BirdBent Grass, Kathleen Venema
BirdBent Grass, Kathleen Venema
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Bird-Bent Grass
A Memoir, in Pieces

Author: Kathleen Venema

Narrator: Catriona LeBlanc

Unabridged: 9 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/27/2020


Synopsis

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother–daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease twenty years later.
In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter’s most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer’s disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image – of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience – sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive.
Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they’re ours to hold.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kira

Intriguingly fragmented and eloquently woven, Bird-Bent Grass considers a time and space when letters acted as the main means of global communication. Delay, fragmentation, and selective information (whether withheld or divulged) structure the text’s narrative to act similarly to the disjointed natu......more

Review from prairiefire.ca Review by Karen Hoffmann Bird-Bent Grass isn’t what I expected it would be. I thought: a memoir about a mother’s Alzheimer’s and a daughter’s three-year sojourn in Uganda in the mid-to-late-eighties—by a Canadian woman writer who is just my age and in the exact same professi......more

Goodreads review by Heather

I’ve never quite read a book like this before. It is organized in beautiful pieces and time, and is such a poignant and sensitive account of a deep and meaningful relationship between mother and daughter. It also incorporates the emotional and heart-wrenching journey of a sick nephew, and introduces......more

Goodreads review by Dilia

Really enjoyed this book. I got it from the library just before everything closed, so have had it in my possession for a few months now. I needed that time as I dipped in and out and read it very slowly. I really enjoy reading letters between people, and especially mothers and daughters. Emphasis on......more