The Paris Review's Blog, page 147

A Medieval Mother Tries Distance Learning

Details of a miniature from the Moral Proverbs, France (Paris), c. 1410.

Imagine you’re a mother, living in the ninth century, and your son is handed over to your husband’s political rival for “safe keeping.” You are miles away. There are no emails. You are living in what was once Charlemagne’s great empire, now being contested by his heirs. Even though you’re an aristocrat, you’re isolated. You do want to make sure your boy is growing up good, strong, devout, and, most importantly, respectful to his royal captors, who are punishing your husband for his disloyalty. You’re afraid for your son, body and soul. Also, you want him to remember you.

And as aristocrat, you have certain privileges most other women (peasants, really) of your time do not. Having survived the rigors of childbirth, you’ll likely live longer. Your clothes are finer, your diet heartier. In some cases, you wield political power behind the scenes and, when your husband is away at war, you are the face of the operation; all are answerable to you. (If you had been a queen consort, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, you would have ruled an empire.) You have some education. You can read, but perhaps you never learned to write, which meant at the time that you weren’t truly literate. Literacy is for clerks, but you have access to those.

Your son, William, is fifteen. His younger brother—your other son—was a baby when he, too, was taken away. You don’t know him. William is older and might listen, even from a distance. What do you write to him?

Before we go any further, there is something you should keep in mind. All medieval literature is derivative. That’s not to knock medieval literature. Not in the least. Originality is overrated. We fetishize it, but mainly because we can’t admit it doesn’t really exist. In the Middle Ages, they weren’t only not trying to be original, but originality was highly suspect. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you emulated the ancients. Aristotle for philosophy, Augustine for self-flagellating autobiography. When medieval writers committed their ideas to parchment, there were tried-and-true models they could follow. Didn’t matter what it was. Poetry or Biblical commentary or chronicles or rental accounts … and the rule certainly applied to advice literature.

That is what the duchess, Dhuoda of Uzés, decided to gift her son. The Liber Manualis is a handbook of her wisdom, one that he should read, internalize, and apply to his own young life to navigate the complicated feudal politics of the age. Though there are other such books in this genre, Dhuoda’s stands out. First of all, it’s rare that we have a book composed by a woman in this period. I’m a medieval historian, and speaking for the weirdos in my tribe, we cherish anything of this nature we can get. Second, its abundance (some might say overabundance) of maternal touches gives us a window into Dhuoda’s turbulent, emotional existence. Despite her relatively privileged life, things weren’t easy for her. We empathize with her, even though she seems a bit smothering. Though I’m Jewish and Dhuoda was devoutly Catholic, her advice sounds, on the whole, like it came straight out of my mother’s mouth. Or my aunt’s. If they lived in a castle and had nowhere to go.

We get a picture of Dhouda’s daily life in some small details she reveals. It’s clear that she’s lonely in Uzés, without her family. Her only companion is a female attendant. Her feeling of isolation was probably lessened, somewhat, by having a library—she talks to her son about looking through books and trying to find the right words to write. When the pandemic hit, I was reminded not only of Dhuoda’s isolation, but of her handbook, divided in eleven parts. It served as a kind of medieval lesson plan for distance learning. It’s not completely a one-to-one comparison—most parents now are at home with their children, rather than away from them—but her story hits so many familiar beats: learning outside classrooms, general gloom and doom, and, occasionally, glimmers of hope.

What got Dhouda into this pickle? In two words: the husband. He made bad (or, rather, unlucky) choices. But she doesn’t badmouth him to William. She’s careful, diplomatic. There’s frustration, but it simmers underneath. In this sense, ninth-century gender politics are still with us in 2020. In the end, she stands by her man.

Instead of Zoom, teachers in the Middle Ages had a feather off a bird and a sheet of parchment, and when the lesson came, it plopped down in front of you as a hundred-and-twenty-page Latin manuscript. And just what was a medieval mother’s education curriculum for her son?

Well, first and foremost, there’s lots of advice about loving God, praying to God, loving priests, praying with priests, loving your dad, praying for dad, and so on. That part’s nobody’s favorite. There are sections of her book that are laughably impossible for any son to follow, no matter how saintly he might have been (and William was certainly no saint): “I urge you to be a perfect man.” There is very practical advice for William’s tricky political situation, in which the young man (under pressure) had to swear fidelity to the future king Charles the Bald: “Accommodate yourself to greater and lesser men,” she counsels. “You are far from me, and so must continually take note of that yourself.” It’s when she goes off script, and gets less formal and more personal, that things start to get interesting.

She says to him if fornication “should tickle [his] heart” that he should fight it with chastity—after all, he will be irresistible to “harlot women.” And he will have to, she yells, “fend them off!” Reading this section from our perch in the twenty-first century, it’s interesting to note how it is different from the advice given to young men today, where the focus on sexual abstinence is more imposed upon girls than boys. Dhuoda’s lesson also involved the medieval version of warning against “boys will be boys.” She told William that it wasn’t only bad women, but also his “lascivious companions” that could lead him astray. Dhuoda’s ideal was that William either keep his “body in a virgin state” or his chastity within the “bond of the marriage bed.” Though she must have known how difficult it would be for William to comply. To that end, she could only counsel, “Courage!”

Because this was a world without modern medicine, Dhuoda also had some choice advice for what William should do if he were to get sick (in short: pray). Dhuoda herself seemed to be frequently sick. And she, like so many of us in this quarantined world, was deep in debt. At the end of her little book, she tells William that she’s borrowed a lot of money, “not only from Christians but also from Jews.” (This was a world without banks.) If she should die, she asks that he should see that her debts are paid off like the good son she hopes he’ll be.

William did nothing of the sort. He eschewed all her good advice on being a good vassal to his lord and got himself killed during a rebellion against Charles seven years after receiving her book. So Dhuoda’s curriculum didn’t help William much, in the end. But maybe it helped me understand, here in 2020, with schools shuttered for the fall semester, that advice given at a great distance can only ever go so far.

 

Esther Liberman Cuenca is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston-Victoria. She has published in Urban History, EuropeNow, and Studies in Medievalism.

The Legacy of Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde. Photo: Elsa Dorfman. CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...).

There is this thing that happens, all too often, when a Black woman is being introduced in a professional setting. Her accomplishments tend to be diminished. The introducer might laugh awkwardly, rushing through whatever impoverished remarks they have prepared. Rarely do they do the necessary research to offer any sense of whom they are introducing. The Black woman is spoken of in terms of anecdote rather than accomplishment. She is referred to as sassy on Twitter, maybe, or as a lover of bacon, random tidbits bearing no relation to the reasons she is in that professional setting. Whenever this happens to me or I witness it happening to another Black woman, I turn to Audre Lorde. I wonder how Lorde would respond to such a microaggression because in her prescient writings she demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable and necessary ability to stand up for herself, her intellectual prowess and that of all Black women, with power and grace. She recognized the importance of speaking up because silence would not protect her or anyone. She recognized that there would never be a perfect time to speak up because “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

In 1979, for example, Audre Lorde wrote a letter to Mary Daly, and when Daly did not respond, Lorde made her entreaty an open letter. Lorde was primarily concerned with the erasure of Black women in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, a manifesto urging women toward a more radical feminism. In her open letter, Lorde wrote: “So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.” The letter is both gracious and incisive. What Lorde is really demanding of Daly and white feminists more broadly is for them to seriously engage with and acknowledge Black women’s intellectual labor.

In the thirty years since Lorde wrote that open letter, Black women have continued to implore white women to recognize and engage with their intellectual contributions and the material realities of their lives. They have asked white women to acknowledge that, as Lorde also wrote in her open letter to Daly, “the oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.” One of the hallmarks of Lorde’s prose and poetry is her willingness to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the lived realities of women—not only those who share her subject position but also those who do not. Her thinking always embodied what we now know as intersectionality and did so long before intersectionality became a defining feature of contemporary feminism in word if not in deed.

Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.”

But how do you best represent a significant, in all senses of the word, body of work? This is the question that has consumed me as I assembled The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters, at least for me. I first encountered her writing in my early twenties, as a young Black queer woman. She was the first writer I ever read who lived and loved the way I did and also looked like me. She was a beacon, a guiding light. And she was far more than that because her prose and poetry astonished me—intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible.

When I read her books, I underlined and annotated avidly. I whispered her intimately crafted turns of phrase, enjoying the sound and feel of them in my mouth, on my tongue. Lorde was the first person who actively demonstrated for me that a writer could be intensely concerned with the inner and outer lives of Black queer women, that our experiences could be the center instead of relegated to the periphery. She wrote beyond the white gaze and imagined a Black reality that did not subvert itself to the cultural norms dictated by whiteness. She valorized the body as much as she valorized the mind. She valorized nurturing as much as she valorized holding people accountable for their actions, calling out people and practices that decentered the Black queer woman’s experience and knowledge. Most important, she prioritized the collective because “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” As a reader, it is gratifying to see the legacy Lorde has created and to see the genealogy of her work in the writing of the women who have followed in her footsteps. Without Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” we might never have known Claudia Rankine’s manifesto of poetic prose, Citizen.

In one of her most fiery essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde asks, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” She quickly answers her own question: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Lorde gave these remarks in 1979 after being invited to an academic conference where there was only one panel with a Black feminist or lesbian perspective and only two Black women presenters. Forty years later, such meager representation is still an issue in many supposedly feminist and inclusive spaces. The essay is pointed, identifying pernicious issues marginalized people face in certain oppressive spaces—having to be the sole representative of their subject position, having to use their intellectual and emotional labor to address oppression instead of any of their other intellectual interests as if the marginalized are equipped to talk about only their marginalization.

