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TThis is a rule followed by Brit Bennett in her novel creation process Half gone. This is a huge blockbuster film that opened in a small town in Louisiana in 1954 and is not on sale until today. This requires twin girls Desiree and Stella, and tell the story of American race and class through their different fates. In this story, history seems to be much closer than people think. The rule of Bennett’s composition is: narrative is full of sadness and disappointment. Whenever the work starts to drag like homework, she breaks, and she does not stand up until she rediscovers happiness. She thought: “Just write the part that excites you, and then figure out how you will connect it.”
Wise premise Half gone Helped to promote it to the top of the best-selling books in the United States. The book was named one of the best books of 2020 by the New York Times and was selected for the National Book Awards. Desiree and Stella, twin girls who grew up in the fictional town of Mallard, made an amazing decision after their teenage children escaped. Bennett wrote, “The wild duck has always been more of an idea than a place.” The wild duck is composed entirely of light-skinned African Americans. “Blond, red-haired, darkest person, no A stronger person than the Greeks.” After arriving in New Orleans, the twins decided to “pass” in white; the other was still black. With this device, Bennett can not only explore the arbitrary boundaries between “shadowism” and ethnic groups, but also explore other social boundaries. She said: “Many stories about passing involve multiple forms of passing.” When Stella married a rich white man, she had to do more than white work (Bennett said) : “Besides courage, no one else can become white”), and also have to do rich work.
Half gone It is Bennett’s second novel.Her first motherShe tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who recovered from the pain of her mother’s suicide. The story was published in 2016 and received wide acclaim. But this is an essay written by Bennett in Jezebel two years ago, and it is the first time that she vaults her to the public attention.Run under heading “I don’t know how to treat white people well”At the time, the 24-year-old described her “self-reinforcing” reaction to the “good white”, which was the self-whipping after the death of Michael Brown. The latter was an unarmed black teenager who was The grand jury exonerated a police officer for shooting. She told a story. Her father was a lawyer. He was overthrown by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) when he was young. His cuffs were thrown on the side of the road and the gun was pointed at his head. They mistook him for someone else. “Sorry, buddy,” they said, and got rid of him when they realized their mistake. They just made a mistake. This is the novel that Bennett speaks and maintains, and then is interrogated. Just as Bennett’s mother came from a farming family in rural Louisiana, he once said: “In rural southern areas, it’s much simpler. The white man immediately let you know where you stand.”
Family stories tell trauma themes that have been passed down through generations Half gone. In the early days of the novel, the twins witnessed their father being dragged out of the house, and later died after lynching. When the twins grew up and had their own daughters-Kennedy, rich and white, lived in the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood; Jude was trapped in Mallard, where she was considered “too dark in the town” “-Never mention this terrible history of violence to her children. But the children still feel it.
“Kennedy didn’t know what happened,” Bennett said. “She doesn’t understand Why is her mother so far away from her, or why she is so rash; not understanding these very basic things, because she has no information about the past. However, she herself is the one who is always upset and always running.One of the urgent ideas [of the novel] What does it mean to inherit so much from our parents? Bennett thinks he is lucky: “Both my parents are still alive, and I have a very good relationship with them-we talked a lot. However, I am sure that their lives are so much that they have not told me, nor will they tell me. Sometimes they will tell me a painful memory that is everywhere, and then you will think, “Oh, you suddenly made more sense to me.”
