The Help

I don't know how I feel about this book.

I wanted to know what it was like for black women working as maids in the 60s Mississippi, but I obviously shouldn't have picked a book written by a white woman and based on the memories of her white family members. Yes, she lived in Mississippi in the 60s, their family had a black maid, but she was a kid and her memories are unreliable. It'd be the same if I wrote about the struggles of ethnic Lithuanians during perestroika, based on my memories from kindergarten. That, plus me belonging to the ethnic group members of which occupied their land, tried to erase their national identity, sent thousands of them to GULAGs, among other things.

You can see that I am venturing into the “should Stockett have written this book” territory. I don't know. I don't think it's for me to decide. I don't think a white person is incapable of writing a compelling story about black people, if they ask enough black people for advice and don't make it about themselves. The problem is, Stockett didn't follow either of these points, since the black people in the book are based on other works of fiction written by white people, and the book is, ultimately, about her. Not her exactly, but a self insert.

I think Skeeter is one of the reasons I gave this book two stars. I hate that her issues with unruly hair deserve more attention than the struggles of black women in the 60s. I hate that she was friends (best friends, in fact) with a racist woman who terrorizes black maids. Their friendship didn't even make sense within the framework of that story! I hate that her boyfriend gets more attention than the struggles black men faced in the 60s.

The book did portray some awful things that black people had to go through, but they all seemed pushed aside in favor of Skeeter's personal growth. The problems also seem to get resolved in an unrealistic, white fairy-tale like manner, without the likely real-life consequences.

This is a vulnerable (and highly important!) topic for black people in the USA, and instead it gets turned into a feel-good flick for white people. And that's the thing - we all want to feel good about ourselves, we want to make sure that when members of our ethnic or religious group commit atrocities against another group, everybody knows not all of us are like that. And it's true - we're not. There were white people in the Civil Rights Movement. There were Russians holding hands with Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians during a peaceful protest against Soviet occupation. We just need to be careful not to silence the voices of the people who actually got hurt, because when you're not directly affected by a problem - it is very easy to do.

I don't hate this book, I don't think Stockett shouldn't have written it. But it needs to be clear what a book like this means in the context of Black Rights in the USA and why this book has four times more ratings on GR than The Colour Purple, or 243 times more than Coming of Age in Mississippi - a book on the same subject written in the same decade, only by a black woman.