This semester I’m part of a faculty learning cohort meeting regularly to “enhance courses in our teaching repertoire to better support and promote well-being in our students and in ourselves.” One of the first assignments was to write a short statement on what gives us joy in our teaching. Here’s what I turned in.
Walker Evans, Clean Hill Wooden Schoolhouse, Alabama, 1936
The psychanalyst Jacques Lacan—who never met a pun he didn’t like—said that teachers are people “who are supposed to know.” “Supposed” as in required—we’re supposed to know stuff, that’s our job. But also “supposed” as in imagined or projected—other people suppose that we know stuff and we build our identity on that belief. It’s the task of a lifetime to learn that what seems like a rule is in fact a fantasy, and a disabling one at that.
I like knowing things, and showing others that I know them, and helping them learn those things—yet “playing expert” is also the part of teaching that stresses me out the most.
How to push back against the idea of expertise as a kind of omnipotence?
Teaching is a way for me to be seen—which for reasons of temperament and family origin has always been a struggle. While teaching I feel, visible, viable, worthy. The joy of teaching thus inheres in the way that filling that role paradoxically allows me to perform myself. When I am at my best as a teacher I am my best self. I am funny and warm and generous: the joy of teaching is that it allows me to unabashedly affirm these values of care and concern toward others.
If I can’t be unabashed, if I feel constrained (if the students seem bored or hostile, or I imagine them that way) then I tighten up, I feel dried up and useless, a little mean even.
When I’m really teaching I’m sometimes expounding—being the expert makes me anxious but also fills me with a geeky thrill—but mostly I’m leading by example. If I can be loose and warm and curious and engaged then I can transmit those qualities to students, which matters to me because these qualities are the preconditions for critical learning.
So far I’ve had the classroom in mind. But everything I’ve said applies to less formal situations too: the conversation in the hall; the email exchange about a paper draft; the back-and-forth of a tutorial. These non-classroom situations make it clear to me that what I love about teaching is mentoring. The joy comes not so much explaining something, and definitely not from justifying my responses to student work, but in attending to another person and thereby allowing them to flourish. As the indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “all flourishing is mutual.” In such moments, there’s no supposing at all. That moment could be difficult or charged and might not be fun. But it is always a space of joy.
Yesterday I addressed Hendrix’s incoming Freshmen and their families, as part of a convocation welcoming them to the college. Here’s what I told them.
From Maus, vol 1
At the beginning of MAUS, his remarkable memoir in comic book form of growing up with parents who survived the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman tells a story about his ten-year-old self. On a summer’s day in the late 1950s, Spiegelman is rollerskating with friends in his neighbourhood in Queens when he falls and skins his knee. Tearfully he makes his way home, where his father, Vladek Spiegelman, is cutting a piece of siding in the driveway.
“Why do you cry, Artie?”, Vladek asks, continuing with his work
“I – I fell, and my friends skated away without me,” Artie sobs.
Now Vladek pauses. He looks at his son and says:
“FRIENDS? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, THEN you could see what it is, friends.”
[This is where the platform party gets nervous about inviting the Holocaust guy to give the inspiring talk…]
In the several panels over which Vladek offers this pronouncement, Spiegelman pulls back the point of view: father and son get smaller; the tidy suburban neighbourhood gets bigger; Artie’s expression is unreadable. But only two pages into the book it’s already clear how much Vladek has been shaped—by which I mean, mis-shaped—by his experience of persecution, and how he inadvertently passes on that damage to his son.
Reading MAUS, with its dramatic incidents, terrible and miraculous outcomes, and shattered family dynamics, we can easily forget that the opening anecdote turns on the idea of friendship. What could friendship have to do with the Holocaust? After all, the Nazis were determined to destroy their victims as humans—to that end, they ensured that nothing like solidarity or common feeling or fellowship could exist among victims. The result, it has been said, was a situation in which selfishness was everything. As the doctor and antifascist fighter Ella Lingens-Reiner wrote about surviving Auschwitz: “My principle [was]: “I come first, second, and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others.” [Pause] But reality was more complex. Yes, victims were often too hungry and afraid and sick to create any relationship approximating friendship. It was dangerous to care for others: the result was often punishment or torture, even death. And yet victim testimony is full of stories of connection, even among complete strangers. Care and friendship persisted throughout the ghettos, camps, and killing fields of Europe. (Lingens-Reiner, in fact, saved many people, both before her internment and during it, when she was pressed into service in the camp “hospital.”)
And despite what Vladek Spiegelman says to Artie—“If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, THEN you could see what it is, friends”—his own story is full of comradeship, solidarity, care, and, yes, friendship. A Polish priest gave him, of all things, a lesson in Torah at one of his darkest moments. A Kapo (a prisoner in charge of other prisoners) agreed to pass letters from Vladek to his wife Anja when they were briefly interned in the same camp complex. And another prisoner agreed to share a clean, by which I mean a lice-free, shirt, which prisoners had to be able to show to get even the irregular rations on offer in the chaotic final days of the Third Reich.
[Pause]
I’m always struck by the presence of friendship in Holocaust testimony. Maybe that’s because friendship has always been so important in my own life. Being and having friends has always been central to my sense of self. Which is why I believe one of the most important things that will happen to you over the next few years will be making friends who help you flourish, by caring for you and allowing you to care for them. [Slight pause] I genuinely believe that many of the most important lessons you’ll take from Hendrix will come from things you learned in class, and I don’t just say that because I’m a professor. But when I reflect back to my own time in college—at a liberal arts campus in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada—I think above all of the friends I made there. And mostly I think of one friend, my bestie, Alan Hall.
Alan and I lived together for three years. When we moved into our apartment in downtown Halifax in the fall of our Sophomore year—in a crumbling former rooming house that had, it was said, put up Oscar Wilde on his speaking tour and Duke Ellington on his frequent sojourns north of the border—we didn’t know each other that well. Of course, I’d seen Alan around during my Freshman year, it was a small school, everybody knew everybody. But I wouldn’t have called him my friend. But when my Freshman roommate decided to transfer, I needed someone to split rent with. One morning in the caf, a guy with floppy hair and a necklace of wooden beads, smelling of Patchouli (I dunno what to tell you, it was the 90s) came up to me and said, “I hear you need a roommate. I have a great stereo.” Then he gave out the infectious high-pitched yelp-snort of a laugh that I would grow to love so much over the coming years.
That was our meet cute. We were an odd-couple: Alan so open, me so shy; Alan so outdoorsy, me so not; Alan so even-keeled, me so neurotic. I’m not sure what he saw in me, but I fell in love with the joy he took in the world. I was a child of immigrants and had the buttoned-up quality of one who has had to translate for his parents and is always anxious to fit in. Alan was from an Old Canadian family—the patriarch on his mother’s side had been a lumber baron; his great-grandfather had founded the CBC, the national radio service—and he had the confidence of belonging. One time we took the bus to the mall and on the way Alan started singing, like right there, out loud, in front of people he didn’t know! I was mortified, of course, but then I saw how others smiled, enjoying that little moment of serendipitous pleasure, and I realized, with amazement, “Huh, there are other ways to be.”
