The Paris Review's Blog, page 159

A Letter to the Professor Whose Name I Carry

Rudolph P. Byrd

Dear Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd,

Scores of Brooklynites are marching on the busy street in front of my apartment. I’m watching from the window, hearing white people chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” I’m happy to see the support for Black Lives Matter, but here in gentrified Brooklyn, I can’t help but find that funny. I recorded two minutes of it in the event that it’s useful if I ever write poems again. (Cataloging has been a habit of mine this month.) It’s times like these that I miss teaching, sitting with cohorts of first-year college students as their safe worlds are torn apart by conversations around race and privilege. But all of that makes me recall my own reckoning, the moment when I realized the extent to which the law functions to serve these white students more than myself. That was the fall of 2011, the year the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis. And about a month later, you died.

I sometimes think about Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays, and who I would put in such a book, were I to write it. As a Black, gay, Southern artist, I want to practice intentional ways of memorializing people of influence. This is important for me, for the “people who led to my plays” are often those that will never have buildings or other monuments named in their honor. I imagine that some don’t even have headstones. I like to think of my writing, if not as a headstone, as an homage. Much of it is an homage to people like you who have shaped how I reimagine the world that has been given to me.

I was twenty-one when I enrolled in Call and Response, your introductory graduate-level survey of African American studies. This remains one of the most pivotal courses I took at Emory University. It helped me to see how the humanities were integral to Black liberation and Black sovereignty. I began to think about my contributions: who I was writing to, what I was writing for, and why it mattered. Even though you were with us for only a month before cancer caused you to take a leave of absence, I witnessed the power of that syllabus through the professors who stepped in for you in the months after. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carolyn Denard, and Mark Sanders all testified to your leadership and light, to the ways you’d led the charge in their own lives. I remember how remarkable it was to me that someone who’d seemed so reserved had had so much influence.

Inside the classroom, we studied. Outside, I wept. You introduced me to Kwame Anthony Appiah, Melville J. Herskovits, and Albert Murray. I learned why Marlon Riggs’s art should never be forgotten. Through a volume you edited yourself, I read Jean Toomer’s Cane. I was mesmerized by Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, because it was the first time I witnessed an urgency for Black life in academic writing. That same urgency inspired a fury in me. Outside the classroom, I encountered a world that called for the death of a convicted Black man who had maintained his innocence for over twenty years. Excuse me, but I can’t help but think of parallels. Troy had been incarcerated my whole life, accused of killing a police officer in my hometown. In August 1991, when I was but a year old, he was sentenced to death. It was the year you started your tenure at Emory.

The night Troy was executed, September 21, 1991, I read Patricia Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor for your class, led that week by Carolyn Denard. Democracy Now! broadcasted the protest and vigil outside of the prison, but no one knew what was happening inside. I sat in my university dorm waiting, not wanting to believe he would die. I had gone out to do something, and when I returned to my apartment, I had a message from my friend: “They killed him.” As police threatened to unplug Amy Goodman’s camera, she signed off and the network began to play Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” over a photo montage of Troy throughout the years. Make no mistake, I knew what injustice was, but did I know the crux of how it intersected with my own young life so viscerally? After picking myself up from the couch, I read Patricia Williams and it was a numbing experience, to see in that moment anti-Blackness and whiteness talked about so bluntly in connection to the law. I thought about governance and our bodies and our lives. I grew sick again thinking about Troy’s body being held by the state after his execution before it was turned over to his family.

Troy was from where I am from; his funeral was held in the neighborhood that raised me. The photos of prom night, school dances, cookouts were all too familiar. The scenery of that country in the background. The silver chain-link fence. In those smiling faces of Troy’s family, I saw my own grounding in the flat Savannah landscape. As I worked my way through your syllabus in the weeks leading up to Troy’s execution, communities and cities across the world took to the streets with signs and blue shirts that said I AM TROY DAVIS. Believe me, I get the message, but some people will never know what it’s like to fear that your life is endangered by those you pay to protect it. They will never know what it’s like to see photos like this and look for your loved ones in the background. That’s how close Troy’s life was to my own—both him and my father were from the same city and in prison when I was born.

I admit, I’m a jaded person. I get exhausted when I hear the phrase “black bodies” as if there is not also a life force there that activates the flesh. I’m over non-Black people needing triggering, visual evidence of state-sanctioned racial violence (yet again) as proof that change is needed. I’m saddened that when a movement was sparked by a man murdered by the police, his daughter said with a smile that her father changed the world. And maybe I feel some type of way that movements tend to center the experiences and deaths of straight cis men while Black women and trans people continue to die. I’m such a pessimist; I’m looking out of my window and I’m having visions of marching in this same way five years ago. Yes, I’m tired, but I do realize things are different this time and even I’m learning. I’ll get over myself soon.

Why am I going on like this about a moment from nearly a decade ago? It’s not because the moment changed me, but because you helped facilitate that change. At the end of class, not too long before you left us, you looked over at me and said, “Are you keeping up with the readings?” Yes, I was keeping up with the readings, but not with my own unraveling. What got me through that semester and the several others after that was being reminded that there were things to be done in writing and in art. I can’t let myself forget that Black expression saves Black lives. Even as I look at the worrisome world outside my window, I know that I am touched by people in and out of my life, even those I knew for just four short weeks. This is what Black writing means to me. You taught me that.

One of the most difficult things about being at Emory was how professional my college classmates were. They wanted good grades to get jobs. I wanted an educational experience (and took so many chances with my grade point average in the process). I rarely participated in class discussions, because my classmates were in a race to prove their intelligence. It was taxing. This was also the case in your class, but the graduate students were making substantial points about things they cared about. I remember, quite vividly, a theology student at the table going to great lengths to make her point about something. While doing this, she paused and said, “I’m sorry, I just care about this a lot.”

Care. In some ways, it’s why I started graduate school. In other ways, it’s why I grew jaded with the academy. Yes, I cared about some of the debates, but not more than I cared about the people and communities around which the debates were centered. I surrounded myself with art, I did my work, and I left. When I realized I was writing what became Heed the Hollow in the process, I knew that my own reckoning had something to do with it. That my writing about Southern history, racial violence, and Black queer life was powered by a critical and necessary care for our people. And what a privilege that is: to decipher, document, and divulge. This is why I dedicated my first book to you, to acknowledge and share the light of your life’s work. And what an honor it is to create a monument your legacy, one that includes one of your greatest accomplishments, the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference.

I miss teaching. I miss witnessing the reckonings and the resistance to them. I have you and a few other teachers at Emory to thank—Amanda Lewis and Angelika Bammer among them—for my approach in cultivating classroom dynamics like this. But I also have Black feminism, something I gained from your legacy more than your syllabus. In my time at Emory, you helped facilitate placing Alice Walker’s archive at the university. Alice’s early writings had a deep impact on me—so much so that I almost went to her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, instead of Emory. In college, I would go to the third floor of the library, where an exhibit of the archive was on display, and marvel at the huge photo of Alice that met every person entering the Schatten Gallery. Each time, the large, dark eyes in the photo interrogated me. They made me confront myself. More importantly, they reminded me who I was and where I came from. At a place like Emory, that was important for a Black student. Writers like Alice, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton are people who come to mind when I think about writing fueled by resistance and care. And while you didn’t introduce me to these writers, you helped me to understand why I loved them so much—because they are able to understand the radical change needed to overcome the internal and external systems working against liberation. They help us make the necessary connections, to understand the violence we can embody and must fight against.

In spite of my fatigue, I’m happy to see that movements carry names and that organizers who have always resisted patriarchy are leading us. At the time, I don’t know if I necessarily felt empowered because I had an openly gay Black professor, but I do realize now how rare that was. That there was a force on campus who told us all why and how he became a practicing feminist, and what it meant to live such a life. Yours is a name I must carry. And I know many other people do as well.

And anyway, it’s June and there is so much devastation. It’s June and it is Pride Month. It’s June, and how thankful I am to look out of my window and know I had a gay Black professor who once asked a question and saw me.

With love,

Malcolm

 

Malcolm Tariq is the author of Heed the Hollow, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He is a 2020-2021 resident playwright with the Liberation Theatre Company and is the programs and communications manager at the Cave Canem Foundation, a home for Black poetry.

Redux: Nor Staple Down to Fact

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.

Jeanette Winterson.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting queer and trans writers in our archive in honor of Pride. Read on for Jeanette Winterson’s Art of Fiction interview, Jericho Brown’s “The Trees,” Timothy Liu’s “Action Painting,” and a selection of diary entries by Jan Morris.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? 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.

 

Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150

Issue no. 145 (Winter 1997)

INTERVIEWER

One might say that your writing is characterized by a kind of excess. Have you gotten different responses to that aspect of your work?

WINTERSON

If you want something to be clear straightaway then it’s probably better not to read my books. Read somebody else’s. I don’t really feel that I should be held accountable for writing the kinds of books that I want to write just because some reader I can’t imagine or will never know doesn’t want to read them. It seems a bit unfair. You can’t win in the art stakes, because there is always somebody who is cross with you. So that’s why it is better not to care and instead think, Well, I must really do my work, hope that it reaches people and leave the rest to chance. That’s often mistaken for arrogance, but it isn’t. You have to believe that you are good, because if you think you are rubbish, why are you doing this stuff anyway? And what are you doing chucking it out there for people to buy? I think that would be the true arrogance—if you thought your stuff was rubbish and still got people to pay good money to read it.

 

 

The Trees

By Jericho Brown

Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)

In my front yard live three crepe myrtles, crying trees

We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing

During a break from work in the heat, their cool sweat

Falling into us. I don’t want to make more of it.

I’d like to let these spindly things be

Since my gift for transformation here proves

Useless now that I know everyone moves the same …

 

 

Action Painting

By Timothy Liu

Issue no. 144 (Fall 1997)

A canvas we cannot stretch across the frame

nor staple down to fact: a ladder leaning

against an awning, workers pitching tar

on the roof of a church packed each week

with swine—a chain of pearls dangling …

 

 

Diaries

By Jan Morris

Issue no. 225 (Summer 2018)

Not long ago there was certainly more of it, but shifting ecology has robbed us of the grass snakes, glowworms, and occasional lizards that used to frequent the place—even the toads seem scarcer. Never mind, butterflies visit me as I laze, bees and wasps buzz around, beetles and caterpillars make for the gravel, sometimes a handsome dragonfly comes up from the river or a robin hops in. A sudden scuffle in the bushes means that a clumsy squirrel or two are in there—and yes, there they are leaping erratically from branch to branch. More often a crow or a blackbird swoops or cackles among the trees, and a wood pigeon monotonously serenades its mate. Sometimes coveys of seagulls from Cardigan Bay pass overhead, on their way to a promising harvesting somewhere: our owls are still asleep, I suppose, but I like to think of them anyway, there in the dark of the woods.

Ah, but here comes our merry postman with his morning consignment of trash. Elizabeth drops her trowel and pops off to make some coffee, and I pull myself together, stretch, send my respectful regards to Ovid and the emperor, and leave the yard to the rest of them.

 

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.

American, Indian

Photo: John H. White. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

You know why they call them Indians? Because Columbus thought he was in India. They’re called Indians because some white guy got lost.

—Herb Stempel, Quiz Show

We called them American bhua and American phupher, the middle of my father’s three older sisters and her husband. As the vanguard of my family’s transplants to the U.S., they’d been assigned these honorifics by their nieces and nephews living then in England. American phupher arrived in Chicago for a temporary stay in the late fifties, then returned permanently with bhua in 1971. Together they raised three children while she labored in an electronics assembly plant, and he worked first as a diesel engineer for the Chicago Transit Authority and later in its managerial ranks. In their earliest years here, they would occasionally receive a phone call from a stranger who had just arrived at O’Hare on British Airways or Air India. The callers didn’t speak much English, and they had no friends or family in the city; they’d simply found a pay phone in the terminal, opened the directory, and dialed the number next to any name that sounded like it came from their part of the world. When these calls came in, my uncle would drive from the family’s apartment in Logan Square to the airport and collect the newcomers, whether they were Punjabi, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi, whether they were Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, and he and my aunt would host them, sometimes for months, until they had secured employment and apartment leases.

This is a kind of generosity that has been practiced by generations of immigrants to and from every part of the world. Among South Asians, such ethnic esprit de corps is captured most succinctly by the term desi, which Vijay Prashad defines to include those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afghani, Sri Lankan, and Nepalese descent. It isn’t his invention. It’s commonplace enough among my family that I know it to mean one of us in a manner akin to the Italian paisan. Derived from Sanskrit, desi refers to umber skin and curried English, but—like paisan again—its application isn’t entirely seamless. Where outsiders might see homogeneity, immense internecine tensions permeate the histories of the desi peoples. Even among Indians arrived in the West from what is ostensibly a single country, there are chasms of cultural, linguistic, and religious difference that make India more like the fitful cohesion of Europe’s constituent nations than anything resembling the U.S. Uniting all our tongues, gods, cultures, and bodies under a single desi banner is tribalism elevated to a continental scale, and it doesn’t quite work.

Yet desi isn’t a wrong category for us to embrace. When you live in a place that doesn’t recognize differences between you and anyone who looks vaguely like you, you come to accept, even welcome, certain conflations. Partition isn’t much remembered. Who assassinated whose head of state and for what reason doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The cold war over Kashmir, the occupation of Amritsar, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the centuries-long history of persecution and conflict across South Asia—these are hardly known, much less understood, in the West. Here, survival matters. Wellness matters. It matters that we have each other. Growing up in Chicago in the eighties and nineties, it seemed to me that I really might be related to anyone with brown skin and a Bollywood accent. My “uncles” and “aunties” were Gujarati and Pakistani, Hindu and Muslim, Jatt Sikh and Saini. They were shopkeepers and cab drivers, laborers and tailors, professors and physicians. If it takes a village, I lived in a flourishing and richly populated one.

Still, in that village, I have long felt like a freeloader. Though I understand and speak Punjabi and can muddle through a modicum of Urdu and Hindi, though I wore kurta pajamas as a kid and can cook a few sabzis, I know little of the vastness and diversity of the desi nations. From my one visit to India, when I was four, I remember nothing but a sensation here, an image there: a water well between stalks of what might have been sugar cane, saag and corn flour roti cooking under an open sky at night, bathing in the reservoir surrounding the Golden Temple, smoke and the lingering smell of burning hanging over farm fields. This is the entirety of my firsthand reporting on a nation of more than a billion people and its sixty-five thousand years of history. Like every other child of immigrants here, first-generation or fifth-, my distance, my detachment, and my ignorance make me an American.

*

The wide slab of the hi-fi system in my cousins’ suburban living room—different aunt and uncle, different era—sat at the center of a wooden wall unit like an idol upon an altar. In a wire rack to its left stood their collection of Hindi and Punjabi records; in an identical rack to its right was their American collection, which read like Billboard’s Top 100 for the eighties: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, the Police, Tina Turner, Huey Lewis, David Bowie. An only child, I must have spent half my childhood sleeping over at that house, where my two teenage cousins would ask their younger sister and me to vote on what to play next. Those records became the soundtrack to our hiding and seeking, our bedsheet tents and board games, our chattering and reading and drifting off to sleep.

The voice that suited me best was Bruce Springsteen’s. I liked the gravel and strain in his singing, his grinning persona and cultivated relatability. I liked the stories his songs told and the stories he told in rambling introductions to live versions of them. They reminded me of our family. Only eight or ten years old, I knew almost nothing of New Jersey or the Rust Belt or the heartland, of Vietnam or recessions or the blue-collar whiteness his lyrics so often embrace, but our money was tight, too. We lived in regular homes in working-class neighborhoods. Our parents and aunts and uncles drove aging Oldsmobiles and Fords to their jobs in factories and other unglamorous places, and no matter the long hours they put in, they never seemed to get all they deserved. Just like the people in Bruce’s songs. Also like Bruce, we seemed to be having a good time anyway, and anyway I was born in the U.S.A., and all of this together meant his music was my music. Knowing a little more about Springsteen’s politics now, I imagine he’d be fine with my overeager empathies. Knowing a lot more about America, I’m not sure the people he sings about would.

The people he sings about are generally counted among the nebulous “white working class” whose political whims have alternately obsessed and held hostage the news media since the election of our current president in 2016. People who fit that description are corralled into televised focus groups and town halls, scrutinized and analyzed in print and in film and on podcasts, polled and pandered to by politicians of every persuasion—and what materializes is a portrait of a mostly decent but anxious people who fervently believe their own legends. They’re devoted to this land they believe is their land: a place discovered, settled, tamed, and civilized by ancestors who carved their pale faces into the indifferent mountains, who settled the “wild” West and built the railroad, who won the wars and spiked their banner into the oblivious moon. They’re proud of their folklore, and their pride makes them certain they deserve more than they’ve already taken. It allows some of them to imagine this country as an ethno-theocracy built by and for the white imagination, delivered unto them by a white god and a white messiah.

In this version of events, I have long felt like an interloper, my family and I counted among the invasive, inundating the American homeland, diluting its religious and ethnic culture, swallowing up its jobs and resources—and we’re only one breaker among several, arriving endlessly from so many “shithole countries” to deluge these shores. To celebrate the relentless advance of European-born settlers as evidence of a pioneer spirit while denigrating the progress of brown migrants here as an invasion is a bald hypocrisy, but the colonizer’s view of American history put the supremacy in whiteness long ago. That history—impressed even upon liberal lions like Springsteen—reflexively casts one people as prototypical, authentic, and heroic while dismissing the rest of us as outsiders to the “real” America: that of the focus group, the media narrative, the rock anthem and grammar school pageant. And so, like every other child born of brown immigrants, first-generation or fifth-, my difference keeps me detached and at a distance. My skin makes me an Indian.

*

Dots, not feathers, the other kids cracked in school, even though in my family’s part of the old country you see mostly turbans and chunis, not bindis. That a single word can conflate the descendants of one continent’s achingly ancient civilizations with those of another, half a planet away, is evidence of colonialism’s continued hold on the American imagination. Desis, of course, have little in common with North American “Indians” beyond the depth of our histories and the diversity among our peoples. But politicians, folk historians, and Americans who proudly recast exploitative expansionism as noble and civilizing have no need for any such distinctions. Our textbooks celebrate Columbus, Daniel Boone, Lewis, Clark, and every manifestly destined land-grabber who followed as trailblazers boldly claiming uncharted lands. In this telling, America is a nation of humble pioneers confronting brutal savages, a nation of industrious homesteaders terrorized by interloping raiders, a nation of—yes—cowboys versus Indians.

I remember these lessons from grammar school, their uninterrogated heroism. They are what we mean when we say Americana, and they bear no responsibility for the genocides committed here. They offer no reparations for slavery. They deliver no correction to the existential threats all our technology and growth and bellicosity have wrought on the planet. They only allow the heirs of colonial power to continue laying claim to this country’s historical successes while placing the blame for its failings elsewhere. And so those heirs become a burden for the rest of us. Their self-importance is our burden. Their oblivion is our burden. Their fear and anger over any challenge to their preferred narrative are our burden. Sooner or later, the question confronting the desi arrived in the U.S. is whether or not we will accept their version of history, whether we will cast our lot with the cowboys or with the Indians.

*

My family gathers in December 2012 for a birthday party at a cousin’s house—different cousin, different era—bringing together three generations of auto mechanics and physicians, laborers and homemakers, middle managers and entrepreneurs, professors and retirees. Observant Sikhs, casual Sikhs, and those of us who claim no religion at all. In an election year, it’s unsurprising that our conversation turns to politics, but in the familiarity of this space I’m startled to hear some of my elder relatives expressing so much anger about the state of the nation and directing their vitriol at President Obama. Some who barely speak English complain that Black people and Latinos are coming for their jobs. Some complain that other minorities, even those arriving from the desi homelands, are guilty of exploiting the same social safety net from which they themselves benefit. Too many, they claim, are coming here and straining our resources, and they lay all of this at the feet of our first Black president.

