Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir (2023) by Brianna Craft

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an incredibly engaging and well-written memoir of something that affects everyone on this planet by somebody who was there in the thick of climate change negotiations for years until the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 and beyond. Brianna Craft gives a no-holds-barred account of the frustrations and triumphs involved and the intense depression and euphoria it invoked, alongside family issues and an unexpectedly close relationship to her God. If you want to understand why it all took so long to agree on, you can’t do much better than read this book.

The insight into what goes on in the background of international negotiations was absolutely fascinating in this memoir. It’s incredible that so much of the support work is done by unpaid interns, whereas I was paid a salary to do essentially the same job for an international European project. Ranging from the COP17 in Durban in 2011 right up until the Paris Agreement signed in November 2015 and beyond, Brianna Craft attended and assisted at all the negotiations, preparations and discussions related to the Least Developed Countries.

Climate change and the Least Developed Countries

Reading Brianna Craft’s memoir of the climate change negotiations, it is fascinating to see the human side of the government officials and their support staff. But, working as she still is for the Least Developed Countries, Craft is well-positioned to give us an overview of the desperate situation many countries face. In fact, working to support Pa Ousman, one of the most prominent African negotiators, she may well have a better overview than anybody else of what happened.

As the world spirals towards climate disaster, negotiations are painstakingly slow. It is the Least Developed Countries that are facing the worst consequences and are affected most, yet it is the developed world that caused the climate crisis and is dragging its heels about solving it. Many small island nations and low-lying coastal areas may be swamped by rising sea levels and salination, making their farmland unproductive. In the entire continent downriver from the Himalayas, the vast quantities of water released by melting glaciers could spell disaster. Weather systems are destabilising and extreme weather causes disasters around the globe.

Inspiration

“After an AmeriCorps year spent teaching kids in after‐school environmental clubs, removing invasive species, and organizing local climate co‐ops in Seattle’s south side, I knew there was no going back, no more ignoring what I wanted. Doing something about the global threat affecting everything and everyone was more important than the regimented future continuing my architectural aspirations afforded. At twenty‐four, I would go back to school. I decided to gamble two years and all the borrowed money I could muster on a master’s in environ mental studies in the fabled Ivy League, where I hoped to turn passion into a bankable career, one that would make a genuine difference.” The subject she studied was Technology Transfer for the energy transition.

When she attended a weekly discussion group on climate change, mostly for the free lunch included, she was given the chance of a lifetime. A London‐based researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development needed an assistant when she advised the chair of the Least Developed Countries Group at the upcoming UN climate change negotiations in Durban, South Africa, representing The Gambia.

Once she arrived in Durban, one of things that she noticed is that some of the delegates very openly sexually harassed and propositioned the young women like herself. It was a cultural difference she hadn’t expected and later on, she joined with other women to try to combat it, or rather, avoid it; there seem to have been no policy guidelines. However, most of the relationships she built up during the ongoing and repeating negotiations and their preparation were positive. One of the things I enjoyed most were her stories about informal moments and in particular with certain of her colleagues who obviously have a great sense of humour.

Another thing that she soon realised about the climate negotiations was that, unlike in her own country, i.e. the USA, there was no question about whether climate change was happening or if it was an issue. For many of the countries it was a deadly serious reality threatening their very existence. That gave the opinions of the Least Developed Countries added weight in the discussions.

“Power was the ability to inspire wide‐ranging agreement rather than bend others to your will. Moral authority could rally strength of numbers, so the vulnerable spoke with influence the wealthy could rarely command.”

A personal story

Interspersed with the main story of the climate talks is Brianna Craft’s own life story. She had always had an extremely difficult relationship with her tyrannical father and couldn’t wait to move away from the family home. Only when he had gone through major surgery (which she only heards about later) did she make a concerted effort to reconnect, but old habits are hard to break. Struggling with her guilt about this failure, she reveals that she has a very personal relationship with a loving God who values her. She does not pray in a conventional sense, but has imaginary conversations with an amusing God who teases her and advises her.
“I didn’t know anything like this Love. Patience on an unhuman timescale. Kindness. Undemanding, eternally hopeful. His faithful love endures forever. It was not inconsistent or determined by my performance.” The contrast with her father is obvious.

