Matt E

There is a shelf on the third floor of Central Library in downtown Portland. It contains all of the nonfiction books specifically about bring queer: books about raising your gay teenager, coming out in later life, how to support your partner who is transitioning, and about four books on bisexuality. I have never done anything in my life without reading a book about it first, so I picked out the most relevant of those four books, which was Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution.

It turns out that Bi has everything to do with why there are only four books on that shelf. Shiri Eisner has put together a book that discusses the particular political, economic, and social marginalization experienced by bisexual people—distinguished from the experience of gay, lesbian, and straight people (“monosexuals,” in her terminology). Eisner starts by describing how bisexual can be a radically inclusive term for all sorts of people that experience attraction to more than one gender, then goes through the myths, stereotypes, and stigmas attached to bisexual people. Next, Eisner examines how bisexual identity intersects with sexist and racist axes of oppression, then proposes this vision of a radical bisexuality that inherently destabilizes patriarchy and gender based oppression.

Whew!

There is a lot of material in this book, and because of the jargon-bordering-academic language it uses, the tedious and repetitious disclaimers of privilege, and activist-y eye rolls at global capitalism and the police state, I would say that it's more of a reference than a book to read front to back. I did appreciate the thoroughness of the work, and I have to admit to a certain bias against radical and activist thinking that sometimes provokes me into greater critical thinking and sometimes makes me churlishly dismissive.

Unfortunately, I was also turned off by some methodological loosey-goosey and an inconsistent analytical lens that made it seem like polemic. For example, a lot of Eisner's evidence for the argument that bisexuals experience worse health economic etc. outcomes is based on a single set of demographic data. That's certainly not Eisner's fault—she argues persuasively that bisexuals are an understudied group of people. But in another part of the book, she points out that because this data set is based on self-reported categories, it dramatically under-represents the group within bisexuals that would have the best outcomes due to other kinds of privilege, namely cis bisexual men.

Whatever gripes I might have with the rigor of some of her evidence, I also have to admit that despite coming in with a lot of skepticism, Eisner ended up convincing me that there is a unique stigma attached to bisexual people, and I came to understand why she considered bisexuals and their relationships as a battlefield of patriarchy and queer liberation.

And yet, I did end up walking away a little disappointed. I was still looking for some idea of what the specific bisexual experience of the world is. My gay identity was built not only from crushes and eyes averted and inconvenient erections and hot shame, but also from books and poetry and movies and narratives and testimony and role models. And a lot of that just isn't out there for bisexual men—or at least I might have to keep working to find it.

Reading Habibi is like watching Craig Thompson juggle with chainsaws. The huge ideas he works with: the intractable divisions of gender, sex, ecology, religion, and colorism, are live and dangerous and complicated. He chose to set this story in a dreamlike world outside of time and concrete geography, and it frees him to explore these divisions as aspects of the human condition.

There are no easy answers found in this story, grey area is everywhere and anyone looking for relief or prescriptions is bound to be disappointed. Except maybe in the values of story and art. Story, art, words and ink are intwined, and I have to note as well that I cannot think of a more beautiful object than the book that is and contains this story.

Here's what I knew coming into the book: it was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and it was about the consequences and effects on a marriage of a black man's interaction with a racist and unjust legal system. I wanted to remain open to what the book, and Tayari Jones had to say, but my expectations were tempered a little bit by the cynical baggage I brought to it. I did not think I needed a book to teach me that the legal system in this country is racist, I did not need a book to teach me that the personal consequences were devastating (do you hear the cliché of that word? Our cliches fail us: devastating, heart breaking, immense, incomprehensible. They all relate to a quantity so vast as to challenge human scale, but they're equally so vague as to be almost bloodless).

This wasn't that book, it's better than that.

This book asks difficult, almost despairing questions. What happens when injustice is as commonplace, as unbounded, as inhuman in scale as the weather? What's the point of shaking your fist at the weather? Roy is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and once he has successfully appealed, the system may expunge his record and release him but it can never give him the the time lost, the life that he could have lived, back. Who pays him back for that time? It's not the state, and if it's not the state, then the only other people can pay are the people around him, but they've changed too.

It's the irreconcilable paradox of our prisons, the math that never penciled out in the first place. It's become so encumbered by history and politics and violence and profit that we delude ourselves into thinking that our reforms and incremental changes and civic religion of equality can fix it, but when you take it all away, the same conflict remains: if prisons are places of rehabilitation, at some point the prisoner becomes a different person than committed the crime. If prisons are places of retribution, who believes anymore that wasting years of human life does anything to mend what cannot be broken?

I loved the characters in this book. Not loved them in the sense of being good or likable people, I don't feel the need to judge them but nobody in the book is perfect. But Tayari Jones makes you believe in their dreams, believe that they are real, and that means that the painful realization that all of these dreams together did not add up was real too. Nobody was going to get exactly what they want, and even those that got most of what they want will have to live with the knowledge that some of it came from some pretty selfish choices.

The justice system, the whole legal system, is based on the ideas that everything is owned by someone, and when something is stolen, somebody has to pay. Except for the system itself. It never has to pay.