Stretching the cultural boundaries again

So I'm working on reading more urban and non-white authors, especially as I'm doing library stuff in a city with significant African, African-American, Hmong, Vietnamese, Hispanic, and Latin American immigrants.  (I realize that several of these categories sorta overlap, but I am aware that one doesn't have to be Latin American to be Hispanic, so I think they have to be two overlapping not non-identical sets, thus two labels.  And of course not only are African and African-American different categories, but some of our African-American patrons are kinda at odds with some of our African patrons.  I had to quell some racial name calling on that score once this month.)

So I read Sister Souljah's memoir thing "No Disrespect" last night and this morning.  It's written in a very "fictionalized memoir" sort of style - that is, she says in the intro that she's condensed and re-ordered time a bit, combined several real people into composites for the sake of the narrative, etc...  I think it is fairly readable, but it's mostly like, the story minus the analysis.  She has a really nice essay that closes it where she makes her arguments, but I'm used to the part of a nonfiction work where the analysis and the story are more intimately connected piece by piece, which was missing here.  I think perhaps the audience she is writing most for has a different expectation of narrative?  That's my assumption for the moment, future reading pending.

Overall it was... ok.  I learned some stuff about environmental and social pressures, but about 3/5 of the way through there was this whole part with a female character who was lesbian and came on to the narrator in a creepy way which was the occasion for this odd Christian rant about how homosexuality was a copout and not a natural thing, and that folks who were gay were "advocating" a homosexual lifestyle that would lead to the destruction of the family unit and ... it went on and on.  I sorta tuned it out and kept turning pages, but it made it hard to feel any empathy with the author.  She sorta implies in an earlier segment of the book that male homosexuality is caused by child sexual abuse, too.  Which was, umm, icky.

One thing I did keep thinking of in the early bits about the author's time in the ghetto: one of the worst things I can imagine about being a kid in an urban environment has to be the lack of the privacy that nature provides.  I mean, as a kid, when I didn't want to deal with other people, I could wander off out my backyard and walk through the woods that sat on the edge of the farm property.  If I wanted to I could hike a mile along little farm lanes and go up the hill along a brook, picking blackberries as I went, and sit and read on a rock, peering down at houses in the valley.  I could go to the swimming hole, I could take a book and wander around into the cemetery.  I wasn't ever very outdoorsy, I wasn't off hiking and adventuring, but there were quiet green spaces near at hand where I could sit and think and dream in peace and quiet and safety.  It's always so hard for me to imagine what it must be like psychologically for children to grow up in an environment where it's not possible to go sit under a flowering tree, invisible to any (extremely unlikely) passerby and just think in privacy.  And be pretty sure of not finding any trash under the bushes - no cans or bottles or diapers or condoms or anything but leaves and sticks and flowers.  Obviously the poverty and oppression and violence and drugs sound pretty awful, but the thing I have to force myself to imagine is not being able to escape them by just going outside.