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    Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh
    Unavailable
    Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh
    Unavailable
    Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh
    Ebook207 pages3 hours

    Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

    By Thomas Glave

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • Glave is a multiple-Lambda Award winner.
  • Glave is an extremely brave author, one of the only Jamaicans outspoken about gay rights in Jamaica, where there have been many violent (and sometimes lethal) attacks on gays and lesbians.
  • Extensive social media campaign.
  • Bound galleys available 6 months prior to publication.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781617751783
    Unavailable
    Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

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    Reviews for Among the Bloodpeople

    3.5/5

    17 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is my first introduction to Glave, a gay Jamaican who fully embodies his country and sexuality. This collection of essays follows years of public praises for his writing and a handful of awards from the biggest and the best (O. Henry award). In his introduction, Yusef Komunyakaa states that, like Glave's earlier books, "these essays pulsate with the same charged lyrical, moral authority. No one easily wriggles off the hook." I assumed he meant Glave's adversaries; turns out he means the readers of Bloodpeople.Glave mostly writes about homosexuality and Jamaica. I didn't know how hated homosexuals are in Jamaica. I didn't know they were disemboweled with machetes. And I didn't consider one could be poetic about fear and anger and isolation. But the touchingly phrased sentences don't soften the impact of reading about murder and political corruption. Instead, it eats at you because it makes you attentive to every word, feel the pauses as Glaves takes a breath and speaks with the pulse of his heartbeat. It takes a few moments to find Glave's rhythm and read with it, pulling the poetry from the prose. If you do, however, you'll be forever changed.That might be a bit dramatic for a poet's anthology of non-fiction essays, but to date I haven't finished Bloodpeople. I've found I need some time between readings. Glave's does not shout but whispers in your ear and sometimes you can know too many secrets.
    • 4/5
      I received this book as an early reader. It was disturbing, moving, and thought-provoking. I found myself in tears during some of the authors descriptions of cruelty, and I found myself laughing and smiling during his depictions of victories and amusing family moments.I would highly recommend this book to those who enjoy short stories that force them to focus on harsh realities and turbulent social issues. It is well-written, and you get caught up in each and every piece.
    • 5/5
      I was lucky enough to receive Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh as an earlier reader copy, and I'm VERY happy I had chance to read it. This is a book I will definitely be keeping on my shelf and re-reading.The essays in here were extremely well crafted, and a lot of human rights issues were touched upon. The author really had a distinctive voice that griped my attention immediately. The standout pieces in this selection for me were The Letter to The Prime Minister and Interview With the Not-Poem.Great voice, interesting writing style, and book that really left you thinking long after finishing it.Definitely a 4.5 stars out of 5 for me!
    • 2/5
      Early reviewer book review. This book is my introduction to Thomas Glave. I would strongly urge anyone who is interested in his subject matter NOT start with this book of essays. From the back cover I would suggest (but I have not read) "Whose Song?..." or "The Torturer's Wife" or, even, "Our Caribbean..." an anthology edited by Glave himself. I disagree that these essays are "about homosexuality". I think the essays are mostly about semantics. If you read them and comprehend, you are certainly getting into a writer's head grappling with his own native language, English. It appears he is never satisfied with just one word or one phrase. He is constantly modifying the meaning of words as he goes along such as the following: "No, I'm absolutely not going to do IT today: feeling, the really bad one, that confirms with an awful sinking that things are pretty sad right now and have been sad for a long time--and although they'll of course eventually improve, because everything does eventually in one way or another get better, it's very difficult, so bogged down this morning, to see or in any way believe in that down-the-road truth." (Contemplating suicide this morning)Curiously, when Glave hears the Jamaican language he hears his past, his ancestors talking.Another essay, "Against Preciousness" takes 12 pages to hash out the meaning of "precious" uttered by one of his friends. He wonders about connotation. If a jeweler says "precious", that's one thing. If a mother says "precious" about her newborn that's another thing. If a writer friend of Glave's says of another writer "...[some of his] more recent work has been a bit precious...", well, that's a brain scrambler. I agree. I'd need a lot of pages to understand this. As Prof SI Hayakawa once said (paraphrased), you never know the meaning of a word until it is uttered then it may take more explanatory utterances for complete evaluation.The essay, "Jamaican, Octopus" is a huge exercise in allegory. An old man who introduced Glave to homosex was the octopus, Glave drowned in the sea for the first time aged 12, etc. This essay is rife with the word "queer". It is Gen Y/Z that is trying to co-opt that word back into general use. In any case, I couldn't determine the "top" in this essay. Who was it? One might read essay "Meditation ("on barebacking") to figure that out.To get into the head of Thomas Glave, read "Among the Bloodpeople" after his other novels.
