Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers takes us
into a world of recyclable garbage, where the extremes of poor and rich live
mere yards from each other. Boo paints a grotesque picture of a Mumbai slum,
horrific for readers never exposed to these conditions, such as myself, but
this is the reality of the dwellers of Annawadi.
Boo’s narrative focuses mainly on
the people she follows, giving apt descriptions that read more like a novel
than a work of non-fiction. Her take on the culture and her purpose for writing
this book seem immediately clearer to me than reading Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. She
takes in every detail, not leaving a single piece out about the garbage, the
sewage, the lack of clean air or water, depicting the people living in them not
as lowly or in need of help, but as regular humans who do as much as anyone
else can, living their life, making money, and even, in the voices and hopes of
the younger generation, dreaming of rising above and getting out of the slum. The
stories told are stated matter of fact, even when talking about starvation, or
a child getting his hand cut off in a shredder. This slum culture is clearly much
different from my own comfortable, middle class culture, and Boo’s writing
targets this without being overbearing. She makes me feel uncomfortable,
something I’ve never before said was a positive thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment