It was a week that started with laughter and ended with tears. With illumination along the way.
The laughter came during a Monday talk by Cameroonian-American author Imbolo Mbue, who appeared in Denver as part of the popular Pen & Podium author series.
My date was my daughter. She and I listened to Mbue describe leaving her village to earn a business degree at Rutgers University. Mbue got a job on Wall Street that she lost during the 2008 recession. Unemployed, she turned with new seriousness to an environmentalist novel that she had been writing as a hobby.
While she was working on that novel, Mbue got an idea for one closer to home. She finished the second novel first -- "Behold the Dreamers", about the impact of the recession on two New York families, one led by a Lehman Brothers executive and the other by his immigrant chauffeur. "Behold the Dreamers" won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award.
Mbue recently published the novel she had begun first, "How Beautiful We Were". (Don't you love her titles?) "How Beautiful We Were" is about the struggles of people in a fictional country very like Nigeria against an American oil company that has brought spills, gas flares and toxic waste to their village. Mbue said she was inspired in part by the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian environmentalist who was hanged in 1995 by the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. But she said she could easily have been writing about the struggles of the children of Flint, Michigan or of the Native Americans who resisted the Keystone XL Pipeline.
After her introductory remarks, Mbue took questions from members of the audience, many of whom held copies of one or both of her books in their laps. One admirer posed a question concerned the myriad points of view and styles she uses to tell “How Beautiful We Were”. Mbue responded: "When you spend 13 years writing a book, you try everything." That made my daughter and me laugh.
The tears came a few nights later, at the opening of an art show at teh gallery at RedLine, a Denver community art institution. The show featured paintings by people who have taken part in a RedLine program that provides art materials and studio space to artists who are homeless. The show was sponsored by the ACLU of Colorado, whose new director has identified combatting homelessness as a priority. The director says that “the lack of safe and stable housing preserves the racial wealth gap and denies every person the tools necessary to thrive.” The ACLU saw the exhibition, which opened with homeless poets sharing their art, as a chance for people living on the streets to tell their own stories.
We learned at the opening that Teri Vanderhoof, who had experienced homelessness and whose painting was featured on the event poster, had recently died. Vanderhoof’s painting featured simple shapes – the peak-roofed house at its center evoked a child’s idea of home. But Vanderhoof layered her work with fluid images and ideas. Is the dark figure in the house a person at rest, or a lifeless body? Do the fiery colors scattered like confetti across the canvas symbolize the warmth of a hearth, or the chaos of life on the streets? A “for rent” sign was depicted as a barrier in front of the house. And a frame drawn in thick, brown lines within the canvas made me wonder whether Vanderhoof believed a stable home was something that she would never attain, that she could only paint for a gallery wall.
Vanderhoof’s daughter was at the opening and read a poem by the British writer Becky Hemsley that she said reflected her mother's experience at RedLine. The last lines of the poem: "Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs. And she stopped and she heard what the trees said to her. And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave. For the forest said nothing, it just let her breathe."
I think everyone in the room teared up.
The morning of the gallery opening, we’d had a visitor to our home. Tré Seals is an artist who designs and researches typefaces. He's based just outside DC and was in Denver to speak to art students about his work, into which he weaves history. His typefaces have been inspired by, for example, the look of the “I am a man” signs carried by striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, and of the “I am an American” poster Japanese American shopkeeper Tatsuro Matsuda installed in the window of his family’s Oakland grocery store in 1941.
A friend thought Seals would like to see our edition of a series of woodblock prints by Cecil Skotnes – who carved lines as gracefully as Vanderhoof painted them. Each Skotnes print is accompanied by poetry by Stephen Gray, and together the images and words trace the life of the 19th century Zulu leader Shaka. We're always happy to show people “The Assassination of Shaka”, which I have loved since first seeing an edition displayed at the Johannesburg convention center in the early 2000s. Seals came over after speaking to our friend’s art students. As soon as he got to the first print, he exclaimed with pleasure: "Berthold Wolpe!" Seals then illuminated background about “Shaka” of which I’d been unaware.
It turns out the type in which Gray's spare, evocative poetry is set is Albertus, which was designed by Wolpe. Wolpe was born into a Jewish family near Frankfurt in 1905 and emigrated to England soon after the Nazis came to power in 1935. Seals said he had been telling students about Wolpe earlier that morning.
I was able to tell Seals that Wolpe is a well-known name in South Africa. Harold Wolpe was a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who was arrested in 1963 in a police raid of a Communist Party and ANC hideout on a farm outside Johannesburg. Harold Wolpe and three others later escaped from a Johannesburg jail and made it to Tanzania, where they gave interviews that infuriated the apartheid government. Harold Wolpe eventually settled in London. I wonder if he ever met Berthold Wolpe.
I suppose there was illumination in the week’s laughter and its tears as well. Mbue, Vanderhoof and Seals each shone a light on artists’ process, and on their patience and perseverance.