I’m less startled, at another gathering four years later, to learn that these same relatives are unified in their support of candidate Trump. They, too, want to see America made great again, in spite of the fact that they themselves, several of them bearded and turbaned, have had their homes in well-off suburbs and exurbs hatefully vandalized or riddled by xenophobic bullets. They support Trump’s every regressive diatribe in spite of the fact that they’ve benefited from affirmative action and unemployment, from social security protections they now believe are too economically burdensome, from the very immigration policies they now support ending. They align themselves with the same bigoted, jingoist inclinations that would have them barred or deported from here. They speak their allegiance in Punjabi. When other members of the family challenge them, not one is willing to admit the hypocrisy or absurdity in all of this. They have another version of history in mind.

It isn’t that any of them are daft enough to mistake themselves for white. It’s that an exclusionary and supremacist mindset doesn’t belong to the white imagination alone. It is possible for even the brown immigrant to begin to believe in his own triumphal legend: that he set out as a noble explorer and made his way, made a home for himself, that he owes nobody anything for his achievement, and that anyone arriving after him poses a threat to his own hold on resources and opportunity. Decent and devoted to this nation as he might be, he, too, can grow fearful and eager to blame anyone else for his misfortunes. He, too, can believe he deserves more than he’s already taken. He doesn’t have to mistake himself for a European in order to wish to be identified with white America rather than Black or brown or native America. He, too, can simply want to be on the side of power. He, too, can mistake the aggressor for the hero and adopt the aggressor’s values as his own. He, too, can betray the marginalized and the subjugated who need him most. This is how the turbaned desi comes to ally himself with white supremacists, how he becomes for someone else the very burden he wishes to escape.

This is the Indian taking the side of the cowboys, and that this is even possible ought to demonstrate how utterly invented race is, how incidental the white in white supremacy. The supremacist imagination is bigger than race. It merely invents race, over and over, as a means of claiming and clinging to power. Racism is not ignorant or oblivious: racism is willful. Where it is practiced, every manner of revisionism and contradiction required to preserve supremacy, every hypocrisy and absurdity, will follow. This is how the self-proclaimed greatest nation on Earth can also clamor to be made great again, how the leader of the free world can imprison children at our borders, how a nation of immigrants can turn away those tired refugees yearning to breathe free.

*

When my American phupher died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1997, hundreds gathered in mourning at his funeral. Just as many paid their respects after my American bhua’s passing in 2018. If their example in this country is instructive of anything, it’s that there’s an answer to America above and beyond exclusionary thinking. Had they turned their backs on those arriving after them, had they kept for themselves alone whatever progress they made, they may well have thrived here, but they would have done so in isolation, forever afraid that someone would come along to take whatever they were hungrily protecting. They didn’t do that. They chose generosity. They chose solidarity. They showed—and the desi experience writ large shows—that allegiance and community are possible even among those who would be strangers or enemies elsewhere.

So many of us have gotten it wrong in arriving here, whether by birth or by migration. Too many have sought to claim this country for themselves alone. We all want to believe we have earned it, but believing such a thing requires us to lie to ourselves, to create myths that demand we antagonize, wall off, deport, or eradicate anyone who would challenge them. To confront those myths is to surrender some power, but in surrender there can be a greater strength. The history of native America, of Black and Latin America, of broke and brown and immigrant America, is as epic and heroic as any invented legend. Those stories deserve to be a part of our Americana, too. Embracing them—and offering humility, conciliation, and reparation where they reveal injustice—is necessary to tell the larger story of a better nation. That’s the country I’d like to call home, the identity I’d like to claim, the song I’d like sung of myself and everyone else.

 

Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. His latest book of poems, The 44th of July, was published by Omnidawn Publishing in April 2019. His previous collections include Phantom Camera, Carrier Wave, and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America. His essays can be found at The Poetry Foundation, McSweeney’s, Himal Southasian, The Writer, and other magazines. He teaches on the faculty of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Miami.

“American, Indian” is used by permission from Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Jaswinder Bolina.

The Art of Distance No. 15

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.

“As we move from spring to summer, as the days shift from getting longer to getting shorter, as some states push to reopen while others are placing new restrictions, I find myself split as well: wild to get outside, and desperate to crawl into a hole with a very big book. So I’m taking many walks outside with my family’s new puppy, Cashew (yep, we got a pandemic pup), and my current pandemic reading plan involves books in series—since reading all three volumes of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, I’ve moved on to alternating between Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (you’ll find these last two authors’ Art of Fiction interviews unlocked if you click their names). And so this installment of The Art of Distance, which offers another deep dive into the work of a single writer, features the poet Carl Phillips, whose work resonates for me in ways public and personal. I love the syntactical challenges his poems pose, of course, but his work in the TPR archive also forms a bit of a series—Phillips has conducted one Art of Poetry interview and been the subject of another; in the latter, he also talks a good deal about walking his dog, so we’ve got that in common. These connections may seem tenuous, but in these weird times, I’ll take what I can get. May you, too, find focus, clarity, and a sense of shared consciousness and conscience in Phillips’s work.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director

Carl Phillips. Photo: Reston Allen.

Carl Phillips is one of America’s most beloved contemporary poets, known for his command of English syntax, his blending of classical mythology and contemporary concerns, and his deep explorations of eros and its implications. As judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, he has also been an advocate for new writers, launching the careers of Eduardo C. Corral, Airea D. Matthews, Yanyi, and others.

Phillips has been publishing poems in the Review since the early nineties, is the subject of one Art of Poetry interview, and conducted another. Before you start reading, though, watch his most recent contribution, this short video in the Poets on Couches series TPR launched shortly after lockdown began:

 

 

Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview, conducted by the poet Rick Barot, delves into growing up with one Black and one white parent, a lifelong engagement with the classics, and Phillips being “terrified” when speaking with Geoffrey Hill for his Art of Poetry interview.

Hill is another poet obsessed with stretching and straining the bounds of syntax, as his Art of Poetry interview shows. He is an intricate thinker, and prodded by Phillips’s equally intricate mind, his responses interweave his views on aesthetics, metaphysics, and his political sensibility: “One’s idea of the authentic self may be quite different from the authentic self as it really is. The dividing line between innocent stupidity and fakery is very unclear; and I think that innocent stupidity and deliberate fakery can coexist in the one writer.”

The Review has published seven of Phillips’s poems over the past three decades. It’s a snapshot of his stylistic evolution, the earliest poems set in orderly columns and couplets, the most recent snaking and stretching across the page. They’re all unlocked, and may these first lines be tantalizing enough to make you want to read line two:

“Fra Lippo Lippi and the Vision of Henley” (Issue no. 122, Spring 1992)

If, in depicting the angels, I cannot

“Youth with Satyr, Both Resting” (Issue no. 135, Summer 1995)

There are certain words—ecstasy, abandon

“On Morals” (Issue no. 135, Summer 1995)

Naturally, the preference is for

“The Swain’s Invitation” (Issue no. 135, Summer 1995)

The barn is warm, come inside, lie down

“Of That City, the Heart” (Issue no. 148, Fall 1998)

You lived here once. City—remember?—

“On Triumph” (Issue no. 226, Fall 2018)

If done steadily, and with the kind of patience that belies all fear

“Unbridled” (Issue no. 226, Fall 2018)

To look at them, you might not think the two men, having spoken briefly

 

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The Ancestry Project

Seventeenth-century Dutch map of Africa, Atlas van Dirk van der Hagen, ©Wikimedia commons

In fourth grade, my teacher assigned us a research report on a foreign country. She was a nice white lady. They all were. She said to choose a country we could trace our ancestry to. I was one of her favorites, but when she made that lesson plan, she was not thinking about me. Or Yvonne. We were the Black kids in class.

I asked my mom for help after school. She’s Black on her father’s side and Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother’s side; I thought she might get my bubbe on the phone to wax poetic about Eastern Europe. But she didn’t. Nor did she rant about the nerve of the nice white lady whose bright idea this was. If my mom was bitter, she didn’t let it show. She turned that mess into lemonade. She smiled and pulled out the map and we went back to Africa, Garvey on our minds.

Sometimes I learned more Black history in a week at home than I did in a lifetime of Februarys at school. I knew about slavery but I didn’t know about slavery. The information I had to work with was PG, maybe PG-13. Can we ever comprehend that level of unadulterated evil without living through it?

My peers were gripping safety scissors, sketching sauerkraut and four-leaf clovers, spreading glue on the back of a cutout of the Great Wall. I was nine years old, trying not to imagine the skin on my great-great-great-great-great-greats’ backs getting shredded by a braided leather whip that might also catch them behind the ears, where their hair hung in braids the Kardashian-Jenners could only dream of.

I looked down at the map. The men in the Romare Bearden print on the wall looked over my shoulder, too busy jamming on their instruments to tell me the right answer. I just wanted to get an A. I just wanted to be told what to do.

“Mom?”

“We don’t know—they made it so we don’t know. So now we get to pick. Something on the west coast, though. On this curve right here. Let me tell you about Gorée Island.”

She found a shred of autonomy for me, among so much dehumanization. We got to choose. We got to do what our ancestors didn’t.

Senegal. It was arbitrary. It meant everything.

I read the encyclopedia entry on a World Book CD-ROM. Capital: Dakar. Population: 10.28 million. The sun and the sand and the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean where they packed us onto boats—but no, there was more to it than that. The fishing and the mining and the Wolof people and the French colonizers and I made my poster or maybe the assignment was to decorate a paper doll.

I gave my presentation and I got my A and I waited to see what Yvonne would do. Imagine my surprise when she chose these United States of America.

