A toddler will unsteadily wander about, picking up random objects. This acquisitive trait regularly results in attempts at items too heavy and too numerous. Walking, an act still in development, becomes overburdened. Inevitably things are dropped, sometimes hurting toes, or worse. Do we ever outgrow this impulse to acquire beyond our capabilities?
Zawi's Want is a fictional series of American tragedies, a collection of short stories based upon the American cities in which the author has formerly lived. Provocative and laced with comic relief, volume one includes four locales:
El Paso -- journey with a young family carving a life into the American southwest, encountering medical and militaristic influences, a sequence of suffering interspersed with fleeting love and hope.
Pittsburgh -- meet Katie, an adolescent trying to find her way through a maze of parental and societal tangles. Tragedy awakens her artistic expressions. A satire on 1980's middle-class America.
Chicago -- feel the pain, frustrations and communal love radiating from an inner-city Chicago project. Matriarchal Mary guides her flock, using a community garden as a physical and metaphorical foundation, providing resistance and shelter versus chronic and relentless adversity. The drama of community activism versus gentrification unfolds.
Orlando -- CEO Rich Demeanor uses George Orwell's 1984 as a guidebook. A satire on corporate and political dystopia. Written in 2006, it heavily foreshadows the revelations of government NSA spying made through Edward Snowden seven years later.
Herein lies an artifact of counterculture, four threads woven into the tapestry of 21st century literature.
