In honor of Martin Luther King Day I’ll share my thoughts about Matt Ruff’s latest book, Lovecraft Country.
But first, because it’s my blog and I can, I’ll talk about Martin Luther King Day and, uh, stuff like that. I have to say that I very much like MLK Day, and not just because I get a day off. I like it conceptually. If there is any federal holiday that I relate to personally, it’s MLK Day. You may be wondering how that can be possible since I don’t appear to fit the correct demographic; I am not black. However, if you go to the Martin Luther King Day Wikipedia article today and search for the word "black" you’ll notice that it is only there in the phrase "Black History Month". The first sentence of the article to describe the holiday spells out its purpose clearly, "King was the chief spokesman for nonviolent activism in the Civil Rights Movement…"
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Unlike other federal holidays which sicken and shame me with their perverse glorification of violence and war, MLK Day is refreshingly subversive on the topic.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As Dr. King was well aware, there’s more than one way to be a minority in the US. In January 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War, 79% of Americans polled supported the Gulf War. In March 2003, 76% of Americans supported the Iraq War. As a pacifist Dr. King was part of yet another minority ostracized by mainstream American society. This I share with Dr. King and in a very real way, I derive inspiration and courage from him.
However, in any of the meager publicity generated by this holiday, the main theme of Dr. King’s life would seem to an outsider to merely have been that he was black. I don’t have any insight into what that’s like personally. I can say that I am a strong believer in the fundamental pillars of Liberalism, liberty and justice for all. It doesn’t take a statistician to see that something is severely broken in how America treats its black community.
Why for example are latinos three times more likely than whites to be incarcerated in Scranton, PA? Blacks there are thirty times more likely than whites to be in jail ( source). The only explanations for this are the following. Either black people are worse people than whites or they’re being unfairly targeted by laws and/or policing. Since we know that disastrous policies established by known white racists were implemented specifically to repress minorities, I think it’s safe to assume that black people are just as much people as anyone else and no worse fundamentally. Here’s recent news about Nixon’s motivations for prosecuting the War on Drugs. Note that this policy was disingenuously designed to specifically marginalize two groups, blacks and anti-war protesters (yes, like me!). Luckily I’ve never been interested in any kind of drugs and have never used them but because of civil rights issues and the horrible stink of drug prohibition’s unconstitutional racist hypocrisy, I’ve always been a strong and vocal proponent of complete legalization (or a return to alcohol Prohibition if you like). What drug prohibition has done, disproportionally, to the black community is a shameful disgrace to the principles the US was founded on ("…that all men are created equal…").
I mention the idiotic War On Drugs because it is so idiotic. I’ve never met any intelligent person who thought it was a great idea and that is because we now know with certainty that it was never designed to be a good idea with respect to substance abuse. It is the obvious place to start in moving American civil rights yet forward. Of course the day to day details beyond that are brusting with incomprehensible complexity. Yet in general I support the "Black Lives Matter" movement. I completely agree with Tyler Cowen who believes that invoking Black Lives Matter "reflects the fact that many white people have been unaware of the extra burdens that many innocent black people must carry due to their treatment at the hands of the police. The slogan is a way of informing others of this reality."
And that brings us back to the original topic, how does a brilliant author like Matt Ruff convey the idea that black lives matter? With an ingeniously crafted novel like Lovecraft Country.
One of the strange problems with fiction is that if you know where to look, it seldom achieves its goal of being more interesting than real life. For example, one of my favorite authors, Neal Stehpenson, and a bunch of his friends were barely able to make the Mongol Empire more interesting than the Mongols of reality. I feel that Matt Ruff is fighting a similar battle here. In Lovecraft Country, Ruff uses this to brilliantly create one of the most terrifying and creepy books I’ve ever read. The effect could only be this strong by an essentially authentic depiction of the ordinary lives of 1950s black people.
The book is layered with irony. The title comes from H.P. Lovecraft who was an overt racist. The novel’s characters are a literate black family which enjoys science fiction and fantasy books and is conflicted by popular racist authors like Lovecraft. I personally have not read tons of H.P. Lovecraft, but enough to get the gist of it and I can see that Lovecraft Country is a kind of cool parody of Lovecraft’s writings. Instead of the swarthy natives doing uncivilized voodoo things that shock the proper and refined white explorer types, the roles are completely reversed. The poor but educated and intelligent black family stumbles upon a cabal of voodoo (essentially) practicing rich white men. Just that alone is priceless.
By simply reversing typical racial roles it becomes quite clear how absurdly racist a lot of literature is. True to a Lovecraft style story there is magic and eerie weirdness and scary monster things. But the irony is that none of that is scary in the context of this book. A tentacled beach monster devours some people and, yawn. What would have been climatically chilling for Lovecraft’s readers barely rates remembering in this book.
Yet this memorable book is one of the most eerie and disturbing I’ve ever read. The effect is brilliantly created by a deadpan style that simply shows what ordinary life was like, especially things white people take for granted. It’s difficult to describe how compelling and dramatic that can be and fortunately I don’t have to. Matt Ruff has a PDF of the first chapter on his web site which I highly recommend reading. This doesn’t get into the real story but it shows how for black people at the time, fictional science fiction monsters couldn’t be any worse than ordinary people being their ordinary selves. I highly recommend reading just that chapter if nothing else.
I’m a huge fan of Matt Ruff generally. His calm and measured style belie the subversive ideas of his books. He has an unparalleled ability to see things from a very different perspective and to convey that vision clearly with apparent nonchalance. Although he can be quite hilarious, his humor is usually quite dry and subtle and in this book I think he took special care to avoid flippancy. I’ve read his entire oeuvre and have loved every work. Some of his books I felt had weak endgames but Lovecraft Country was fine in that respect. I highly recommend everyone read the first chapter which stands alone as a thought-provoking bit of context for all Americans. And if you think you might be entertained reading more of the same, do read the whole thing.