This is a reality we often lose sight of when we surrender to assimilationist ideas about social change. There is, for example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, we will achieve the equality we seek. Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.

In Lorde’s body of work, we see her defying this idea of the dominant culture as the default, this idea that she should write about only her oppression, but while doing so she never abandons her subject position. She is empathetic, curious, critical, intuitive. She is as open about her weaknesses as she is about her strengths. She is an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last.

We are rather attached to the notion of truth as singular, but the best writing reminds us that truth is complex and subjective. The best writing reminds us that we need not relegate the truth to the narrow perimeters of right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. I have thought about how narrow the perimeters of change really are when we insist on using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. This narrow brand of thinking has only intensified since the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump was elected. Whatever progress it seemed like we were making during the Obama era has retracted sharply, painfully. We live in a very fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized, demonized, and where discourse demands allegiance to extremes instead of nuanced points of view. We live in a time where the president of the United States flouts all conventions of the office, decorum, and decency. Police brutality persists, unabated. Women share their experiences with sexual harassment or violence but rarely receive any kind of justice.

It seems like things have gotten only worse since the height of Lorde’s career, when she was writing about the very things we continue to deal with—the place of women and, more specifically, Black women in the world, what it means to raise Black girls and boys in a world that will not welcome them, what it means to live in a world so harshly stratified by class, what it means to live in a vulnerable body, what it means to live. There are very few voices for women and even fewer voices for Black women, speaking from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are, but Lorde was, throughout her storied career, one such voice. In her poem “Power,” Lorde wrote about a white police officer who murdered a ten-year-old Black boy and was acquitted by a jury of eleven of his peers and one Black woman who succumbed to the will of those peers. She captured the rage of such injustice and how futile it feels to try to fight such injustice, but she also demonstrated that even in the face of futility, silence is never an option.

A great deal of Lorde’s writing was committed to articulating her worldview in service of the greater good. She crafted lyrical manifestos. The essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” made the case for the importance of poetry, arguing that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde examines women using their erotic power to benefit themselves instead of benefiting men. She notes that women are often vilified for their erotic power and treated as inferior. She suggests that we can rethink and reframe this paradigm. This is what is so remarkable about Lorde’s writing—how she encourages women to understand weaknesses as strengths. She writes: “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move toward and through them.” In this, she offers an expansive definition of the erotic, one that goes well beyond the carnal to encompass a wide range of sensate experiences.

Rethinking and reframing paradigms is a recurring theme in Lorde’s writing. As the child of immigrants who came to the United States for their American dream only to have that dream shattered by the Great Depression, Lorde understood the nuances of oppression from an early age. It was poetry that gave her the language to make sense of that oppression and to resist it, and she was a prolific poet with several collections to her name, including The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, Coal, and The Black Unicorn.

Her work took other forms—teaching; cofounding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; public speaking; and a range of advocacy efforts for women, lesbians, and Black people. During her time in Germany, she gave rise to the Afro-German movement—helping Black German women use their voices to join the sisterhood she valued so dearly. She also demanded that white German women confront their whiteness, even when it made them defensive or uncomfortable. In an essay about Lorde’s time in Germany, Dagmar Schultz wrote that “many white women learned to be more conscious of their privileges and more responsible in the use of their power.”

Lorde was not constrained by boundaries. She combined the personal and the political, the spiritual and the secular. As an academic she fearlessly wrote about the sensual and the sexual even though the academy has long disdained such interests. Her erotic life was as valuable as her intellectual life and she was unabashed in making this known. This refusal to be constrained was notably apparent in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she called a “biomythography.” In her definitive biography of Lorde, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, Alexis De Veaux describes Zami as a book that “recovers from existing male-dominated literary genres (history, mythology, autobiography, and fiction) whatever was inextricably female, female-centered.” In Zami and much of her other work, Lorde expressed the radical idea that Black women could hold the center, be the center, and she was unwavering in this belief.

At her most vulnerable, Lorde gave the world some of her most powerful writing with her work in The Cancer Journals, which chronicled her life with breast cancer and having a double mastectomy. “But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.” With these words, she assumed as much control as she could over a body succumbing to disease and a public narrative that, until then, allowed a singular narrative about what it meant to live with illness. She made herself visible and gave other women permission to make themselves visible in a world that would prefer that they disappear, stay silent.

In all of her writing, Audre Lorde offers us language to articulate how we might heal our fractured sociopolitical climate. She gives us instructions for making tools with which we can dismantle the houses of our oppressors. She remakes language with which we can revel in our sensual and sexual selves. She forges a space within which we can hold ourselves and each other accountable to both our needs and the greater good.

All too often, people misappropriate the words and ideas of Black women. They do so selectively, using the parts that serve their aims, and abandoning those parts that don’t. People will, for example, parrot Lorde’s ideas about dismantling the master’s house without taking into account the context from which Lorde crafted those ideas. Lorde is such a brilliant and eloquent writer; she has such a way of shaping language that of course people want to repeat her words to their own ends. But her work is far more than something pretty to parrot. In The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, you will be able to appreciate the grace, power, and fierce intelligence of her writing, to understand where she was writing from and why, and to bear witness to all the unforgettable ways she made herself, and all Black women, gloriously visible.

 

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times best-selling Bad Feminist, the nationally best-selling Difficult Women, and New York Times best-selling Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. She is currently at work on film and television projects, a book of writing advice, an essay collection about television and culture, and a YA novel entitled The Year I Learned Everything.

Reprinted from The Selected Works of Audre Lorde . Copyright © 2020 by Roxane Gay. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Off-Kilter History of British Cuisine

Edward White’s monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.

Still from Fanny Cradock’s BBC Christmas Special

On the evening of November 11, 1976, the BBC broadcast the third episode of The Big Time, which followed members of the public as they tested themselves in high-pressure situations. It was what we’d term today a reality TV–style show, and that week was the turn of Mrs. Gwen Troake, a middle-aged woman from rural Devon in southwest England, who was being given the chance to design and cook a special banquet at the world-famous Dorchester Hotel in London. Troake, an amiable, soft-spoken lady any audience would root for, was assigned the most demanding mentor the production team could muster: Fanny Cradock, an extraordinary character who was the face and voice of cooking on British television from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s and was once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.”

Cradock built an entertainment brand on her putative brilliance in the kitchen, but also her superciliousness, hectoring her husband, mistreating her colleagues, and patronizing her audience, the great British public, whom she regarded as gastronomic philistines. Evidently, this included Gwen Troake, the amateur cook on The Big Time. As Troake ran through what she was planning to serve at the banquet—a seafood cocktail, followed by duck, and rounded off with a rum and coffee cream pudding—Cradock rolled her eyes, gulped, and grimaced in a pantomime of disgust and disbelief at the overbearing richness of the menu, at one point blowing her cheeks out as though she were about to be physically sick. When Troake revealed that the duck would be served with a blackberry jam, Cradock could stomach no more and unleashed what she thought was the ultimate insult. “All these jams,” she said, “they are so English.”  Despite being stereotypically English in so many ways, in her mind the only really good English—or, indeed, British—food was really just French food by a different name. “The English have never had a cuisine. There’s nothing English. Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy.”

She was probably wrong about Yorkshire pudding, but she definitely had a point, both about the heaviness of Troake’s menu and about the sorry state of her nation’s cuisine. In the postwar decades of Cradock’s great success, amid heated debates about what it meant to be British in a postimperial world, British food was an international laughingstock. It was fitting, then, that Cradock herself seemed to be in a perpetual identity crisis. Her personality was as peculiar as many of her famous recipes, and nobody was quite sure which of the stories she told about herself were true, and whether, despite her constant talk of refined French food, she was half as accomplished in the kitchen as she claimed to be. In the words of somebody who knew her well, “She wasn’t real … she didn’t know who she was. She made herself up as she went along.”

*

The notion that Britishness is inimical to good food is almost as old as Great Britain itself. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Britain earlier and faster than in most other countries, did great harm to its “peasant” food tradition, the foundation of any national cuisine. Places such as Manchester and Birmingham swelled to smoking urban behemoths in the blink of an eye, relocating workers from farmland to factories and causing havoc to regional food cultures. By the start of the twentieth century, the global reputation of the nation’s food was poor, except when it came to the tables of the wealthy and the lordly. Auguste Escoffier, Cradock’s French cooking idol, ran celebrated restaurants in London, and stately homes hosted banquets that were vast, technically brilliant, and replete with ingredients, recipes, and customs unique to the British Isles. But after World War I, aristocratic households could no longer afford such indulgences, and the production line of skilled and knowledgeable kitchen staff dried up.

Fanny Cradock, born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey, was only nine when the war came to an end and wasn’t much affected by the conflict, but her early years were full of upheaval. After her sybaritic parents decided they were either unable or unwilling to look after her, she was raised by her grandparents. By the age of thirty, she had been married three times, widowed once, and birthed two sons with whom she had no contact, a sad shadow of her own childhood. At least some of the extraordinary personality for which she would later be known, and her predilection for inventing and reinventing her biography, was surely rooted in these early decades of trauma, abandonment, and failed fresh starts.

It was probably during her disrupted childhood that she first acquired her skills in the kitchen. According to Cradock’s reminiscences—which are littered with tall tales and deceptions large and small—her grandmother taught her the rudiments of how to be a lady: deportment, the piano, French, hosting soirees, and cooking. As her biographer Kevin Geddes points out, Cradock sometimes claimed these lessons took place not in suburban England but in the grandest kitchens of Paris and the Riviera, though these stories were obviously untrue. They were attempts, perhaps, to rewrite a painful past, or simply to make herself seem more glamorous and distance herself from the bland inadequacies of British food.