Halifax, early 90s. I remember those snowbanks.
You don’t know Alan. How could you? He’s not famous. He lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. [5 bucks to anyone who can find that on a map.] He teaches part-time at a local college, and takes care of his three kids. He’s an all-around good guy, such a total delight, and the most important person in the world to me other than my wife and daughter. Now that we are middle-aged with all the ordinary disappointments and frustrations of that time of life, kids to schlep around, home repairs to ignore or contract out, we don’t have as much time for each other as we’d like. Plus, the trip from Little Rock to Fredericton is no picnic. But whenever we text or Zoom or, best of all, see each other in person, it’s like we never left off.
I know, I know, what do you care about these middle-aged Canadians? My point is this: find your Alan. [Slight pause] I’m not sure you can go looking for them, it just has to happen. But you can make yourself open to the possibility. Try new things this year: ask to sit next to someone in the caf; join a club, even if it makes you nervous; take someone up on their invitation to go the gym or a party or to the play they’re in. Put the word out that you’re looking for a roommate and when a guy comes up to you and says he has no furniture except a decent stereo (on which, you will learn, he only plays Joni Mitchell) maybe say, what the hell. Maybe you’ll meet the person who will stand up with you at your wedding, or give advice to your kids, or cheer you on when you write a book or take a new job or submit a photo to a contest or whatever it is you do later on that you’re proud of and want to be validated about.
Most of all, find someone to just hang out with. This feels like the moment in the speech where I humblebrag about the shenanigans Alan and I got up to. Alas we were too nerdy for shenanigans. But we cooked a lot of chickpeas together while listening to the CBC. [Is that a shenanigan? What’s that you say? No? Ok.] We wrote a humour column for the campus paper. We serenaded a girl outside her window one frigid night because she was roommates with a girl I really wanted to date and the girl I really wanted to date asked me to do it to cheer up her friend who was having a hard time and Alan agreed to come with me. [Now that’s a friend!]
And we talked about what we were reading. About this amazing book that blew our minds, a comic book, but about the Holocaust. The characters were half-animal, half-human, and the story was as much about what happened after the war as during it, and how the child of parents who survived the genocide indirectly suffered from their traumas. That book, of course, was MAUS. In the early 90s it wasn’t yet the classic it’s since become, taught in schools and colleges around the world. Though not in every school. You might have heard that a school board in Tennessee recently banned MAUS as being “too troubling.” As Spiegelman himself put it, partly incredulous and partly enraged, it was as if the board was saying “Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?” I can picture Spiegelman’s expression when he said this, because I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with him when he gave a lecture here at Hendrix about ten years ago. Spiegelman was kind and smart and wry, a real mensch, but also not one to suffer fools gladly. He reminded me, in fact, of Alan. Because Alan is sweet and gentle but he also doesn’t put up with any nonsense, especially with anyone who disparages people who are too often marginalized. I learned so much about my own prejudices, for example, when after we graduated Alan lived at a home for folks with Down’s Syndrome.
When you find your Alan, when you make the friendship that will last for decades, you’ll be finding someone to order late-night pizza with, yes, but also someone who will help you in the task of figuring out how to live, which is especially hard when you also realize, as you will in every class at Hendrix, that everything is complicated. The reason that scene at the beginning of MAUS is so painful is that Vladek wants, even needs, Artie to live the way he does. Which is understandable, maybe even well-intentioned—Vladek is convinced the next Holocaust is coming and he wants his son to be ready—but it’s also paranoid and paralyzing.
When you’re in college you’re figuring out how you want to live, and you need your friends to help you. Especially these days, when lots of people—a minority, maybe, but an increasingly vocal and vicious one—think that knowing how to live means dividing people into those who are worthy of protection and care, ultimately of being deemed a human being, and those who aren’t. It’s just that kind of thinking that destroyed Vladek Spiegelman along with so many other victims.
When you’re in search of your friends, of course you want to avoid people ruled by insecurity and fear and hate. They’ll be the ones judging and demonizing others. But, sadly, you must also approach someone like Vladek Spiegelman with care. Despite the friendships he made during his time of suffering, Vladek was too damaged not to replicate in his own life the divisive logic of his persecutors. (In an infamous scene in the book, Vladek launches a racist tirade when his son picks up an African-American hitchhiker.) Much better to find someone like Art Spiegelman, who, as far as I can tell, is an all-around good guy. He’d be a good friend, I bet. Problem is, geniuses aren’t always thick on the ground, even at Hendrix. So best of all to find someone like Alan Hall, who as I speak is probably going for a run before he has to pick his youngest up after school.
Thinking of home, no doubt
I can’t speak to what would happen if Alan and I were locked in a room for a week without food—god forbid any of us should learn what that’s like—but I know for sure that if I suffered any of life’s ordinary hurts, as of course I have, stuff like falling down while rollerskating, Alan wouldn’t—hasn’t—skated away. Which is funny because there’s a famous line in a song on Joni Mitchell’s album Blue (ask your parents about it). The line goes: “I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” The speaker, someone like Mitchell herself, who was born in Alberta but sought her fortune in California, is living in the US and pining for Canada—relatable!—but she’s also running away after having hurt the person closest to her. Lucky for me, Alan confined all his skating away to the cds he played on what turned out to be a really great stereo. He’s never left me yet. I wish similar good fortune to you all.
January was a long time ago, I hardly remember it. The reading month started strong, buoyed by the carryover of a modern American classic from December. Things petered out a bit toward the end, but that’s only to be expected, given the start of the semester, which was a cluster from the get-go since we spent the first week online. (Remember when we still believed in covid?) In addition to the reading and teaching, I posted almost daily year end reading reflections from a talented group of readers and writers. Check those out if you haven’t already. Maybe I’ll still do one myself. In the meantime, here are my January reads:
Jean-Paul Riopelle, Blue Night, 1953
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
What can I say that others haven’t? Titanic both in content and form, Invisible Man is a novel that doesn’t quite want to be a novel, or that wants to see to what limits novels can be pushed. Sometimes I admired the book more than I loved it; my literary preferences are more conservative than I might like to think. I was especially enthralled by the first third—I often like the childhood parts of books best, but this section has so many indelible scenes, especially one about a group of boys, including the unnamed narrator, who are brought to a southern town’s Whites Only Chamber of Commerce event to fight a cage match during which, stripped naked, they scramble to collect money thrown into the ring by the Pillars of the Community. From that electrifying (a word those who have read the book know I use advisedly) beginning, the narrator finds himself in the middle of the issues of the day, from his student days at an all-Black college which requires him to appease white benefactors (and the Black administrators who appease them) to his time in Harlem, where he joins The Brotherhood, an organization inspired by the ideals of Communism and challenged by white racism on the one hand and Black nationalism on the other. Throughout, the narrator remains enigmatic, refusing (or perhaps being refused, I can’t tell) the development we expect to find in a Bildungsroman.
