Feministing Reads: What We’re Reading

Sam: This month I reread Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, which may be the best novel ever written about activist burnout and self-care. Published in 1980, as the utopian political projects of the preceding decades were giving way to the political disappointments of the Reagan era, the novel spends three hundred pages following a Southern black community’s various responses to its opening challenge: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

Reina: I just finished I Want to Destroy Myself by Malika Amar Shaikh. It’s a ferociously honest memoir, written in Marathi when Shaikh was still in her twenties and just recently translated and published in English decades later. Shaikh grew up in Bombay in the 60s surrounded by communist activists, poets, and artists, and married Namdeo Dhasal, poet and co-founder of the Dalit Panthers. Her portrait of her own ambitions, as well as her famous husband’s magnetism and violence — all set against the turbulent politics of the Dalit Panthers and communist movements — evokes questions about violence, power, liberation, and love that lot of women in movements continue to struggle with.

Juliana: Lucky Boy by Shanti Sekaran tells the story of an undocumented woman who loses custody of her baby son to the U.S. immigration system, and a liberal brown woman living in Berkeley, California, who brings the boy into her care after years of painful infertility. Sekaran does a beautiful job of writing the characters in a way that it’s almost impossible to pick a side — and when she does, you’re left devastated at the way we treat mothers in the U.S. Also, I picked up Breathless after watching a lot of Jane the Virgin and re-considering my feelings on romance novels. Beverly Jenkin’s book is not intellectually stimulating, but if you’re looking for a thoroughly enjoyable book dedicated to women’s pleasure, power, and happy endings, this is for you! Jenkin’s paints rosy a picture of 1800s Arizona that is filled with handsome brown feminist men, educated women, and racial solidarity between indigenous people and Black pioneers. A great feminist beach read.