The Political Is Personal
If you were intrigued by the political and true-crime collisions of Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division, the August California Book Club selection, check out these podcasts.
Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division is a crime novel with heart. Told from the point of view of passionate, determined, and relentless Aki Ito, this month’s California Book Club selection sees the young woman become an amateur detective in her pursuit of justice for her late sister, Rose. Rose dies under mysterious circumstances that are revealed to Aki in fragments, and Aki only makes progress on the case because of her tenacity and refusal to accept the official narrative around her sister’s death, that of a person she doesn’t recognize.
Hirahara lays out clues throughout her book, allowing the reader to investigate Rose’s death alongside Aki. Like the host of a true-crime podcast—the medium that has most captivated audiences drawn to these mystery tales—Hirahara creates an engaging narrative arc and keeps her audience, the readers, hanging on to her words as she reveals more through Aki’s perspective. Also driving the novel is a fight against the dominant power structures, as Aki navigates justice systems, secrets, lies, and her family’s recent release from Manzanar. The personal is political, and vice versa. Just as Aki and her family cannot escape the memory and trauma of Manzanar after moving to Chicago, they cannot separate the ways their lives have become centers of power imbalances in the course of wartime conditions. These four podcasts—all true stories—investigate this same intersection of personal and political, with lives on the line.•
Join us on August 17 at 5 p.m., when Hirahara will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Kristen Hayashi to discuss Clark and Division. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
PEOPLE’S COVER-UP
An accident occurs, a young woman brimming with potential dies suddenly, and the powers that be jump into action to make sure her death stays hush-hush—it’s an all too familiar tale and one that follows America’s closest thing to royalty, the Kennedys. Nearly 50 years after the event, People’s Cover-Up revisits the harrowing night in Chappaquiddick when Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign worker, died in Ted Kennedy’s car. Though separated by years and circumstance, Kopechne’s death and the reaction to it raise the same questions that Hirahara poses in Clark and Division: Who gets to write the narrative after tragedy, and what does a young woman’s death mean when it’s tangled up in politics and power?
STOLEN
Stolen, a podcast by Gimlet hosted by Connie Walker, pays close attention to injustice in Indigenous communities, emphasizing the violence committed against Indigenous women and the history bound up in these crimes. The first season, The Search for Jermain, documents the life of an Indigenous woman and young mother who went missing after a night out. “So much of [my] work, and really my life, is spent immersed in the lives of women I can never meet,” Walker says in one episode. “Women who have been stolen from their families and communities. Women whose lives have been cut short but who, I imagine, still need justice.” The second season hits even closer to home, as Walker investigates the abuse her father suffered at a residential school in Canada and seeks the truth as justice decades later.
FINDING TAMIKA
“A Black girl does not have to go missing for us not to see her,” Erika Alexander, the host of Finding Tamika, says in the podcast. Tamika Huston went missing in 2004, when she was 24 years old, but the lack of attention to her case was a heartbreaking and glaring example of the unequal treatment women of color face when they are victims of crimes as compared with white women. Finding Tamika, from Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s SBH Productions, has created a national network to bring attention to the disappearances of women of color, particularly Black women and particularly when law enforcement mismanages their cases.
SERIAL
Last, the following podcast changed the true-crime genre permanently. Rather than follow a whodunit structure, Serial dared to challenge the format, reopen a closed case, and look critically at the justice system that put away an alleged criminal. In the podcast’s first season, Serial host Sarah Koenig investigates the murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of Adnan Syed in the same journalistic voice that Hirahara gives Aki. Serial lets the listener lean in to uncertainty and put the facts together piece by piece, questioning what real justice would mean and carefully retracing the past in a determined pursuit of the truth.
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Alta Journal and John Freeman at Kepler’s
