By Anita Chikkatur
Ross Gay was interviewed on an episode of This American Life that explored the concept of delight (Episode 692, “The Show of Delights”). After listening to this piece with guest host Bim Adewunmi, who noted that Gay’s book inspired the episode, I knew that I had to read The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, February 2019). In the book, Gay chronicles everyday delights over the course of a year. The 102 micro chapters are a result of a daily practice he started on his 42nd birthday: he would write about a delight every day, by hand. Coincidentally, I read the book this spring just around the time I turned 42!
He meanders from observations to memories to analyses of his/our world. Some are outright funny. Many are about the delights of the natural world: trees, plants, gardens, insects. My personal favorites were the ones where Gay notices and delights in small moments of community: four women at an airport sharing a moment of pause and ease (Chapter 37) or passengers on an airplane being charmed by a toddler (Chapter 55). At a time when we are physically distancing ourselves from our extended families, friends, neighbors and colleagues, it was particularly touching to read about the joy of human connections.
Interspersed through these short chapters chronicling delights are Gay’s brilliant meditations on race, gender, class, and family. For example, the chapter “Hole in the head” starts off with Gay talking about how he loves “weird vernacular sayings” and ends with these powerful lines: “I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country…Crazy not to think they want to put a hole in your head.” Or the chapter “Still Processing” where Gay concisely analyzes the role of popular media in reifying race: “…one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness…Which is clever as hell if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people.” I’ve read the last three paragraphs of this chapter multiple times, astonished each time by how precisely Gay describes our society’s tendency to blame Black folks, rather than racism, for the inequities and indignities of a racist system, including those being currently seen as COVID-19 is devastating Black communities in disproportionate numbers in cities all across the country.
Anita Chikkatur, Minneapolis resident and Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College, Northfield, MN.
