Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages.

Mungi Ingomane’s Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, The African Way (2020) was the perfect with-tea read for me. The fourteen chapters are short and easily broken into smaller reading sessions.

Mini-chapters with subtitles like “Tiny acts can change narratives”. Or, read from one quotation to the next, like the proverb “It rains on every roof”. Originally described to the author by her grandfather Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the essence of ‘ubuntu’ is: “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up in yours.”

It would have made good reading at any time, but particularly during the pandemic, I appreciated reading about the distinction between ‘hope’ (a sensibility) and ‘optimism’ (a feeling, changeable) and this concept: “Worrying is wishing for what you don’t want to happen, so don’t agonize over the future.”

The book is also a solid reminder of the truth in this Chinua Achebe bit: “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; their societies were not mindless, but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty; they had poetry, and above all, they had dignity.”

“As it turned out, I do not have good eyes, though I may have better insight. I think and talk in pictures, so artwork is natural to me.” Germaine Arnaktauyok’s artwork is mesmerizing, always beautiful and often haunting.

The 2015 paperback My Name Is Arnaktauyok, published by Inhabit Media, is short enough to fit on a shelf with hardcover fiction, but it’s longer than most, so viewers can more readily imagine the artworks off the page.

Etchings, pen and ink, coloured pencil and aquatint: there are illustrations of people sledding and parenting, walrus and sled dogs, ivory combs and beadwork, narwhal and northern lights. For a glimpse of the works featured in a solo exhibition by the Yellowknife artist, peek here (there are a few pages, and all the works sold—no wonder, they’re stunning).

Most of the pieces are accompanied by an artist’s statement and there are a few paragraphs of autobiography in each chapter too, in language so direct it seems lyrical; it’s most excellent for artsy browsing and as a reminder that indigenous people have been able to survive and thrive in extreme conditions for centuries.

The introduction to Ahilan’s Then There Were No Witnesses (2018) by translator Geetha Sukumaran was instrumental in my experience of these poems. Without it, I would have marvelled at the original Tamil, now on the facing pages—a beautiful script that makes English look all edges and spaces.

The verses are often very short (this is the first of the poet’s work to be translated into English), the images stark and tragic, but not necessarily distinct in my mind. The remark that a few specific lines about a bloodbath would be immediately understood by Tamil readers, as depicting the final stages of the Sri Lankan armed conflict, broadens my understanding.

Reference made to medieval Tamil literature, connections with other contemporary Tamil poets, mythological allusions, and even what’s missing here but usually found in traditional Tamil poetry (the sea) was all interesting. As a “register of history, a witness to trauma, and a counter-memory written in an inimitable style and diction” kept me company with tea on several mornings.

“I am building a memorial,
not with stone,
not with water,
but with air,
the sound
that trails me forever.”
Semmani

Gender Failure (2014) by Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote (who have collaborated before, on First Spring Grass Fire and Miss Her) is a collection of essays, lyrics, anecdotes and photographs by the travelling duo.

At the time of writing, Spoon has retired from gender, as they put it; Ivan continues to use the personal pronouns she/her for professional reasons (because they do a lot of work in schools and want to broadcast a more complex understanding of gender for others assigned female at birth who might feel like they don’t belong) but prefers they/them outside that context.

One of the most touching elements of these performers’ revelations is, simultaneously, how much they continue to struggle with self-acceptance, but also how much their perceived confidence means to audience members. Most of whom seem to project their own identities onto the performers, seeing parts of themselves in Spoon and Coyote so clearly that it obscures how the performers themselves self-identify.

The desire to belong is moving and expressed with such open-heartedness that when one finishes reading, one wishes that there had been no need to write the book in the first place, no such sense of failure. And simultaneously how grateful so many readers will be, that they have responded to this need by sharing their stories.

These are some of my browse-y or sit-with-tea reads. Now…your turn!