When I said that Invisible Man was only uneasily a novel, I had in mind its essayistic elements, which are more pronounced in its second half. But as I think about it, where it chafes most against novelistic expectation is in its idea of what constitutes an event. It’s a book in which one character after another gives a speech. Whether in barroom yarns, sermons, or street preaching, Invisible Man is about rhetorical persuasion. What the novel itself wants to persuade us of is harder to say. I bet I could be more intelligent about this if I’d read Richard Wright, who Ellison seems to be arguing with throughout. (Is that right?) But one answer might be that the narrator speaks for many more Americans than just himself: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Not that there is no difference between Black and white experience, but that the former knows more than the latter, since its intelligibility must be measured through the tape of the other. But maybe that’s to make Ellison into Du Bois. Help me out here, fam.
How silly to say “a must read”—it is, tho.
I’m grateful to Jules and Anja, who read this with me and kept me on track.
Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019)
Brilliant sf novel—I think it’s a space opera, though I’m not really sure what that means—about the subaltern experience. Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the remote Lsel Station to the Teixcalaani Empire, arrives in the metropole to investigate the death of her predecessor, Yskandr. Like all officials from her home, Mahit has an “imago machine” implanted in her brain, containing the memories and reflections of the person who most recently held their post. But the machine malfunctions almost as soon as Mahit arrives in Teizcalaani, which means she loses the benefit of Yskandr’s insight—as well as possible clues to his death. Mahit’s investigation, which turns out to hinge on much larger political events, is exciting enough. But what makes the book so terrific is its worldbuilding. The Empire is so compellingly constructed, its system of intricate poetry so lovingly—but not boringly—detailed, its differences from Lsel so thoughtfully fleshed out. Mahit is a devotee of Teixicalaani culture; like many colonized subjects she knows it better than the colonizers themselves. Yet she can never be accepted by the Empire, she will always be a barbarian, will always feel “the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen,” which is to say she lives in “a state of simultaneous gratitude and fury.”
Martine is the pen-name for a scholar of medieval Byzantine and Armenian history who is also a city planner and climate activist; some people really do seem to be able to do everything. Her erudition shows on every page of A Memory Called Empire, as she folds the problem of colonial identity into a meditation on how the technology of the imago machine challenges even more fundamental aspects of identity: lifespan, individuality, memory. Exhilarating.
Ross Gay, Be Holding (2020)
I’d never minded gym class in elementary school, it was fun and low-stakes, but then came junior high. Like everything else, gym class got worse. A lot worse. I’d never been bad at sports, but now I was terrible. The kid who loved school hated PE days. The kid who loved every teacher, was confronted by a new phenomenon: coaches. They were the worst—one was suspended for walking into the girls changing room, which I imagine took some doing back in the 80s—and they accordingly fostered a vicious and terrorizing atmosphere. I made it through but high school gym promised to be worse.
But the teacher my tenth-grade year (happily the last year PE was a required class) was Coach Bishop, who had been on the Canadian men’s basketball team. This was not a particularly big accomplishment back then, but he was genuinely athletic, unlike some of my previous PE teachers. Much more importantly, he was kind. He used the respect his accomplishments garnered him to keep the jocks from beating up on the nerds. (Nerd had yet to become a term of respect; it’s still weird to me that that happened.) Nerds still got picked last for teams, though; Coach Bishop was not enlightened enough to have done away with that practice. I don’t think I was ever the actually last one to be picked, but it was always a close thing. Until we came to the unit on basketball. This was a time when the rise of the NBA was permeating even solidly white western Canada—we had some kind of minor league team in Calgary called the 88s, after the Olympics, which my friends and I often went to see, tickets being practically free—and I often shot hoops on my own. I wouldn’t say I was good, but I wasn’t terrible.
Coach Bishop, unsurprisingly, was good at teaching basketball fundamentals. It was a long time before he let us even scrimmage. Because we’d spent so long working on layups, I knew what to do when, in our first game, I was able to pick off a lazy pass and go in all alone for an easy two points. This surprised everyone, me included, but not as much as what happened a few minutes later, when another kid—a jock!—passed me the ball. I stopped at the circle, jumped, and let loose a shot. Nothing but net. I still vividly remember Coach Bishop’s delighted cry: “He stops, he pops, it drops!” To have invested so much in this moment—to have needed that validation so badly—that I think of it thirty-five years later, oof, not awesome.
Next class the two alpha jocks, the captains, so surprise, were as usual in charge of picking teams. I went first. Me! I wasn’t great; not terrible, but now that kids were wise to me I had lost the element of surprise. Plus I always do better without any expectations. My moment passed. We moved on to some other sport and I went back to the end of the line. That was the end of my basketball career. When I think of that brief moment of success—when I look at myself as if watching a film—can I get past the shame I feel at how much that recognition from even people I did not respect (those jocks) meant to me? Can I avow the need to be seen? What life of privilege did I lead that the worst I can imagine happening to me when fixed by the gaze of the other is feeling ashamed?
Ross Gay’s long poem Be Holding is about basketball, sort of. It starts with a brilliant description of Dr. J’s baseline scoop in the 1980 NBA playoffs, a moment that readers, like Gay himself, who stays up too late at the mercy of the YouTube algorithm, will want to watch again and again. Gay is fascinated with how Irving holds the ball, in a swooping cradle that seemed to defy gravity. This is the first of the many instances of holding that comprise the book. Holding as stopping. Holding as enabling. Holding as comforting. What begins as an imperative—always be holding— turns into a warning. Be holding becomes beholding, a much more ambiguous proposition. Freezing the frame on a grainy sports video is one thing; looking intently at an image of suffering—a photo of a young African American boy falling from a burning tenement building, for example—is another. Can we look at others (behold) and care for them (hold)? How do African Americans, especially, traumatized by the middle passage, the rupture of a voyage in yet another hold, respond to this dilemma?
I’m not doing a good job with the details of Gay’s explosive, sinuous leaps and transitions. It’s been a while and I don’t have the book to hand. But I remember glorying in his close readings of images—the book’s a triumph of ekphrasis—and thrilling to his associative leaps, as bravura as Dr. J’s how-did-he-do-that scoop. So grateful to Rebecca for pointing me to this terrific book.