I found this an immensely absorbing and interesting glimpse into something that is a closed book to most of us. Yet anyone who has worked in an office will recognise the office politics and the day-to-day reality of back-to-back meetings, though I was surprised just how much of the final decision-making was done in extremely late-night meetings. I was also expecting Greta Thunberg to turn up at any moment, but she generally moves in completely different circles. This is the real inside story of how negotiations progress, rather than the activist side of things that possibly have more effect at persuading the public than truly changing the minds of politicians. There is also some succinct information about climate change and how it affects the Least Developed Countries that is extremely valuable. This book is just full of mind-blowing information. Personally I enjoyed the more personal aspects of Brianna Craft’s home life and her quirky, talkative God, but I can imagine that some people would find it unnecessary or even off-putting. You could always skip those parts; there’s more than enough to make this a fascinating and absorbing non-fiction read for anyone interested in travel and politics.

Disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion of a digital ARC I received for free from NetGalley.

Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen (1001 book) #1929club

Passing by Nella Larsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a stupendous story and fresh as a daisy (unlike my similes), even though it was published in 1929. I hadn’t heard of the concept of passing (as white) until Brit Bennett’s modern version The Vanishing Half came out and was much-discussed. In this story, a young woman who herself is able to pass as white unexpectedly meets an old acquaintance from her childhood in Harlem. Irene is married to a darker man and still lives within African American society, but her old friend Clare, who is blond and fair-skinned, left long ago, living a life where nobody, her husband included, knows of her origins. As Clare spends more and more time with her, Irene’s insecurities about her comfortable life are brought to the surface. But Clare is playing a dangerous game, risking all by spending time in Harlem, risking her husband finding out her secret. For she knows that he is a racist and is almost certain to reject her if he finds out. Then what will become of their daughter?

The tension builds as we see disaster looming. By the finale, the level of jeopardy has reached a crescendo with a phenomenal clash of cymbals at the end. Not at all what I had expected at the beginning. Now I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of Nella Larsen’s writing, so I’m glad I bought an ebook with her ‘complete works’. This is one of the best things I’ve read for a long time.

Want to read

Nella Larsen was not the only African American woman writing about passing for white in 1929. Another book about which I have heard good things is Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset. It’s available online, so I hope to return to it at a later date. However, the book which first brought the subject of passing to my attention was written much more recently, Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half which is about twin sisters, one of whom remains in a Black community in the South, whereas her sister has been living as a white woman, married to a white man who has no idea of her background. Sound familiar? I first heard it discussed on one of the first podcasts I listened to. I clearly remember hanging upside down in a flowerbed whilst listening, probably digging up bulbs.The story sounded utterly compelling. It would be really interesting to read a modern take on Nella Larsen’s masterpiece.

Read for 1929 Club, hosted by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas – Maya Angelou (read for the 1976 Club): thoughts

Reading this book is like reading a summary of all the Black Lives Matter articles I’ve read in recent years about systematic racism, cultural appropriation and Black experience. This is the third installment of Angelou’s novelisation of her life. I have read the first part, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but I missed the second, Gather Together in My Name. This is not a problem because Angelou summarised the major points near the beginning of this book and, as she seems to have acted impulsively throughout her life, her actions were so extraordinary that I will certainly try to go back to book two.

The more I read Maya Angelou, the more I recognise set phrases and images which are still used today. I’m not sure if she originated them, whether she picked them up from reading, or from conversation. Some of them may belong to a later racial consciousness; after all, she wrote this book 20 years after the events she described. It’s notable, however, that the majority of people she socialised with in this period were white or the mainly apolitical singers in an opera company.

She went on to explain that much of her pride in her race came from her grandmother who had belonged to a Black American secret women’s society. We also know that her mother frequently cautioned her about the dangers of white people; there is a general background wisdom and folklore about interracial relationships.

Maya Angelou’s political consciousness was probably also encouraged by one of the schools she attended which was blacklisted due to ‘un-American activities’; this was the California Labor School, funded by trade unions, which was listed as a communist organisation.