    • 4/5
      I got this through the Early Reader program. The writing is beautiful, and coveys the overt horrors of homosexual repression in Jamaica, as well as the insidious and subtle workings of the culture that keep that repression going. The culture he describes is in many ways alien to me, but his prose is clear and makes his experience accessible and his insights useful. He also has useful things to say about the interactions of Jamaican academic culture with other academics in the world. Worth checking out.
    • 3/5
      Among the Bloodpeople is a collection consisting of an interesting mixture of items that are varied but remain cohesive. Glave is in a position to talk with authority on various topics that we would consider "political," such as race, nationality, homosexuality, immigration, and colonialism, and he approaches all of these in a direct, intensely personal way.The things Glave talks about are not pleasant. Across all of the items included in Bloodpeople is the constant theme of violence. Violence against Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, against gays, among gays, suicide, ethnic cleansing, and so on and so forth. It's not pretty stuff, and it isn't sugarcoated. At the same time, running parallel to all of this is the theme of love. Glave declares his love for Jamaica, his family, and the world in general over and over again, even as he repeats that as a gay black man he is always at risk of being the target of hateful violence himself. And, in his more personal essays, there is the constant longing to love and be loved man to man, sometimes explicitly enough that when a older friend picked up this book I started to squirm a little. But it is that deeply personal perspective that makes his statements so strong. When he is writing an open letter to the Prime Minister of Jamaica, he isn't talking about some vague hypothetical. He writes about his own death, calls himself the prime minister's son, and asks him to console his mother if he is murdered. The things Glave says are things that need to be said, and, more importantly, need to be heard, though I did take some issue with the style in which the book was written. I am not a great fan of parentheticals, and Glave uses them so much I was starting to get exasperated. The level of formality in his writing varies a great deal. Some items were intended for public consumption in other venues, as editorials, book introductions or what have you, and those are more standard in style. But there are a lot of items that meander everywhere, and even some poetry, and with those I can't say I enjoyed the way Glave writes. It's a matter of taste. Constant repetition, asides to asides, and a sort of stream of consciousness flow is something I will curl my nose at more often than not. None of this dilutes the message though, so while I would probably have never read this had I not been given a review copy, I found the time spent on it was worth it.
    • 4/5
      Very mixed review. Beautiful prose, but a lot of anger, which can sometimes stray into academic-style political correctness that I strongly dislike. He makes it clear that much of the anger stems from his feeling unwelcome in so many communities: Jamaica, England, the white gay scene. If the writing itself weren't so good, I would also be more irritated with the structure of his essays, in which many new paragraphs begin with non-sequiturs, as he tries (and often succeeds in) forcing the reader to look at a topic in an unexpected way. I find his use of parenthesis (and parentheses) irritating as well. I learned a lot, by reading this, though: about Jamaica (and being gay there), the British Empire, Africa, etc., and I was intrigued and curious about many of the books and authors he writes about, including his own.
    • 3/5
      I'll be honest. The cover of this book disturbed me. And what's inside isn't much better. I had a lot of trouble getting through the whole book. not because of the writing; it is very well written and researched, but the subject matter: the difficulty of being homosexual in Jamaica, is just so heart rending that I can't make myself finish it.
    • 3/5
      This is my first introduction to Glave, a gay Jamaican who fully embodies his country and sexuality. This collection of essays follows years of public praises for his writing and a handful of awards from the biggest and the best (O. Henry award). In his introduction, Yusef Komunyakaa states that, like Glave's earlier books, "these essays pulsate with the same charged lyrical, moral authority. No one easily wriggles off the hook." I assumed he meant Glave's adversaries; turns out he means the readers of Bloodpeople.Glave mostly writes about homosexuality and Jamaica. I didn't know how hated homosexuals are in Jamaica. I didn't know they were disemboweled with machetes. And I didn't consider one could be poetic about fear and anger and isolation. But the touchingly phrased sentences don't soften the impact of reading about murder and political corruption. Instead, it eats at you because it makes you attentive to every word, feel the pauses as Glaves takes a breath and speaks with the pulse of his heartbeat. It takes a few moments to find Glave's rhythm and read with it, pulling the poetry from the prose. If you do, however, you'll be forever changed.That might be a bit dramatic for a poet's anthology of non-fiction essays, but to date I haven't finished Bloodpeople. I've found I need some time between readings. Glave's does not shout but whispers in your ear and sometimes you can know too many secrets.