Losing the Game of Racism
Review of Devi S. Laskar's The Atlas of Reds and Blues (USA: Counterpoint Press, 2019)
by Prasanthi Ram.
This review contains spoilers.
American poet Devi S. Laskar's debut novel is nothing short of unconventional. Released in early 2019, the enigmatic The Atlas of Reds and Blues is an amalgamation of several vignettes that are conveyed in poetic prose. Collectively, these moments draw urgent attention to the debilitating experience of racism in America's South, especially in the post-9/11 Trump-led context today. To simply define the novel as non-linear does not fully encapsulate its experimental structure. Rather, Laskar has arranged the vignettes like planets around a dying sun, orbiting around the novel's climax: the protagonist Mother gazing up at the blue sky as she bleeds to death on her driveway after being shot by a policeman with an assault rifle.
It is initially hard to grasp the narrative's purpose, what with it jumping between the harrowing climax and the lengthy flashbacks, brief conversations between dispatch officers as they journey to the scene, or the haunting hoot of an owl in Mother's neighborhood. Yet, as the story unfolds through Mother's strong and frank voice, it becomes clear that Laskar has opted for the orbital style of storytelling in order to reflect the dying protagonist's own final pursuit: to decide "which particular incident set her on the path of this particular life story, concrete driveway and all."
Throughout the text, Mother searches for the defining moment in her life that can sufficiently explain to the reader (and herself) why she ends up being shot on her own driveway. Could it be the moment she serendipitously meets her husband? Could it be the moment she decides to move from the city to the wealthy suburbs filled with cookie-cutter families ("these real Barbie dolls" / "life-size neighbor Barbie dolls") that are nothing like her own? Could it be when she is almost arrested by a policewoman after being mistaken for a wanted criminal named "Angela Wallace," with whom Mother only shares skin colour and a haircut? Could it be when a group of male burglars appear at her doorstep, her husband overseas, and leave her alone only after encountering the family dog Greta? Or could it even be the moment she is in a car accident as a child and her brown doll, the one no one else in that part of North Carolina wants, gets tragically decapitated?
Yet as she struggles to identify a root cause for her demise, the inevitable conclusion is as follows: it is not her fault at all, but the fault of racism, of a society that fails to condemn racism and, worse, shamelessly perpetuates it by partaking in micro- and macro-aggressions alike.
This becomes more apparent when one unpacks the singularities of the protagonist's experience of America. Mother is an American woman born to Bengali immigrants. She goes to a Catholic school where a white girl named Mary-Magdalene Anne declares that she will never be asked out by white boys because she is "not white" and her skin color "doesn't rub off." In her adulthood, Mother marries a white man, addressed in the novel only as "her hero" (an affectionate term that later turns ironic), and they go on to raise three mixed-race daughters in the state of Georgia. Up till this point, the narrative sounds representative of an increasingly progressive and diverse America. Except Georgia is a red state and racism continues to thrive here despite the intervening decades since Mother's own childhood experiences of discrimination.
Even as an adult, Mother deals with daily micro-aggressions, from the night manager at a 24-hour grocery to a salesgirl at the dry cleaners, who casually demean her because they readily assume that she is an immigrant, not a fellow American. Her usual dry cleaner Mr. Patel advises her to paste flag stickers on her car after she is harangued by a white customer in Patel's shop. Yet her own husband dismisses the advice like "a mosquito" and argues, "We're American...You shouldn't have to prove anything. (This is despite Mother's earlier remark: "You don't have to... But I have to.")
