Books on certain topics and of particular types seem to come in waves. For a while, it seemed that nearly every new book on the market carried in the title the promise of “seven ways to…” or “seven steps toward….” More recently, books on ways to beat the stock market or alter the national or global economy include in their titles the phrase of promise “and how you can….”
Often within a short span of time, we see on best-seller lists several books that treat the same topic. However, certain themes or topics that surround us almost never appear as the focus of books these days. Take poverty, for example. Though historical fiction pieces and particularly fiction works set in the first half of the 20th century sometimes wind their main characters’ tales within contexts of poverty, non-fiction books that do so appear far less frequently. Yet this year, we have in Katherine Boo’s nonfiction book, Behind the beautful forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity, the gift of a work that takes us into poverty of a type and level that most readers have never imagined could exist. Boo centers the volume in the lives of ordinary people living in a Mumbai slum. She shows us how global economic ups and downs determine everyday life, neighborly relations, loss of hope for life, and the corrupting influence of an obsession with power.
In the volume, we meet Abdul, the ever-strategizing young trash picker living in Annawadi, a slum located adjacent to the Mumbai airport and its luxury hotels. We first see and hear Abdul struggling in the dark to hide from the police who are sure to come and charge him with setting on fire One Leg, the cripple who lives just next door. From this harrowing opening, we go through the book to watch and listen as Sunil, Rahul, and other boys close in age to the innocent Abdul seek work by scavenging the waste thrown from cars, trucks, and pedicabs that travel the airport road. The female counterparts of these young boys spend their days at the slum’s water tap and prepare and cook meals inside the smoke-filled hovels flimsily built of collected brick, stones, corrugated tin, and cardboard. Parents market themselves and their sly and victimizing schemes whenever and wherever possible. Women sell their bodies to men outside the slum who circulate through the airport’s many inner communities of police, mechanics, truckers, and food preparers. Men and women sell schemes to their neighbors or move in to take advantage of a neighbor’s misfortune and offer advice or help in exchange for payment. Some look beyond the slum to local politicians and the nearby police station and wiggle their way into favor by offering to sell information. often misleading, if not entirely false. The few Muslim residents live ever aware of the animosity of their Hindu neighbors who, in turn, live in the shadow of a caste system discounted by their government while held in memory by anyone wishing to claim power over a member of a lower caste. Envy, suspicion, and distrust feed the imaginations of residents ever on the lookout for ways that maneuvering, gossiping, and denouncing might temporarily advance their position.
Throughout Boo’s compelling book, we hear Abdul speak rarely, but we come to know what he thinks through Boo’s carefully constructed entries into his mind. Abdul thinks while he sorts trash. He contemplates the falling ambitions of a younger boy, analyzes the motivations of Annawadi’s couples, wonders what love could feel like for him, and grieves for a murdered friend whose body is left tossed inside a fence. When Abdul enters the juvenile detention center to the unstoppable beatings there, his thoughts speak less of the pain than of his mental strategies for getting his own mind beyond what is happening at the moment. He takes from a charlatan “teacher” allowed to enter the detention center a sense of moral code for himself that, added to his own sensitivities to the world, becomes his guiding rationale. Once released, however, he clings to this code fiercely, as he watches the human destructiveness that comes along with the mechanical destruction of the encroaching bulldozers that will clear the slum to make way for hotels and promised housing for the poor.
Katherine Boo and I have never met. Yet when we do, I can imagine that we will easily fall into conversation about how her book came about. I will want to tell her how much I appreciated the beauty of words that do not show the loving labor of composition that lies behind prose as graceful, vivid, and flowing as hers. I will rush to tell her my gratitude that someone of her fame and stature is so willing to admit her own need to learn,and struggles to find young colleagues to work alongside her. I will especially want to tell her how much I appreciate her sense of realism about just how much and how little such a book can achieve in a world of readers disinclined to want to read about worlds they see as so distant, so foreign, and entirely unrelated to their own.
As we talk, I will also want to tell Katherine Boo about my book,Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life. Though set on the opposite side of the world, this book parallels in several ways the book that Boo has written. Each of our books relies on taking the chance to be trusted by those who have many reasons not to trust the person they see as an outsider white woman. Each of us goes inside places with families and their children that adults find dangerous and insignificant. Each of us listens and then listens some more, collects documents, talks to outsiders, follows people away from their communities to hospitals, funerals, morgues, detention centers, and into the pursuits children take up on their own time. Each of us has worked along side young scholars who distrust our intentions initially but learn that they are not immune to the need to follow the lives of children where their poverty takes them.
Katherine Boo, as journalist, reporter, and editor recognizes that her book reports not only what she saw, heard in conversations and fact-checking interviews, and read in documentation from multiple sources. She also goes within the heads of those whose lives she came to know so well. Whereas anthropologists generally strive not to report the inner thoughts of the characters in their works, reporters can do this. Katherine Boo admits that she does so, and she tells her readers both why and how she managed to “convey the deep, idiosyncratic intelligences” (p.250) of the individuals living in Annawadi. She reminds her readers that she never mistakes a “sliver” for the “whole.”
Our two books share much by way of intention, process, engagement, and honesty. We both believe deeply that “better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives” (p. 251). Each of us admits to experiencing the fierceness of emotions of those with whom we spent days and days over years. We admit our sense of helplessness in altering the course of lives, while also acknowledging the frustrations that those we studied felt toward us and our “dim-wittedness” (p. 252). Both of us make no significant effort to cover our dissatisfaction with the deceptions of schools, justice systems, governmental bureaucracy, and commercial media.
Finally, and perhaps a surprising trait we seem to hold in common is our view of what has happened to morality as the global economy reaches farther and farther into every corner of ordinary lives around the world. Boo speaks of the “contraction of our moral universe” (p. 253), while I insist that readers of my book acknowledge the failing ethical strength of parents who blindly put their own needs and goals above the need their children have for boundaries, joint play, explorations in the natural world, and frequent and long conversations centered in caring.
Katherine Boo and I have independently written books that speak to the absence of a center that can hold between those in positions of wealth and power and those living powerless in poverty. What I wish for from these two books is that one or both will encourage more readers to think about capabilities squandered when the world talks incessantly of consumerism, construction, and exploitation of the earth’s resources to fuel the speedup of both. I wish from both books for less talk among political leaders about manufacturing of consumer goods and more talk about innovative approaches to creation of learning environments in which the Abdul’s, Sunil’s, Manju’s and Meena’s of India and the Martha’s, Tony’s, Bernardo’s, and Donna’s of the United States could apply their imaginations and relentless strategizing to the advancement of ideas about what and how to manufacture. I wish most for more attention going to infrastructural support of grassroots opportunities that could then be examined, expanded, and tested so that they could be set down elsewhere in communities of poverty and need.
Reading two or more books at once is a habit of many avid readers. My hope is that some of you out there who do this kind of reading will alternate between Words at work and play and Behind the beautiful forevers. Then think about what they have in common and the characters in each that you cannot get out of your heads. What book might you write that would build from either of these nonfiction works in leading readers to recognize that “they hold some responsibility now and into the future for the lives of individuals whose stories resemble those told here” (Heath, p. 195)?