Everything changed for Fanny in 1939, when she met Johnnie Cradock, an officer in the British army. Their connection was instant, deep, and profound: not only did they adore food and drink—their first date was a five-hour lunch—but they also had a yearning for wealth and glamour and shared ambitious designs for the life they would share together. With Johnnie offering moral support, Fanny thrived. Between 1942 and 1952, she published twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults under a range of assumed names. As a writer she was prolific but unfocused, shifting from one identity to the next, never settling on one fixed idea of herself.

Around this time, she also perfected the art of entertaining, using those skills her grandmother had taught her to host dinner parties and soirees. In the conditions of the day, this was no small accomplishment. Food rationing had begun in Britain in January 1940 and did not end until 1954, causing shortages of even basic foodstuffs. When the English food writer Elizabeth David returned home in 1946 after many years abroad, she was horrified to see some people eating meals as paltry as flour-and-water soup. From a public health point of view, this was obviously gravely serious. It also dealt a further blow to the integrity of British cuisine, as another generation lost out on vital skills, knowledge, and experiences. In response to this situation, Cradock became involved with the British Housewives’ League, an organization that urged the government to end rationing and make radical changes to the British food system. Her involvement with the group led to her writing a series of hotel and restaurant reviews for the Daily Telegraph. She adopted yet another pseudonym, Bon Viveur. This name was more considered than the others she’d used, articulating how Cradock saw herself in her iteration as food expert: a steadfastly British woman filled with French sophistication.

Her reviews were hugely popular with readers, and throughout the fifties, the Cradocks developed Bon Viveur into a brand, producing books and a live stage show that traded heavily on their personal relationship. Onstage, Fanny cooked in ball gowns and high heels, the glamorous, extroverted star of the show, while Johnnie, dressed in black tie, played her hapless sidekick, a henpecked lackey who bore the brunt of his wife’s short temper. They were like sitcom spouses, though one could never be sure how much of it was put on for the audience and how much was a reflection of their real relationship. Certainly, Fanny kept everybody on their toes. She communicated an “innate superiority,” to quote the writer John Walsh, “as if she were a grande dame condescending to offer cookery tips to the great unwashed.” She succeeded, it seemed, because of her astringent personality, not in spite of it. Perhaps somewhere deep in the British collective consciousness, there was a feeling that the nation deserved to be rebuked for its bloody awful food—and waspish, haughty Fanny Cradock was the perfect person to do it.

In the sixties, the couple became household names, fixtures on radio and television, Fanny almost as famous for her performative rudeness—snapping her fingers and barking orders at Johnnie and a cast of onscreen helpers—as for her prolific output. Though there were always doubts about precisely how expert she was in the kitchen, she was assiduous in building her brand as a British home cook of rare sophistication. She grasped any commercial opportunity and published books on every conceivable aspect of cooking: soup, the brave new world of pasta—she even managed to devote an entire book to the uses of aluminum foil. Doubtless these ventures helped to educate their audience, but what the Cradocks did more than anything was to put glamour, fantasy, and indulgence into ordinary British food at a time when that seemed mightily difficult to do.

Yet there was always something off-kilter about Fanny Cradock’s food, fitting for the most famous cook in a land that had lost the thread of its culinary identity. She gave her public green mashed potatoes, green Gruyère-flavored ice cream, blue hard-boiled eggs, and a recipe for roast swan decorated with gold leaf, even though eating swan was against English law. She was addicted to garnishes and overpowering sauces, and never passed up an opportunity to flambé something in brandy. When that wasn’t a viable option, she doused everything in icing sugar, including the bizarre and unappealing mincemeat omelet she made as part of her 1975 BBC series Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas. Her appearance got more striking each year, and by the time of that Christmas series—presented without Johnnie—she resembled a psychedelic Cruella de Vil, her face heavily powdered, her eyebrows plucked and redrawn an inch above her eyes, her hair decorated with large pink ribbons. She was—and still is—magnificently watchable, partly because she’s so elusive; she switches from ingratiating smiles to impatient scowls so quickly that one can’t tell what she’s thinking or feeling, whether she wants to embrace her viewers or rap their knuckles. Perhaps this was the effect of the mood-altering amphetamines that some have alleged she took before filming. Whatever the reason, the person beneath the Fanny Cradock persona is as confusing as her food.

Though Cradock’s peak years were probably the mid to late sixties, she and her cooking seem tailor-made for the seventies. In his novel Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis described a seventies menu that was “firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth … soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffeepots.” Yet although the quality of British food may have been as disastrous as it had been for as long as anyone could remember, a spirit of gastronomic adventurousness broke through in that decade, one that Cradock had done more than a little to stoke. It was the decade of fondue parties, cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks (considered an exotic indulgence at the time), Black Forest gâteau, chicken Kiev, chili con carne, Neapolitan ice cream, and the prawn cocktail. The latter is often cited as a Cradock invention, and although that’s probably not the case, it does seem like the sort of thing that could have emerged from her imagination: a fusion of colors, textures, and flavors with a veneer of sophistication, yet simple enough to be cooked in every kitchen in the land.

Inexpert and clumsy though it may have been, Britain’s exploration of new foods was indicative of deeper currents, as Britain, its empire definitively dead and buried, reexamined its place in the world. In 1975, a referendum was held to decide whether or not the UK should join the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union. Amid the huge economic difficulties besetting Britain at the time, food was central to both sides of the argument. In the buildup to the vote, Cradock was given a regular spot on the magazine television show Nationwide, in which she visited various member states of the EEC to profile, mainly positively, their cuisine. A spin-off series of books—Common Market Cookery­—followed; the volume on France, naturally, was especially exultant.

The referendum took place in June 1975; 67 percent voted in favor of joining the European project. It was hailed as a definitive turning point in Britain’s relationship with the outside world. Edward Heath, the former prime minister, was a key pro-European figure of the day, and the banquet that Gwen Troake prepared as part of the Big Time television series was in his honor. When Cradock made her infamous appearance, assailing the Englishness of Troake’s menu, the public apparently decided that it had had enough of her imperiousness. Bullying Johnnie was one thing but, in a pre–Gordon Ramsay era, being unkind to a nice lady from Devon was a soupçon too much. Viewers complained, and the British newspapers—primed as ever with confected moralism—declared themselves outraged. “Not since 1940,” wrote the Daily Telegraph, the paper that had first allowed Cradock to write about food, “can the people of England have risen in such unified wrath.” Her goose was cooked. It was time for Fanny Cradock to get out of the kitchen.

*

Cradock never hosted another show, although that wasn’t entirely down to the Troake incident. She and Johnnie had already left the UK to live as tax exiles in Ireland, where Fanny rediscovered herself as a novelist and, alongside Johnnie, practiced faith healing, which they claimed had helped to cure them both of cancer.

Their public image had always rested on their relationship as husband and wife, though in fact they had never tied the knot. When Fanny split with her Catholic second husband, Arthur Chapman, in 1929, he refused to give her a divorce, meaning that when she married for a third time (to Gregory Holden-Dye, shortly before she met Johnnie), she had done so bigamously. Johnnie, too had been married at the time he met Fanny; breaking from that marriage was dreadfully messy and destroyed his relationship with his four children, just as Fanny only ever had strained and fractured relationships with the two sons she gave up in her youth. However, in 1977, Johnnie learned that Arthur Chapman had died and Fanny was at last free to marry. Curiously, the Cradocks were unable to resist tweaking their biographies even on the marriage certificate. They both lowered their ages by several years, gave a wrong address, and Fanny recorded her father, Archibald, as Arthur. To add to the confusion, it turned out that Johnnie had been mistaken, and that Arthur Chapman was alive and well. Unwittingly, Fanny had committed bigamy for a second time.

When Johnnie died, age eighty-two, in 1987, Fanny struggled to cope with the loss. She refused to see him in his final days, a reflection, perhaps, of her selfishness, but also of her fear and distress at the prospect of losing another beloved. In a final tribute to him, she signed herself Jill, his pet name for her. It was one more alternate identity, this one shared just between the two of them.

Cradock lived for a further seven years, during which time she made a few appearances on talk shows, where she was treated as a kitsch curio from a distant age. In some ways, she was. By the time of her death in 1994, Britain was in the foothills of something like a food renaissance, much of which has been communicated through her television successors. The global popularity of Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, and The Great British Bake Off would have seemed implausible in Cradock’s day, when good British food was universally considered a contradiction in terms.

Though just as it was in 1918, 1945, and 1975, food remains a contested part of the nation’s endless tussles over its identity on the world stage. Prawn cocktail–flavored crisps, bendy bananas, and chlorinated chicken all featured in the Brexit campaign arguments. And as Britain prepares (or fails to prepare, depending on one’s perspective) to leave the EU in December, there are dire prognostications of food shortages, rationing, and malnutrition, countered by elysian visions of a self-sufficient country returned to the soil amid teeming fields of homegrown produce. It would have seemed like déjà vu to Fanny Cradock, a lodestar in the foul-tasting odyssey of bad British food.

 

Readers in the UK can see the whole of Fanny Cradock’s Christmas series on the BBC iPlayer.

Read earlier installments of “Off Menu.”

Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for The Paris Review Daily was “The Lives of Others.” 

At the Ends of the Earth

Photo: Klaus Franke. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-0731-318 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth. There’s not much traffic there, so the asphalt is free for roller-skating, and parents don’t have to worry about any bad guys roaming around. What business would a bad guy have on a dead-end street?

