The Help

[evanovitch]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I heard of this book.. Wasnt interested in reading it....

It struck me as a modern literay equavalent of Gone with the wind....

This is this authours persective...

My mother who I supply with books, might be itnerested in reading it.... .. Evan did you find it a good read??? </div></div>

it is a good read...the maid portrayed are not passive women who sit n bemoan their predicament r kiss up to their white employers...it shows the disparity in their lifestyles yes...it shows the insensitivity of the employers yes...it shows the inequalities n the usual of life back then

but it also shows how these women fought bak in the ways they could...it shows how whites, could also be locked out whether because they were minorities demselves, i.e. Jews, r , in the case of the protagonist, a misfit due to her failure to graduate wid a MRS as was supposed to be the norm of women attending college back then

the language of the book is not sterotypical...i.e. yess'um etc...maids agreed wid employers in the same aimless an inattentive way that employers paid lipservice to the needs of their maids...an then u had the exception...employers who relied heavily on their helpers since family had abandonned r ignored them as we know happens in the real world

blacks are as proactive in their own lives an communities...the juxtaposition of their reality as opposed to their employers' is one of the avenues i enjoyed in the book

i am amazed at how a book of this type gets blazed while Stella is crowed over....wat..we can appreciate black women going abroad to get some sex but cant appreciate a view of how black women had to fight against being sexual stereotypes n stereotypes in general...how they fought n lived a parallel life n survived wid their dignity

because in the end,it took that dignity PLUS a whole heap of BALLS for them to cooperate wid the protagonist in writing about their , the helpers' interaction wid dem employers...and they did slowly...not alll were willing at first..they had to find their own way to this show of independence...

and lest we forget..the germ for the book was from one of the helpers whose son had had that dream to write a book about black life under the conditions of the town but who had lost his life...

the book is full of lessons if u read wid appreciation...but most seem to read dese days fi titilation..

n frankly some of the naysayers in teh black world could do wid some reading wid comprehension n appreciation..cause one thing those ladies showed was dat dem circumstances might be artificially circumscribed but their spirits were not..n they found their way to go through wid ingenunity ...thinking ahead and looking beyond...someting missing in present day black life, for the most part...
if u approach the book as piece of fiction wid a bow to reality of life bak then, u will read and appreciate it....


i read it , enjoyed it along the same way i read n enjoyed Brother Man

[jah_yout]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I heard of this book.. Wasnt interested in reading it....

It struck me as a modern literay equavalent of Gone with the wind....

This is this authours persective...

My mother who I supply with books, might be itnerested in reading it.... .. Evan did you find it a good read??? </div></div>


1938;

first black to win an oscar plays a maid....

2011;

latest black actress to possibly win an oscar plays a maid...

you've come a long way, baby

more flames!!

[R_C]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: jah_yout</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I heard of this book.. Wasnt interested in reading it....

It struck me as a modern literay equavalent of Gone with the wind....

This is this authours persective...

My mother who I supply with books, might be itnerested in reading it.... .. Evan did you find it a good read??? </div></div>


1938;

first black to win an oscar plays a maid....

2011;

latest black actress to possibly win an oscar plays a maid...

you've come a long way, baby

more flames!! </div></div>

2010;

The sole black actress to be nominated for an Oscar since Halle Berry in 2001 (who won after playing a black woman who has sex with a white racist southerner in exchange for shelter), plays an illiterate, obese 16-year-old girl with two children, both of whom are the products of being raped by her father.

[jah_yout]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: R_C</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: jah_yout</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I heard of this book.. Wasnt interested in reading it....

It struck me as a modern literay equavalent of Gone with the wind....

This is this authours persective...

My mother who I supply with books, might be itnerested in reading it.... .. Evan did you find it a good read??? </div></div>


1938;

first black to win an oscar plays a maid....

2011;

latest black actress to possibly win an oscar plays a maid...

you've come a long way, baby

more flames!! </div></div>

2010;

The sole black actress to be nominated for an Oscar since Halle Berry in 2001 (who won after playing a black woman who has sex with a white racist southerner in exchange for shelter), plays an illiterate, obese 16-year-old girl with two children, both of whom are the products of being raped by her father. </div></div>

OK maybe<span style="font-weight: bold"> you </span>see it...
but why are so many of us still so happy whenever hollyweird decides to 'recognize' us by pushing <span style="font-style: italic">certain</span> stories....
usually with some embarrassing depiction as in the ones mentioned above...(long sigh)

[mountaingal]

Re: The Help

<span style="font-style: italic">saw the trailer, vowed not to see this movie. sickening to think black maids &quot;needed&quot; the help of a white women employer to raise awareness of their lives at the hands of white folk. </span>

<span style="font-weight: bold">
Bestseller novel The Help needs help with its history homework</span>
LYNN CROSBIE
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Aug. 06, 2011 6:00AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Aug. 08, 2011 12:05PM EDT


“Change begins with a whisper.”