I was speechless. She took the easy way out. Coward. It was self-denial, self-hatred. It technically made sense but it didn’t make any damn sense. We were neither indigenous to this land nor citizens of the colonies that would become this nation. Our ancestors were only included as a means to an end, and to me, that didn’t feel like home. I didn’t know what to say to Yvonne, so I said nothing. We were children and we had been given an impossible task.

Only now, years later, can I concede that Yvonne’s response was not cowardly. She claimed her own stake in what some say is the greatest country in history. She undermined the founding fathers by calling attention to the foundation of forced labor on which their glory depended. Our ancestors had lived and fought and sang and died here. They built here with their hands.

I can’t remember Yvonne’s last name or her face but I picture her in two braids, high on each side of her head, bobbles on the ends that clacked like hard candy when she threw her head back and laughed.

This might be a funny story if it weren’t so heinous. It would sting a little less if I could call it ancient history. But just last year, a teacher in New York turned her fifth-grade classroom into a mock slave auction block. Don’t worry—she only confined her Black students to imaginary shackles before she unleashed the White bidders upon them. I suppose real wrought iron would have put her over budget.

Sometimes I want to be a halfway innocent again, lined up with my classmates while we wait to be shepherded to the playground for recess. I want it to be one of those days when I’m standing behind Yvonne—so close I can smell the shea on her skin—knowing that in a few minutes we’ll be playing hopscotch and feeling free.

 

Mariah Stovall is a literary assistant at Writers House. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in Poets & Writers, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Literary Hub, HelloGiggles, Joyland, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is working on her first novel.

Staff Picks: Brownstones, Ballpoint, and Belonging

Arundhati Roy. Photo: © Mayank Austen Soofi.

Haymarket Books will release Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., a slim new collection of essays by Arundhati Roy, this September, but if there were ever a book that, given some minor magic wand, I would abracadabra into publication, it’s this one. The nine essays were written recently, between 2018 and 2020, “two years that … have felt like two hundred.” The words I elided in that sentence are “in India”—as she has said earlier, we should not forfeit “the rights to our own tragedies,” and Roy’s writing is implacably, unrelentingly specific, digging into the smallest details. That zoom has the paradoxical impact of also revealing broader, more general patterns, fundamental forces that take on different shapes. It’s impossible to read this book now, in America, and not hear the ways in which it is talking to us, too. Given the moment, I think a bit about sickness, how a disease can cause a fever in this person, a heart attack in that person, seemingly nothing at all in the third, but still be the same disease. (“I have begun to wonder why fascism—although it is by no means the same everywhere—is so recognizable across histories and cultures.”) And what comes after? As Roy puts it at the end of Azadi’s introduction: “Reimagining the world. Only that.” —Hasan Altaf 

Paule Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones is forged by the tension between husband and wife. When Deighton Boyce learns he has inherited land in his native Barbados, he shuffles rapidly through ideas to make quick money in New York before moving his family back home. His wife, Silla, works a factory job and sees in that land only a down payment on a brownstone that will secure for them a life in Brooklyn. These forces of dreamer and realist (and the question of who is which) play out in the imagination of their daughter Selina, the protagonist, whose childhood love of her father and fear of her mother are complicated as she enters adolescence and begins to understand her parents as flawed and human. Marshall vividly renders Selina’s coming of age alongside the family’s push and pull between where they came from and where they are. —Lauren Kane

 

Installation view of “Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Matter of Fact” at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Johnna Arnold of Impart Photography.

 

San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora recently hosted a pair of conversations about its 2016–17 exhibition “Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Matter of Fact.” Ojih Odutola created all the show’s pieces over just one summer, working in charcoal, pastel, and pen—even ballpoint. The exhibition marked her movement away from drawings and toward large-scale portraiture—a genre familiar to the New York audience who saw “To Wander Determined,” her show at the Whitney a year later. Although the name suggests documentary-grade realism, “A Matter of Fact” presents itself as a novel, each frame containing a chapter in an interconnected narrative. Ojih Odutola’s painted subjects are her characters, members of a fictitious aristocratic Nigerian family who invite the viewer into their opulent portrait hall. Playing freely between life and art, fact and fiction, Ojih Odutola even casts herself in a role: the family’s deputy private secretary. A panel of the museum’s docents virtually welcomed viewers into the well-curated gallery space, where the portraits are offset by burned-orange-red walls that evoke a stately home. As the docent Remi Majekodunmi noted, this gives “the characters an actual place to live, thrive, and come alive.” Ojih Odutola’s playful wit comes through in the smallest details—the textures of moving fabrics, the posture of bodies in repose, the pearl earrings and silver nail polish that nod to her own signature style. —Elinor Hitt

I first saw Howardena Pindell’s 1980 work Free, White, and 21 when I was in college and then again a few years later at a Brooklyn Museum exhibition exploring the work of radical Black women artists in the latter half of the twentieth century. I recently rewatched the video; the ICA Boston has, with the artist’s permission, uploaded it to their website in its entirety. It’s a sobering work in which the artist recounts in deadpan detail the racism she has experienced throughout her life, from elementary school onward, while wrapping and unwrapping her head in gauze. Juxtaposed with this is footage of Pindell dressed as a white woman who refuses to believe her, repeating again and again, “I’ve never had an experience like that, but then of course, I’m free, white, and twenty-one.” Pindell offers a pointed commentary on not just race, gender, and coming of age in America as a Black woman but also how cultural tastemakers reinforce what is and isn’t considered political in art. “It’s got to be in your art in a way that we consider valid,” Pindell’s white woman says. —Rhian Sasseen

My love is a poet, and when we leave town, he brings poetry with him. There are, of course, some books that get to travel more often than others; Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia has lain by at least a hundred beds. Late one already-tomorrow night this week, after reading several of the book’s familiar, sun-warmed poems, I paged to the acknowledgments. Anyone remotely familiar with this territory in a poetry collection can see her lyric at play here: “hand-on-heart gratitude to the DY Prep Slam team (08–09), Acentos, & Cave Canem: oh, school & family.” A whole bibliography exists in another section, alphabetical and inspiring: Chris Abani, Elizabeth Alexander; Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady. The long kitchen table of Girmay’s thanks is rich and full. In her poetry and her teaching, Girmay makes artwork of seeing people, learning people. Take, for example, “Central City Senior Center, New Orleans (for Ellen, after Jane Kenyon),” where she sees—“Old friend, I knew / you were something special / when we danced at the Senior Center”—and is seen—“& you, without my saying / a thing, as if you heard the chest its joy / & cardinal, you said yeah, just that.” I could hardly do better than take up the lesson of Girmay’s gratitude. A syllabus can be made from the company she keeps—“Patrick Rosal & Ross Gay”—the company that kept Kingdom Animalia—“the Aunts & the Uncles, the cousins, my All.” Just before I sat down to write this, I passed a television that offered suggestions for longevity. There were the usual tonics: avocados, olive oil, red wine, dogs, but also community. This makes the deepest medical sense. An ecosystem, a belonging, is vital for art and vital for life. From where I’m sitting, I think Girmay will live forever—a blessing. —Julia Berick

 

Aracelis Girmay. Photo: Sheila Griffin.

The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas

Thomas Mann. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arising by most accounts in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the novel of ideas reflects the challenge posed by the integration of externally developed concepts long before the arrival of conceptual art. Although the novel’s verbal medium would seem to make it intrinsically suited to the endeavor, the mission of presenting “ideas” seems to have pushed a genre famous for its versatility toward a surprisingly limited repertoire of techniques. These came to obtrude against a set of generic expectations—nondidactic representation; a dynamic, temporally complex relation between events and the representation of events; character development; verisimilitude—established only in wake of the novel’s separation from history and romance at the start of the nineteenth century. Compared to these and even older, ancient genres like drama and lyric, the novel is astonishingly young, which is perhaps why departures from its still only freshly consolidated conventions seem especially noticeable.

The techniques that stick out against the generic norms listed above appear across modern and postmodern texts with striking regularity. They are: direct speech by characters in the forms of dramatic dialogues or monologues (The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point, Tomorrow’s Eve, Iola Leroy, Elizabeth Costello, Babel-17); overt narrators prone to didactic, ironic, or metafictional commentary (The Man without Qualities, Tristram Shandy, Elizabeth Costello); and flat allegorical characters (Faith and the Good Thing, The Man without Qualities, Against Nature, Moby-Dick). Also prevalent, to a lesser extent, are experimental formatting (Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy, Diary of a Bad Year); sudden, unexplained, narratively isolated outbreaks of magic in a predominantly realist frame (The Magic Mountain, Elizabeth Costello, Artful); and even a curious thematization of the “device” or gimmick as such (Tomorrow’s Eve, The Magic Mountain, Clear: A Transparent Novel).

Whether executed as science fiction, bildungsroman, or more recently, the satirical form Nicholas Dames calls the “theory novel,” the novel of ideas is “artful,” with all the equivocality this term brings. Willingness to court the accusation of relying on overly transparent stylistic devices is a consistent, perhaps even cohering feature of a notoriously unstable genre. Scholars have therefore obliquely acknowledged the novel of ideas’s predilection for contrivances. Claire De Obaldia’s groundbreaking study of the “essayistic novel which appropriates existing material,” for example, describes it as a “fundamentally ambivalent product,” confronting its authors with unusual “demands of literary integration.” For all of their “tremendous size,” the novels of ideas of Proust, Musil, and Broch are paradoxically “fragments,” sharing German Romanticism’s divided loyalties to a “uniquely self­ conscious intellect and an equally self­ conscious anti­-intellectualism.” Even in magisterial (if tellingly unfinished) works like The Man without Qualities, the inclusion of essayistic excerpts induces “a mutual interruption of theory and fiction,” a disruption of “narrative continuity and totalization” undermining the systematic spirit of the “conceptual” as much as the imaginative pleasures of mimesis.