Life with white people

Maya Angelou was mystified when the white proprietor of a record shop, Louise Cox, asked her name, trusted her to pay back later, then offered her a job. Was the woman lonely? “As far as I knew, white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”

Even after she took the job, she was on her guard, expecting her boss to show some sign of internalised prejudice. “I waited for one smirk, one roll of her eyes to the besieged heavens and I would have my evidence that she thought her whiteness was a superior quality which she and God had contrived for their own convenience.”

This is an aspect of systematic racism I hadn’t really thought of before, or not until this week, when I read an interview with the ex-footballer John Barnes, who has a book about to be published called The Uncomfortable Truth About Racism. I’m not much interested in footballers, but if his book is half as well-articulated as the interview, then it sounds illuminating. Barnes explains that even white people he likes have shown their innate racial bias. “They’ve said ‘I don’t see you as black’ or ‘I see you as normal’ as if that is a compliment. They can’t say: ‘I see you as a black person’ because in their minds, subconsciously, that equates to them seeing me as inferior. Why can’t they see me as black and normal? Why can’t they see me as the same as them or, maybe in some cases, even superior?”

Angelou comments on Black Creoles from Louisiana who could ‘pass for white’. It’s a concept I only learned about when Brit Bennett’s book The Vanishing Half came out in 2020. I have read neither that, nor the classic Passing by Nella Larsen, published exactly a century earlier; did Bennett realise she was celebrating the centenary when she was writing?

Stealin’ the music

Angelou then goes on to report how white musicians came to listen to Black jazz jam sessions, but the musicians sometimes barred them because “The white boys come, smoke up all the pot, steal the chord changes, then go back to their good paying jobs and keep us Black musicians out of the union.” Again, this is something I only became aware of when my music-loving son told me how many of the songs that were played on the radio when I was growing up had been written and recorded first by Black musicians, without acknowledging the original, sometimes not even on the sleeve notes or label. Of course, the white cover artists got all the fame and riches. If only I had read Singin’ and Swingin’ first, I could have told him myself. While I was trying to find a good link to illustrate this, I found this article about the sidelining of early female Black singers’ work, which is fascinating, but not what I was looking for. An article about whitewashing black rock is more relevant.

Sadly, this is not a dying phenomenon, either, as this list showcases more recent plagiarisms. Black backing singers are also frequently uncredited, though I suspect this is the case for backing singers and session musicians of all races.

Married to Tosh, a Greek-American ex-naval man, Maya became domesticated and revelled in it.“Our home life was an Eden of constant spring, but Tosh was certain the serpent lay coiled just beyond our gate. […] After a year, I saw the first evidence of a reptilian presence in my garden. Tosh told Clyde that there was no God.” To please Tosh, Angelou gave up her faith, but it triggered memories of her grandmother’s tales of having to worship in secret when she was a slave. She repeated this experience by going to different churches in secret, pretending to go to her friend’s house, just like a teenager sneaking out. All the signs of a controlling relationship were there: Tosh told her to give up her job (though this was commonplace in those days), restricting contacts to a chosen few he approved of. At least he spent time with Maya’s son, wanting to be the perfect fifties father.

Hair and appearance

It had never occurred to me in the past that Black hair equates in many people’s minds to ‘problem hair’. Maya was startled to find her son considering straight hair as not just the norm, but better; he wondered when his hair would become grown up as de straight, like Tosh’s. Later in the book, hair again became an issue. Angelou mentioned that the women in the opera company she worked for went to have their hair chemically straightened instead of their usual routine of heating heavy iron combs “heated over cans of sterno”, a sort of petroleum jelly called ‘canned heat’. The issues with Black hair are a major theme in books about Black women, but I first read about it in a book about a fictional white character ironing her hair straight; I suspect it was Anne of Green Gables or Pollyanna or something of that ilk. Reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americana for my book club was eyeopening. It provoked a discussion about hair with a Black friend who was subjected to lots of annoying white folks’ questions, willingly I sincerely hope; I’ve since learnt acting as a spokesperson for an entire race or nation is not appreciated by many people.

Identity politics were different in 1976

If Angelou were writing today, she would probably have written certain things differently. The obvious one is the use of the word Negro, but she also uses comments about appearance that would be frowned upon now. For instance, she often compares black skin to various food or drinks, describing one woman as “the colour of freshly made coffee” and her Greek husband as having “the slow, sloe eyes of Mediterranean people”.