This is the tagline for The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s blockbuster novel, which has been adapted for a film of the same name by Disney (starring Viola Davis and Emma Stone) and will hit theatres on Wednesday.

The Help follows five women from Jackson, Miss., in 1962 – two are black, three are white. One of the white women (Hilly) is a high-society bigot who believes fervently in the Jim Crow laws of the then-segregated South; the other two are, alternately, a clueless babe (Celia) and a heroic, aspiring writer (Skeeter), clearly modelled on To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout (Stockett mentions Harper Lee’s novel three times). As for the black women: Aibileen has raised 17 white babies and works for the racist harpy; the other, Minny, is a firecracker who works for – and disdains – the hapless Celia.

The “whispering” of the tagline is the hushed conversations between the prejudiced white ladies, between the angry and frightened maids, and, finally, the maids’ whispering to Skeeter, who holds top secret meetings and acts as their liaison and the novel’s Deep Throat. <span style="font-weight: bold">Skeeter, who has been plagiarizing Aibileen’s ideas for a domestic tips column, decides to write a book of transcribed conversations with 12 maids (her disciples, one assumes) and a chapter by herself</span>. The book is called Help, and it’s published by “Anonymous.”

Stockett’s book and the movie based on it are packaged in the colour purple; the character Celia, oddly enough, evokes the dauntless “Celie,” the black heroine of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel. Both novels address severe racial prejudice.

But Walker’s book is distinguished by its place within a powerful continuum of African-American female artists. <span style="font-weight: bold">Stockett, a white Mississippi native, seems, incredibly, unaware of her competition – her novel is not only devoid of any deep insight into black women’s lives, it exists in a cultural vacuum, seemingly oblivious to the impact of black artists and activists of the era she writes about.</span>

All of this makes one lament the passing of essentialist arguments about appropriation of voice (the idea that oppressed people should write their own stories), as does reading dialogue like this:

“Don’t you worry, Minny. We gone find you somebody deaf as a doe-knob, just like Miss Walter.”

“Who you think you’re talking to, Aibileen? A monkey?”

“I’m sorry, Lordy me.”

This dialect – reserved for the black characters – is not so much racist as stylistic ineptitude. <span style="font-weight: bold">Were the author familiar with Zora Neale Hurston’s work, for example, she may have fine-tuned her dialogue (Hurston was a black ethnographer and novelist whose pitch-perfect writing appeared in the 1930s during the Harlem Renaissance).</span>

The book also seems unmindful of other inspirational figures of the period: While Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Dr. King and Medgar Evers are mentioned, it is always in passing, as if to further the bizarre idea that Stockett is a kind of “maid whisperer,” revolutionizing the South with her story.

The idea of “whispered” change is nothing new for African-American women, as well as the black men and children, who, say, modulated or adapted their voices to pass each other life-saving messages.

And while the triple subjugation of poor, black women in the early 1960s is a cultural fact, their oral and written culture is substantial, their voices well-documented.<span style="font-weight: bold"> Many memoirs by black women appeared in the heat of the civil rights movement, but one would never know this by The Help.</span>

In the film, Minny speaks about getting “it” right, meaning her true story, and authentic voice.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Yet she and her friend, the gifted writer Aibileen, tell their stories anonymously to a white employer. They do it for reasons of safety. It reads as plagiarism: Skeeter crows to herself about “her book” and lands a prestigious job after its publication.</span> Furthermore, doesn’t finding a voice mean transcending anonymity? If Harriet Wilson could publish, in 1859, an autobiographical slave narrative under her own name, what is stopping Aibileen from writing her own book?

In the 1960s, political women across the board – black and white– recognized the power of the subjective voice; of the movement, through art, from object to subject. Why don’t the maids recognize this power?

It’s not as if they don’t have striking role models: Sojourner Truth, Billie Holiday, Jessie Redmon Fauset,<span style="font-weight: bold"> Gwendolyn Brooks (who won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry 12 years prior to the era in the novel).</span> Or Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man Aibileen says she has read.

But has Stockett?

Ellison did say that “the act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.” <span style="font-weight: bold">What is curious however, is why white folks are always plunging back into times of monstrous oppression against blacks, out of an interest that feels only self-serving.</span> Why are blacks always depicted in crisis, almost always punctuated with slapstick (the film has a comic component; the book is filled with hack jokes)?

This is more than a disquieting novel: The violence against blacks includes an evil black husband and a naked, onanistic cracker, whose scene plays out like accidental pornography. <span style="font-weight: bold">Central to the novel’s plot is also the recurring image of a maid excreting into the chief bigot’s chocolate pie. If this is meant to elicit a cornball “Serves her right!” reaction, does it not also, horribly, fuse race and filthy waste? </span>(Another convoluted plotline has a white woman, who advocates segregated facilities, finding toilets all over her lawn.)