Focusing on the labor that the effort to synthesize fiction and ideas requires, De Obaldia comes close to instating the gimmick at the heart of the essayistic novel. If this move never happens, we can understand why. Predisposition to gimmickiness is just that: a predisposition. It hovers at one crucial degree of remove from gimmickiness itself, which already presents its own complications. Historical arguments about genre, such as that the “novel­ essay” is a response to a European crisis of modernity, as Stefano Ercolino maintains, or an “art form … peculiar to twentieth-century literary history,” as Hoffman argues, are contestable, as they should be; aesthetic judgments made about entire genres inevitably prove more so. But aside from ontological difficulties posed by its virtual and aesthetic character, the gimmick­-proneness of the novel of ideas seems to have been avoided primarily because it is an intellectual embarrassment. Philosophical fiction should be a serious enterprise, we think, impervious to the gimmick’s compromised form. But what if a susceptibility to the gimmick—and to the comedy that so often attends it—is finally the one feature that consolidates this equivocal genre?

In Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley places this doubt in the mouth of a character who is a novelist, commenting on the “tiresome” device of the character used as “mouthpiece.” In one of the several chapters titled “From Philip Quarles’s Notebook,” freestanding mini­ essays on the craft of fiction, “modern intellectual” Quarles gives us a quick rundown of the genre’s “defect[s]”:

Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books. But then, I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.

The novel of ideas is characterized here as an intrinsically un-novelistic, “made-­up affair” (and once again, by one of its own practitioners): “the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books.” As the “mouthpiece” puts it, “People who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous.”

Even late modernists undertaking the integration of “neatly formulated notions” into fiction feel compelled to highlight the novel of ideas’s equivocality as a novel. It is an equivocality that therefore cannot be entirely chalked up to antimodernist reactions to violations of classical narrative, bourgeois preferences for culturally consecrated forms, or mass audience theory of the gimmick preferences for literary entertainment.

*

In The Philosophy of the Novel, J. M. Bernstein describes the novel as “a vast schematizing procedure, a search for modes of temporal ordering which would give our normative concepts access to the world” and thus a “constitutive role in our comprehending experience.” This joins two ideas: Kant’s claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that pure concepts like “freedom” can only be made accessible to experience if given a temporal structure; and Lukács’s opposition of “conceptual form” to “life” in Theory of the Novel. Since Lukács thinks of “form” in the novel as “abstract and conceptual,” and the “life” it seeks to represent as “secular and causal,” “in order for conceptual forms to attach themselves to empirical life they must be … routed through a temporal sequence which can be matched to empirical events which possess a different order of determination.” The problem finds its solution in the relation between story and discourse, in which the novel shifts between two orders of event determination, a “causal order of events” (succession or discourse) and a “narrative (formally figured) order of events” (totality or story). Arguably the essence of narrative, the story/discourse relation underscores Lukács’s account of the novel as a “dialectic of form­ giving and mimesis, where form demands immanence and the world mimetically transcribed resists form.”

But the novel of ideas throws a wrench in this dialectic. Because it is uncertain whether the presentation of an “idea” in the discourse of a novel like The Magic Mountain counts as an event in a sequence existing independently of the representation of events, the genre tends to short-circuit or simply dissipate the tension between story and discourse that makes narrative so inexhaustibly rich. Discussions of time, suffering, justice, and so on are part of the “life” represented in The Magic Mountain; the same goes for the discussions of vegetarianism and animal consciousness in Elizabeth Costello. Yet for all this, it is hard to think of the ideas presented in either novel as constituting plot. As Bernstein writes:

[The] more reified the represented world of the novel, the greater will be the distance separating event and plot, which is to say, the more difficult it will be make a plot (and hence a theme) out of the presented events; and the more difficult this primitive narrative act the more meaning will come to reside at the level of form alone, and hence the more questionable will be the authority of the narrative or, at least, the less verisimilitude will be a possible source of authority.

The “more the divorce of form from life becomes manifest in the novel, the more fragile, artificial, or purely literary will novelistic schemata appear.” Here the relation between story and discourse, or the reader’s ability to shuttle between events and the representation of events, begins to feel weak or oddly irrelevant. Perhaps this is why novels of ideas tend to be serial rather than chronologically textured, as reflected in the disconnected, interchangeable “Lectures” in Elizabeth Costello, or the picaresque episodes of Faith and the Good Thing. Perhaps it is also why in The Magic Mountain, a “time­ novel” featuring characters tellingly “withdrawn” from time, Mann devotes the majority of his narrator’s didactic speeches to the literary handling of temporality, including the contrivances this manipulation demands. Here and elsewhere, unschematized ideas reflect the social fact of reification. The very “life” or experience that each novel “mimetically transcribe[s]” is dominated by abstractions, resistant to temporalization and thus narrative integration.

Northrop Frye puts it bluntly: an “interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.” The novelist who “cannot get along without ideas” or who “has not the patience to digest them the way [Austen and James did] instinctively resorts to … a ‘mental history’ of a single character.” Perhaps accounting for the reduced character systems of novels like Against Nature, the use of the often solitary “intellectual hero as mouthpiece for authorial justifications” also commits the novel to what Hermann Broch contemptuously calls “conversational padding.” As De Obaldia glosses:

The term essayistic novel calls into question the idea of progression; it suggests that the (initial) essayistic material has not been “dissolved” into the fabric of the novel after all, but plainly stands out of the narrative strand. The offence is not so terrible when the essayistic reflections are “motivated”: in most novels, the essayistic appears in the form of reflections or digressions which are taken over by the characters … Yet this is the procedure which Broch, precisely, rejects. His contempt for the choice of the intellectual hero as mouthpiece for authorial justifications is unreserved: he regards this strategy as “conversational padding” and “absolute kitsch,” and accuses not only Musil, but also Gide, Mann, Huxley of indulging in it.

It is here again a modernist author of a novel of ideas who is pointing out its tendency toward “absolute kitsch.”

“Realism has never been comfortable with ideas.” In this outbreak of direct address by the recessed narrator of Elizabeth Costello, in which Broch’s disliked “mouthpiece” technique is unapologetically embraced, our attention is drawn once more to the problematic nature of the novel of ideas by a practitioner. The narrator’s interruption happens in our reading of what we assume is a story but are eventually told is a “lecture,” implicitly performed to an undescribed audience into which the reader suddenly finds herself conscripted. At the same moment, the narrator is vanquished by an undescribed lecturer, enacting the very strain on novelistic realism described: “It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations—walks in the countryside, conversations—in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them.”

Yet “embodiment” often replicates the problem Coetzee’s self-canceling narrator identifies. For this solution cannot do much when characters are as abstract as the ideas they personify. Perhaps this is why Mann’s paradigmatic novel of ideas puts bodies rendered inert by ambiguous illnesses at the center of its story, highlighting the etiolation of the aspect of character Lukács calls “intellectual physiognomy.” Ideas and illness are thus not only provocatively coupled in The Magic Mountain, as Eugene Goodheart argues. The theme of physiological weakness points to the weakness of the very appeal to characterological embodiment as a solution to the problem “ideas” pose to narration. No character in either of these novels develops, least of all the protagonists: Coetzee’s allegorical double Costello and Mann’s “grotesque innocent” Hans Castorp.

Nondevelopment is, in fact, one of The Magic Mountain’s official ideas. Indeed, its paradoxical narrativization and the temporal monotony ensuing from it, reflexively discussed in chapters titled “Eternal Soup” and “The Great Stupor,” brings out The Magic Mountain’s experimental comedy. As Goodheart notes, the world of Mann’s characters is an “achieved” world, in which the “ideas that circulate … represent forms of existence for which there is no real future.” Hence the “irony of Settembrini’s progressivism,” which takes the form of “an obsolete idea with no prospects.” Mann’s novel of modern, progressive ideas is in short a novel about the “failure of ideas.” It is not just that “[if Hans] and the reader learn anything, it is that the ideas that occupy such a large space in the novel are untrustworthy or worse.” The narrator’s irony seems to ultimately target “the character of ideas per se.”

Something wrong about “ideas per se” also seems hinted by the late irruption of the supernatural in Mann’s novel. In “Highly Questionable,” featuring the séance in which a medium calls up the ghost of Hans’s cousin Joachim, the rationally inexplicable event is as paradoxically striking for its curious lack of impact on the narrative, which simply resumes after the incident, undisturbed. The inorganic imposition of supernatural (but narratively inconsequential) magic seems to almost ensue from the buildup of technical contrivances that the novel finds itself forced to use in its efforts to integrate similarly externally imposed “ideas.”

I could say more about magic as a deus ex machina. For now, though, we need to entertain a more basic reason for why the “novel of ideas” remains an object of critical skepticism. As Mary McCarthy asks: Aren’t all novels “of ideas”? Can one intelligibly speak of a novel without ideas? If not, why pretend to a subgenre that is somehow special for having them? In an enactment of this problem, Lionel Trilling’s essays show him wavering between treating the “novel of ideas” as exception and norm: at times as an emerging form endemic to late twentieth­-century “mass-ideological” society; at others as a synonym for the novel per usual, rooted in class conflict since the dawn of the nineteenth century. Like the gimmick on which it so frequently relies, the “novel of ideas” is an equivocal thing. Is it really a thing?

But it seems time to embrace rather than continue circling cautiously around this genre’s “Highly Questionable” nature. Rather than hunting for less embarrassing ways to stabilize it, we might define the novel of ideas precisely by its intimate relation to the gimmick form. Incorporating the suspicion that attends a genre into its definition has benefits, including that of making the definition more concrete. And so: there is a will to ideas on the part of some novels that drives them toward the use of three obtrusive techniques—techniques that cannot help but obtrude by working directly counter to the genre’s diachronicity, flexibility, and other oft­-noted strengths. Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters: these ancient didactic devices undermine the novel’s claims to contemporaneity. They distance the novel from its métier—narration—and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play. Moreover, as a genre in which storytelling strains to accommodate synchronic concepts—inverting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which philosophy rediscovers its reliance on diachronicity, narration, and a kind of free indirect style—the novel of ideas recalls one of gimmick’s fundamental features: its appearance of “working too hard.”

