One of the units with my ENG3U0 students is about biographies / autobiographies / memoirs. This is an area in which I've felt ill-equipped to make recommendations, so I've added many more of these types of texts to my current list.
Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli tank in Palestine, as a peace activist in 2003, while attempting to guard a house from demolition.
Having been to Israel myself in 2011, and having been unable to ignore the absences of certain perspectives, this was a narrative I needed to add to the list.
Corrie always wanted to be a writer and artist, and her parents collected her poems, diary entries, stories, emails, and drawings, assembling them to make this text. From the liveliness of her words, there's this contrasting sense of loss.
I am finding myself very taken with a particular story in the centre, of a real-life relationship's deterioration. She uses this overarching metaphor of an allergic beekeeper, who can't quit secretly beekeeping, even if it kills him, because it's all he knows. It reads like this really beautiful narrative about serious drug addiction, with a heartfelt intensity of love, and the blind hope for betterment. She wrote this story, aged 20. I want to use it in a classroom.
I searched out this "beekeeper"s name, in conjunction with hers, and learned that he read a eulogy at her funeral. It can be found here: http://criticalconcern.com/colin_reese.htm
I scoured further and learned that he committed suicide the following year.
Lost potential.
Rachel Corrie speaks in poetic subtleties throughout the rest of this memoir, interspersed with social justice and mental health narratives / advocacy, about the ills of drug addiction - and the fear experienced by those who try to nurture sufferers back to health.
It is a privilege to watch the evolution of her growth as a human being, from age about 10-23. I feel like one of her most perceptive statements is the following, my page here dog-eared:
"I also think it's extraordinarily important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is a very strong pressure to conflate the two. Thus, the pro-Israel lobby becomes the 'Jewish Lobby' and criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic. I try to ask myself -- whose interests does it serve to identify Israeli policy with all Jewish people? All I can think of is that it serves people who want to stifle all critique of Israeli policy, people who want to execute various foreign policy goals under the guise of doing something humanitarian for Jewish people (i.e. U.S.), and neo-Nazis who want to use Israel's policy as a way to justify their hate." (Corrie 227)
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