of the narrators. A world rich with ghosts, family bonds, love silence and madness. A collection of stories full of resilience in the face of political upheaval and misogny. It is difficult to capture the mind of an individual, yet Hong Kingston does so with eloquence and beauty. The self is personal. After all, why do women have to prove they are warriors?