The oddness of equality

“These whites were treating me as an equal, as if I could do whatever they could do. They did not consider that race, height, or gender or lack of education might have crippled me and that I should be regarded as someone invalided. The old habits of withdrawing into righteous indignation or lashing out furiously against insults were not applicable in this circumstance. Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimisation. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, “they“ don’t want me, “they” accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, “they” don’t deserve me.”

When Angelou joined the tour of Porgy and Bess, the opera company first toured to Canada. She commented that Canada was the ultimate destination for the Underground Railroad, the secret route for slaves escaping the repression in the South; hence when Canaan is mentioned in Negro spirituals, it was a coded way of saying Canada. This gave the country a kind of mythical status in Black culture, but perhaps more telling was “the fact that their faces did not tighten when they saw me.” It just goes to show how insidious racism is in the USA.

Maya Angelou always took every opportunity she could and she seemed extraordinarily self-confident, sometimes overconfident, perhaps as a front for her insecurity. While she was in Paris for a season as a dancer and singer with Porgy and Bess, she moonlighted as a singer every night at the Mars Club. “The audience liked me because I was good enough, and I was different – not African, but nearly; not American, but nearly. And I liked myself because, simply, I was lucky.”

In Yugoslavia, “I stood in the dusty store and considered my people, our history and Mr Paul Robeson. Somehow, the music fashioned by men and women out of anguish they could describe only in dirges was to be a passport for me and their other descendants and into far and strange lands and long unsure futures.”

Egypt: Africa at last

On the boat on the way to Egypt, after terrible weather, Angelou met actors from a British film company, on their way to make a film. She talked to actors James Robertson Justice and Geoffrey Keen. There was also a young French actress on board, a certain Brigitte Bardot. The film was Doctor at Sea and it was Bardot’s first English-speaking film role. I have just discovered that Dirk Bogarde was also in the film and that, before the first Doctor in the House film, the producers had difficulty persuading Rank executives that he had sex appeal and could play light comedy as he had played character roles until then.

The members of the opera company were all excited to be visiting Africa, the continent of their ancestors. They were also interested to note the variety of skin tones in the street. When they arrived in Alexandria, they were taken aback to realise that the best jobs in the hotel were all held by white people. The servants in the lounge were Black. “We looked at them and each other. If we wore the same clothing no one would be able to say we were not members of the same family, yet we couldn’t hold a conversation. (Europeans and white Americans are not surprised to see their look-alikes speaking foreign languages; but except for meeting a few African students in Europe, we had never seen a large group of Black people whose culture, language and life styles were different from our own.”

A little later on she wrote, when she was been courted by a white man, “I needed to think great thoughts about myself and Africa and slavery and Islam, I didn’t want a white man at my side – in fact, I didn’t want anyone distracting me.” This was obviously a time when Black consciousness was directed with Hope towards pan-Africanism; I’m not sure why Islam was considered more authentic than Christianity. “Beggars still hounded our footsteps and the audiences which shouted Bravos at our performances were largely European, but I felt I was at last in Africa – in a continent at the moment reeling yet rising, released from the weight of colonialism, which had ridden its back for generations.”

Nevertheless, in Egypt, the Black men in subservient positions at an Arabic house make all the Afro-Americans feel profoundly uncomfortable.

The overriding characteristic that Maya Angelou conveyed in this book is her sense of her own worth and independence. She stood up for her rights, refused to tell lies (though she later learned to withhold the full truth when necessary) and refused to be used. When a foreign man professed undying love for her, she realised that he wanted to marry her for a green card but “what made marriage impossible was the fact I would have been embarrassed even if I loved the man, which I didn’t. No amount of kindness or fidelity on his part would erase the idea that I had bought a mate with a licence that gave me little personal gratification: American citizenship.”

Maya Angelou seems to have been constantly pushing against the boundaries of what her friends and family considered wise in her own private exploration of the world. It’s what made her who she was and what makes her so wonderful to read about.

1976 Club at Stuck in a book and Kaggsys Bookish Ramblings

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin: book review

I believe Black Lives Matter and racism should be a thing of the past, so I want to read and review more books written by Black, Asian and other ethnicities. James Baldwin was a Black, gay man, part of the Harlem Renaissance, who wrote this tale of racism and police prejudice and injustice in 1974. Sadly, little seems to have changed.