The issue of trauma and how it is passed on from generation to generation is at the core of Bennett’s motivation for creating this novel, which was published while Donald Trump was still in office. In the United States, there are many stories about blacks “passing” whites, but these stories occurred earlier than Bennett’s novels and beyond people’s memory. People here are more likely to regard them as irrelevant to today. This is not Bennett’s goal. “My mother went to a segregated school. For me, there is no solution to this kind of problem. This is an old historical idea-it has never been so old in my opinion. I only have one generation. This is something I have always known, which is why I want to write a story about passing, which is more modern than the traditional stories usually found in the early 20th century. I want a story that allows you to enter the 80s and late 90s and think about the fact that not so much time has passed. “
There is a good reason to nail this book within this time frame.She said: “I realized that I was writing a book at the time, and it was at the time of strong national nostalgia. This is something I very much doubt. The whole nostalgia that makes America great again feels like TV: people nostalgia Leave it to the beaver, Not any moment that really existed. They want to go back to the childhood that they saw on TV-this kind of nostalgia. This makes it very clear to me that I want to write in an honest and truthful way. She said that the period that Trump and his voters aspire to is a “romanticized and illusory vision of the past.”
Bennett studied English at Stanford University before earning an MA at the University of Michigan. She grew up in Oceanside, California, where her parents worked. The two of them are also only one generation out of poverty. Bennett is as interested in class as race.in Half goneAs a disguise of a wealthy white woman, Stella was almost blown away when she showed false racism. Her white neighbor thought her life was full of vitality and attacked a new nearby Black family. “I like the idea that she always performs these categories incorrectly and always does her best; but even her husband thinks her way of treating black people is tacky. It’s not that he supports civil rights. It’s that. [her version of racism] Too rubbish. “
While Stella was struggling to become a white housewife in California, her twin sister Desiree worked as a fingerprint analyst in Washington, DC, a job that Bennett’s mother used to do. Although it took a while for Bennett to realize the gift her mother gave her, it provides an almost perfect avenue for discussions around unchanging identities. She said: “These are just the stories she told me.” “She arrived in Washington, DC just a week before Dr. King was assassinated. She came from a small town to work for the FBI at this tense moment. “Her mother would make a joke to Bennett and say, “How would her broken finger fingerprint her? I always thought it was funny, so I wanted to write it down at some point.” When I started in this book When writing this book, I thought: “Well, from a topical point of view, this is very relevant.”
Although their lives follow a completely different path, none of Bennett’s heroines has surpassed her misfortune of being born in that cruel town. But their children fight for their own future in different ways, which women cannot foresee or think impossible. Bennett said it was a wave of joy that she felt, and she pushed her to continue to expand the story from the mallard. Initially, it will not become a legend for multiple generations. But the prospect of spending more time in this town frustrated Bennett as much as her characters, especially Jude, the too dark daughter that the whole town hates. “The spirit of walking these characters is unreal. These are 100 pages of this person’s pain. I think it would be terrible to read. For me, what makes that character interesting is how she tries to move on? It’s a sad thing for me to write emotionally and psychologically in this small town by these terrible people over and over again. Then I thought, “What if I leave this place with her to pick me up? do? “”
Jude fled to Mallard by bus and headed to Los Angeles. The reader’s heart was with her. This is a gesture of hope, but of course her childhood demons will flee with her. After President Trump, does Bennett see the United States as a country still suffering from recent shocks? She said: “I think we have been in severe trauma for the past four years and we cannot cope with it collectively. The strange thing about Trump is that he has disappeared. He disappeared from Twitter.” She said that his absence was almost As shocking as his previous inaction. “This person has settled in our brains for many years. I don’t think there has been a day in the past four years that we don’t often react or comment or read to what he is saying and doing, or because of his behavior and whimsical behavior. Under the inner influence, his mood and emotions. Suddenly, they left? It feels very surreal. “
She said that the volume of news in the past few months has been the same. “Sometimes I chat with friends, like, do you remember when the coup failed?” As Bennett’s novel implies, all of this must be resolved at some point. She said that for pragmatic political reasons, if Trump could appear more clearly, she would be happier. “I want to look at him! Because people are very worried that this person will jump up in four years-Trumpism has not disappeared.” She said, however, there were a few days, when the deafening silence of that quarter was almost like peace. Or at least the illusion of a brief escape from history. “I saw an article today:’Where did Trump go?'” Bennett said with a smile. “Part of me is like:’Do we need to know?'”
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