So why the book’s huge popularity?

Is the average reader unaware of fairly recent American history? Of the inarguably better work of Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Gayl Jones? What about the more accessible, still-powerful, pop novels of Bebe Campbell Moore and Terry McMillan?

If Stockett’s book is about the truth (in this case) setting the black women of Jackson free, why does it seem so dishonest?

Perhaps the white ladies in The Help are vicious, but there are far worse things going on in Jackson in 1962. <span style="font-weight: bold">A black man is lynched in the book, but this gets so little attention, relative to the back-stabbing and conniving of white women and their intensive silverware-cleaning demands. The white men never assault black women (though history laughs at this vast improbability)</span> and are otherwise peripheral and always hunting does – this is the kind of sterling metaphor I enjoyed in To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 11 years old.

The Help, ultimately, is best compared to Mean Girls playing in front of a blurry newscast of the Ole Miss riot.

And the great American civil rights movement, shouted, not whispered about, at its height, should not be open for revision.

[kia027]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: evanovitch</div><div class="ubbcode-body">what's dis helping di black..how many have read the book

i did n did not look up the author until i had finished the book

the author is white yes

the protagonist of the book is a misfit of sorts herself within the white race
she carries out an idea of a black maid , whose son had started to write a book but had died

circumstances encourage the maids to overcome their fears and hesitancy in telling their tales and they do

the book is a good read...it is not any one person's story but can be the story of many a one who lived n worked as a maid in that period

the book is a work of fiction wich does touch on some reality...

it is as good a read as was waiting to exhale in terms of touching on subject matter that can be subjective r not...

geez...half of the people on this board dont read a book...di odda half get dem views from group think

at least dis book seh more dan all dem [censored] sex on the beach weh flood di shelves a yaad...

F E H </div></div>

That is how I felt when I read the book - to me it is just a story and if I want to explore how life was as a black maid in the south, I would not consider a work of fiction as a source.

[jah_yout]

Re: The Help

seems the movie is a huge smash hit...audiences can't get enough

[kia027]

Re: The Help

and hits on the bootleg free site was pretty strong too

[jah_yout]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">So why the book’s huge popularity?</div></div>


good article...

white audiences make stuff like this popular because it puts an entertaining &amp; sympathetic spin on history---with them as the ultimate facilitator of justice...

it's tin-can morality for a brainwashed society...
that prefers microwave tales like this rather than looking deeper into the history that provides the backdrop of these fictional imaginative tales...

[Skelly]

Re: The Help

i love how those who have never read the book or seen the movie have themost to say about it..lol

[jah_yout]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Skelly</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i love how those who have never read the book or seen the movie have themost to say about it..lol </div></div>


i was actually commenting on the article MGee posted...
i can see is a eedyat movie (IMO) from the trailer and scenes...

i find the idea of a black woman sheeting in a chocolate fudge or whatever very offensive...

i pretty much find most of hollyweird depictions of blacks that get mega hollywood accolades to be offensive...

&quot;gone with the wind&quot;= offensive
&quot;monster's ball&quot;= offensive
&quot;precious&quot;= offensive
&quot;the blind side&quot;= offensive

but i will give you my critique of the actual film once i catch it on a bootleg

[Skelly]

Re: The Help

a nuh u alone mi a laff afta JY..i had dinner wid smaddy ova di weekend and they pretty much was anting and raving bout the sed book/movie even doah dem neva si or read it

[mountaingal]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Skelly</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i love how those who have never read the book or seen the movie have themost to say about it..lol </div></div>

saw enough in the trailer. would not subject myself to watching it if i got such strong negative vibes from the trailer. wouldnt make sense.

[Wahalla]

Re: The Help

u tink dat in bout twenty year time one ah dem rich AA rappas pickni ah guh write a book bout dem white Nanny ? Ah mean.. Beunce an Jay zee pickni write a book bout dem white help ??

In fact that is a good basis for a novel... The African's Servant....

the cross cultural conflicts which occured while the denizen of an upper middle class African American grew up while being cared for by his white Tutor... While her parents partied in San Tropez, a lonley child only champanion in the Hamptons was the white help....

[mountaingal]

Re: The Help

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">u tink dat in bout twenty year time one ah dem rich AA rappas pickni ah guh write a book bout dem white Nanny ? Ah mean.. Beunce an Jay zee pickni write a book bout dem white help ??

In fact that is a good basis for a novel... The African's Servant....

the cross cultural conflicts which occured while the denizen of an upper middle class African American grew up while being cared for by his white Tutor... While her parents partied in San Tropez, a lonley child only champanion in the Hamptons was the white help.... </div></div>

intriguing concept. however, maybe AAs would follow the rich white folks in getting black help. i don't know, thats the american tradition, no?

in any event, there have been enuf rich rappers and other AA entertainers to hire white help, if that were their wont, so such a story technically could have already been written, we wouldnt need to wait 20 years...