Rape as revolutionary praxis, hip, hip, hooray.
http://maruta-us.livejournal.com/991.html
>...1. Which books changed my life?
Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver. I forget what led me to this book, but
I first picked it up in my early teens at my hometown library. For one
thing, it was a graduation to the world of adult reading, away from
Hardy Boy and Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, Star Trek novels, and
young adult social literature like Black Boy by Richard Wright and
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, both of which were my summer
reading choices one year in junior high (we had to choose books from a
list of 100 and present book reports when we returned in the fall).
For another thing, Soul on Ice is the first book I remember
encountering that challenged me, that was somehow simultaneously
incomprehensible and challenging my ability to comprehend it--I
remember reaching the part about "sexual mitosis" (or is it meiosis?)
and realizing I have no idea what this writer is talking about, and he
inhabits a world and a time far different from my own. These were very
important things for a white boy surrounded by people telling him how
intelligent he is to be confronted by. It's the first book I remember
setting down because I couldn't understand it yet. In my adult life,
"Soul on Ice" has been a good divining rod for telling where someone
is coming from politically: if people start telling me how horrible it
is, how horrible teachers were in the 1960s when they presented this
book as the Bible on the Black man, and how it should be purged from
the canon, that tells me something about the baggage they're carrying.
If people respect it as an important text--say, like Ice Cube's "Death
Certificate"--and start wrestling and arguing with it, that tells me I
want to build with this person.
Which books have I read more than once? Again, "Soul on Ice." One of the great abandoned literary projects of our time was a novel I wanted to write about a unionization campaign, told in monologues by workers identified solely by their log-in number. I was going to call it "Souls on Ice." There's a lot of wisdom in Cleaver's book, and as few others do, it shows a human dropped into a cell trying to think his way out; the book is a great time capsule that suggests what it was like to be sprung from prison into the particle accelerator of the times. In general, I don't read books more than once, although I've probably done it with William Vollmann's "Rainbow Stories"--another favorite.