Yiyun LiMust I Go

Abstract

a proper burial, just a vague monument, about which Herrera has the most to say. It’s a powerful story and also a metaphor for working people and people of color all throughout the history of Mexico and the US. Herrera is one of the best writers of our time, and his decision to give us this stripped-down account of the tragedy in Pachuca is smart and devastating. It rolls in quickly and leaves you reeling. J. David Osborne Norman, Oklahoma Yiyun Li Must I Go New York. Random House. 2020. 368 pages. YIYUN LI, ONE OF THE MOSTacclaimed contemporary American writers, continually reinvents herself. Her last novel, The Kindness of Solitude, solved a mystery by following a love triangle from China to America. She sets her most recent novel in Bayside Garden, a retirement home in California, where Lilia Liska, eighty-one, begins a memoir for her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter. She pauses to read portions from the diary of Roland Bouley, a lover from her youth. Two narrators split into four. Lilia and Roland each have a voice for others and one for themselves. Lilia asks herself what she should include in her story while Roland invents episodes for dramatic effect. Memory itself undergoes revision. Li takes the novel seamlessly across alternate storylines as Lilia recounts the history of her family, settlers who went west to follow the Gold Rush. Lilia’s family history merges with the greater history of America. As Lilia writes, the insubstantial, rootless quality of words disturbs her, yet they are still “the most useless things you cannot afford to lose.” She thinks happy people have no need for words. For her, “a story is not always a love story. A book is much more than just pages of words.” Regrets are like weeds. “Kill them before they spread.” If disappointment breeds in a porous heart, hers is flint. She claims she has no need for love or hate. She wonders if some mathematical formula exists to measure how fast a person is forgotten. Literacy gives her power but dilutes her identity as her race is erased. Conversant in two tongues, she’s at home in neither. Portuguese writer José Saramago’s epigraph underscores this linguistic point. Couto illustrates how crying “Mine!” while pushing others aside, claiming what they have, generates a schism. Imani’s mother counsels her on racial insults. Polarization begins by debasing others, chipping away languages or traditions—until the Other materializes. Us cannot occur without establishing Them. As Couto notes, wars need enemies, and walls are built around fear of the unrecognizable. Must the world be homogenized? Ngungunyane, like Claudius in Hamlet, killed his brother to become king, resulting in nightmares. During an eleven-year rule, Ngungunyane resisted Portuguese colonization . His story symbolizes a global saga— another empire grabbed by greed from afar. Recall the Spanish in Peru when Pizarro executed Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor. Consider Apache leader Geronimo surrendering to the US military. Four different world powers claimed Micronesia’s 2,100 islands over the centuries. In The Dancing Other, Suzanne Dracius addresses Caribbean issues in Martinique, governed by France (see WLT, Spring 2019, 104). Couto’s trilogy explores imperialism, identity confusion, and cultural miscommunication between colonizers and indigenous peoples anywhere. Literary and psychological symbols abound in The Sword and the Spear, from the Holy Grail to feverish Freudian dreams. Even if readers already know Africa, the novel enlarges worldviews—and Couto does so in lovely (at times witty) poetic prose. His themes are reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (inspired by Jonathan Kwitny’s Endless Enemies) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. As the nineteenth century draws to a close, so too does the seventy-eightyear -old State of Gaza. The Sword and the Spear ends as it began: people in a boat on “The Last River.” Mouzinho is taking the conquered Ngungunyane, his seven wives, and his son Godido to Lisbon—with Imani as interpreter. Alas, Germano is not going. “Everything always begins with a farewell.” That’s both the initial and the final sentence of The Sword and the Spear, a bridge connecting all three volumes in the...