The finalists for the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize were recently announced, and listed in the fiction category is Marlon James's The Book of Night Women. A literary peace prize? I wondered upon hearing the news. Of course, I immediately thought of it in terms of the granddaddy of Peace prizes--the Nobel Peace Prize--one of which was won by President Barack Obama last year. Add literature or literary to the notion of peace prize and what do you get? Can there be such a thing as a book worthy of being prized for promoting peace? Better yet, can a work of fiction be so powerful?
A look at the other works of fiction listed with James's Night Women doesn't inform me much, since I haven't read them (though Adiche's The Thing Around Your Neck is on my wishlist). But a look at past winners and those given lifetime achievement awards could give some perspective on the prize: Junot Diaz for fiction in 2008; Edwidge Danticat for nonfiction in 2008; Thomas Friedman, a runner-up for nonfiction in 2009; Elie Weisel received a lifetime achievement award in 2007; and Studs Terkel received same in 2006.
Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat have been getting a lot of attention and have been somewhat singled out from amongst other Caribbean writers as cultural spokespersons. Diaz's first book, and first attention-grabber, Drown, was such an exciting first mainly because of its young characters and the language they spoke, which I recall resonated with young Hispanics I taught in New Jersey classrooms (most if not all the characters were Dominican immigrants living in a heavily Dominican-populated part of New Jersey's Brunswick area). For many of our students it was (finally!) stories about people whose lives they knew and whose language--slang Spanish / slang English--they themselves spoke. I watched them take pride in owning Drown and its characters and as a result take ownership of the literature course I was offering them. That experience was repeated every time I included the book in a syllabus.
My teaching experience with Danticat's works has been more or less the same: students who shared part or all of her experiences as an immigrant, a woman, a black woman, a black woman from Haiti, always delighted in telling me and each other how much they related to her experiences and to those of her characters.
But those are all context-laden experiences with the books and the authors. In a classroom setting we have markers in place to manipulate peoples' experiences with a given text that are not necessarily in place in the outside world. How do we then judge the effect of a book on readers outside of the classroom setting? How have The Brief and Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, and Brother, I'm Dying been effective at promoting peace? Peace for whom? I'd go as far as saying my students (a few hundred over the years, many of whom belong to "minority" categories in America) who have interacted with Diaz's and Danticat's earlier works have achieved critical levels of understanding (peace too) about reading, writing, and cultural relations in my college classrooms with the help of the writers' works. What are the markers for assessing their effect on readers outside of the classroom? Should we even care about such readers? Do book sales tell the story about who's reading and being (positively) affected by what they read?
When we look at the Dayton lifetime achievement awards recipients, the picture about cause and effect gets a lot clearer. Elie Weisel (a Nobel Peace Prize winner--1986) is a worldwide prolific activist and has influenced the way the Holocaust is remembered and talked about in many parts of the world today. And Studs Terkel's interviews with Americans on the subject of race (most memorable being his interview with C.P. Ellis, a reformed member of the KKK) have been described as having helped establish oral history as an important historical genre in America. So if you're talking peace, influential, literary . . . agents for change and understanding here in America and other identifiable and unidentifiable parts of the world, Wiesel and Terkel would definitely enter the conversation. These days, given his much-discussed theories on globalization and the green revolution, Thomas Friedman may quite easily enter into said conversation as well.
And now about Marlon James's Night Women.... Where would it fit in a discussion about books (authors) that promote peace or understanding about something or other? If the subject in Night Women is something like "Women, Slavery & The Caribbean," is there a message, an offering, of peace and understanding concerning that subject? Does it bring new awareness? Does it have the potential to change a mindset?
Rather than hedge at answers to those rather challenging questions (questions which NO WORK OF FICTION should ever be judged by), I'll say that much like I (and others) celebrated the narrow, but valid sentimental markers upon which President Obama's worthiness of a Nobel Peace Prize was judged--he won the election and the whole world (it seemed) celebrated, dammit!--I think Marlon James's brazen, defiant, Caribbean women who wield power with words and actions, who represent an ancestry people from the English / Patois speaking Caribbean like me claim with pride, and who--in the manner of Diaz's and Danticat's cultural characters--have the potential to teach others (certainly in the classroom) certain truths about who we are and where we came from, deserve to be honored as exemplary firsts of their particular literary kind.