Direct speech by characters involves privileging what narratologists call scene, in which story and discourse time coincide. This dramatic tempo contrasts with those at which the novel uniquely excels: summary (fictional events unfolding over years are briskly accounted for in a single paragraph or even sentence) and stretch (a story event taking up less than a second is recounted over several pages of text). Theater cannot do stretch without recourse to special effects like film, which has to rely in turn on special effects like slow motion. Film struggles with summary, resorting to devices like montage or peeling calendars. Summary does not come easily to theater either, which manages it through expository speeches by characters. In short, when the novel’s dominant temporality becomes the “real time” of scene, as opposed to psychological stretch or historical summary, the novel is no longer in its technical wheelhouse but that of another genre. Indeed, stretch and summary are the only temporal modes in which an innovation entirely unique to the novel has been able to develop. Free indirect discourse, in requiring the grammatical third person, cannot take place at moments of direct speech by characters. Nor can it take place in the direct speech by narrators which gives rise to the “pause,” in which discourse time is maximal and story time is null.

Do the techniques the novel becomes compelled to adopt to incorporate preexisting “ideas” inevitably push its form closer toward the play? Hoffman comes close to suggesting this, noting that the novel of ideas brings out the “drama [already] implicit in an idea,” when understood as “point of view which a person holds and upon which he acts.”48 The fact that the novel of ideas is more of a “drama of ideas rather than of persons” commits it, moreover, to one remarkably simple contrivance that might well remind us of the default setting of the well­-made play:

Each character … has given him (if little else!) a point of view drawn from the prevailing intellectual interests of his creator. On this point of view the character stands, wavers, or falls. Thus, implicit in this type of novel is the drama of ideas rather than of persons, or, rather, the drama of individualized ideas. The structural requirements of such a novel are perhaps simpler than they at first appear. One requirement is to get these people, or as many of them as is possible, together in one place where circumstances are favorable to a varied expression of intellectual diversity. The drawing-room, the party, the dinner—these are all favorite points of structural focus.

Similarly, in The Drama of Ideas, Martin Puchner notes that if we broaden the definition of drama from dialogue written for performance to a looser “family of forms” privileging “character, direct speech, scene and action, to the exclusion of narration and interiority,” one can “claim that the dramatic is realized not only in plays but also in certain novels.” If one example of this is the experimental novel, such as Melville’s Moby-Dick with its Shakespearean monologues, or Joyce’s Ulysses with its 150­-page Circe episode, the other is the “novel of ideas.”

Another group would include the novel of ideas, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thomas Mann, which depends heavily on dialogic scenes of intellectual discussion in the tradition of Plato. Rather than calling those moments examples of “typical” novelistic hybridity, it is more appropriate to think of them as dramatic moments in the novel, with the narrator, retreating into stage directions, giving over the scene to the pure action (and dialogue) of characters. If from one perspective this looks like the incorporation of drama by the stronger novel, from another, it looks like the invasion of the novel by a newly resurgent drama.

Reversing a more familiar account of the novel as a form uniquely capable of assimilating others, Puchner sees the novel of ideas as a subset of an older, larger tradition he calls “dramatic Platonism.” In a sense, the novel’s desire for “ideas” makes it not so much philosophical as dramatic.

 

Sianne Ngai is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Excerpted from Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form , by Sianne Ngai, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The Untranslatable

The poetry in the Summer 2020 issue hails from Portugal, Uruguay, Iran, France, India, China, Lithuania, and the United States. To celebrate the range of this work, we asked the translators responsible for bringing these poems to our pages to explain a particular challenge they faced in the process of translation. As Margaret Jull Costa says in her Art of Translation interview, “There’s something so very intimate about poetry and about the process of translating it.” The following essays in miniature attest to this delicacy.

Translating from a Romance language (Portuguese) to a Germanic one (English) always involves the choice of how Latinate to sound. The English language derives both from Latin and German and often offers two words for every idea. One can say “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost,” “sacred” or “holy,” as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, and most words representing abstract ideas stem from the Latin while the majority of words exemplifying concrete ideas come from the Saxon. In a newspaper article, the choice may be irrelevant; in a poem, the choice matters.

One such instance in our translations of António Osório is the noun serpente, which may be rendered as serpent (from Latin) or snake (from Proto-Germanic). In the poem “Crater of the Beginning,” we chose the former, whereas in “The Circus,” we opted for the latter. In “Crater of the Beginning,” the serpent is a mythological symbol in the biblical sense, so it is obviously the tempter in the book of Genesis that best fits the translation. In modern English, the word snake gradually replaced serpent in popular use, so we considered snake the more appropriate noun in “The Circus,” given the poem’s modern-day context. Our choice of the monosyllabic word snake also accomplishes three things: it renders the sense of immediacy, it fills the reader’s imagination with circus-related stunts, and it acts out onomatopoetically the hissing sound (the sn- consonant cluster) of the limbless, scaly, elongate reptile.

Finally, the Portuguese verb estava (meaning “was”) in the last line of “The Circus” provides another example of the Latin-versus-Germanic choice. Unlike English, the Portuguese language has two separate verbs for to be: ser and estar. If we were to succeed in transmitting the intensity of the poem’s final image, we needed an alternative to the ordinary meaning of estava. We needed a muscular verb capable of specifying the seductive nature of the scene. By opting for the verb stand to refer to the position of the snake, we conferred strong physicality to an otherwise lukewarm verb, and we let its presence assume an upward movement within the poem itself, as if it would spiral up through the preceding lines of the poem and subsume it all into itself. In addition, the sibilant consonants (snake and stand) enact the hiss, which in turn enhances the uneasiness, thus making vivid what is only latent in the Portuguese. —Patricio Ferrari and Susan Margaret Brown, translators of António Osório’s “Crater of the Beginning,” “September,” and “The Circus” 

 

 

‘Adam is an Arabic word (عدم) that signifies the absence of existence or being; it lends itself to being translated as nonbeing. While the word ‘adam itself isn’t particularly untranslatable, centuries of religious, literary, and social history are shorn off in the seemingly simple journey from ‘adam to nonbeing. ‘Adam was a source of dispute among Islamic theologians who debated whether it is a space that exists separate from God or whether it is the liminal space in which God holds his creations before they become manifest in the world.

On the other hand, Sufi mystics flirted with the idea of transcending wujūd (existence) and passing into the realm of ‘adam, rendering earthly existence immaterial. What, then, was the relationship of this realm to a union with God, they wondered? In mystical poetry, ‘adam came to signify an ontological paradox—a space defined by its absence and perhaps inhabited by the mythical, fabulous bird, the ‘anqā, which exists only in nonexistence. Mirza Ghalib, the foremost nineteenth-century Urdu poet, uses ‘adam in his ghazals to describe a lover’s state of metaphysical despair that exceeds the bounds of this world.

In “Nonbeing,” a strikingly new and modern take on ‘adam, Miraji builds on seven centuries’ usage of the word to explore man’s relationship to existence. He deploys an ontological paradox, meditating on the idea of existence by focusing on nonexistence—that is, ‘adam. Unlike in its previous usage, Miraji personifies ‘adam as “alive and breathing,” and in another unprecedented departure, he also makes it dependent on the speaker (presumably a human) for its existence.

The title of this poem in Urdu is “Adam kā khalā” (“The Void of Nonbeing”). The khalā, or void, houses ‘adam—that is, nonbeing exists in a nonspace, which is simultaneously material and immaterial. The poem collapses the distinction between ‘adam and khalā; therefore, as translators, we make an artistic and literary choice of using only ‘adam in the English title of the poem to signify nonbeing. While it is not possible to convey the textures and history of this word in the poem’s translation, we hope this explication of the various metaphysical, theological, and philosophical underpinnings of ‘adam will allow the reader to appreciate the complex ways in which Miraji reinvents it. —Krupa Shandilya, Zara Khadeeja Majoka, and Noor Habib, translators of Miraji’s “Nonbeing”

 

 

The word Spring (Manantial) appears in the third stanza of Silvia Guerra’s “Presumption of Heaven”: “The clear water spills over / and sinks into the Spring itself, water in water.” This word draws attention to itself due to its capitalization. After accepting the poem, one of the editors asked us to make it lowercase—in The Paris Review’s house style, seasons are lowercase. The thing is, Spring is not a season here (primavera)—it’s a spring of water (manantial). For us, this was a delightful “found in translation” moment, as the double meaning of the word spring does not exist in Spanish. However, evoking the season of spring makes sense in the context of the poem, which begins with “the dry, black branches of winter seen in flight” that “run singing.” We are invited to “Come here to drink / translucent drops on fresh leaves.” It is a springtime invitation, even though the season is never named in the original.

Our conversation with the editor about the word also signals another “untranslatable” feature of Guerra’s work: her tendency to capitalize certain words—often nouns but sometimes verbs or adjectives—in the middle of a phrase. In publishing her work elsewhere, we have found that editors often ask us to lowercase her words, to normalize them somewhat. Indeed, the sudden capital letters are jarring, and they are even stranger in the original Spanish, a language that uses capitalization much less frequently than English. They are simply a part of the author’s poetics, causing certain words to jump off the page and draw attention to themselves in unexpected ways. This stylistic feature seems unique to Guerra and, in that sense, untranslatable. —Jesse Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, translators of Silvia Guerra’s “Presumption of Heaven”

 

 

Forough Farrokhzad’s “After You” is a love elegy addressed to the year she turned seven, a year that marked the loss of childhood and its innocent joys. It’s a set of scenes and images that describe a collective descent into the darkness of experience, in Blake’s sense of the word. The poem’s vocabulary and syntax are largely straightforward.

