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markoestes's reviews
108 reviews
Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry by Essex Hemphill
5.0
Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies is an experience every black gay male from various walks of life and ages should endure. The prose and poetry between this under 200 pager is concrete evidence that what black gay men and black people in general are currently experiencing in 2018 is nothing new. In fact, it’s quite sad that the trails blazed by Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Assotto Saint, Marlon Riggs, and others ‘grew cold’ in recent years in some areas, but that we’re still facing resistance to the revolutionary act of black men loving black men as well. Hemphill is/was a godsend and Ceremonies has truly changed my life for the better.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
5.0
Never has a book shook me to the core by being as prophetic as The Parable of the Sower. This is my first Octavia E. Butler book that I’ve finished, and I’m glad that I read it now than earlier. Even though the trials of Lauren Olamina’s Robledo neighborhood and, later, her Earthseed traveling companions have not manifested themselves in reality, you can’t help but feel that with this current political and world climate that they are not too far behind. It’s a timely book that is out of its time by being published when the world was in a place of growth and opportunities surrounded by constant change in social and political ideologies. It’s as if Butler saw the seeds of the present planted amongst the blind optimism of the late 1980s - early 1990s, or she just saw through the bullshit altogether and, like Lauren, wrote this book as an “emergency pack” in the event of having to escape a burning community (i,e. America as a whole).
Throughout Lauren’s depressing entries of her daily life behind the Robledo fortress to her travels on the west coast, there are seeds of hope and inspiration interwoven with the bleak narrative. Without one you can’t really have the other, but instead of wrapping the story up in a nice sunset for our travelers, Butler decides to leave the reader with a sense of dread. That despite all the hell you’ve read from page one to page three-hundred thirty-two, there wasn’t a rainbow at the end of this journey: just more uncertainty wrapped with a ray of hope. Yes, the book was set up for the next chapter in a proposed trilogy, but even if Parable of the Talents had not come, the realistic ending to Sower, as well as the book as a whole, is a much needed shock to the system that makes you realize that to make change you have to endure hell to get there. So taking a lighter tone wouldn’t have worked for the book’s overall message of not just the story, but of Earthseed as well.
In the end, reading POTS was like experiencing an episode/issue of The Walking Dead albeit more entertaining and gut wrenching, because it’s a more plausible dystopian narrative which could happen any day now. That’s the horror of it all. With the state of the world currently, POTS feels eerily familiar. And that’s what great science fiction does.
Throughout Lauren’s depressing entries of her daily life behind the Robledo fortress to her travels on the west coast, there are seeds of hope and inspiration interwoven with the bleak narrative. Without one you can’t really have the other, but instead of wrapping the story up in a nice sunset for our travelers, Butler decides to leave the reader with a sense of dread. That despite all the hell you’ve read from page one to page three-hundred thirty-two, there wasn’t a rainbow at the end of this journey: just more uncertainty wrapped with a ray of hope. Yes, the book was set up for the next chapter in a proposed trilogy, but even if Parable of the Talents had not come, the realistic ending to Sower, as well as the book as a whole, is a much needed shock to the system that makes you realize that to make change you have to endure hell to get there. So taking a lighter tone wouldn’t have worked for the book’s overall message of not just the story, but of Earthseed as well.
In the end, reading POTS was like experiencing an episode/issue of The Walking Dead albeit more entertaining and gut wrenching, because it’s a more plausible dystopian narrative which could happen any day now. That’s the horror of it all. With the state of the world currently, POTS feels eerily familiar. And that’s what great science fiction does.