How do you decide which books to take on holiday? One of my usual strategies is to take as many as possible in case there are any I don’t like; how awful it would be to be stuck in the middle of nowhere without a good book to read. And to give me the greatest number of options, I usually take as many thin books as I can. And that is how a couple of years ago I came to be reading If Beale Street Could Talk by torchlight, in a freezing cold tent, high in the mountains of Switzerland. Further from the overheated setting of the book in New York would not be possible.

Virtue signalling

This is a tale infused with the injustice of racism and poverty in the New York of the 1960s and 1970s, when equality was theoretically possible, but racism kept rearing its ugly head. In this book, James Baldwin uses some of his characters as mouthpieces for angry rants about injustice. Tish is ‘lucky’ to be taken on as a perfume saleswoman in a department store, almost as a favour, so the owners could show they weren’t racist. Nowadays there’s a term for that: virtue signalling. It’s rather interesting that so many of the characters are actually in work, in spite of prejudice, but this period was a boom time. Nevertheless, there’s always an undercurrent of violence, of people hooked on drugs or alcohol.

The main story in this short novel is about Tish and Fonny, childhood sweethearts. Tish is the narrator and mentions that others tease them about being like Romeo and Juliet, thinking that is the ultimate in romance, forgetting the implication that their ultimate fate is tragic. The book starts with a dramatic event: Tish telling Fonny that she is expecting their child, the problem being that he is in prison. At first we don’t know why, but the events leading up to Fonny’s arrest gradually unfold.

“Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don’t know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven’t seen or heard a soul and if someone had asked you what you have done that day you’d have to think a while before you could answer. But, at the same time, and even on the self-same day – and this is what’s hard to explain – you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor.” (p.12)

Standing up and being counted

Talking about the first time Fonny and Tish make love, after feeling they belonged together since childhood, she says, “We had not seen it coming. Abruptly, it was there: and then we knew that it had always been there, waiting. We had not seen the moment. But the moment had seen us, from a long ways off – sat there, waiting for us – utterly free, the moment, playing cards, hurling thunderbolts, cracking spines, tremendously waiting for us, dawdling home from school, to keep our appointment.” (p.40)

After giving up her job, Tish can always visit Fonny in jail, emphasising the importance of just showing up, of moral support, of being there for somebody:

“It is very strange , and I now begin to learn a very strange thing. My presence, which is of no practical value whatever, which can even be considered, from a practical point of view, as a betrayal, is vastly more important than any practical thing I might be doing. Every day, when he sees my face, he knows, again, that I love him.” (p.113)

The racist policeman, the bluest eye

Describing the policeman, Bell, who has it in for Fonny, Tish comments, “If you look steadily into that unblinking blue, into that pinpoint at the centre of the eye, you discover a bottomless cruelty, a viciousness cold and icy. In that eye, you do not exist if you are lucky. If that eye, from its height, has been forced to notice you, if you do exist in the unbelievably frozen winter which lives behind that eye, you are marked, marked, marked, like a man in a black overcoat, crawling, fleeing, across the snow. The eye resents your presence in the landscape, cluttering up the view, the black overcoat will be still, turning red with blood, and the snow will be red, and the eye resents this, too, blinks once, and causes more snow to fall, covering it all.” (pp.119-120) Black incarceration

This book is still relevant today, not only in light of George Floyd and others who died in the aftermath of his murder, but also with respect to the unjustly high numbers of Black inmates in American prisons and the impact this has on society. I recently watched the documentary 13th on Netflix, highlighting how Black society is disproportionately affected by this and how successive government measures have exacerbated it and convinced the public that it is somehow justified. It isn’t. Baldwin addresses this in If Beale Street Could Talk as we see the terrible effects of Fonny’s imprisonment on the rest of the family. This is not just the story of ‘two star-crossed lovers’. It involves the entire family of both Fonny and Tish as they all try to clear his name, get the charges dropped, discredit the racist policeman and do whatever it takes to raise the money to pay the lawyer. Desperate measures with dire consequences.

This was a great read. I highly recommend it and hope I will soon be able to watch Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk film, released in 2018.

Adapted from my original post in January 2019.