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Summary
Summary
In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope.
For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D'Aguiar was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, D'Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from two cultural perspectives--his Caribbean upbringing and his American lifestyle--D'Aguiar's beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease.
In his first work of nonfiction, D'Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the lyrical to the quotidian, from the metaphysical to the personal. While his experience could not be darker, its rendering is tinged with light and joy, captured in prose that unfolds in wonderful, unexpected ways. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
D'Aguiar (Children of Paradise) takes a powerful and intimate look at his experiences battling cancer during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, a UCLA literature and creative writing professor, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in October 2019 and was still fighting his disease when California went into lockdown, leaving him gripped by the thought that the crisis was "another manifestation of my cancer, a pincer attack on my life from outside and from within." In lyrical, meditative passages, he describes the comfort he found in poetry, relying on Keats's wisdom to "stay with insecurity rather than run back to certainty." In addition to shouldering the weight of his diagnosis--which he hid from friends and family to avoid burdening them with another worry during the pandemic--D'Aguiar recalls how he reckoned with his private jeopardy in the face of America's virulent racism after the murder of George Floyd. Dashes of humor--as when D'Aguiar discusses flatulence, an act which, thanks to his meds, "must announce itself like the big bang"--offer brief respites from the grim subject matter, and, throughout, the author's resilience inspires. This makes the fragility of life devastatingly palpable. Agent: Jeffrey Leinman, Folio Literary. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
A chronicle of a year of trauma. In the fall of 2019, British Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright D'Aguiar, a professor of English at UCLA, was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the first of three plagues that he recounts in a memoir notable for its uncommon candor. If cancer was the most immediate threat to his life, Covid-19 proved no less fearsome. To undergo tests in a hospital, he had to enter "spaces dominated by the pandemic." The virus, he writes, assumed "the role of an aid to my cancer." Equally assaulting was the "society-cancer" of anti-Black racism, as evidenced by the police killings of George Floyd and others. D'Aguiar reports in detail the trajectory of his illness from the time he first noticed bladder problems through the tests that confirmed the existence of cancer. He also writes about the four drugs--and their insidious side effects--that he took to control it and the eventual surgery to remove his prostate and the lymph nodes to which the disease had spread. Cancer affected both body and spirit: Because one of the drugs blocked the production of testosterone, for example, he began to experience hot flashes and to develop breasts, a disturbing side effect that challenged his "male gender outlook." Trying to marshal "restorative powers" of mind, the author took to chanting, singing, and dancing to create an atmosphere conducive to cure, hoping to stop the disease from metastasizing "with a firewall of meds and positive vibes." Writing poetry, he realized, had the power to rescue him "from catatonic shock and stasis" by opening up "a psychic space of awareness" of the world around him. Interwoven with his illness narrative, D'Aguiar shares some of his poems along with recollections of his childhood in Guyana, tales of the trickster god Anansi, and reflections on inequality in the health care system and the plight of Black men in America. A visceral account of personal illness and social ills. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Born to Guyanese parents, raised in Guyana and England, and long resident in the U.S., poet, novelist, and playwright D'Aguiar reflects on a difficult personal year within a challenging global year. Where does the mind go, he asks, when confronted with mortality, racial violence, and an international plague? D'Aguiar catalogs his diagnosis with prostate cancer in late 2019 and his physical symptoms with a rare combination of clinical reality and impressionistic musings. This juxtaposition of the intensely physical reality of a body battling cancer and the spirit searching for answers and strength in literature makes for an unflinching narrative and a remarkable read. D'Aguiar's acceptance of his body's changes and his resilience are made all the more real as he shares vulnerabilities. Whether he describes difficulty peeing or getting ready for a shot in his buttocks or closely examines his relationship with his long-missing father, D'Aguiar offers keen and candid insights into the complexities of the human condition in the here and now.
Library Journal Review
Ominous symptoms led D'Aguiar (English and creative writing, Univ. of California Los Angeles; Children of Paradise) to the health care system for answers; he was soon diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, which would impact his testing and treatment. As one means of navigating his unexpected circumstances, D'Aguiar wrote this memoir, using the tools of his many careers (novelist, poet, playwright, professor). Here he describes in detail his symptoms, diagnostic tests, and treatments, including surgery and its aftermath, and shares his thoughts, fears, mood swings, and coping strategies. Along the way, D'Aguiar meditates on his early life and familial influences in Guyana and England. He personifies his cancer and converses with it as a sentient foe; he places his illness in the context of the culture of his Guyanese family and calls on poetry, philosophy, music, pop culture, and literature, from Brer Rabbit to Shakespeare. While D'Aguiar recovered from surgery in spring 2020, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police; the events compel D'Aguiar to contemplate anew his own identity as a Black man and his role in a complex society. VERDICT D'Aguiar's memoir is intensely personal and candid, technically informative, and, as a result of its range and inviting style, far from morbid or dry.--Richard Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| 1 Out of This Time | p. 1 |
| 2 I Do Not Want to Alarm You | p. 17 |
| 3 Is This What Dying Looks Like? | p. 39 |
| 4 Fred, Do Not Be Afraid | p. 57 |
| 5 You Are My Mortal Enemy | p. 63 |
| 6 To Fall, Falling, and Never Land | p. 73 |
| 7 Help Me, Anansi | p. 93 |
| 8 What Brer Rabbit Did | p. 113 |
| 9 Surely I'm to Be Saved | p. 147 |
| 10 Hello, Miss Corona Meet Mister Cancer | p. 171 |
| 11 The Maddening Pain | p. 187 |
| 12 The City Is Dying | p. 215 |
| 13 I Listen and Hear More | p. 231 |
| 14 I Wake with His Name on My Tongue | p. 249 |
| 15 As Long As I Draw Breath | p. 265 |
| 16 Juneteenth | p. 283 |
| 17 My Father's Body | p. 307 |