A review by mpho3
Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works by Tillie Olsen

4.0

"I Stand Here Ironing" is probably the short story for which Olsen is most well known, and it is outstanding. Given her dense, complex style, it's also more accessible than some of her other stories. If you're willing to immerse yourself in her stream-of-consciousness rhythms, “O Yes,” “Tell Me a Riddle,” and “Requa I,” are devastating and powerful. Unabashedly feminist and political, these stories tackle working class concerns in a way that is revelatory. I think this particular collection is lesser known than Tell Me a Riddle, but it's worth seeking out for the poem “I Want You Women Up North to Know" and an essay entitled “A Vision of Hope and Fear," which stunned me:

"Sometimes the young--discouraged, overwhelmed--ask me incredulously: 'You mean you still have hope?' And I hear myself saying, yes. I still have hope: beleaguered, starved, battered, based hope. Through horrors, blood, betrayals, apathy, callousness, retreats, defeats--in every decade of my now 82-year-old life that hope has been tested, affirmed. And more than hope: an exhaustless store of certainty, vision, belief--which came to me first in the time of my youthhood, the Depression '30s.

I still live with the ugliness of the decade: the degrading misery, the aloneness, the ravishing hunger, despair: the violence of the clubbings, gassings, jailings, the then shocking killing of swelling numbers of countryfolk. I live, too, with the beauty of the decade: its affirmation of democracy and action; the new right given to assemble, petition, speak out; the use of the right to vote in unprecedented numbers (the first great attempt in the South to break the terror which kept black citizens from that right); the still unseen evidence of human greatness in words, spirit, and deed; the burgeoning solidarity in the nation, bridging differences in color, background, creed, walk of life. Out of that visibility, that sense of identification, came our first body of literature, art, songs, photographs, film concerned with the lives and experiences of most of us.

For the first time, we began to have a sense of our country in all its hues, its wrongs and its rights, its unique diversity and likenesses, its pain, beauty, strengths, possibilities. We were no longer a country of individual helplessness and isolation. Millions in motion, acting together, might not always change their economic circumstances, but they could electrify the consciousness of the nation.

This is Tillie Olsen writing in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, the ugliness and the beauty, o yes. This gives me hope that we may just survive this.