The word mīz, table, and its plural form, mīz-hā, appear in six of the fourth stanza’s seven lines. Although the word repeats in each line, its meaning and connotation shift in ways that reflect the evolving sophistication of the speaker’s younger self. Farrokhzad anchors these lines on the recurring word mīz and marks the evolution of the girls’ lives with only adverbs and prepositions. English can’t replicate that. A literal translation of the lines would be as follows (in Persian, the verb arrives at the end of a clause or sentence):

After you our play area that had been under the table

from under the tables

to behind the tables

and from behind the tables

to the tops of the tables moved

and on the tops of the tables we gambled/played cards

and we lost, your color we lost, O seventh year

The word mīz is more fluid than the word table. Embedded in phrases, it can also mean desk or dinner place, but such clarifying words are missing in lines two through five. In English, mīzhā had to change from tables to desks as the little girls grow up and go to school; and to remain desk of a different sort as the girls go to work; and then, when they are adults, to become card or gaming tables—by which time the word play, from the stanza’s opening line, has acquired a different, less innocent meaning. The speaker has witlessly gambled away the colors of her childhood, and from here, the poem moves from innocence into the dark world of experience, a world of protest, repression, violence, and death. —Elizabeth T. Gray Jr., translator of Forough Farrokhzad’s “After You” and “Window”

 

 

In Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie,” which I have rendered as “Fake Money,” the poet is outraged when his companion gives a counterfeit coin to a beggar. Translating the poem, I aimed for a coherent and well-written narrative rather than a literal version.

The phrase la criminelle jouissance in the last paragraph is difficult to translate because we have no English equivalent of jouissance. The standard definition, enjoyment, leaves out the secondary sense of the word, sexual climax. Critical theorists have made much of jouissance and connected the term itself with a transgressive impulse.

My initial solution: “joyous criminality.” Thus, for the French Je lui aurais presque pardonné le désir de la criminelle jouissance dont je le supposais tout à l’heure capable, I had: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality that I once supposed him capable of.” This is exact, if clumsy, and on further thought, I concluded the clause with the word criminality and dropped the rest: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality.”

All along, I was undecided between this formulation and one that put a greater value on narrative speed. In the end, I decided on the latter: “I might almost have acquitted him of the criminality I have charged him with.” In tonality and succinctness, this is superior, though the gain in clarity sacrifices the concept of “joyous criminality” or perhaps “criminal joy” that Baudelaire champions in a number of his prose poems (gathered under the title Spleen de Paris). Were I to publish a group of my translations, it would be with notes and an introduction addressing just such an issue as this.

I keep making changes in my translations, even after they have been published, as it is the bane of the translator’s life to keep discovering ways he or she can improve upon what he or she has done. The work is endless. But if we can communicate something of the flavor of a great writer, even at the cost of a significant nuance, the gain is great. —David Lehman, translator of Charles Baudelaire’s “Fake Money” and “Get Drunk”

 

 

Among nontranslators, there appears to be something of a fascination with the “untranslatable,” and yet a translator cannot really entertain the possibility that there are such things as “untranslatable” words because, apart from anything else, we don’t translate just words; we translate voices and soundscapes and rhythms. Anyone with a smidgen of Portuguese will doubtless ask: “What about saudade then? Is there an exact English equivalent for that?” Well, yes, there are various possible translations depending on the context in which the word is used. But I digress.

To return to the three poems by Alberto Caeiro included in this issue, I don’t think there was anything I felt to be untranslatable. What is perhaps difficult about Caeiro generally is his unnervingly plain language; one has to rein oneself in and respect that plainness. One instance when I perhaps departed from that is in the seventh line of the first poem, where I have translated Toda a paz da Natureza sem gente—which means, literally, “All the peace of Nature without people”—as “All the peace of peopleless Nature,” thus inventing an adjective, peopleless, to replace sem gente. Too poetic? In my defense, I would say that this version has a voice and a rhythm that the literal translation lacks. It also has the bonus of adding alliteration (so key to English-language poetry), as well as echoing the susurrous quality of paz/Natureza/sem in the Portuguese. Maybe this illustrates what I meant when I said that translators don’t just translate words. Each line requires the translator to make decisions not just about meaning but, above all, voice. Is this translation true to the author’s voice? Answers to that question will vary with each translator.

Another example of the kind of choices the translator has to make is the forty-ninth line of the same poem: “Saúdo todos os que me lerem” becomes “I salute all those who’ll read me.” My cotranslator, Patricio Ferrari, pointed out that when Fernando Pessoa was working on the Caeiro poems, he had already read Walt Whitman, and salute is, of course, one of Whitman’s favorite words. Indeed, Walt stands before us in the very next line: “Taking off my broad-brimmed hat to them”! The translator is, first and foremost, a close reader of a text, and untranslatability is not the issue uppermost in our minds, but, rather, the adventure and privilege of carrying that text over into our own language. —Margaret Jull Costa, cotranslator of Alberto Caeiro’s “1.,” “68.,” and “93.”

 

Explore the Summer 2020 issue.

Reimagining Black Futures

On Lorna Simpson and the Black imaginative practice of collage

Lorna Simpson, Walk with me, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

“The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

–Toni Morrison, Beloved

 

While the usual world order that we once knew has been halted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, Black people continue to be lynched. Two of them were recorded and shared for the world to witness. I wanted to protect my daughter from the harm of watching a Black man take his last breath, but the news looped these images around our living room. I reached over to cover my daughter’s eyes just as my mother used to during sex scenes in films, to shield me from the inevitable. She peeked through the crevices between my fingers, just as I had as a child. She climbed into my lap and we wept, silently. She wanted to know why they hate us so much and I wanted to know if the repetition would ever cease.

Since seeing Ahmaud Arbery murdered, each day after homeschool, my daughter and I meet on the living room floor with images that I’ve found and copied from my father’s photo albums as we quarantine at his home in Texas. There are the faces of my grandmother and her sisters in the country standing grounded and barefoot on dirt roads, my face as a girl racing against the Houston heat to consume a melting ice cream cone in nothing but my panties, moments of Black joy captured in faces that I do not know but recognize all the same. We cut these faces out and put them in the wild on mountaintops, in gardens where they exchange breath with the trees, and in the sky. Using faces of the past, my daughter and I become the architects of Black futures. The practice of collaging has carried me through this grief-heavy quarantine, a meditative motion on nights when I cannot sleep.

Lorna Simpson, Construction, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

Collaging is a historical practice of Black imagination. It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen. This is much like the work of Spiral, an art collective formed in the sixties, whose members included the recently departed Emma Amos and the late Romare Bearden. For Spiral, collaging served as visual representation of Black quotidian life. It deconstructed internalized white-supremacist stereotypes of Blackness, providing momentum to the civil rights movement.

Contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas, Tschabalala Self, and Lorna Simpson carry on this tradition while giving focused elucidation to Black femininity. In her current online exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, aptly titled “Give Me Some Moments,” Simpson uses collaging to speak to the layered and fractured identity of Black womanhood. The title of the show is not a request; it is an imperative. It is a demand for solace and reconfiguration. “We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves,” Simpson recognizes this as the immediate tragedy and offers us a counternarrative through which to reimagine our identities. Social media, a form of collaging in itself, has helped to spread content virally and essentially provide proof of what Black communities already knew to be true: that white folks are killing us. And yet, I fear its psychological effects on an already fragile collective identity. How will we think of ourselves when everything around us reduces our existence to violence in the fight for reform? Buckets of blood need not be delivered to prove we are dying, lest we run the risk of breaking our backs along the way. Collaging, with its varied layering, inherently offers a respite.

Lorna Simpson, “Lyra night sky styled in NYC,” 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

In “Give Me Some Moments,” Simpson collects archival images from Ebony magazine, a publication significant to the Black beauty canon, and layers them with some of earth’s most mystifying elements. In Lyra night sky styled in NYC, we see a Black woman with bare shoulders, her heavily lined, piercing eyes staring into us. The corners of her mouth are turned slightly toward heaven but her hair reaches further upward. Her hair is the northern summer constellation Lyra, seen best in the month of June. For me, summer used to mean ice cream in the Houston sun. Now, I just dread the slayings that the heat brings. But the bright star of Vega is centered in the image, luminous, a guiding light as women often are in the matriarchal Black family tradition. The constellation map stretches out beyond the frame of the collage, proving that there is yet more still. Black is not the absence of light, but the complete absorption of it, and the figure’s gaze holds more depths than we can see. Simpson’s work has always offered just enough story structure to intrigue, but it leaves you with ambiguity, challenging you to question whatever assumptions you bring to the narrative. She understands the correlation you have undeniably internalized between Blackness and sexualized femininity. She uses this to draw you nearer, and then subverts you.

On February 19 at 4:56 A.M. Breonna Taylor tweeted, “Why do I feel like all my life Since I’ve been able to work I’ve always been the one making sure folks straight & nobody has ever looked out for me the same way.” This is what many Black women stay up late wondering: Who is protecting me? Can they even see me? Less than a month later, she was murdered in Louisville, Kentucky, as she lay dreaming in her bed. I wonder what her last dream was. Who she saw in her sleep, what her final moments looked like in her subconscious. In lucidity, she knew what we all know; we are not safe here. Even in death, it has been proven that her life had no value in the eyes of the state of Kentucky, where her killers presumably went home before dawn, climbed into their beds and slept restfully, without fear of consequence. They still roam free because killing a Black person is as American as apple pie.

Lorna Simpson, Flames, 2019 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

In Simpson’s Flames we see two images of different Black women with fires raging from their heads, while they speak and smile and drink tea. Breonna’s tweet was sent while she worked a night shift where her coworkers probably had no clue of the yearning she held inside, of the fires she contained in her head. The most potent love I have received in this lifetime has been that of other Black women. Simpson gives nod to this in To Control Fire, which is positioned as a response to Flames. A woman’s floating head is fixed on you. You watch voyeuristically as two other women stand behind her, gently tending her hair. They control and offset the fire that they are not quite able to extinguish. Rain water ripples behind them, and Simpson’s 1986 image Waterbearer is brought to mind. In that work, a woman seen from behind, holding two vessels of water, rests above a text that reads: SHE SAW HIM DISAPPEAR BY THE RIVER. / THEY ASKED HER TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED. / ONLY TO DISCOUNT HER MEMORY. Water calms, the women calm each other. This is a necessary salve to survive. Everyone else will look at you and tell you that you’re not on fire, and this only fans the flames.

