The Blue Moon Review

Be I Whole
by Gita Brown
MacMurray & Beck; Aspen, Colorado 1995
267 pp., Hardback/$16.95

Reviewed by Maryanne Hexberg

Welcome to the world of the Ki people, a community who manage to maintain their traditional heritage in the landlocked 1950's American Midwest. Gita Brown's first novel, Be I Whole, is a story within many stories, woven of tales and fables by the capable hands of a talented writer. The novel centers around Sizway, an island immigrant, and her husband, Papa Job, who was raised in Detroit, and branches out to include their own family, extended family and the Ki community. How they manage life, the simple and the intricate, the joyful and the tragic, in these ever-widening, inclusive circles of kinship and community provides the basis for a strong novel--that by turns comforts the readers and provokes her sensibilities.
As the title implies, the theme of being whole, of being completed and complete is central to the novel. Through the language and culture of the Ki, Gita Brown asserts that no individual can be whole unless they are a part of something larger than themselves: the family, the community, the universe. Throughout the novel, Sizway and Papa Job try to make sense of the world and their places in it--weighing personal need and desire against the duties ascribed to men, women and children to assure the stability and continuity of the traditional Ki ways, which in turn, ideally, gives stability and peace to the individual. This is evidenced by the community's tendency to embrace members in need, by men sharing in the housekeeping and childrearing while the women work in the marketplace-- breadwinners in their own right--creating a balanced harmonious society. At times, however, the Ki have an almost "family values" quality to their wisdom which is gently delivered by the soothing, self-assured voices of storytellers, but not so gently that it will fail to raise the eyebrows and the hackles of more liberated readers.
In a novel peopled with some of the strongest, wisest women encountered in print, much is made of the belief that women must obey their husbands and never "nag" them. This "nagging" includes disagreeing with the man of the house and making too much of his extramarital dalliances (note that women are scorned for similar activity). When Papa Job goes on an alcoholic bender because his wife has shown him disrespect, a friend comes to talk sense into him with an analogy that describes the father as the "head" of his family, which is his "body:"
"Then if you are the head, why are you destroying your body? So you didn't know that your family was your body?.... A body will feel what the head feels."
While the idea that the actions of one family member effects all members is a point well taken, the notion that the father has and should have control of the family's brain, eyes, mouth and ears, and therefore, its destiny, is hard for a person of the nineties to swallow. The author offers no ironic twists, no asides, just a traditional viewpoint which seems to negate the communal lifestyle that makes the Ki people of the first half of the novel so wise and admirable.
Gita Brown's graceful style and the melodic voices of her characters make Be I Whole a pleasurable journey through the lives of Sizway and Papa Job. Readers will be carried along by the cadence of the Ki dialect, Sizway and the Talebearers cautionary stories, and by Brown's beautiful descriptions of place and character. Though it is difficult to agree with all of her characters' beliefs--which seem to echo the author's--it was more difficult to stop reading this enigmatic first novel by Gita Brown, a worthy "Talebearer."