Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 09, 2019 Book Review…
On the heels of her critically acclaimed, “Did the Right Sperm Win,” Vinette Hoffman-Jackson delivers a far more intimate message and proves her salt as a writer of note. With enviable range and timing, her ‘Vignettes’ holds our attention.
There is an unmistakable authenticity to this work. It is raw and speaks to the complexities that shape us. Hoffman-Jackson wrestles with competing feelings. Her musings tell of a restless soul, a soul that at times teeters on a fine line, vulnerable, but still searching desperately for meaning. Her vignettes are existential and movingly powerful, and in a single breath, self-effacing and fatalistic. Therein is her appeal.
We identify with her vulnerabilities and her ambiguities. However, for all her shortcomings and missteps, she stirs the imagination. It is a paradox that has worked for many through the ages. Hoffman-Jackson has now joined a storied list of writers.
We find favour in her gratitude and humility. She acknowledges her mother, but her encomium is neither tritely repetitive nor is it purely a hagiographic.
And throughout there is an unquenched thirst for intimacy.
“My daddy left me when I was two,” she pens, “and my mother did what she had to…Although through the years she did what she can, my mother never taught me how to love a man. Simply no one taught me, how I should love.”
She mentions the absence of her father without labour, but we still connect the dots and feel her searing pain. Hoffman-Jackson can’t hide that truth. But some wounds are best left untreated. Maybe.
She is not drafted by the immediacy of passion and reflects: Why? And, what if? If only she could trust. “He says, ‘Stay with me and try’ I looked at him and said ‘Good-bye.’”
Surely, love is her Achilles Heel and the wounds on the inside are the hardest to heal.
“He loves me, and that’s a fact,” she writes. “I just cannot love him back. Someday, somehow, He will discover my lie…He loves me, but I just cannot love him back.”
Without fanfare she let us know of her fidelity: “Although I know the time is fleeting. And death will one day send its greetings. And this heart will stop beating. In heaven, I’ll wait patiently for our next meeting. I’ll be there. Forever I’ll be there.”
Hoffman-Jackson can be philosophical, but hardly in a didactic way. Man is his own worst enemy, she avers. She invites us to respond. Of man’s bellicosity, she ponders: “I wonder what exactly is a religious war? An oxymoron if I have ever seen one. From who exactly did that order come? I wonder what would happen if all wars should stop? What would become of the bullets and guns? And the people who have always profited?”
Somewhere lies the answer, but for now, she is confounded by the ways of men.
Still, she delves into aesthetics, cosmology and the uniformity of life. It is an unfathomable, unspoiled wonderment:
“Your shell cracked
Out you spilled
Floating and spreading until
You became part of everything
And new life forms to bring.
We are one…You exist not in singularity
But in harmony and perfect unity
Be still with the universe and move with the flow
The more you listen the more you will know.”
‘Vinette’s Vignettes’ is daringly purposeful. We are neither broken beyond repair nor do we ever impeccably mend what is broken in and around us. What is important is our existential worth. Brutally credible, ‘Vignettes’ hits the mark with seamless abandon.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
Mar 28, 2024
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