The Life and Loves of Mr. Jive Ass Nigger by Cecil Brown

I read this book quite a while ago, and meant to post a review. Librarything is now saying, no freebie books if I don’t, and anyway, I do want to review it. But this is a bit from memory. Anyway, here’s what I posted on the Librarything website:

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This is, as someone else put it, a novel of a time and place. But it’s an interesting and somewhat alien time and place, even though it’s not so very long ago.

Maybe it’s just because I’m projecting onto this text, but some other books that came to mind when one reads this: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Neil Strauss’s The Game. Regardless of that latter reference, the book is a novel, not a dated guide to playing pickup as a black man in Denmark (though it could have been many places in Europe) back in the late 60s.

That said, the book is dripping with sex, and a lot of it is multiple-birds-with-one-stone sex, too. The protagonist (“George Washington”, he calls himself) tells the stories of his (constant) encounters with white women not only because he likes to talk about sex, but also because there are other things he wants to talk about. Anger. Humiliation. Being used. Using. Hypocrisy. Power.

Being a white man in Korea at the start of the 21st century is radically different from being a black man in Copenhagen in the 60s, I’m certain, but I can say as an expatriate that Brown certainly hits the nail on the head in terms of the feel of an expat’s mindset, the dynamics of expat communities, the sense of interactions based more on using a convenient foreigner than on any human interaction, and also the sexual charge that seems to drive so many expats, and even to infuse a relatively homogenous society when it comes to how it regards its “exotic” foreigners. Things do get weird; deeply weird, in this book, and that’s no surprise, but the specific weirdnesses do indeed surprise, even as they feel strangely familiar.

I found the book quite interesting, even though there were times when I found myself slightly discomfited at being reminded just how crappily human beings can treat one another. Jive: the crudity of life distorted by all the ridiculousnesses one can imagine, and the sad ridiculousness that one becomes by living within it. And the abyss that gazes into our protagonist…

This is, in the end, a powerful, discomfiting book. My discomfort with it makes me want to say something limiting it, but I’m going to resist that and say I was both fascinated and somehow sobered by it at once.