The apartment that we’re living in when I’m first old enough to go down to the street on my own is on the third floor of an elegant old building with elegantly crumbling plaster, bay windows, enormous double doors for an entrance, and a wooden staircase, the monstrous head at the end of the banister has been worn to a shine by countless hands. Flora Strasse 2A, Flora Strasse 2A, Flora Strasse 2A. The first words I learn after mama and papa are this street name and this house number. That way if I ever get lost I can always say where I belong. Flora Strasse 2A. Squatting in the stairwell of that building, I learn how to tie my shoes. Just around the corner, on Wollank Strasse, is the bakery where I’m allowed to go shopping by myself for the first time in my life, at age four or five, when my parents send me down with a shopping bag and the magic coins that they’ve counted out to buy rolls for breakfast. The bakery has hand-carved wooden shelves and a cash register where the cashier turns a crank before she puts the money in. A bell chimes when the drawer is opened. Wollank Strasse comes to an abrupt end a few hundred meters farther down, at a wall. That’s the end of the line for bus number 50. My parents don’t have to worry about any bad guys roaming around, what business would a bad guy have on a dead-end street? In those days, they send me down to the courtyard to play by myself in the sand, a large fir tree casts its shadow on the sandbox, and when dinner is ready my mother calls down to me from the window. There’s a dance school on the second floor of our building, from the courtyard you can hear the tinkling of the piano and the voice of the teacher instructing her students in the steps.

On the other side of the wall, past what I know as the end of Wollank Strasse, the elevated train goes by. It runs to the left and to the right, but neither of those directions is open to us. One station farther to the left, but on our own side of the wall, my grandmother lives together with her husband and my great-grandmother in a two-room apartment, in one of those Berlin tenements with one courtyard after another. To reach their apartment you have to go all the way to the third courtyard back from the street. The building is actually on a corner, and if you could enter from the other side, their apartment would be at the front. But since that side has been declared a part of the border strip, the passable part of the street comes to an abrupt end just shy of the corner, at a wall. In this neighborhood, where my grandmother and great-grandmother live in their tenement, it’s always winter. When I look at the snowflakes in the greenish glow of the streetlights, I feel dizzy, coal is hauled up from the cellar, the third courtyard is paved with concrete, and the ash cans in the courtyard are always surrounded by puddles or dingy reddish snow. Baths are taken only once a week in this household, since the bathwater has to be heated in a special furnace. The only ventilation for the bathroom comes from a tiny window that can be opened with a metal rod mounted above the toilet, a rod that I believe is infinitely long. It runs the entire length of the ventilation shaft, beginning in the bathroom and continuing across the top of the pantry (which is separated off from the kitchen) until it finally reaches that tiny window, which I never actually see. In the kitchen, there’s a big, round glass jug on the floor filled with fermenting grape juice that’s supposed to turn into wine, but sometimes it turns into vinegar. On the sideboard I see a canning jar full of the leeches that my grandmother has to apply to herself to prevent thrombosis. When I spoon out the pear compote for dessert, I look uneasily at the leeches and the lids of the jars. My grandmother doesn’t wash the dishes under running water, she uses two bowls that she pulls out of the kitchen table like drawers. In my great-grandmother’s bedroom, where I sleep too when I spend the night, a lacquered wooden clock with golden numbers ticks throughout my entire childhood. This room, which is never heated, is also where my great-grandmother stores her pepsin wine, and she keeps her knitting inside the compartment of the unused tiled stove. In that same compartment, alongside her knitting, she also lays the pins that she removes from her hair before going to bed, undoing her bun and letting her long, gray braid fall down her back. When I look from the bedroom or the living room down to the street, which isn’t a street anymore, I can watch the soldiers on patrol, or count the elevated trains that pass, running left and right. I see the strip of sand, the fluorescent lights, the snowflakes swirling in their green light, then the barricades, the watchtowers, and the wall, behind that the train tracks, behind the train tracks the garden plots, and behind the garden plots an enormous building with many windows, perhaps it’s a school, or a barracks. On Sundays, when I come to the tenement house where my grandmother lives with her husband and her mother, it always smells like roast pork, steamed potatoes, and cauliflower; it could be the roast pork, steamed potatoes, and cauliflower that my grandmother has prepared, but it could be from the neighbors. You never know.

Shortly before I start school, we move to Leipziger Strasse 47. A boxy pair of blue-and-white high-rises, ours is twenty-three stories tall, the one next door is twenty-six; these are the first buildings to be finished along the grand socialist avenue that leads to Potsdamer Platz, at least that’s how it would be described today. But during my childhood Leipziger Strasse doesn’t lead to Potsdamer Platz, instead it comes to an abrupt end just shy of Potsdamer Platz, at the point where the wall turns a corner. That means that the West is there to the left of our building, and the West is also there farther along, where the wall turns the corner, just past the end of the line for bus number 32. I learned about that on Wollank Strasse, in the Berlin neighborhood of Pankow. But there are other things that I didn’t learn in Pankow. In Leipziger Strasse, when we move in, there’s just the pair of buildings where we live, a supermarket, a school, and two apartment buildings that were seriously damaged in the war, nothing else. In Pankow, I learned to ride a bike in the public park, I fed ducks in the palace gardens, I dragged my feet through the autumn leaves when we went for Sunday strolls in the Schönholzer Heide. Now there’s nothing around us but mud. My walk to school leads through the mud of the giant construction site, my walk to the supermarket leads through the mud of the giant construction site, my walk to piano lessons leads through the mud of the giant construction site. In the mud, I find a twenty-mark bill, it’s green. If I hadn’t found that bill in the mud—a miracle!—I surely would have forgotten by now what a twenty-mark bill looked like back then. Our Sunday strolls take us down the smaller streets that branch off from Friedrich Strasse to the west, since that’s the only place with asphalt where I can roller-skate, the asphalt is bright gray and smooth, and we can walk down the middle of the street, since there isn’t any traffic there. What business would a driver have on a dead-end street?

The high-rises keep growing and filling up with people, including children who become my friends in school. When my friend in the building across from ours oversleeps, we see the one dark square in the seventh row of windows, between countless little bright squares, and we call to wake her up. The construction of socialism is always tied in my mind to this construction site where I live. To the left of our building is the high-rise that houses the Springer publishing company, but that’s on the other side of the wall, as if the wall were a mirror reflecting our evil twin back to us. And farther along, near the bend in the wall, roughly across from my schoolyard, the upper half of a building can be seen, its facade displaying not only two glowing cursive letters, BZ, but also a glowing clock. Throughout all of my years in school, I read the time for my socialist life from this clock in the other world.

We live on the thirteenth floor. On the thirteenth floor, a child starts to wonder about certain things, for instance, if it would be possible to balance on the balcony railing. I decide against it, for reasons that I no longer remember, but it’s a close call. Sometimes, when I forget my key to the apartment and my mother isn’t home yet, I stand at the hallway window facing west, passing the time by counting the double-decker buses that come and go from the Springer high-rise. We don’t have double-decker buses in the East. From thirteen floors up, I have a good perspective. Depending on the time of day, the buses come every five or ten minutes. One day I set a record, I count twenty-six buses. At some point we move into a larger apartment, which means moving to the sixth floor. A high-rise that large is like a city unto itself, and changing apartments just means rolling up or down a few floors, from one space to another, hauling the furniture up or down in the elevator. Living on the sixth floor isn’t just an advantage from the standpoint of my survival, since the temptation of vertigo isn’t so strong, it’s also an advantage because when all three elevators are out of service, it doesn’t take so long to climb the stairs. Whenever I climb up or leap down the shallow steps of that stairwell with its smell of piss and dust, its walls painted a rusty red, I think of our geography teacher’s advice that in case of a nuclear attack we should take shelter in the stairwell near the banister. The nuclear attack never comes while I’m living on Leipziger Strasse, there’s only a small earthquake one night—we and many of our neighbors run down the rusty red stairwell with its smell of piss and dust, our sweaters pulled over our nightshirts, all the way down to the ground floor, where we stand outside the giant block that has spit us out, looking up at it with concern and considering the possibility that all twenty-three floors might fall on our heads, but that doesn’t happen either.

At the age of thirteen, a child starts to wonder about certain things. For instance, whether both people have to stick their tongues out when they French kiss, or just one person at a time. The ABCs of kissing are recorded on a scrap of paper that’s grown crumpled from repeated studying. My school friends and I always bring it with us when we venture into the ruins of the Deutscher Dom on the Gendarmenmarkt, where we discuss the hierarchy of kisses and test out our conclusions with a series of experiments: a kiss on the hand—respect; a kiss on the forehead—admiration; a kiss on the cheek—affection; a kiss on the mouth—love. In these ruins we always have the sky above us. In our dusty clothes we return home to our newly built apartments. As childhood gradually turns into something else, and Leipziger Strasse finally becomes a real street instead of a construction site, we move. My mother has seen enough of these blue-and-white boxes, we move into an old building on Reinhardt Strasse at Albrecht Strasse, diagonally across from the Deutsches Theater. Looking out the window of my childhood bedroom, I now enjoy a stunning view—across the lots that bombs left clear—of old Berlin apartment houses silhouetted against the sunset. The sun still sets in the West. At some point, Reinhardt Strasse comes to an abrupt end at a wall. A hundred meters from our house is the end of the line for bus number 78. Now that I know the ABCs of kissing by heart, a boyfriend takes me to the ruins on Museum Island. A birch tree is growing on the ground level. To get to the second floor, you have to climb the birch and then carefully cross over to the cracked marble floor. Up there, a white Venus stands in front of the burned-out windows of the gallery. There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.

—Translated from the German by Kurt Beals

 

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Her previous books include The Old Child, The Book of Words, Visitation, The End of Days, and Go, Went, Gone.

Kurt Beals is an associate professor in the department of Germanic languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He has previously translated books by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.

From Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces , by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Kurt Beals. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Redux: Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re going back to school. Read on for Ha Jin’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself,” and Melanie Rehak’s poem “Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts.” And to celebrate the students and teachers in your life, why not gift our special subscription deal featuring a copy of Writers at Work around the World for 50% off?