Lorna Simpson, California, 2019 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

California shows a woman in a gold jumpsuit with gold sling-back shoes, sitting relaxed on a bench, one leg propped up like a mountain peak. Her posture is alluring and inviting, as her weight rests on the palm of her hand. We can’t see her face but her body tells us she’s ready. Her head is composed of kunzite, a pink precious stone that possesses mystical romantic powers. The stone, it is said, encourages one to release the armor built up around one’s heart in order to receive abundant love. Much like the earth itself, this woman is capable of producing lava and then processing that pressure to mold precious stones.

Breonna was essential, and not just because she worked as a medical professional during a pandemic that has claimed over 100,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. In an essay in The Cut, her mother, Tamika Palmer, describes Breonna as the one who gathered the family for functions and game nights. Her magnetism pulled them together like the discreet roots beneath an archipelago. One day, we must acknowledge that Black women birthed this nation. Since its inception they have been a source of emotional comfort, of reliable drudgery, sexual laborer, physical laborer, your nanny and your mammy, your punching bag, your liberator, your organizer, your siren, granter of your manhood, the soft warm pink place for you to deposit your darkness. The most precious and valuable tool of the empire was the womb of the Black woman. In order for America to reconcile its reality with its image of itself, it has to reckon with this history first. And it hasn’t, and it can’t, because it has forgotten who its mama is.

Lorna Simpson, *Adornment, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

I have had many restless nights pondering the question Breonna asked. In the revolution that I imagine, Black women get moments of rest. I remember the many nights that my mother waited up for my brother or my father to come home, her fear that the police would pull them over, plant a substance under their seats, arrest them, or worse. Even if, by chance, you evade police violence, your mind is still plagued with fear of the possibility. Black women abused by the police are often ignored, they become footnotes in the movement toward equality. In the very city where protests erupted in honor of George Floyd, who called out for his dead mother in his final moments, just a few blocks over, a Black trans woman named Iyanna Dior was brutally attacked by more than a dozen cis Black men. The attack was filmed. The outrage was footnoted. Author Kiese Laymon recently wrote about Black boyhood in the New York Times, astutely saying, “…we tried to humiliate Octavia in the lunch room to make ourselves feel harder, impenetrable, like men.” This is what that group of Black men were seeking when they attacked Iyanna. They wanted her blood to make them whole. They were not dissimilar from the officer that kneeled on George Floyd’s neck. Fiona Apple’s recently released album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, has an entire track dedicated to a Black girl she never took the time to get to know, Shameika, who told her back in middle school that she had potential. This country owes itself to the Shameikas, the Iyannas, the Octavias, the Breonnas. To all the Black women who built men up so that they may stand erect while stepping on them all the way. Even in the civil rights movement, the rights of women were sidelined in the name of progress. “Sit down ladies, we gone get to y’all in a minute.” When we erupt, they call us angry, and we are. But we are angry and we are soft, we are formidable and we are tired, strong and vulnerable, essential and forgotten. We carry all these ways of being at once. This time, all the Black lives matter, not just those of cis Black men. Time’s up. We are done waiting.

In the 1977 winter issue of The Massachusetts Review, Ralph Ellison writes that through collaging, Romare Bearden was creating a “new visual order” that reconfigured the possibilities of Blackness as it refers to masculinity. This is precisely what Lorna Simpson has created for Black womanhood. She constructs surreal story lines that make our internalized racial bias pliable. The Black Lives Matter movement rests on the expansiveness of our imaginations, on our ability to imagine worlds that have never yet existed. The Americas were built on oppression, and a new order must be conceptualized. Reform is simply not enough. We must start from scratch, cutting up the past and then piecing together the imagined with what worked for those before us. We must start with how we see ourselves. We can liberate through loving one another. The imagination of artists has always been necessary in willing us toward an implausible existence. So when I put my ancestors in the sky, I’m manifesting our ascendence. May we never return to the way things were.

 

In the short time since I began writing this essay many more Black women and Black trans women have been murdered. The list is swelling still. Our need for protection is urgent. Say her name:

Breonna Taylor
Dominique Rem’mie Fells
Riah Milton
Nina Pop
Oluwatoyin Salau

Shiand Miller
Shaniya Gilmore

 

Sasha Bonét is a writer and critic living in New York City. She is currently at work on a collection of essays on Black motherhood and memory in America.

Seeing the Country’s Shadows on My White Husband’s Face

 

A Black woman friend who also has a white husband confesses at the height of the George Floyd protests: “Times like these, I don’t know why I’m with a white man.”

“That’s a thought I’ve had,” I say. Black people are fighting white supremacy with a force unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime.

This time, the fight hits more personal, too. I had trouble being around white people at the onset of it; my rage was too thick. In my own house, it feels disloyal not to assume the battle lines. It’s like I’m stunting the cause of my life through affiliations that subvert it—most centrally, my husband. At night, sleeping beside him, I feel the guilt of betraying my people, of betraying myself. More than that, I feel lonely.

There is a balm for this sort of collective pain my people are experiencing. We have been supplying it to each other for centuries. In conversations with my Black women friends, I have felt soothed not by any one thing they’ve said, but by the gentle power of their complete understanding. And then I go home where I can’t help but see the country’s shadows in my husband’s face.

Let me back up. My husband is woke. He’s a senior director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging for a prominent tech company. He frequents protests more than I do, often with our children. He’s quick to correct microaggressions when he notices them. He’s viewed by many in our community as an accomplice who understands the history and weight of white supremacy, the perspectives of Black people fighting for equality, and the relevant corrections that might begin to upend generations of injustice. I am prouder of him than I can say.

Nevertheless, he’s a privileged white man: he’s been given the benefit of the doubt in schools, in the workplace, and just on the street for thirty-eight years. The comfort that comes from being appraised in that way can’t be overstated. It’s evident in the way he carries himself, the tone of voice he uses, the rights he assumes. Sometimes I read him as entitled. How could he not be? Our country has raised him that way.

The country has raised me the opposite. I expect to have my opinions discounted. I am paid less for equal work. I work harder because it’s assumed I’ll make a mistake and if I do, it will reflect on my entire race. I swallow my own anger so I won’t be viewed as bitter. I code-switch around whites so I’ll be viewed as safe. I bring my husband along to doctor appointments so I’ll be viewed as worthy. I tense up around the police. At thirty-seven, I am still teaching myself to use my voice.

On the weekend following George Floyd’s murder, at the height of the protests, my husband, grief-stricken and overworked, cried. I comforted him, shelving my own sadness for a time that has not yet come. Later, his white friends will ask us how we’re doing and then zero in on him, saying in front of me that it must be so hard for him right now given the nature of his work. How is he holding up?

When, later that night, I point out the irony of that display, how dispiriting it was that even in their attempt to ally they were so fundamentally flawed, my husband says he doesn’t remember it.

“Did you notice?” I ask.

He says no. He didn’t notice. He feels guilty about his misstep, I can tell, and the guilt is a certain wedge between us. He says he’s tired and turns over. He won’t be able to hear me tonight.

The thing is, I’m tired, too. For once, I want to not have to explain why I’m hurt. I want him to notice on his own whatever racist slight has stung me. I am tired of dragging him over into acknowledgement. I want the balm of understanding—that wordless resonance I felt with my Black women friends—to envelop me from inside my most intimate bond.

Ultimately, my husband will move past his guilt and apologize. He’ll speak to his people; he’ll do whatever is in his power to make things right. Part of the reason he does this is because he understands that the toxic power dynamics in this country can’t help but affect our power dynamic at home, and that to snuff them out in the world, he, as a beneficiary of that power dynamic, as a beneficiary of that privilege, needs to snuff them out at even the most microscopic level.

More than that, my husband loves me and wants me to be happy. He sees our lives as blended, our potential for happiness as linked, and for those reasons he’s able to demand change in himself. If he was still acting from a place of guilt, the way he was when I first asked him about his friends’ remarks, that change wouldn’t have been possible. The guilt would have kept the conversation about him; it would have obfuscated the bigger picture, the interior work that is necessary for sustained progress in our marriage, and in the country. Because he’s willing to do that work, especially when it’s uncomfortable for him, I have deep faith in us, even though I have to dig deep for it sometimes.

This is where our story and the country’s may diverge. There’s an influx of support streaming in from white people right now. Black people are hearing from former colleagues and associates they never thought they’d speak to again. Any white progressive worth her salt is posting black squares or the latest instructive memes on privilege. Donations to bail funds are soaring, and yet most Black people I know are suspicious. How could they not be? It’s hard to know what sparked the sudden onset of concern. If it’s guilt, it won’t lead to sustained impact, just as it wouldn’t in my own relationship. In a few weeks, the concern will start to dwindle as will the support, and unfortunately, without the commitment of allies, the movement will falter. It is white people’s problem after all, racism. They’re the inventors of it, and they’re the carriers and the wielders. Its demise rests in their hands.

Maybe something different is going on, though. Maybe there’s awareness now, beyond my own family, that our lives are blended. Our potential for happiness is linked. The time certainly feels distinct. COVID-19 has kept us isolated for months, yet aware of a greater connection. Perhaps the realization of our shared humanity has contributed to a new day. Perhaps it is the realization that the same white supremacy that elected the leader who landed the country in this mire is responsible for George Floyd’s death. Perhaps the sense of helplessness the virus has provoked has lent whites a hint of what it might feel like to be at perpetual mercy. If through one of these threads, whites have glimpsed our predicament as part of their own, our reprieve as necessary for their own liberation, if they view themselves as inevitable contributors to this system and thus fundamental keys to its dismantling, I am as hopeful for unity in the country as I am for it in my own house. Even if sometimes, to reach that hope, I have to dig deep.

 

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s most recent novel, The Revisioners, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national best seller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in Oakland with her family.