Japanese crime novel, quite famous, I gather. Maybe a new translation could help me get why; this one is painfully stilted. Not sure even that would save the book, though: it’s way too long—dude investigates every fucking detail—and not a patch on Matsumoto’s A Quiet Place, which I read several years ago and still think of often. I only made it to the end because I was reading it aloud to my wife and we kept saying to each other, “Well, we’ve read this far…” We’re reading a book about sunk cost next.
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1948) Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (1957)
Tremendous novel about four sisters from an aristocratic Osaka family in the late 1930s. Filled with event—hard to know which set piece to single out: that extraordinary and terrifying flood, probably, which makes a similar scene in The Rainbow seem tame—but also leisurely, a little aimless, as if unwilling to commit to anything as definitive and perhaps crass as “action” or “plot.” Fittingly, the book repeatedly returns to the family’s attempt to marry off the third of the sisters, Yukiko, who is thirty and rapidly approaching irredeemable spinsterhood; she declines each laboriously contracted proposal, always finding some problem or other, most of which boil down to her almost Bartleby-like preferring not to.
I just couldn’t get enough of this book—it has all the feels, it considers a world at once accepting of and resistant to modernity, it has scope but is also modest. The last line is justly famous, and you should read Tom’s acute interpretation of it and its relation to Tanizaki’s depiction of violent and traumatic history. The guy wrote a lot of books; I should see what else he was up to. I’m guessing they are mostly not like this.
Last thing I’ll say: I’ve thought of The Makioka Sisters every day since reading it. That don’t happen too often.
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2000)
I’ve written about this book so many times. It’s still great, in fact, it just keeps getting greater. Every year the students love it more; Kluger’s take-no-prisoners manner gets them where they live. Before long I won’t need to read it any more to teach it, but I’ll probably keep doing so, it’s that good.
S. A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (2020)
Top-shelf Southern Noir, with enough suspense in the first half alone to merit your attention. It’s long (Cosby is not a minimalist), and it doesn’t balance action with characterization as well as the more recent Razorblade Tears but from the opening scene—late-night drag racing on the back roads of Virginia—you know you’re in the hands of a talent.
Emma Seppälä, The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success (2016)
Not my usual thing, and I pretty much hate-read it. I’d joined a reading group set up by our Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning (a psychologist, natch) in which participating faculty discussed the book with a student of their choice before we all met together. The best part of the exercise was working with my student—she is my mentee in the First Generation program at my college and an absolute delight—because she too was annoyed that Seppälä overestimates willpower and underappreciates how much privilege is demanded by her rhetoric of self-care. (I’m all for self-care, I just hate when it’s used to make people feel guilty that they have not done the impossible and avoided systemic problems.) Anyway, I learned a few things. Like the way we often think we’re relaxing when in fact we’re doing something mentally taxing. Scrolling through our social media feeds, for example, demands concentration, and leaves us more rather than less tired. So when we “take a short break” from some other task to check Twitter we’re still working, as far as our brain is concerned. Talking with colleagues and students did nothing to accelerate my success—whatever that means, ugh, management speak—but it made for a fun and, yes, happy hour or two.
Norman Lewis, Alabama, 1960
Pretty good reading month, right? Tell me about books that are exactly like Makioka because that is what I want to read this summer. Which, now that I am caught up with these monthly posts, I might actually have time for…
My personal essay on teaching Holocaust literature in the South has appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Oxford American.
Regular readers of this blog know how much I love Ruth Kluger’s memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In the essay, I begin by describing how differently Kluger’s shocked response to segregation in 1950s Texas registered for me once I started teaching her work in a classroom filled with students from Texas and across the South.
Vienna, 1938
“Cutting across Lines,” as the essay is titled, is about belonging. I consider three times and places that have shaped me–the Canada of my childhood, the Eastern and Central Europe before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust, and the South today. I reflect on how each of these worlds shapes my understanding of the others. I worked hard on the essay, helped by stellar editing from the folks at the OA and my wife, who helped me see what the essay was really about.
You can read it here, but I encourage you to subscribe to support this valuable magazine.
Gordon Parks’ “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956). Credit for all images must say: Photograph by Gordon Parks, Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation, Courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
What do we see when we’re not looking? We say we are “lost in a trance.” Could we in fact be finding our way? In a series of interlocking scenes from the middle of his 1991 film The Double Life of Véronique, Krzysztof Kieślowski repeatedly shows one of his two conjoined heroines lost in thought: at a puppet show held for the entertainment of the children at the school where she teaches; in her classroom, as she gazes out the window while her students play a new piece of music; in her car, at a traffic light, where she absent-mindedly puts a cigarette in her mouth the wrong way round.
At each moment, her reverie is connected to the same man, a puppeteer who masterminds the show she and her students are so taken by. In the auditorium she stares at his reflection, seeing him pulling the strings. In the classroom, she looks out distractedly at his van in the courtyard of the school. In the car, she eventually sees him pulled up next to her at the light. In the last case, he interrupts her absorption, honking at her as she is about to light the cigarette before motioning to her with a twist of the wrist that she needs to turn it around.
He has saved the day, it seems; the lesson is that you need to turn things around, look at them, not differently, but the right way; you need to be brought out of your absorption. But what if the man is not the hero but the villain? What if he has destroyed something? What if the scarf that in an earlier scene trails along behind the woman as she walks through the corridor of the cardiology unit in the hospital, test results clasped to her chest—suggesting a different reason for absorption than romantic infatuation—is a sign not of absent-mindedness, even carelessness, but of strength, elegance?
Several weeks ago, I sat in on a workshop for some of the students at the school where I teach who hope to apply for distinguished scholarships, like the Fulbright or Rhodes. The facilitator–who was teaching essayistic writing without naming it as such–showed part of The Double Life of Véronique and gave the students ten minutes or so to write about it. Because I loved this movie when I was in college, I decided to take up the prompt, too, and recently found what I wrote when I was cleaning off my desktop. I thought it was interesting enough to post here, in the hopes that those of you who know the movie better than I do–or who have thoughts about being absorbed–can tell me what to write next.
I wrote this essay for a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) ceremony organized by the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. For the past three years, a grant from Hendrix College has allowed me to train a small cohort of students as future Holocaust educators. As part of the commemorative programs, this year’s students and I read personal reflections about what we’ve learned studying and teaching the Holocaust.
Gerda Weissmann was 18 years old in 1942. That was the year when, having already suffered the German occupation of her hometown in southern Poland, she was deported to Bolkenhain, a subcamp in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp system. Bolkenhain was the site of a weaving mill; in a perverse way, Weissmann was lucky to end up there, as it was considered one of the best labour camps for women. Which didn’t mean it was easy or pleasant. Weissmann and her fellow internees were expected to run four looms at a time—”experts who had spent their lives weaving never handled more than three,” she later wrote, not without pride—and the work was grueling: the women were on their feet for hours, deafened by the noise of the machines, suffering from eye-strain that must have been exacerbated by the threat that any mistake would be punished as an act of sabotage.