After you’re finished, mark your calendar for our forthcoming Fall issue launch, on September 23 at 6 P.M. EST. This free virtual event will feature several Fall issue contributors reading from their work: Rabih Alameddine, Lydia Davis, Emma Hine, and Eloghosa Osunde. For more information and to RSVP, please visit our events page.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

Ha Jin, The Art of Fiction No. 202

Issue no. 191, Winter 2009

INTERVIEWER

Is it better for a writer to be out in the world working rather than in an academic setting?

JIN

It really depends on the individual. Some people prosper in a working environment, some people don’t. But I think for a poet, teaching is a great profession. Because you don’t have to spend a lot of time on poetry, you can get stimulated by interacting with others. For fiction writers I think it’s hard because a novel takes so much time, so much energy, and often that’s the time and energy you spend on the students’ work, on teaching.

 

Photo: Alessandro Patelli. CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

 

Bettering Myself

By Ottessa Moshfegh

Issue no. 204, Spring 2013

My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. One was old and the other was young. The young one talked to me sometimes, asked me what I would do for the long weekend, if I’d see my folks over Christmas, and so forth. The old one looked the other way and twisted her robes in her fists when she saw me coming.

 

Photo: alegri. CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...).

 

Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts

By Melanie Rehak

Issue no. 165, Spring 2003

1. ARITHMETIC

The addition of solitude untrammeled,

one and more and more but always

the inner life astray,

that equation incompatibly private.

The errors unrepenting that will not

come out right.

Tautology, tautology. What I’ve said

in argument cannot be taken away.

I’ve emptied my pockets of change.

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives.

What Lies Ahead?

The following is taken from the introduction to Arundhati Roy’s  Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. , which was published earlier this month by Haymarket Books.

Arundhati Roy. Photo: © Mayank Austen Soofi.

While we were discussing the title of my latest book, my publisher in the United Kingdom, Simon Prosser, asked me what I thought of when I thought of Azadi. I surprised myself by answering, without a moment’s hesitation, “A novel.” Because a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants—to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics. A novel can be endlessly complicated, layered, but that is not the same as being loose, baggy, or random. A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility. Real, unfettered azadi—freedom. Some of the essays in Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. were written through the eyes of a novelist and the universe of her novels. Some of them are about how fiction joins the world and becomes the world. All were written between 2018 and 2020, two years that in India have felt like two hundred. In this time, as the coronavirus pandemic burns through us, our world is passing through a portal. We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past—social, political, economic, and ideological.

Coronavirus has brought with it another, more terrible understanding of azadi. The Free Virus that has made nonsense of international borders, incarcerated whole populations, and brought the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. It casts a different light on the lives we have lived so far. It forces us to question the values we have built modern societies on—what we have chosen to worship and what to cast aside. As we pass through this portal into another kind of world, we will have to ask ourselves what we want to take with us and what we will leave behind. We may not always have a choice—but not thinking about it will not be an option. And in order to think about it, we need an even deeper understanding of the world gone by, of the devastation we have caused to our planet and the deep injustice between fellow human beings that we have come to accept. Hopefully, some of these essays, written before the pandemic came upon us, will go some small way toward helping us negotiate the rupture. Or, if nothing else, a moment in history that was recorded by a writer, like a metaphorical runway before the aircraft we’re all in took off for an unknown destination. A matter of academic interest for future historians.

The first essay in Azadi is the W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, which I delivered in the British Library in London in June 2018. Much of it is about how the messy partitioning of the language we knew as Hindustani into two separate languages with two separate scripts—now sadly and somewhat arbitrarily called Hindi and Urdu (in which erroneously Hindi is associated with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims)—presaged the current project of Hindu nationalism by more than a century.

Many of us hoped that 2018 would be the last year of the reign of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party. As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically. We knew this was a dangerous moment. Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country. One of the essays—“Election Season in a Dangerous Democracy”—is, among other things, about this fear. We held our collective breath. In February 2019, weeks before the general election, the attack came. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Kashmir, killing forty security personnel. False flag or not, the timing was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party swept back to power.

And now, only a year into his second term, through a series of horrifying moves, Modi has changed India beyond recognition. The infrastructure of fascism is staring us in the face, the pandemic is speeding up that process in unimaginable ways, and yet we hesitate to call it by its name.

I started to write this while U.S. president Donald Trump and his family were on an official visit to India in the last week of February 2020. So it, too, has had to pass through the rupture, the pandemic portal. The first case of coronavirus in India had been reported on January 30. Nobody, least of all the government, paid any attention. It had been more than two hundred days since the state of Jammu and Kashmir had been stripped of its special status and placed under an information siege, and more than two months since a new anti-Muslim, unconstitutional citizenship law had brought millions of protesters onto the streets of India. In a public speech to a crowd wearing Modi and Trump masks, Donald Trump informed Indians that they play cricket, celebrate Diwali, and make Bollywood films. We were grateful to learn that about ourselves. Between the lines he sold us MH-60 helicopters worth three billion dollars. Rarely has India publicly humiliated herself thus.

Not far from the Grand Presidential Suite of the Delhi hotel where Trump spent the night, and Hyderabad House, where he held trade talks with Modi, Delhi was burning. Armed Hindu vigilante mobs in northeast Delhi, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in working-class neighborhoods. Violence had been in the air for a while, with politicians belonging to the ruling party delivering open threats to Muslim women conducting peaceful sit-in protests against the new citizenship law. When the attack began, police were seen either standing aside or backing up the mob. Muslims fought back. Houses, shops, vehicles were burned. Many, including a policeman, were killed. Many more were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Horrifying videos flew around the internet. In one of them, grievously wounded young Muslim men, laid out on the street, some piled against each other by uniformed policemen, are being forced to sing the National Anthem. (Subsequently one of them, Faizan, died from having a policeman’s baton pushed down his throat.)

Trump made no comment on the horror swirling around him. Instead he conferred on Narendra Modi, the most divisive, hateful political figure in modern India, the title “Father of the Nation.” Until recently, this was Gandhi’s title. I am no fan of Gandhi, but surely, even he did not deserve this.

After Trump left, the violence went on for days. More than fifty people lost their lives. About three hundred were admitted into hospital with grievous wounds. Thousands of people moved into refugee camps. In Parliament, the home minister praised himself and the police. Members of the ruling party gave speeches to their smirking supporters in which they more or less blamed Muslims for provoking the violence, for attacking themselves, burning their own shops and homes, and throwing their own bodies into the open sewage canals that crisscross their neighborhood. Every effort was made by the ruling party, its social media trolls, and the electronic media it controls to portray the violence as a Hindu–Muslim “riot.” It was not a riot. It was an attempted pogrom against Muslims, led by an armed, fascist mob.

And while the dead bodies were still surfacing in the filth, Indian government officials held their first meeting about the virus. When Modi announced the nationwide lockdown on March 24, India spilled out her terrible secrets for all the world to see.

What lies ahead?

Reimagining the world. Only that.

 

Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. A collection of her essays from the past twenty years, My Seditious Heart, was recently published by Haymarket Books.

From Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., by Arundhati Roy, published earlier this month by Haymarket Books. Copyright © 2020 by Arundhati Roy.

On Doulas

Still from Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat”

In 2016, Erykah Badu performed at Chene Park, now called the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, a beautiful, outdoor waterfront venue in Detroit overlooking Canada. Badu donated proceeds from that concert to the African American 490 Challenge, an organization trying to raise money to process 11,341 untested rape kits that had been abandoned for years at a Detroit police department storage facility. The initiative was named 490 after the dollar amount needed to test a single kit, each of which represents, the organization’s president Kim Trent emphasized, “a living, breathing victim.” Four years later, thanks to their work, 11,137 kits have been tested, and there have been 210 convictions. Eighty-one percent of the victims were Black women. You could call this an archive of negligence.

Recently, my great aunt Cora Mae joined a similar sort of archive. A few months ago, she shocked us all by surviving COVID-19 just shy of her ninety-ninth birthday. But afterward, she lost her appetite and, a few weeks ago, we lost her. Her body was held at a funeral home while my parents kept sending in requests for court permission to bury her. She was terrified by the idea of burning. After a maddening couple of weeks of sending and resending forms, converting Word docs to PDFs, getting things notarized, being sent back to square one again only to be told by the funeral director, “If this isn’t resolved by 4 P.M. I’m going to cremate the body,” we finally got my great aunt a proper resting place. She was buried in a plot at Mt. Elliott Cemetery on one of the first days of fall. “That’s the fastest I’ve seen anyone go through probate to bury a family member,” the hospice social worker told my mom. “I’ve seen it take years.” We thought our experience was an aberration, but apparently it’s common for bodies to wait in funeral homes—on ice, or forced into ash—in a kind of limbo that must devastate so many families.

Cora Mae loved to chew tobacco. She kept a covert spit cup in her hand like someone might hold a handkerchief. She’d often summon somebody over by curling her pointer finger, and give them money to go buy her more chew. Her voice was raspy, as if the effort to propel air through her throat took great effort, but there was also a honeyed quality that came through when she told a joke or a story or claimed innocence about something illicit. Both she and my grandmother began to tell stories toward the end of their lives about the men who had hurt them when they were young. Both she and my grandmother had in their arsenal a particularly childish mode of speaking, a gentle croon, a not-quite whine, though they were always also grasping their fingers around a more lethal, hidden option, just in case things got nasty. A story I’ve heard my great aunt tell over and over again involved her first and only husband and an ice pick. The doctor asked, “Cora, how’d this ice pick end up in Mr. Andrews’s foot?” As she reenacted the moment, she would shrug her shoulders and make her voice go up an octave: “I don’t know.” Then her tone would drop again, coming close to a growl: “I guess he stepped on it.”

