The White Boy Shuffle

As is natural for any middle-class white man growing up in rural England, I have long been a fan of hip-hop, basketball, Spike Lee films and many other aspects of black American culture. Perhaps it's precisely because it's all so far removed from my own experience that I find it all so engaging and intriguing, perhaps it's the varying depths to it, or maybe it's because it all just sounds so fun. In any case, I'm fairly sure I would be considered one of the Caucasians on the outside looking in that Paul Beatty takes aim at in 1996's The White Boy Shuffle.

Primarily a poet, Beatty's debut novel is a paradoxically rambling yet tight coming-of-age tale tracking the exploits of one Gunnar Kaufmann, an obscenely gifted young black man growing up in 1980s Los Angeles. Gunnar introduces himself by way of his ancestry, a procession of shameless servants to the white man, from the man who accidentally kicked off the War of Independence to the ballet-composing great-great-great grandfather who voluntarily subjected himself to slavery, to Gunnar's own estranged father now working as a sketch artist for the LAPD. Gunnar himself grows up in an affluent neighbourhood in Southern California, up until the point his mother decides his experience thus far hasn't been "black" enough and promptly relocates the family to an entirely non-white area of the city, named The Hillside here but likely based on Compton. At first, Gunnar struggles to fit in in pretty much any way, but gradually learns to make the most of what he has. It's here that the book really kicks off, introducing a host of colourful characters and plot lines. Gunnar discovers a God-given talent for basketball despite never having played before, joins the city's most hopeless gang (The Gun Totin' Hooligans, hopeless because, despite their name, they refuse to carry guns) and by way of friend Nicholas is introduced to jazz and intellectualism. For all the success basketball brings him, he discovers his true talent is poetry, and begins spray painting his work on the neighbourhood walls.

This all makes for an entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud read - made all the more enjoyable by Beatty's exceptionally good prose style. His background in poetry is clear to see, the words veritably tumbling off the page in a flurry of alliteration, assonance and wordplay, and the poems he creates for Gunnar are worthy of a collection in their own right.

But as fun as all this sounds, The White Boy Shuffle is not without its heavier moments, especially as it moves into the final third. Accepting a scholarship to Boston University, Gunnar becomes increasingly disillusioned with the classmates and academics who worship his every move just because of his colour, the black student groups who defeat their own object with their rabid exceptionalism, and the feeling that none of it matters anyway. His trips around the country to play basketball with Nicholas become less fun as the white crowds continue to turn on him, he can't attend class for fear of being mobbed, and despite his best efforts to shun the attention of the black student groups, he ends up becoming a cult leader to them anyway. Once Nicholas commits suicide, Gunnar heads with his Japanese mail-order wife back to LA to establish a commune for minorities, ultimately turning his back on the world and daring the government to drop a nuclear bomb on the city to solve the issue once and for all.

Beatty tackles some truly weighty themes: hypocrisy on all sides, the inherent racism and classism that pervades American society and the fundamental ineffectiveness of idealism, and satirises them all with little mercy. The White Boy Shuffle is a million miles removed from any life I'll ever know, but it certainly made me understand a bit better why being black in America is quite so hard. Beatty's concluding verse sums it up in all its painful simplicity:

Like the Reverend King
I too "have a dream"
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I'm running late for work.

4.5/5

Twenty years on and Kendrick Lamar is still having to say all the same things.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

Every now and then, I like to read something completely different. And it doesn't get much more "different" than Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the personal account of Colonel Jim Corbett about his exploits in tracking the tigers and leopards posing a threat to the citizens of Northern India in the 1920s and 30s. Born and raised in the area, Corbett spent his childhood learning the ways of the jungle, and it was from this background that he came to be seen as the only man to be called on to help the local population, of whom an estimated 1200 were killed by various animals at the time.

I found Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and I am sure that this is as a result of its having been written in 1944, to be a book of bizarre contrasts. Corbett clearly possessed a talent for descriptive writing, and combined with his exceptional knowledge of the area's flora and fauna, creates a wonderfully vivid image of the jungles and valleys in which he stalks the tigers. He was also clearly a great lover of nature and is keen to stress that man should make great efforts to limit his impact upon it. All of which goes out of the window somewhat as he goes around shooting tigers, deer, birds and landing hundreds of fish. While his reasons for it were fair enough - to protect the lives of others, and for food - it did seem something of a contradiction to me. Likewise, in his interactions with the local population, Corbett describes their cultures and customs in a way that only someone who had put in the time and effort to understand and appreciate them could - but is more than happy to be waited on hand and foot whenever he reaches a village, and of course is clear on the point that the locals are incapable of sorting out their own problems with these animals. On balance though, Corbett takes care to describe the reasons that these tigers became dangerous to humans - always some form of injury or illness that rendered them unable to hunt their usual prey - and the fact he shows any respect to local culture at all is admirable given the historical context.

Otherwise, the book was an enjoyable enough read, despite some archaic language use and a liberal sprinkling of (what I assume to be) Pubjabi or Hindi loan words with little explanation. Corbett makes the hunts as much about the build up as the actual kills themselves, leading to some heart-stopping moments as he suddenly finds himself face to face with a man-eating tiger after days of tracking, or almost running out of time to find his quarry after six weeks in the wild and the prospect of letting down the locals weighing over him. He takes care to explain his tracking techniques, based on a staggering knowledge of the network of interactions between animal life in the region, and switches up narrative styles by including first-hand anecdotes by villagers who had survived encounters with the animals and official reports from the time. There are even some moments of (perhaps unintentional) humour, as Corbett drops in incidental details probably deserving of chapters in their own right. "That house was definitely haunted, but this isn't a book of ghost stories", and "at that point we were almost killed by a leopard but I'm talking about a tiger at the moment" were two highlights from this point of view.

Ultimately, Man-Eaters of Kumaon is an interesting throwback to a time when man and nature were still not quite on equal terms, a time when the British Empire was still very much in force in India, and an account from a man whose own story is often more interesting than those he is telling.

4/5

There was a whole range of songs I could have gone with here, but with apologies to Nelly Furtado I had to go with the one that reflected Corbett's prose style best. So many tigers...