{"id":18525,"date":"2013-04-05T16:59:45","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T16:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=18525"},"modified":"2015-01-07T19:23:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T19:23:48","slug":"bewildered-in-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=18525","title":{"rendered":"Bewildered in Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bewildered in Boston<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

HiLobrow<\/a>
\n2011-11-12<\/p>\n

Joshua Glenn<\/strong>, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n

Fanny Howe isn\u2019t part of the local literary canon. But her seven novels about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and \u201970s.<\/em><\/p>\n

[This essay first appeared in The Boston Globe’s<\/em> IDEAS section, on March 7, 2004.]<\/p>\n

Fanny Howe<\/a> isn\u2019t wild about her hometown. \u201cBoston<\/a> is a parochial and paranoid city,\u201d the 63-year-old poet and novelist charges in the introduction to The Wedding Dress<\/a><\/em> (University of California), a new collection of her literary essays. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t admit its own defects, and it belittles its own children as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between 1968 and 1987 the Cambridge-born Howe lectured at Tufts, MIT, and other local institutions while publishing 19 books of poetry and fiction, including a series of seven semi-autobiographical novels obsessively chronicling not just particular Boston neighborhoods but the social, economic, and political tensions that plagued the city in the racially charged \u201960s and \u201970s. Yet it wasn\u2019t until the University of California at San Diego offered her tenure in \u201987 that Howe began to be recognized as one of the country\u2019s least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers. Since then, she has won the National Poetry Foundation Award, the Pushcart Prize for fiction, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among other prestigious awards.<\/p>\n

Still, she\u2019s never been celebrated as part of Boston\u2019s literary pantheon. \u201cThis city is tougher on its own\u2014that\u2019s a sign of its provincialism,\u201d says Howe\u2019s old friend Bill Corbett, an influential local poet and writer-in-residence at MIT. \u201cFanny had to leave town in order to find her audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Howe says Boston\u2019s reluctance to recognize her work was the least of her worries. In The Wedding Dress<\/em>, she recounts her experiences as a well-born Brahmin turned community activist, a white woman married to a person of color, and a mother of three mixed-race children during the city\u2019s violent busing crisis\u2014and recalls feeling that she\u2019d never be the same again. \u201c[The late anti-busing activist] Louise Day Hicks<\/a> and the vociferous Boston Irish were like the dogs and hoses in the South\u2026,\u201d she writes. \u201cSome worldview was inexorably shifting in me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her daughter <\/strong>Danzy Senna<\/strong><\/a>, whose bestselling 1998 novel Caucasia<\/a><\/em> drew upon her own memories of growing up in Boston in the early \u201970s, says Howe \u201chad an epiphany: As the mother of nonwhite children, she was no longer comfortable in the blind spot of the white world. She became a race traitor and a keen analyst of whiteness, in all its complacency and complicity.\u201d<\/strong> As Howe herself writes in The Wedding Dress<\/em>, she often feels \u201cthat my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage.\u201d…<\/p>\n

..It was an era of assassinations and race riots, and Boston\u2019s black neighborhoods, where the newlyweds spent their time, sometimes became war zones. (\u201cMy white face felt like something I had foolishly chosen to wear to the wrong place,\u201d recalls Henny, protagonist of Indivisible<\/em>, the last of Howe\u2019s memoiristic novels, of her travels \u201cfrom Connolly\u2019s to Bob the Chef to Joyce Chen\u2019s and the Heath Street projects.\u201d) Still, Howe and Senna bought a crumbling Victorian on Robeson Street in Jamaica Plain, and quixotically tried to establish their own racially neutral utopia. Senna went to work for Beacon Press, while Howe lectured at Tufts, got involved in neighborhood politics, and filled the house with \u201cCarl\u2019s family and Jamaican, Irish, and African friends of friends,\u201d as she puts it.<\/p>\n

The couple had three children\u2014daughters Ann Lucien and Danzy, and son Maceo\u2014in four years. Danzy looked white, but Howe encouraged all three children to think of themselves as black, and enrolled them in Roxbury public schools and the late Elma Lewis\u2019s arts programs. <\/strong>(The white mother in Senna\u2019s Caucasia<\/em> tells her mixed-race daughter, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what your color is or where you\u2019re born into, you know? It matters who you choose to call your own.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But as Howe admits, \u201cBoston was a poor choice of a place to live\u201d for a mixed-race family. \u201cMany times people stopped me with my children, to ask, \u2018Are they yours?\u2019 with an expression of disgust and disbelief on their faces.\u201d<\/strong> In a 1985 poem titled \u201cRobeson Street,\u201d she\u2019d recall: \u201cThis stage was really hell \u2014 the fracas of an el\/to downtown Boston, back out again,\/with white boys banging the lids of garbage cans,\/calling racial zingers into our artificial lights.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bewildered in Boston HiLobrow 2011-11-12 Joshua Glenn, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief Fanny Howe isn\u2019t part of the local literary canon. But her seven novels about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and \u201970s. [This essay first appeared in The Boston Globe’s IDEAS section, on March 7, 2004.] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,8,20,25],"tags":[3711,1340,8436,8435,8434,3712],"class_list":["post-18525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-boston","tag-danzy-senna","tag-fanny-howe","tag-hilobrow","tag-joshua-glenn","tag-massachusetts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}