Aunt Cora Mae survived life after Mr. Andrews by sporting jars of lye in her purse and stashing a gun underneath her pillow, but most useful to her, I imagine, was that girlish voice. This is how my Black female elders responded to the fact of being a particular kind of silenced, a particular kind of unseeable. In a society that recognizes Black females as neither fully adult nor ever truly innocent, they found a way to weaponize girlhood. That coy effect communicated both a sweetness and an edge. We often laughed when they spoke about their fondness for weapons, but never for a second did we doubt them.

In the second trimester of my pregnancy, I was having a difficult professional interaction over email. I felt distraught, like I couldn’t get this person to pay attention to me, and their silence hurt me more deeply than I could understand. I began to grind my teeth at night and would wake up in excruciating pain. One night, my wife tried to talk me through it. I told her, as an afterthought, about an article I’d read while unable to sleep, about how the reason Black women die more frequently during childbirth is simply because people ignore them. She wondered aloud if the reason I was so frustrated was because this email exchange triggered in me the much more paralyzing fear of being ignored during or after labor. As soon as she said it the throbbing stopped. When I finally went to the dentist, it turned out that I’d split my molar completely in two.

*

In the video for her song, “Window Seat,” Erykah Badu walks the route John F. Kennedy drove before he was assassinated. First, she takes off her shoes. A blurry man standing half a block behind her begins to look around, then follows her, collecting her things as she disrobes. She unzips her purple hoodie. She takes off her pants. She slips her thumbs underneath the waist of her underwear and pauses before bringing them down. Every time she takes something off, she seems to get a new rush of energy. She begins to run a little. Parents usher their children away as she passes.

The act was completely impromptu. On her Twitter feed, Badu said, the video was “shot guerilla style, no crew, 1 take, no closed set, no warning, 2 min., Downtown Dallas, then ran like hell.” This context makes the reactions of those around her all the more captivating. People peek at her while pretending not to care. She seems to be coasting a wave of adrenaline, coaching herself to keep going, committed to the act of becoming completely nude. At the end, she falls, as if struck by an assassin. This is not unlike the act of giving birth, during which, especially if you are able to labor naturally, you move through waves of adrenaline and oxytocin, toward an unthinkable act of opening. Though the video has its own themes and theses, stated explicitly at the end, what I’ve always been preoccupied by is the way her nakedness is an act of speech on behalf of black womanhood that nobody around her is able to ignore.

I’ve wanted to write about “Window Seat” as it relates to Detroit for years. I am drawn, perhaps, to the uncanny patriotism of this black woman retracing the last moments of a fallen president’s life, stripping her way toward an irrefutable, and radical, Americanness. It’s like Marvin Gaye’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner at the 1983 NBA All-Stars game—that exquisitely relaxed beat and altered tune were a way of claiming a country that tries at every turn to refuse us. Implicit in both actions is the importance of slowing, of prompting a kind of de-escalation for the observer, entering us into a new somatic rhythm.

Badu’s walk reminds me of a performance by the conceptual artist William Pope.L, in which he crawls on hot cement through New York City, holding a yellow flower. And also, it reminds me of a piece wherein the artist Gabrielle Civil holds a red rimmed mirror toward her audience as she reclines in the ocean surf, inviting viewers to see themselves attached to her body. A few years ago, I started to paint black performance artists. Amateur depictions of both these scenes live on canvases in my office. This allows me to ritualize and more fully enter into their chicanery. To feel into these ways of being heard by a world that will not listen.

Badu’s guerrilla walk beckons to mind, more recently, the protests that have been taking place in Detroit and other cities around the world for the last hundred days since George Floyd was murdered. The most obvious comparison would be the white woman who showed up naked to a protest in Portland, known as “Naked Athena,” facing her vagina squarely at a police line. I am moved by the bombastic nature of this action, by what so many have gleefully hash tagged, “pussy power.” But it’s the endurance and constant vulnerability of a community that shows up, night after night, in the face of increasing police violence, that astonishes me most.

My fears around the pandemic and my pregnancy have kept me from protesting with my body this year. I’ve been surprised to see that the marches in Detroit are largely absent from the national news—a grand gesture that has managed to evaporate into thin air, to be ignored or forgotten. But if you follow “Detroit will Breathe” on Instagram, there are black and white photographs of protester’s faces broken open in laughter and shouting and song. They have walked in solidarity with Yemen and Palestine. There are images of ocular bones bruised and broken by batons, swollen with tear gas. Calls for donations, a lawsuit against police brutality. Mostly this feed is full of photos torn through with joy. It is a spiritually indelible archive. Proof of life.

*

Erykah Badu was a doula, and is now a certified midwife. In one video online, she supports the performer Teyana Taylor while she moves through contractions in a bathtub. The two take turns singing and rhyming, even while Taylor’s eyes drift back in pain. Badu also sits with people in hospice, singing gospel hymns and playing Richard Pryor performances so they can laugh one more time. In the attempt to assuage my anxiety, I’ve found a Black doula to work with, who also works with incarcerated women. I’ve been lucky enough to take a birthing and prenatal yoga class with a queer Black doula, surrounded by other pregnant people of color. These efforts have helped me to cope with the intense fear of being forgotten. It has done incalculable good for me to weep and breathe and feel held by a group of people who know the same fear in their bones.

My aunt Katherine flew from Detroit to Los Angeles to help my mom after I was born. My great aunt Cora Mae moved to Detroit to live with my grandmother after my grandfather died. Both aunts acted as postpartum doulas of a kind. We lost them both this summer. There is something especially cutting to me about losing these aunties while awaiting the birth of my child, like some sort of cosmic test. On FaceTime, I told my aunt Katherine how much I loved her as her head craned backward, looking toward some unseen presence. As if reporting from another dimension, she told my cousin, “I’m washing the baby’s feet!”

We were granted access to visit my great aunt Cora Mae weeks after she recovered from COVID. I am convinced that the time she spent without seeing us in person took a toll on her spirit, prompting her to stop eating. Guilt made me obsessed with the idea that she should make it to the age of one hundred, and I rallied like a cheerleader. I showed her my belly. I tried to use the baby as bait. “We’re having a baby?” Her voice sang out as I revealed the bump. Later, she told me, in what felt like a goodbye, “You take good care of that baby.” The last time I saw her, she was deep asleep. I put the TV on mute and placed a photograph of her with my grandmother in her line of sight. I paced around her body, humming softly the songs that came into my head: “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby.” My wife said a prayer quietly to herself and soon after, the sun burst through the blinds, covering Cora Mae’s body as if in music, silver keys of light. My great aunt’s remarkable voice emerged only through periodic puffs and sighs. Her leg was curled up like a wing.

 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of the essay collections The Fluency of Light and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers’ Program.

The Art of Distance No. 25

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below.

“For many of us, the sudden shuttering of museums this spring was an upsetting jolt. Me, for one. Visual art has always been a part of my New York: my first job in the city was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the route from my basement office to my favorite Frankenthaler is still burned onto my eyelids. When MoMA opened after its renovation in 2019, I treated myself to a membership, which meant that when I found myself in Midtown I could weave through the crowds to look at one dear painting, or two, before heading on my way. And The Paris Review’s offices are in West Chelsea, New York’s premier gallery district, which meant my colleagues and I would often chat around the coffee maker about what we’d visited over lunch, installations coming in, and shows closing soon. My commute currently takes me past several bookshelves and a dog bed, but there hasn’t been a total vacuum of visual arts: over the summer we’ve seen art in the sky and on billboards, art in the mail and online. It’s been inspiring, yet I still miss the gallery view. Incrementally, museums here in New York are opening, with timed tickets and limited capacity. While some of us are queuing up, I know others, by dint of safety and geography, aren’t sure when they’ll be able to visit museums again. In anticipation of returning to museums and galleries—or, in some cases, as a substitute for it—this week we offer selections that remind us of those big white cubes and the art therein.” —Emily Nemens, Editor

A drawing of Vincent van Gogh by Saul Steinberg.

In John Tranter’s epic poem “Rain,” we meet a memorable, troubled artist whose work sounds like it would fit well into an abstract expressionist gallery. Here’s how Tranter describes the artist’s work:

… He painted

big canvases, twelve feet across,

red, black and purple zigzags,

then he’d blacken them with a blowtorch—

trying to face up to the Americans,

he said …

In the Art of Fiction no. 235, Percival Everett, who maintains a painting practice alongside his writing, recalls his first encounter with Jackson Pollock: “But the experience of understanding that you cannot take the entire work in at once, yet that there are places you can enter—I still hold onto that.”

A few seasons ago, we published correspondence between Helen Frankenthaler and James Schuyler; the friends found inspiration in each other. Schuyler’s unpublished poem “Torcello” describes their run-in at the Venice Biennale; other lines of the poem are lifted straight from postcards Frankenthaler sent him.

The poet Stanley Kunitz was married to a painter, and he loved the energy painters brought into his life. They even influenced his process, as he explains in the Art of Poetry no. 29: “My painter-friends—among them Kline and De Kooning and Rothko and Guston and Motherwell—were enacting an art of gesture to which I responded. When I insist on poetry as a kind of action, I’m thinking very much in these terms—every achieved metaphor in a poem is a gesture of sorts, the equivalent of the slashing of a stroke on canvas.”

And of course there are the art portfolios. It’s hard to pick any as favorites, but I do like this pair: an early feature of Alberto Giacometti’s drawings coupled with a portrait of him by Saul Steinberg, whose 2010 feature “Portraits and Landscapes” includes a drawing of “a dear friend.”

 

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Lost Libraries

What is lost when Nadine Gordimer’s personal library accidentally winds up in boxes on the street?

