From the Bookshelf of FoCo Readers…

Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Camille T. Dungy

Start date: August 1, 2019

Finish date: August 27, 2019

Discussion: Book Club

Why we're reading this: Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State …more
[close] Camille T. Dungy is an award-winning poet and editor and professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. This book was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a 2018 Colorado Book Award Finalist.

As a working mother and poet-lecturer, Camille Dungy’s livelihood depended on travel. She crisscrossed America and beyond with her daughter in tow, history shadowing their steps, always intensely aware of how they were perceived, not just as mother and child but as black women. From the San Francisco of settlers’ dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana, from snow-white Maine to a festive yet threatening bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods, Dungy finds fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, this is an essential guide for a troubled land.

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 65 topics — 358 comments total

Book Club

* The Overstory by Richard Powers
By Beth · 5 posts · 23 views

last updated Jul 29, 2019 07:09PM

* Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
By Evan · 7 posts · 16 views

last updated Jul 08, 2017 10:25AM

What Members Thought

Aug 27, 2019 Danny Hesser rated it really liked it

I hear the teacher’s voice, but one guided by her curious and scientific mind, in Camille Dungy’s first book of essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: journeys into race, motherhood, and history. A mind for the subtle and not-so-subtle racism at work today, among us but also pervasive in our institutions, might approach that subject with a detached view and a historical breakdown. But as a black poet, meeting with other writers or engaging her wide audience in disparate places, as a mother of I hear the teacher’s voice, but one guided by her curious and scientific mind, in Camille Dungy’s first book of essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: journeys into race, motherhood, and history. A mind for the subtle and not-so-subtle racism at work today, among us but also pervasive in our institutions, might approach that subject with a detached view and a historical breakdown. But as a black poet, meeting with other writers or engaging her wide audience in disparate places, as a mother of a precocious child, not unlike Dungy herself, she embeds us with the people she encounters, and that narrative makes her observations at once more personal and worthy of our own explorations. We also get strong historical notes peppered into this story, as she makes a point to visit particular landmarks of our racist society in her sojourns, in places where it was propagated as well as where people took a stand. But often she is unexpectantly thrust into its reality, described aptly in the opening salvo, where seemingly well-educated fellow writers at a retreat display their ignorance.
Dungy, as a student and teacher of writing, young in motherhood and brimming with discoveries about infant and then toddler daughter Callie – these are often the best flourishes – as a student of history and racism and nature, brings an ecological inquisitiveness to bear on her subjects. Seemingly disparate things are interconnected through time and space. Black bodies have been commoditized and exploited, just as the natural world continues to be. Segregation itself required more resources, as she notes while in small-town Maine. In visceral and clandestine ways, we have constructed an elaborate society that continues to extract resources unsustainably. Black bodies, Native bodies, all manner of Living bodies, have been usurped, plundered, and re-named, in a way that channels their power to an elite class.
Dungy hints at the murky water and undertow beneath the seemingly tranquil current of our progress. In these moments her tentacular mind is on display. I couldn’t help but think of Donna Haraway and her ideation of “making kin.” I like to think that Dungy’s building up a levy of ideas which point to these connections more directly, to be released in this same prosaic form. Or perhaps they have found voice in her poetics, implicitly or explicitly. If there is power in naming, which Dungy suggests, then the recurrent phrases which she employs amplify and collect that power. Repetitions can be lyrical. The multitudes of people sold into slavery at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, come at us in waves of phrases, syncopated, leading us and preparing us to understand. To say Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin is to echo those young men, so that their names will never dissipate, their deaths never forgotten. There I was reminded of Claudia Rankine, in a piece where the names of young black males who have been killed slowly disappears into the white background. Dungy’s young daughter becomes the focus of the emergent nature of language, as she repeats Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, ebbing and flowing with the nearly correct words. She runs in circles within the castle where so many, already taken from their homes and their families, were enslaved. Callie circumnavigates a room which served as portal through which thousands of men and women were sent to slaver ships; circling and circling, she later explains that this is one of her ways of dealing with fear. She reclaims this strange, oppressive space, Dungy comes to understand, by running about, unfettered, unbound, free.

...more

Like · see review