Still, as Weissmann recounts in her memoir, All But My Life(1957, revised 1995) she came to enjoy the work: “the intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” These were emotions she would need to hold close when, in August 1943, she was sent to another camp, the notorious Märzdorf. After she rejected a supervisor’s demand for sex, her life became a living hell. He ensured she was put on so-called flax detail, a chain of women who unloaded enormous bundles of flax from freight trains for hours at a time until their bodies were bloody from the prickly fibers.
Weissmann considered killing herself, so profound was her misery, but before she could put her head on the rails she was transferred to yet another camp where she made silk parachutes that would be used by the soldiers fighting to destroy her, her family, and her people. That was merely a brief stop, though, on the way to her penultimate destination, yet another textile mill repurposed as a camp. In the recent past, Grünberg had been a model factory, designed for the well-being of its workers. But in its terrible new incarnation, that care had become a mocking façade: “The camp was modern, well scrubbed, clean, and filled with suffering.” Most of the suffering took place in the Spinnerei, the spinning hall, where a giant machine shredded finished material into a kind of mash that was then spun into yarn. Some of the material had been donated by German civilians; but other material had been ripped from the backs of those who arrived at Auschwitz. The spinning room was a terrible place. The women who worked there were soon as destroyed as the old clothes they repurposed. Weissmann describes them as:
Living skeletons with yellowish-gray skin drawn tight over prominent cheekbones; there were gaping holes in their mouths where teeth had either been knocked out or rotted out. These girls ran to and from huge spinning machines, repairing broken threads with nimble fingers. Their tired eyes and sallow jaws seemed to belie the swiftly running feet and dexterous fingers.
This mixture of life and death horrified Weissmann—not least because it prefigured her own fate. Before long she too was a living skeleton, though not nearly to the extent she would become when, after nine months in the Spinnerei, in the freezing cold of late January 1945, she and 4,000 other prisoners were forced by the SS away from the advancing Red Army and deeper into Germany. (You can read more about the infamous Death March to Volary here.) For more than a hundred days she and the rapidly dwindling prisoners (many froze, starved, were shot by callous, anxious guards, or succumbed to illness) marched over 300 miles, eventually ending up in a town in Czechoslovakia where they were liberated by American troops on May 5, 1945. At the time, Weissmann weighed 68 pounds. Only 120 women survived the march.
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Gerda Weissmann was just one of the millions of victims of Nazi persecution. We know some of their stories. We know little, almost nothing about many others’. Most Holocaust stories did not end as Weissmann’s did. Most ended in the mass graves of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia; the steadily accumulating piles of corpses in the ghettos of Eastern Europe; or the gas chambers of the extermination camps. For the past 15 years I have made it my self-appointed task to read as many of these stories as I can, and to learn as much as I can about the conditions of the lives and deaths of those whose stories must go untold. I am often asked how I can spend so much time reading, thinking, and teaching about the Holocaust. Isn’t it depressing? How can you take it? Doesn’t it make you despair for humanity?
I understand these questions. In fact, a few times a year, without fail, I feel the same way. A great weariness comes over me, repugnance, sometimes even disgust. I’ll sink into depression, overwhelmed by the enormity of the event. I’ll say to myself: no more histories or novels or memoirs, not even ones as engaging and moving as Weissmann’s.
Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern to my depression. I’ll feel it mildly in January and strongly in June. It took me a long time to realize what should have been obvious—those are the times after and between academic semesters. That, in turn, helped me realize that I seldom feel despair about the Holocaust when I’m teaching it. On the contrary, teaching the Holocaust energizes me. It’s even, and I know it is weird to say this, affirming. How can I say that? Because in doing that work I am not so different from Gerda Weissmann—my satisfaction and accomplishment comes from an analogous work of weaving, unweaving, and weaving again: placing one story next to another, juxtaposing, comparing, adding, measuring, bringing this fact together with that, paying out these threads to my students, who are themselves individual strands whose various abilities and experiences I braid into the accomplishment that is a successful class.
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The work Gerda Weissmnan was forced to do was always dangerous, always backbreaking, destructive of her body and her spirit, but occasionally, and certainly contrary to the intentions of the perpetrators, satisfying. Remember what she said: “the intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” That work also offers a metaphor for how we might think and teach about the Holocaust. Think about what Weissmnan did. She bound. She tied. She created. She spun yarn. She wove fabric. She brought different strands together to create something new. I’m not suggesting she should have been grateful for the work; I’m not transforming her slavery into something good. I’m suggesting that even in oppression there will be resistance, however slight or ultimately futile. And that making something new from diverse strands offers a model for such resistance, a model that we in our different time and place might emulate. “The intricate process of weaving gave me a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.” What was true for her might be true for us.
Literary people like myself love to talk about weaving. From Homer onward, with the story of Penelope’s secret resistance to her importunate suitors, weaving has offered a powerful metaphor for creation and destruction. Literature is itself woven; in fact, the words “text” and “textile” have the same root. They both refer to tissues and webs, to the activity of tying strands together in order to make something greater than the sum of the parts. You make an essay like you make a carpet. You write a memoir like you shuttle a loom. You study the past like you stitch and unstitch and re-stitch a garment. And when you are a maker, even one persecuted by a terrible master, some Pharaoh, some Nazi, you have just the tiniest bit of control over your situation.
In the Classical tradition of Greece and Rome, in fact, the person who weaves—I should note that it is almost always a woman who weaves: I don’t have time to talk about it here but the study of the Holocaust has for decades been imbalanced when it comes to gender: that’s a story for another day—the woman who weaves is the greatest maker of all, has the greatest control of all. A similar idea struck the writer W. G. Sebald, who, at the end of his remarkable book The Emigrants (1992) recalls his time in Manchester, the city he moved to in the mid 1960s in an attempt to escape the stifling amnesia of postwar Germany, where he grew up, having been born in a village in the Alps in 1944, and which he couldn’t wait to leave. Manchester, of course, was for a long time one of the greatest manufacturing centers in the world. Mostly it manufactured fabric made from cotton and flax, which was mostly brought across the Atlantic as a result of the slave labour and indentured servitude of African Americans.
There were other manufacturing centers across Europe, of course. One was the Polish city of Lodz, which the Germans renamed Litzmannstadt when they occupied it in 1939, but which in earlier decades had been known affectionately as the Polish Manchester. That infrastructure was the reason that the Lodz ghetto—one of the most crowded places in human history, where 165,00 Jews and Roma lived in 1 1/2 square miles, a dense landscape of suffering, illness, despair, and death—became home to dozens of workshops, in which Jews made among other things uniforms for the German army.
