2 Classics, and 1 Masterpiece of Diaspora Writing

Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” 
--Richard Adams, Watership Down

"A great book... A whole world is created, perfectly real in itself, yet constituting a deep incidental comment on human affairs" --Guardian 

A worldwide bestseller for over thirty years, Richard Adam’s Watership Down is set in England’s Downs. It is a vivid tale of the adventures, courage, and survival of a band of rabbits on their flight from the intrusion of man and the destruction of their home. Fiver, a clairvoyant, receives a frightening vision of his warren's imminent destruction and this premonition leads his rabbit comrades on a journey through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a “perfect” or “ideal” society.

I would definitely recommend this as a text for Upper Secondary students. Adams eloquently articulates man’s self-serving behaviour and sense of self-entitlement. This is a major critique that I would love to explore in our local classrooms. Other salient themes include love, humanity, nature, and home, which are relevant issues that our students would be excited about. The way in which the story unfolds -- adventure after adventure, one turmoil after another -- constantly places the reader at the edge of her seat wanting more of Fiver and his gang. Adams gives a voice to the rabbits and, ironically, very elegantly exposes the decadence of the human condition. The elements of the story very intricately inform each other, thus exemplifying Adams’s craft in putting together a masterpiece that is at once both accessible and yet extremely profound.  

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
--Anna Sewell, Black Beauty 

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is a classic bestseller. Set in nineteenth-century England, the novel drives home the message that animals will serve humans well if they are treated with consideration and kindness. Some call it a treatise on animal maltreatment. Narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by Black Beauty, this novel tells the story of the horse’s life first as a colt in a pleasant meadow to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman to a painfully overworked cab horse and finally to his happy retirement. This is an excellent book for readers of all ages for the chief reason that it speaks, it teaches, and it entertains. 

Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee

“The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.” 
--Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

Consider: What would you give to be an American? What would you give to experience the American dream, to grasp "American" prosperity, security, and happiness? Here is what The New York Times has to say about Jasmine: "Rich...one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American." -- The New York Times. In this novel, Mukherjee opens up the Pandora box about transformation and identity ,and a process of self-discovery in a dynamic world. 

Jasmine was born in a rural Indian village called Hasnpur. When she is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she was expected to resign to a life of quiet isolation in the Indian village where she was born. But the force of her desires propels her into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. At the age of 24, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer in Iowa, pregnant, and also the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Her journey encompasses five distinct settings, two murders, one rape, a maiming, a suicide, and three love affairs. Throughout the course of the novel, her identity, along with her name, changes repeatedly: From Jyoti to Jasmine to Jazzy to Jassy to Jase to Jane. She moves from Hanspur, Punjab, to Fowlers Key, Florida, to Flushing, New York, to Manhattan, to Baden, Iowa, and finally is off to California as the novel concludes.

I think the most salient question we can ask ourselves while reading Mukherjee's work is: “Is Jasmine a rebel or a revolutionary?” Could she be both? Perhaps.