I was a student in the University of Cape Town’s English department when the Ransom Center acquired J. M. Coetzee’s papers. This was in 2012, when to be a student in the English department at UCT was to be required to hold a strong, fluently expressed opinion on J. M. Coetzee, his life, his work, the position he held within the South African academy, and whether or not there was a “fascinating contrast” between that position and the one he held overseas. Extra points if you could get all this off while referring to him at least once as “John Maxwell Coetzee” in an ironic and weary tone of voice. I never really got to the bottom of why people liked that so much, saying “John Maxwell Coetzee” and then looking around proudly, sometimes with the nostrils a bit flared. I’d managed to discharge the obligation to have an opinion on Coetzee by having a strident opinion on Nadine Gordimer instead, and so never learned why it was hilarious to refer to him by something other than his initials.

I did learn to smile knowingly when it happened, which was very often. No smiling about the Ransom Center acquisition though, a subject that was discussed with such bitterness that for a while I thought “Ransom Center” was departmental shorthand for American rapaciousness, something to do with rich U.S. institutions holding the rest of the world to ransom, riding roughshod over questions of legacy and snatching up bits of history to which they had no rightful claim. The Harry Ransom Center is of course a real place, situated on the University of Texas campus, containing one of the most extensive and valuable archival collections in the world. One million books, five million photographs, a hundred thousand works of art, and forty-two million literary manuscripts. Highlights of the collection, according to the center’s unusually user-friendly website, include a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, a First Folio, and the manuscript collections of Capote, Carrington, Coetzee, Coleridge, Conrad, Crane, Crowley, Cummings, and Cusk, looking at just the c’s. James Joyce’s personal library from when he lived in Trieste is in there, as well as the personal libraries of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Don DeLillo, and Evelyn Waugh.

A friend who went to UT told me that the Ransom Center is an ordinary-looking building, big and brown, and that it would be easy to walk past and have no idea what was in there. She said that undergraduates do it every day. I have confirmed this description by looking at photos online, but it doesn’t sit right with me on a symbolic level. It should be bigger, surely, resembling more of a compound or fortress. It should emit some kind of low humming sound, or glow. Forty-two million manuscripts! A million books! Kilometers of archival holdings in climate-controlled rooms, all wrapped up in sheaves and purpose-built cardboard boxes, lovingly tended to by armies of well-compensated grad students. This same friend was doing some work in the archives when they received Norman Mailer’s manuscripts. Great jubilation heard throughout the Center, she said. A week of celebrations culminated in a party where all the attendees were given little boxing-glove key rings.

I didn’t know all that then, only that the Center had a lot of money, and that people in my department said it had effectively ripped Coetzee’s papers out of the hands of South African scholars forever. Cape Town is far away from a lot of places, but it is very far away from Texas. Even if you got funded, who would have the resources or the time to apply for the visa (expensive, takes ages), travel to Texas, and then sit in the reading rooms of the Center for months, going through the small spiral notebooks in which the earliest drafts of Waiting for the Barbarians were sketched out? I sympathized, but not very much. The bulk of Gordimer’s papers, as far as I knew, had been at the Lilly Library in Indiana since 1993. Also very far away, also involving grant applications in order to travel for many days, and the reading room was probably not even as nice. I had long ago accepted that I was just not the sort of person to overcome these obstacles, and I thought the Coetzee people should see their problem in a similar light. They might never actually touch the manuscripts with their own two hands, but someone would, and surely it was nice to know they were being looked after so well. David Foster Wallace’s archive, which included about two hundred annotated books from his own library, had been acquired by the Center two years earlier. There were already stories of students going to Texas purely to sit and commune with his library, weeping over his copy of White Noise, touching the pages of certain books over and over until they went all soft and frilly and had to be removed from general circulation, replaced with digitized copies. I myself could not imagine getting on a plane in order to touch a book, but I liked the idea that some people would, and that there were institutions with the money and the will to facilitate this kind of behavior.

It’s possible, also, that I was able to take this benevolent view of things because the documents I needed for my own research were housed in a building about a ten-minute walk from my front door, at the Western Cape Provincial Archives on Roeland Street. I was writing about literary censorship during apartheid, with a particular focus on the state’s treatment of the novels of Nadine Gordimer. Six of her novels passed through the system. Three were banned and three weren’t. There was no discernible logic behind these decisions. The Publications Control Board was accountable to almost no one, and the censors were given extraordinary freedom to ban whatever they liked. Often what they did with that freedom was write long, rambling, defensive accounts of their decisions.

I was fascinated and disgusted by their reports, the venom and the stupidity and the intellectual waste they represented. I’d go to the archives to fish out a specific set of documents—say, the files pertaining to the appeal against the banning of Burger’s Daughter—and I’d end up stuck there for a whole day, and then a week, helplessly reading through a knee-high stack of files relating to the censor’s opinions on Pale Fire, or a stash of letters from members of the public demanding that the censors do something about copies of Franny and Zooey continuing to circulate through the nation’s public libraries (“dangerous filth emanating from a certain class of writer in the United States of America and masquerading as ‘culture’”). I’d worked out that these boxes of files amounted to just under a hundred linear meters’ worth of material, and I hated the idea that I would never be able to look through it all.

There’s been quite a lot written about apartheid censorship, some of it by Gordimer herself. Many of those documents had already been read and analyzed by researchers much more rigorous than I was, yet I still wanted to read it all myself. Even worse was the near certainty that there were boxes that no one had looked at, full of Christ knows what, but all too probably some pieces of paper that would upend every assumption anyone had ever made about the way apartheid censorship worked, potentially transforming book history as a field, enlarging our understanding of the making and unmaking of the authoritarian state, et cetera. I was rereading Middlemarch around this period, and I kept finding myself getting tearfully defensive on Mr. Casaubon’s behalf. There have been books written about this feeling, and I read some of them, making notes in the margins about the ones I needed to read next. I read Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, and drew a red wiggly line under the part where she says that Archive Fever is “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings.” Carolyn Steedman, thank you very much. I drew a less vigorous line under the part where she withdraws that understanding hand and says, “And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.” I knew she was right, that every archive is necessarily fragmented and incomplete, but I didn’t like it.

I stopped being a student, eventually, after finally managing to wrench myself out of the archives and write something about what I believed I’d found. I stopped worrying that I hadn’t looked at enough of it, because of course I hadn’t, and I stopped making urgent notes to myself in the margins of Gordimer’s novels. I read her books for pleasure again, and tried not to look too proprietorial whenever her work came up in conversation, because no one cares about your thesis.

Still, when the rumor started going around that Wits University had accidentally given away the library Gordimer had donated, the story was passed on to me repeatedly, by friends who were sure I’d be especially interested, as an archives person, as a Gordimer person, as a nerd. There was a text message, forwarded by a friend of a friend of a friend, saying that someone had walked past the library and seen boxes of books inscribed to Gordimer piled up outside, with a notice saying they were free for anyone to take. There was a sort of blind item in the Mail & Guardian, inserted into a longer article about the failures of record keeping in postapartheid South Africa, about someone whose acquaintance had seen books stacked up outside a library, and noted that several of them were “inscribed to the Nobel laureate, some from other writers of equal renown.” The piece did not go on to name the library, or the Nobel laureate, but it was easy to see who was being referred to. South Africa has two Nobel laureates, and absolute hell would have broken loose if the books left outside the library had belonged to the other one. The Ransom Center would have instituted some kind of contact-tracing effort, or put up wanted posters all over Johannesburg until every last book had been returned. Of course it was Gordimer. For those left in any doubt, the piece also included a photograph of the Nobel laureate, holding her cat.

According to the piece, and to the various versions of the rumor floating around, the university realized what had happened pretty quickly. A call was sent out asking that the books be returned, and apparently most of them were. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t really work when you think about it. Unless the collection was catalogued before being thrown out, how could anyone be sure that all of the books had been returned? If the collection had been catalogued, why would anyone give it away, knowing who it belonged to? I hated this story when I first heard it. It seemed to say a number of extremely depressing things very quickly, mostly about the role that money plays in legacy formation. It’s easy to imagine how it could have happened. The Nobel laureate bequeaths her library to the university, which is desperately underfunded and five years deep into a fees crisis. The books are received, but there’s nowhere to put them, and no money to pay a grad student to go through them all. No question of there being an exhibition anytime soon, or a week’s worth of celebrations culminating in a party where attendees are given a key ring with a silhouette of the mine dumps around Johannesburg. The books are put into a storage room, maybe with the labels on the boxes turned to the wall, and then maybe one day a new employee comes along and thinks the time has come to free up a bit of space back here. I couldn’t stand thinking about this. I hated the idea that Gordimer’s library was scattered throughout Johannesburg, while David Foster Wallace’s was getting breathed on reverently in Texas. I wanted somebody to kick up a fuss, call the manager, mount an aggressive publicity campaign. When Frank Kermode’s library was lost during a move (the story is that he mistook the Cambridge trash collectors for the removal men), it made the front page of the Times: “Professor’s first editions end up in dustcart.” Thirty boxes of first editions, manuscripts, and volumes with personal dedications, thrown into the compactor and crushed. Kermode claimed twenty thousand pounds in compensation, which was contested by the council on the grounds that it was not their fault that he had gotten removal men and trash collectors mixed up, and that “once it was realized they had been mistaken for removal men, they could not go back into the vehicle to rescue the professor’s belongings, because you cannot crawl into a compacting machine.” For a short article, there is a lot of vivid detail about the crushing process, but nothing about what was actually in those boxes, and nothing about how Kermode arrived at twenty thousand pounds as a figure commensurate with the loss.