Out of her three children, it is Middle Daughter who suffers the most; like her mother, she too is dark-skinned, making her a target at school where she is tormented by vicious white male bullies. The bullied child pleads with Mother not to tell her father, who for the most part remains ignorant about how entrenched racist attitudes are in the South because he is too preoccupied with his regular business trips to notice. As a result, both mother and daughter keep the bullying a secret until Middle Daughter suffers a concussion from a particularly violent incident, which completely shocks the father since he had no inkling of the violence prior to that moment. Even then, although he ensures that Middle Daughter withdraws from the school, he also refuses to let Mother submit a scathing letter of withdrawal because "we have to live here" and "it is the gracious thing to do." This is reminiscent of a previous scene where he insists that they must "be nice" even when they're wronged in order to keep living in the neighborhood without trouble. Although such a survivalist tactic is understandable, his insistence on it despite the worsening racism against his family comes across as rather apologist, especially when he is the white American “hero” privileged enough to be left unscathed till the end. The irony is that the police raid is called because of him. Furthermore, his insistence on being nice invalidates Mother's outrage and suppresses her rightful urge to stand up for her daughter and herself. Laskar's message is clear: even those we call family may sometimes be unable to fully share our grievances because of their own blind spots with regards to race and racism.
What then does one do with the trauma from such ill-treatment that not only goes unchecked but is sometimes further perpetuated and compounded? How does one continue to navigate one’s day-to-day lives if one is constantly subjected to threats of violence that may escalate depending solely on someone else's whim? More so, how can one fight back in a world that constantly disallows one from doing so?
In a particularly heartrending scene, Mother tries to comfort Middle Daughter, who is crying over being the only one who was not invited to a classmate's birthday party. This is all a game, Mother soothes her child, and it is called the Stiff Upper Lip game. The trick to winning, Mother claims, is not to cry in front of "them." It is to bear stoic witness to the atrocities thrust upon one without outward reaction. Yet when Mother later admits to being scared after Middle Daughter's concussion and says she wishes they could be "happy, not scared," the girl sadly concurs: "Poor us, Mommy... We both lost the Stiff Upper Lip game after all."
Perhaps the hardest part of reading the book is knowing that Laskar herself was held at gunpoint during a police raid by Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation in 2010 to investigate her professor husband's possible misuse of university resources for his start-up. She fortunately survived the traumatic encounter by conceding to the agents' demands for her family's belongings, including her laptop. Although the case against her husband was eventually dropped, Laskar felt compelled to address the issue through her debut novel. An Atlas of Reds and Blues is thus a meditation, lyrical and true to life, on an alternative reality in which a non-white individual resists police intervention and is horrifically punished for it.
As the novel makes its final return to the opening scene/ultimate climax, an earlier statement by Mother in Act I becomes even more pertinent: "The object of the game, she suddenly decides, is not to lie in a pool of one's own blood." It is painfully clear by now that she has lost the game. The last nail is hammered into her coffin when a policeman arrives at the scene and mocks her name while communicating with the dispatcher: "Sweet Jesus. What the hell were her parents thinking?" Even in her final moments, Mother is not afforded any shred of dignity. She is instead subjected to yet another instance of micro-aggression and remains a punchline to a never-ending joke made entirely at her expense. The injustice of this will leave readers seething, and rightly so.
At the very end the reader is initially bathed in poetry: languid prose that shows Mother revisiting ("flying through time and space") all the people and moments in her life. Yet Laskar yanks the reader right back into the dreadful present. With the ambulance on its way, with her phone ringing, with a dispatcher confirming that her hero has indeed been released and is on his way home to her, Mother is at last rendered a "clothed, unmoving torso" with the shadow of the dispatcher ominously "[passing] over her like an eclipse" as the chaos around her continues to build. Given that the narrative ends right there, it is certainly not the hero or Mother's children who have to deal with the fallout. Instead, it is the reader who bears not only the impossible weight of those orbiting moments that have led up to this point of no return, but also the grave consequences of normalizing any and all acts of racial discrimination.
The Atlas of Reds and Blues is truly not a narrative that can be mindlessly consumed and then forgotten once the book comes to a close. Reading this novel instead entails a slow dawning of horror that sits with you long after, because this is reality for America in a time when politicians weaponize racist rhetoric and police brutality is on the rise. And it is a reality that Laskar urges us to confront and address before more non-white subjects are cruelly, even carelessly, turned into bodies simply for attempting to live honest lives.
Prasanthi Ram is a PhD candidate for Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Her interests lie in South Asian literature, feminism(s) and popular culture. She is currently working on her debut collection of short stories that explores the Tamil Brahmin community in Singapore.