The Lodz ghetto was a terrible, terrible place, but you wouldn’t know it from the most famous pictures of it that have come down to us. These were taken by a man named Walter Genewein, a Nazi accountant, sent to Lodz as financial manager of the German ghetto administration, and a passionate amateur photographer, perhaps as much as, across Europe, in an utterly different situation, a man named Otto Frank had been. Genewein’s ghetto photographs are tinted pale blue or green, which gives them an otherworldly air, as does the absence of crowds. His photos are staged, not state-sanctioned propaganda exactly but saturated in the Nazi worldview nonetheless. In the last lines of his book, Sebald describes a single photo taken by Genewein, one of many the accountant took of the metalwork shops, basket-weaving ateliers, and nail factories that constituted the futile hope of the Jews of Lodz that their essential labour would protect them from death. The photo Sebald fixates on is of a textile workshop. Three women, probably about 20 years old, the same age as Gerda Weissmann, sit behind a loom. Here’s how Sebald describes them, in a beautiful translation by the poet Michael Hulse:
The light falls on them from the window in the background, so I cannot make out their eyes clearly, but I sense that all three of them are looking across at me, since I am standing on the very spot where Genewein the accountant stood with his camera. The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of the night, with spindle, scissors, and thread.
Nona, Decuma, and Morta: in Latin, the Parcae, in Greek, the Moiri, in English, the Fates, who spun the thread of life, measured its length, and cut it, thereby determining the length, time, and mode of a person’s death. Women who meted out life and death. Weavers, writers, creators. Like Gerda Weissmann, the unnamed women in the photo are victims of particular circumstances, and emblems of suffering more generally. But like Weissmann they take on at least some of the power of the Fates. They are helpless, determined, accomplished. Unknown yet not forgotten. In weaving their stories together with those of others—just as in pacing my classroom like Weissmann among her looms—just as in sending the students you heard from tonight out into the world as weavers themselves—I hope in some small way to do their example justice.
I feel bad saying it, it is a mark of my privilege and comfort, but 2020 was not the most terrible year of my life. In many ways, it was even a good year. I have secure employment, about as secure as can be found these days, and what’s more I spent half the year on sabbatical, and even before then I was working from home from mid-March and didn’t miss my commute for a minute. Thanks to the sabbatical, I avoided the scramble to shift my teaching to a fully online schedule—watching colleagues both at Hendrix and elsewhere do this work I was keenly aware of how luck I’d been to have avoided so much work. I do worry, however, that I’m hopelessly behind the curve, clueless about various technologies and best practices; I expect elements of the shift to virtual will persist.
My family spent a lot of time together last year; among other things, I watched my daughter grow into someone who edits YouTube videos with aplomb. (At not-quite ten she is already the house IT person.) As an introvert, I found staying home all the time the opposite of a burden. (Last week I had to be somewhere relatively crowded, for the first time in months, and boy am I going to be in for a rude awakening when this is all over.) I missed seeing friends, but honestly my social circle here is small, and I continued to connect with readers from all over the world on BookTwitter. Most excitingly, I had a lot of time to read. I’ve heard many people say their concentration was shot last year, and understandably, but that wasn’t my experience. For good or for ill my response to bad times is the same as to good—to escape this world and its demands into a book.
But sometimes, usually on my run, I’ll wonder if I’m mistaken in my assessment of the year. I suspect a deep sadness inside me hasn’t come out yet: sadness at not seeing my parents for over a year; at not being able to visit Canada (I became a US citizen at the end of the year, but Canada will always be home; more importantly, our annual Alberta vacations are the glue that keep our little family together); at all the lives lost and suffering inflicted by a refusal to imagine anything like the common good; at all the bullying and cruelty and general bullshit that the former US President, his lackeys, and devoted supporters exacted, seldom on me personally, but on so many vulnerable and undeserving victims, which so coarsened life in this country.
I think back to the hope I sometimes felt in the first days of the pandemic that we might change our ways of living—I mean, we will, in more or less minor ways, but not, it seems, in big ones. I feel hopelessness at the ongoingness of the pandemic, the sense that we may still be closer to the beginning than the end. And a despair fills me, affecting even such minor matters, in the grand scheme of things, as this manuscript I’m working on—could it possibly interest anyone?
I suppose what most concerns me when I say that 2020 was not a terrible year is my fear of how much more terrible years might soon become. My anxiety about the climate-change-inspired upheavals to come sent me to books, too, more in search of hope than distraction. A few of the titles below helped with that. Mostly, though, reading books is just what I do. I am reader more than anything else, and I expect to be for as long as that’s humanly possible.
For the second straight year, I managed to write briefly about every book I read. You can catch up on my monthly review posts here:
All told, I finished 133 books in 2020, almost the same as the year before (though, since some of these were real doorstoppers, no doubt I read more pages all told). Of these 45 (34%) were by men, and 88 (66%) by women. 35 were nonfiction (26%), and 98 (74%) were fiction. Sadly—if predictably—I read no collections of poetry or plays last year. I didn’t read much translated stuff: only 30 (23%) were not originally written in English. Only 4 were re-reads; no surprise, given how little I was teaching.
Highlights:
These are the books that leap to mind, the ones I don’t need to consult my list to remember, the ones that, for whatever reason, I needed at this time in my life, the ones that left me with a bittersweet feeling of regret and joy when I ran my hands consolingly over the cover, as I find I do when much moved. These are the books a reader reads for.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
My book of the year. A road novel about a cattle-drive from the Mexican border to Montana around 1870. Thrilling, funny, epic, homely. Characters to love and hate and roll your eyes at and cry over and pound your fists in frustration at. And landscapes to swoon over, described in language that is never fussy or mannered or deliberately poetic, and all the better able to capture grandeur for that. I think about the river crossings all the time. And those last scenes in wintry Montana. Lonesome Dove is good for people who love Westerns. It’s good for people who don’t love Westerns. Recently someone asked me to recommend a 20th century Middlemarch. Crazy, I know, but I immediately thought of this book, which, albeit in a different register and in a different location, is similarly fascinated by the webs that form community, and why we might want to be enmeshed in them. (A goal for 2021 is to re-read Eliot’s masterpiece to see if this comparison has any merit.) If you read novels for character, plot, and atmosphere—if you are, in other words, as unsophisticated a reader as me—then Lonesome Dove will captivate you, maybe even take you back to the days when you loved Saturdays because you could get up early and read and read before anyone asked you to do anything.