There’s a part of me that feels the loss is incalculable. What if there was something in one of those crushed boxes that would have transformed literary criticism forever? What if we were looking at a sort of key-to-all-mythologies situation, something that could have cracked the case wide open? This is the same part of me that spent months thinking about Gordimer’s library and moaning quietly to myself, asking friends if they wanted to hear an unbelievably sad story, and going on to tell them all about it even when they said no. Such waste and neglect, so much that we’ll never be able to figure out now.

The university librarians sent me a list of what is currently in their possession: 526 books, many of them with a strong quality of “reading material you would expect to find in Nadine Gordimer’s library”. Deutscher’s biography of Stalin, a Tutu biography, Ahmed Kathrada’s letters from Robben Island, The Gulag Archipelago, a Turkish translation of July’s People, three copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, the letters of Simone Weil, The Complete Correspondence of Adorno and Benjamin, fifteen copies of Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black, a lot by other South African writers (Bessie Head, Zakes Mda, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ivan Vladislavic), a lot of African writers (Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish, published in 2005, is one of the few books with a twenty-first century publication date), a lot of Thomas Mann, a lot of books about Thomas Mann (including one called Thomas Mann: The Ironic German), a lot of ironic Germans in general. There’s less Sontag than I would have expected—there’s none, actually—and less poetry. There’s less Dostoyevsky (just The Brothers Karamazov), less Tolstoy (just The Kreutzer Sonata), less Lawrence (just The Kangaroo), and less Turgenev (just one volume of the collected works). There’s no Roth, no Rushdie, and no real way to work out why this might be. It could be that there is a copy of American Pastoral with a flirty inscription from Roth sitting on someone’s shelf in Rosebank right now, next to a heavily annotated copy of Against Interpretation, full of notes in the margins that reveal something extraordinary about Gordimer and Sontag’s friendship. There might be a copy of Anna Karenina out there somewhere with pencil markings next to all the bits about Anna’s ears, like in Edith Wharton’s copy of the novel, and this discovery might pave the way for a whole breakthrough in Tolstoy studies, or at least be a good excuse to hold a conference culminating in a party where the attendees are given tote bags featuring a drawing of a neat, feminine ear.

It could also be that the reason there’s no Rushdie or Dostoyevsky among the 526 books is because Gordimer had lent them to friends, or thrown them out herself years earlier to make room for more ironic Germans. It might be that she’d gotten rid of some of her books for the same reasons that my parents constantly bring up, which is that they don’t want my brother and I to have to deal with it after they die. There could have been some kind of crushing incident years earlier that never made it into the papers, or the living room could have gotten flooded, or she made a decision not to have any books by Sontag in the house, for reasons we will never know. Thinking about it this way, the list of remaining or recovered books looks different. What does knowing that Gordimer had a surprising number of L. P. Hartley books in her library tell us? Maybe she just liked the line about the past being a foreign country, and friends took her quoting it in conversation as an indication that she felt more strongly about his work than was actually the case. What does knowing that Gordimer owned a copy of Colm Tóibín’s The Master tell us other than that she might have read it, and then again perhaps she didn’t.

There’s a copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Sixth Series) on the list I got from the library. The book features interviews with Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Nadine Gordimer, among others, and is edited by Frank Kermode. The Gordimer interview begins with a vivid, detailed account of her “very curious childhood” in Springs, the small mining town outside of Johannesburg. She tells it like a story. Her mother, unhappily married and with nothing to do but obsess over her children, persuades herself, her doctor, and her daughter that Gordimer is “delicate,” that she has a “bad heart”: “By that time I was reading all sorts of books that led me to believe my affliction made me very interesting… When I was eleven—I don’t know how my mother did this—she took me out of school completely. For a year I had no education at all. But I read tremendously. And I retreated into myself, I became very introspective. She changed my whole character.” There’s no record, in the interview or anywhere else, of exactly what she read. What books were on the shelves of her childhood home? We have her legacy, or some bits of it at least, but we will never know her whole character, and that is as it should be.

 

Rosa Lyster is a writer living in Cape Town. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Outline, and the Guardian, among many other publications.

Staff Picks: Night Skies, B Sides, and Neon Lights

Joanna Klink. Photo: © Antonia Wolf.

When I picked up Joanna Klink’s new poetry collection The Nightfields, I had half a mind to rush to the main event, Night Sky—a long sequence inspired by James Turrell’s massive land art project Roden Crater. (Paris Review readers got a preview of Night Sky in the Fall 2018 issue). For fans of Turrell (I consider myself one, as do Drake and, recently on the Daily, Scott O’Connor), the cinder cone crater is the culmination of his life’s work—and also a fiercely guarded work in progress. The Arizona site is closed to the public, leaving followers to squint over elevation drawings at museum exhibitions and trawl the internet for artist-approved and illicit photos. Now we can turn to Klink’s metaphysical sequence to get a different sort of visit to the earth work. Her poems do a tricky thing of being at once urgent and geologically slow (every breath and breeze is noticed, but time passes such that copper is “greening” and stars “thicken”); the sequence is imbued with depth and color and all the possibilities of a pitch-black night. Before I leave, I should acknowledge my other half a mind: like a dutiful editor, I started The Nightfields at the beginning and found prior to Night Sky several exquisite poems about the passage of time (“Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls / in the room where we sit”) and the liminal space between seasons (“The bright key of morning. / The bay fanned with foam”) that make the quotidian nearly as beautiful as Turrell’s monument. —Emily Nemens 

Every night is date night, or none of them are, for my man and me in 2020. But to set Friday apart this past weekend, we watched an entire feature film that, though not new, was new to us. Rafiki, currently available on the Criterion Channel, was the first film from Kenya to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival even as it was banned in its home country for a “too hopeful” portrayal of homosexuality. Wanuri Kahiu’s 2018 film can be dazzling in its use of light and love. When the afternoon sun, a candle, or the club’s neon light plays on the face of the actress Sheila Munyiva, it is easy to surrender to the movie’s charms—or to the charms of Munyiva herself, who, especially in Kahiu’s hands, is so beautiful as to test hearts of any gender and the laws of any nation, to say nothing of the bounds of time and space. The movie’s plot, which concerns a love affair between two young women who are the daughters of rival politicians, is less groundbreaking. The threats of intolerance and discovery are always at the door, and the chorus of gender expectations is with them either way. Still, Kahiu and her talented actresses do the hardest thing, whether under the jacarandas or under COVID: they make love new again. —Julia Berick

 

Eric Berryman in The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation. Photo: Bruce Jackson.

 

The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation (streaming through September 14 on the Wooster Group’s website) may consist mainly of men singing along with a record, but it is not a sing-along. It is a channeling of spirits. After briefly explaining his fascination with a 1965 LP titled Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons and a book called Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues, the performer Eric Berryman plays the record almost straight through, only breaking to read from the liner notes or the book and explain, for example, the type of work a song might be sung to or a historical fact about a character named in the chorus—like Jack of Diamonds, a monstrous prison guard said to have challenged the devil for control of hell. On the record, each track is sung or spoken by a different prisoner or group of prisoners. Onstage, Berryman—or one of two supporting cast members, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore—matches his voice to the lead so exactly, taking on the prisoner’s accent, timbre, or tremor, even coughing when he coughs, that sometimes it’s unclear whether we are really hearing two voices or one. The stage, apparently, is an eternal portal between 1965 and 2017, when The B-Side was first produced. Other times, there is a minuscule lag between ancestor and reenactor, a drastic thinning of the decades just short of perfect communion. In the end, Berryman stares out a Harlem apartment window and sees a chain gang chopping wood. Through the essential medium of human voices, The B-Side brings into the present a moment of song and story that itself was born from all preceding moments. If you want to think about eternity, I recommend this play. —Jane Breakell

Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things has knocked me out of my hiatus from watching films, and I couldn’t be more grateful. With this stream-of-consciousness narrative, Kaufman clearly demonstrates how much he trusts his audience in the midst of narrative fragmentation. Of course, the cast delivers exemplary performances all around. But to be entirely honest, the film left me unsettled in a way few have. I felt as though I were watching a cerebral horror movie at some points and a romantic drama at others. But this juggling of genres—or perhaps a joyous disregard for them—kept me utterly immersed. The uneasiness I felt could be sated only with more unease, and therein lies the biggest strength of the film: the most satisfying comfort lies after cumulative and seemingly endless discomfort. If I hadn’t finished it, I wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about it. I probably still won’t be able to stop thinking about it, but I’m perfectly content with that. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

When my college shut down for lockdown in March, I left with two suitcases in hand and a promise from the administration that the pile of boxes in the middle of my stripped-bare room would be shipped home to me sometime that spring. Spring came and went, and it wasn’t until this week, six months later, that a freight box of my belongings finally arrived at my door. As I unpacked, there were moments when I felt like I was sifting through some other girl’s things. Who was this version of me whose belongings I had gone six months without? And what was I supposed to do with her unused mini blender, her collection of mason jars, her tapestries? But there were little joys, moments of self-recognition, especially as I did what we all do when packing and unpacking piles of books: flicking through, reading the highlighted lines, stopping at the dog-eared pages. I moved some of those books from my boxes to my bedside and am taking my time with them now. Up first is A. Van Jordan’s most recent poetry collection, The Cineaste, in which he chronicles his life as a moviegoer through the films he loves and the experiences of watching them. Some of the poems are ostensibly retellings of famous and obscure films through his own lens; the middle section, The Homesteader, is a series of poems formatted like a screenplay, each taking cues and borrowing lines from the one before it to weave cinematic worlds and characters together; and other poems describe becoming like a child again on every visit to the cinema. Missing my favorite place in the city, the Roxy Cinema, as much I do, it is no surprise that I started here, with poems so vivid and multivalent in their study of the simple “magic moviegoers still believe in, / the way voters and lovers do not.” —Langa Chinyoka

 

A. Van Jordan.