Currently the two texts which will be the center of my Senior Thesis are Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, and Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine. I first encountered Koolaids my first semester of college in my English 101 course about American Postmodernism. This was the first book that I had read that truly refused to be confined by any standards of the novel format. That is, the story is composed of vignettes, most of which are less than a page, but some can be up to 3 pages long. The whole time I was reading Koolaids I could not help but wonder, “Okay, why is this like this?” I think, also, I just really enjoy weird books and stories that open entirely new avenues of looking at the world. I certainly never would have thought that the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese civil war had anything in common, or that writing about them in tandem could be so beautiful. Koolaids is a book that is both weird and beautiful, and I would argue, it is beautiful because of its weirdness.
I encountered Giovanni’s Room for the first time last February. I had read Going to Meet the Man and Go Tell It On the Mountain over winter break and was absolutely enthralled by Baldwin’s prose. As such I found myself in Whistlestop one afternoon looking for something interesting to read for fun and happened to look at the shelf with Baldwin’s works on it and thought, “It would be cool to read some more Baldwin,” so I grabbed Giovanni’s Room by chance. Mostly because I was certain I would enjoy anything that he had written. I was of course correct. Baldwin’s prose, storytelling, and characters are all stunning.
The goal, or rather the question then, becomes how these seemingly very different texts come together. I was reading Koolaids again over Fall Pause, and realized, that at the center of both of these novels is the simple fact that the openly gay, or queer, main characters of these books die at the end. So, the center of these novels in the question of the future, and what a life looks likes when one is left without the possibility of ever truly being oneself or is confronted with the slow and painfully death of all of your closest friends. Indeed, while these stories address different generations of queer men the ending, or rather the conclusion is the same: to be gay is to die.
Oof. What an astute observation, albeit a bleak one. I definitely find that the “bury your gays” trope is still all over media of all kinds, so it’s not a surprise that you found such commonalities between two very different texts. It would be really interesting to see a kind of evolution of this trope and why it still persists. During Baldwin’s time, and certainly during the AIDS crisis, the trope is “realistic” but I would be curious as to what you could gather as to why the trope still persists even though the possibilities for queer futures have multiplied and become considerably less bleak.
Your final sentence of your post is absolutely chilling. I haven’t read either text in full (though I now plan to) and I wonder if there’s something to be said about embracing death and life? I don’t want to sound too much like a hopeless optimist, but I’m curious what these texts have to say about how to live on limited time, especially if you know that you don’t have a lot left, as might be the case for the narrator of Koolaids. At least in terms of the prescience of death, it reminds me a little bit of They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera (also haven’t had the chance to read this one yet despite my sister begging me to).
Thank you for introducing me to Koolaids; it sounds amazing and the excerpts you provided for your class discussion were fascinating! I think your connection between queer identity and death is interesting and it reminds me of the book They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. Going back to your excerpts from Koolaids, we discussed how religion was presented in the text, and I was wondering how prevalent religion is for the rest of the piece, especially since it can be connected to both sexuality and death.