Kapka Kassabova, To the Lake
I loved Kassabova’s previous book, Border, and was thrilled that my high expectations for its follow-up were met. Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa, connected by underground rivers, straddle the borders of Greece, Albania, and the newly-independent North Macedonia. This book is about these places, but as the singular noun in the title suggests, “lake” here primarily concerns a mindset, one organized around the way place draws together different peoples. Like Border, To the Lake is at first blush a travelogue, with frequent forays into history, but closer inspection reveals it to be an essayistic meditation on the different experiences provoked by natural versus political boundaries. Unlike Border, To the Lake is more personal: Kassabova vacationed here as a child growing up in 1970s Bulgaria, as her maternal family had done for generations. But Kassabova seems more comfortable when the spotlight is on others, and the people she encounters are fascinating—especially as there is always the possibility that they might be harmful, or themselves have been so harmed that they cannot help but exert that pain on others. In Kassabova’s depiction, violence and restitution are fundamental, competing elements of our psyche. One way that struggle manifests is through the relationships between men and women. As a woman from the Balkans who no longer lives there, as a woman travelling alone, as an unmarried woman without children, Kassabova is keenly aware of how uncomfortable people are with her refusal of categorization, how insistently they want to pigeonhole her. (No one writes ill-defined, menacing encounters with men like she does.) People have been taking the waters in these lakes for centuries—the need for such spaces of healing is prompted by seemingly inescapable violence. I’ve heard that Kassabova is at work on a book about spas and other places of healing, and it’s easy to see how the forthcoming project stems from To the Lake. I can’t wait.
Kate Clanchy, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me & Antigona and Me
Clanchy first earned a place in my heart with her book based on her life as a teacher, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. She is particularly good on how we might teach poetry writing—not by airily invoking “inspiration” but by offering students the chance to imitate good poems. These models will inspire students to write amazing poems of their own, and offer students whose background is from outside the UK (where Clanchy lives) the chance to refract their own experiences into art. Clanchy is committed to the idea that students have things to gain from their education, if they are allowed to pursue one. But she is equally adamant that students have things to give to the institutions where they spend so much of their lives. Thinking about what a child might bring to her school reminds us that education is a public good first and not just a credentialing factory or a warehouse to be pillaged on the way to some later material success. It’s an idea that might begin to redistribute the social and economic inequalities attendant in neoliberalism.
I’m sure I liked Some Kids as much as I did because I’m also a teacher. Which doesn’t mean I don’t think non-teachers (and non-parents) will enjoy it too. But I do think Clanchy’s earlier book Antigona and Me is an even greater accomplishment, with perhaps wider appeal. Antigona is Clanchy’s pseudonym for a Kosovan refugee who became her housekeeper and nanny in the early 2000s. The two women’s lives became as intertwined as their different backgrounds, classes, and values allowed them. Yet for all their differences, they are linked by the shame that governs their lives as women. Antigona’s shame—her escape from the code of conduct that governed her life in the remote mountains of Kosovo, and the suffering that escape brought onto her female relatives—is different from Clanchy’s—her realization that her own flourishing as a woman requires the backbreaking labour of another—and it wouldn’t be right to say that they have more in common than not. What makes the book so great is what fascinating an complex characters both Antigona and Clanchy are. Riveting.
Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
A brilliant historical novel. My knowledge of the Napoleonic wars is thin—though having just finished War and Peace I can say it is less thin than it used to be—and I appreciated learning about both the campaign on the Iberian peninsula and the various milieu in England, ranging from medicine to communal living, that were both far removed from and developed in response to that war. (Miller has Penelope Fitzgerald’s touch with the telling detail, conjuring up the mud and blood-spattered viscera of the past while also showing its estrangement from the present.) But what has really stayed with me in this book about a traumatized soldier on the run from both his memories and, more immediately, a pair of contract killers hired to silence the man before he can reveal a wartime atrocity is its suggestion that the past might be mastered, or at least set aside. Reading the last fifty pages, I felt my heart in my throat. Such anxiety, such poignancy. This book really needs to be better known.
Helen Garner, The Spare Room
Garner is a more stylistically graceful Doris Lessing, fizzing with ideas, fearless when it comes to forbidden female emotions. Old friends Helen and Nicola meet again when Helen agrees to host Nicola, who has come to Melbourne to try out an alternative therapy for her incurable, advanced cancer. Garner brilliantly presents Helen’s rage at the obviously bogus nature of the therapy—and Nicola’s blithe (which is to say, deeply terrified) unwillingness to acknowledge that reality. Helen is resentful, too, about the demanding and disgusting job of taking care of Nicola (seldom have sheets been stripped, washed, and remade as often as in this novel). Emotions about which of course she also feels guilty. Nicola expresses her own rage, in her case of the dying person when faced with the healthy. In the end, Nicola has to be tricked into accepting her death; the novel lets us ask whether this really is a trick. Has Nicola gained enlightenment? Is false enlightenment, if it gets the job of accepting reality still enlightenment? What does enlightenment have to do with the failure of the body, anyway? I loved the novella’s intellectual and emotional punch.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
I’ve grouped these titles together, not because they’re interchangeable or individually deficient, but because the Venn diagram of their concerns centers on their conviction that being attuned to the world might save it and our place on it. These are great books about paying attention. Whether describing summer days clearing a pond of algae or noting the cycles nut trees follow in producing their energy-laden crop, Kimmerer reminds us that “all flourishing is mutual.” We are only as vibrant, healthy, and alive as the most vulnerable among us. The past year has taught us the truth of this claim—even though so far we have failed to live its truth. Jamie observes a moth trapped on the surface of the water as clearly as an Alaskan indigenous community whose past is being brought to light by the very climactic forces that threaten its sustainability. Robinson imagines a scenario in which dedicated bureaucrats, attentive to procedure and respectful of experts, bring the amount of carbon in the atmosphere down to levels not seen since the 19th century. Even though Robinson writes fiction, he shares with Kimmerer and Jamie an interest in the essay. We need essayistic thinking—with its associative leaps and rhizomatic structure—more than ever. These generous books made me feel hopeful, a feeling I clung to more than ever this year.
Best of the rest:
Stone cold modern classics: Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw (autofiction before it was a thing, but with the texture of a great realist novel, complete with extraordinary events and powerful mother-daughter drama—this book could easily have won the Booker); Anita Brookner’s Look at Me (Brookner’s breakout: like Bowen with clearer syntax and even more damaged—and damaging—characters); William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows (a sensitive boy, abruptly faced with loss; a loving mother and a distant father; a close community that is more dangerous than it lets on: we’ve read this story before, but Maxwell makes it fresh and wondering).
Stone cold classic classics:Buddenbrooks (not as heavy as it sounds), Howells’s Indian Summer (expatriate heartache, rue, wit).
Thoroughly enjoyed, learned a lot (especially about hair): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
Best deep dive: I read four novels by Tessa Hadley this year, two early ones and the two most recent. Since I’ve read a few of her books before I now only have two more to go before I’ve finished them all. That will be a sad day, though with luck we will get a new one before too long. Hadley has been good from the start, but The Past and Late in the Day show her hitting new heights of wisdom and economy. Her characters are arty types or professionals who learn things they don’t always like about what they desire, especially since those desires they are so convinced by often turn out later to have been wrongheaded (like Proust’s Swann, they spend their lives running after women who are not their types, except “women” here includes men, friends, careers, family life, their very sense of self). I can imagine the future day when young literary hipsters rediscover Hadley’s books and wonder why she wasn’t one of the most famous writers of her time.
