JACOBIN, n. I recently finished The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, originally published in 1938 by CLR James, a historian of the Atlantic world who was born in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s a masterpiece of a book. Before we get to that, what’s a “Jacobin”?
Originally, it referred to the Dominican order of monks and nuns, because in Paris they worshipped and lived near the church of Saint Jacques (“Jacobus” in Latin). In 1789, the word came to refer to a political club that was founded, and that met, at the site of the old Dominican convent. Jacobins believed in “absolute democracy and equality” per the Littré, a dictionary from the end of the 19th century; the Trésor de la langue française describes them as “of an extreme intransigence.” In the two centuries since the Revolution, people use “Jacobin” to refer to radicals or sometimes just regular old leftists who aren’t even advocating for violent overthrow; the term can be an insult, but is also, on occasion, adopted with pride.
In The Black Jacobins, CLR James uses the title to assert that the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution are inextricable from each other: the formerly enslaved Black people fighting in Saint Domingue were Jacobins, too. They fought for liberty, equality, and brotherhood—and liberty meant something far more concrete to them than it did to the white people fighting in France.
The Black Jacobins is a great read. The history is essential, and the story, as James tells it, is compelling and dramatic, with the brilliant, tragic hero Toussaint L’Ouverture at its center. James is an incredibly adept stylist. The rhythm of his sentences is remarkable even when reading silently. This one, in the book’s first chapter “The Property,” has such a powerful cadence:
The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. (11-2)
That “quite invincibly human beings” lands with such a blow. Appropriately, since James never pulls his punches: he is shining a light on some of the worst cruelties in history, and he is unsparing in his descriptions.
He’s also wonderfully opinionated in a way that makes this book feel personal, and a real pleasure to read. I have the 1962 edition, and in a passage describing the August 1791 uprising that began the years-long revolution in Saint Domingue, he writes, “The slaves destroyed tirelessly. […] And yet they were surprisingly moderate” (88), where my ellipses is replacing a long paragraph about violence. Next to the word “moderate” is a footnote that says: “This statement has been criticized. I stand by it. C. L. R. J.” James never, ever lets the reader forget that the violence of the Revolution is caused by the violence of the status quo—and in Saint Domingue, the status quo was an unconscionable, all-encompassing brutality where Black people were abused, violated, and worked to death. Even in their revolt, the ex-slaves were still “far more humane than their masters had been or ever would be to them” (88). As he says later, “When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity” (138).
God. What a book. This revolution is one of the most astonishing events in modern history. In the annotated bibliography, James describes revolutions as times when “excesses are the normal” (385), and that certainly feels true of this one: cruelty and domination and treachery are present in excess, but so are courage and endurance and brilliance. James’s writing, even decades later, still feels like it’s delivering an urgent message. May we learn to listen.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Sunshine and Spice (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Aurora Palit. This was so fun, I raced through it in a day. Naomi Kelly is Bengali-Canadian, but she doesn’t know much about Bengali culture. Her mom got pregnant as a teenager and ran away from her family to raise her kid in Canada, in a small mostly white town where Naomi would be cut off (or protected, depending on who you ask) from her roots. Naomi always wanted to learn more, and as an adult, being hired by a Bengali-Canadian family to revitalize their small Indian imports/convenience store is a tantalizing opportunity for her. She doesn’t want to reveal her whole life to them, but she wants very badly to belong. Meanwhile, the middle son of said family, Dev, is chafing under his mom’s strict, traditional expectations. Dev and Naomi make a secret pact: she’ll help him fend off potential brides and he’ll help her successfully rebrand his mom’s store. This is fast-paced and sweet and really captures Naomi’s yearning as an outsider who wants to be invited in. And it has a mean-girl rival who is more than she seems, which I always love. I read an Advance Review Copy. This book comes out September 10, 2024.
Scales and Sensibility (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy, historical) by Stephanie Burgis. Elinor Tregarth’s parents lost their fortune and then their lives, so now she’s a “poor relation” of her richer, heinous relatives—and to make matters worse, her cousin has just been gifted a dragon, the must-have accessory of any debutante, and the poor animal is terrified all the time. This book begins on the day Elinor snaps and walks out the door with the dragon. I loved her and the dragon immediately. She’s penniless with nowhere to go, but soon encounters help and hindrance in equal measure. I’m not saying more because I was delighted by many of the twists the plot took, and I hope you will be, too. This is so much fun, it really kept me turning pages, and it all comes together in such a satisfying way in the end.
A Little Kissing Between Friends (lesbian f/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Chencia C. Higgins. I was really excited for this after loving D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding so much, and it did not disappoint. Higgins is so good at character voice. Meet Cyn Tha Starr, music producer:
When people saw me, a five-foot-ten, dark-skinned, three-hundred pound, masculine-presenting woman with a taper-fade and a bottom grill, the assumption was almost always that I was a carpet-muncher and not just a fat tomboy. And the assumption was one hundred percent correct. I mean…genetics made me fat, but I did indeed love to eat.
