Saturday, March 31, 2012

Behind the Beautiful

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is Katherine Boo's celebrated book whose title sums up the subject. Unlike many anthropological/sociological studies, this book is successful for one reason in this reader's opinion: the reliance on narrative. Rather than give historical overviews, or including interviews with experts, Boo lived in the slum of Annawadi for three years while  interviewing people over and over while following them and spending time with them---not sitting them down in a typical interview format. The book gives us stories of the people who live there, focusing the plot lines on a few people whose dramas are very compelling and very human. The details are vivid, while being instructive and Boo somehow manages to give us the horrific without hysteria or hyperbole; the quotidian itself is often terrifying. Two of the story's "protagonists" are teenagers named Abdul and Sunil who make a living collecting and sorting recyclables to sell by scavenging garbage. It is horrible work, and Boo gives us this:

Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair,
gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
Sunil had his own guess: the deranged guy who talked to the hotels and believed the Hyatt was trying to kill him...But Abdul said it would be a Tamil guy whose eyes had gone from yellow to orange, and Abdul turned out to be right.

Boo's prose gets it just right---we don't notice her as the author. Her own story of living in this slum, and how she got into the lives and minds and hearts of her subjects doesn't appear in the text; there is only a short 'Author's Note' at the end. This is Boo's first book, but the topic is one that she has pursued in her career as a journalist: "to [press] uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity."  Boo does this by conveying how human her subjects really are, and how much the story of their existence makes this an indictment of economic stratification. This is, finally, a story of people's desire to be human, to be seen as human, to appreciate their own uniqueness, or in the thoughts of one subject, "that a boy's life could still matter to himself." Too often, though, this means resorting to extreme measures, as when a woman named Fatima immolates herself over an argument with a neighbor:

There was no mirror...but she didn't need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her....she'd started to be treated as a mattering person. 'What have I done to myself!' she cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. 'But it is done now, and I will make them pay!'


This book is a good antidote to the current narrative of India's rise as an economic power, in which the prosperity is trickling down and the middle class is growing. Maybe it is, but that's not enough. The continuing corruption and failed infrastructure of India aren't altered enough to significantly affect the lives of the poorest.  Ironically, many these slum dwellers aren't even the poorest--a hierarchy of wealth exists even here.

I was reminded, while reading this, of Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger.
  This novel's bitterness obliterated the manufactured, bullshit feel-good ending of a movie like Slumdog Millionaire. But that isn't my point here, much as I love to make that point. (There are only a few movies I hated more, one of them the stupidly offensive Life is Beautiful, which I mean to dissect one day for my own personal satisfaction). The point is the level to which the corruption has seeped into Indian daily life, and how much of a family's money, time and personal resources must go in to managing a system that is designed to exploit and keep under those already at the bottom. What Boo has done is to address what other writers---Robert Coles and Elie Wiesel come to mind--- have said: narrative makes us human. So Boo humanizes her subjects, the slum dwellers of Mumbai, by telling their stories. She does not reify their poverty. Boo offers no prescriptions for change, nor does she point fingers, though admittedly the irony of the animal rights group that comes to the aid of a particular slumdweller's "zoo" is frustrating as well as satisfying to read. The implicit challenge is this: if we are all to recognize the poor as fully human this puts an ethical dimension on global (or local) economic repression. I'd argue that this ethical problem has always been with us. I contrast with this the idea that "the poor have always been with us" as I've heard said again recently, an idea which strikes me as ethically lazy and reliant on a dichotomy of self and other. It is an ever more convenient position as globalization seems to be leading to an increase in such economic stratification. For these slumdwellers, opportunity only comes in the form of luck or graft; the myth of hard work and pluck to make one's fortune is a fabrication.
    

 Interestingly, Boo doesn't make an issue of this. She doesn't have to. That, finally, is why reviewers, like the strange collection on the back cover (we have Barbara Ehrenreich, Amartya Sen and David Sedaris) saying things like "I couldn't put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to." That's good storytelling.

Read more here: www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com