Cyn is back in town (Houston, TX) after a few weeks away working with a secretive popstar, and it’s been hard to be separated from her best friend, exotic dancer Jucee. They go out clubbing with a group of friends, and another woman hits on Cyn, and Cyn feels weird about it even though she normally likes that kind of attention. More importantly, Jucee gets jealous. That sets them down a bumpy, winding path of figuring out what it would look like for their friendship to become a romance, and whether they’re brave enough to try. It’s hot as hell when they do. I loved that Jucee is a single mom who obviously loves her kid, but has enough friends and loved ones around to help out with care work so she’s still able to be her own person—and romance protagonist. This book also has such a great sense of place, and it’s really fun to hang out with Cyn and Jucee as they go to the club and the cookout and the studio and Yee Raw, the Texan-Japanese fusion restaurant.
Starling House (bi m/het f, both cis, horror) by Alix E. Harrow. Before we talk about this book, I have to tell you a couple of Kentucky stories. At some point prepandemic, I flew home, and because I am from small-town Kentucky, the airport is long way from my parents’ house. As I drove south through the suburbs and horse farms, the Top-40 radio in my rental car started playing, in breaks between songs, ads for coal. Not to sell me, a random radio listener, lumps of coal. Just to remind me that coal power is good and I should love it. Somebody pays to put that shit on the radio in Kentucky. It’s both sinister and desperate. On a different trip, also years ago, I was at a wedding. A fellow guest, a young woman, reminisced about accompanying her dad, a pastor in the eastern part of the state, to check on sick or elderly members of his flock, most of whom were or had been miners. In any house, she said, if you opened the kitchen cupboards to get a glass of water, you would find coal dust coating the shelves. It was everywhere, inescapable. “That’s awful,” I said. She replied, “All those people are dead now.”
Kentucky’s real-life monsters are the people who own the mines and the coal plants, and they are still clinging to power. Coal mining is terrible, fatal work, ruinous to humans and their environment, and the unemployment suffered by former coal towns is also miserable, so the whole history of the industry is one of cruelty and poverty and desolation. If this miasma of misfortune and unrepentant evil sounds like an apt setting for horror, then welcome to Eden, where what’s waiting under the earth has a taste for blood. The setting is so satisfyingly Kentucky: humid and haunted, scruffy and ruined and still, sometimes, overwhelmingly lush and beautiful, all of it in the shadow of a big old house built from nightmares.
You will probably not find Starling House shelved in romance if you look for it at a library or a bookstore. However, as the book itself asserts, something can be both horror and romance, and this certainly is. Living in that haunted mansion, keeping one window lit at night, is a tortured soul named Arthur Starling. Something wonderful about this book hanging out in the overlap of horror and romance is that it’s able to discard some of romance’s strictures: both Arthur and Opal, the heroine, are described as “ugly” at different points—Opal has crooked teeth! what a marvelously normal human feature to have! and of course she does: she grew up poor in Kentucky—and no makeover occurs. What does occur is that Opal brazens her way into being Arthur’s housekeeper, because she’s in desperate need of money to pay her brilliant, asthmatic little brother’s tuition at a distant private school where the air itself isn’t poison, and also she’s obsessed with Starling House. As Opal slowly clears away the house’s film of grime and lets the light in, tiny kindnesses accumulate between her and Arthur, and they begin to see each other differently. “I’m not pretty,” Opals tells the reader, “but Arthur doesn’t seem to know that.” Isn’t that the best? The ultimate? It feels so much more specific, so much more individual, than hot people finding each other mutually hot. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I need a little variety in my life, that’s all. And other romances do allow their protagonists not to find each other instantly attractive, and to then gradually change their minds, of course. I just found this iteration particularly defiant and delightful.)
Starling House also has a wonderful interest in books and research and storytelling, and contains footnotes, a bibliography, a Wiki entry, and many variations of people telling the tale of the house, all of which I loved. This kind of formal and stylistic playfulness is easier to find in romances that are hybridized with horror or fantasy or science fiction, but still not common. Again, not that there’s anything wrong with a romance that adheres to the genre’s forms—our forms have been refined over ages, streamlined, like a river finding its fastest course, which is a metaphor I borrowed from Starling House and am only twisting a little—but if more romance authors wanna start getting weird, I will cheer them on. Add that footnote. Mix that media. Do it for me.
Speaking of, Starling House is also illustrated (by Rovina Cai), which rules. More, please. What a gorgeous book.
You know I gotta link that John Prine song about Muhlenberg County.
Lastly, here’s the two-minute speech that Palestinian-American (and Georgia state representative) Ruwa Romman was not allowed to give at the Democratic National Convention in August. Makes me think (again, always) about Edward Said’s “Permission to narrate.” Who is allowed to speak?
I hope you had a lovely August, friends, and that your September is off to a good start. I missed you! I’ll be back in your inbox on September 21st.