Did not totally love at the time, but bits and pieces of which would not quite let me alone: Tim Maugham’s Infinite Detail (struck especially by the plight of people joined by contemporary technology when that technology fails: what is online love when the internet disappears?); Henri Bosco’s Malicroix translated by Joyce Zonana (so glad this is finally in English; even if I was not head-over-heels with it, I’ll never forget its descriptions of weather. Do you like wind? Have I got a book for you!).
Loved at the time but then a conversation with a friend made me rethink: Paulette Jiles’s The News of the World. I was a big fan of this book back in the spring—and its rendering on audio book, beautifully rendered by a gravelly-voiced Grover Gardner—and I still think on it fondly. But a Twitter friend argued that its portrayal of a girl “rescued” from the Kiowa who had taken her, years earlier, in a raid is racist. I responded that the novel is aware of the pitfalls of its scenario, but now I’m not so sure.
Maybe not earth-shattering, but deeply satisfying: Lissa Evans’s V for Victory, Clare Chambers’s Small Pleasures, two novels that deserve more readers, especially in the US, where, as far as I know, neither has yet been published.
Most joyful, biggest belly laughs: Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul. That bit in the supermarket! Priceless.
Best Parul Seghal recommendation: Seghal elicits some of the feelings in middle-aged me that Sontag did to my 20-year-old self, with the difference that I now have the wherewithal to read Seghal’s recommendations in a way I did not with Sontag’s. Anyway, I’ll follow her pretty much anywhere, which sometimes leads me to writers I would otherwise have passed on. Exhibit A in 2020 was Barbara Demnick, whose Eat the Buddha is about heartrending resistance, often involving self-immolation, bred by China’s oppression of Tibetans. In addition to its political and historical material, this is an excellent book about landscape and about modern surveillance technology.
Ones to watch out for (best debuts): Naoisie Dolan’s Exciting Times; Megha Majumdar’s A Burning; and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary. Have I ever mentioned that Leichter was once my student?
Longest book: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Almost 1500 pages of easy reading pleasure that I look on with affection (perhaps more than when I first finished it) rather than love. Although now that I have finished War & Peace I see that Seth frequently nods to it. Wolf hunts!
Longest book (runner up): Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend A mere 900-pager. As I said back in November, “I read it mostly with pleasure and always with interest, but not avidly or joyfully.” Most interesting as a story about “revenants and ghosts, about corpses that don’t stay hidden, about material (junk, trash, ordure, tidal gunk, or whatever the hell “dust” is supposed to be) that never comes to the end of its life, being neither waste nor useful, or, rather, both.” Happy to have read it, but don’t foresee reading it again anytime soon.
Slow burn: Magda Szabó, Abigail (translated by Len Rix). Bit irritated by this at first but then realized the joke was on me—the narrator’s self-absorption is a function of her ignorance. All-too soon ignorance becomes experience. Not as gloriously defiant as The Door, but worth your time.
Frustrating: Carys Davies, West. Ostensibly revisionist western that disappoints in its hackneyed indigenous characters. I do still think of bits of it almost a year later, though, so it’s not all bad.
Left me cold: James Alan McPherson, Hue and Cry; Fleur Jaeggy, These Possible Lives (translated by Minna Zallman Procter); Ricarda Huch, The Last Summer (translated by Jamie Bulloch) (the last is almost parodically my perfect book title, which might have heightened my disappointment).
Not for me, this time around (stalled out maybe 100 pages into each):The Corner That Held Them; Justine; The Raj Quartet; Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight. Promise to try these again another time.
Stinkers: Géraldine Schwarz, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe—A Memoir, a History, a Warning (translated by Laura Marris); Jessica Moor, The Keeper; Patrick DeWitt, French Exit; Ian Rankin, A Song for the Dark Times
Writer I read a lot of, mostly very much enjoying and yet whose books do not stay with me: Annie Ernaux. I suspect to really take her measure I would need to re-read her, or, better yet, teach her, which I might do next year, using Happening. As I said in regards to the latest Sigrid Nunez, I think I do not have the right critical training to fully appreciate autofiction. I enjoy reading it, but I cannot fix on it, somehow.
Good crime fiction: Above all, Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, an impressive inversion of the procedural. Honorable mentions: Susie Steiner; Marcie R. Rendon; Ann Cleeves, The Long Call (awaiting the sequel impatiently); Tana French, The Searcher; Simenon’s The Flemish House (the atmosphere, the ending: good stuff). In spy fiction, I enjoyed three books by Charles Cumming, and will read more. In general, though, this was an off-year for crime fiction for me. What I read mostly seemed dull, average. Maybe I’ve read too much the last decade or so?
Inspiring for my work in progress: Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Mendelsohn excels at structure—and in these three linked lectures he tackles the subject head on.
Best Holocaust books (primary sources): I was taken by two memoirs of Jewish women who hid in Berlin during the war: Marie Jalowicz Simon’s Underground in Berlin (translated by Anthea Bell) and Inge Deutschkron’s Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin (translated by Jean Steinberg). Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoir All But my Life is worthwhile, with a relatively rare emphasis on forced labour camps. In her novel Other People’s Houses, closely based on her own experience as a child brought from Vienna to England on the Kindertransport, Lore Segal takes no prisoners. Uri Shulevitz’s illustrated memoir, Chance: Escape from the Holocaust, is thoroughly engrossing, plus it shines a spotlight on the experience of Jewish refugees in Central Asia. Of all these documents, I was perhaps most moved by the life of Lilli Jahn, a promising doctor abandoned in the early war years by her non-Jewish husband, as told by her grandson Martin Doerry through copious use of family letters. My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900 – 1944 (translated by John Brownjohn) uses those documents to powerful effect, showing how gamely her children fended for themselves and how movingly Jahn, arrested by an official with a grudge, contrary to Nazi law that excepted Jewish parents of non or half-Jewish children from deportation, hid her suffering from them.
Best Holocaust books (secondary sources): I was bowled over by Mark Roseman’s Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany. Fascinating material, elegantly presented, striking the perfect balance between historical detail and theoretical reflection. To read is to think differently about our misguided ideas of what rescue and resistance meant both in the time of National Socialism and also today. His earlier work, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany, which focuses on a part of the larger story told in the new book, is also excellent. Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz is another fine example of the particular used to generate general conclusions. Considering the fate of the Galician town of his ancestors in the first half of the 20th century, Bartov uses the history of Buczacz, as I put it back in January, “to show the intimacy of violence in the so-called Bloodlands of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. In his telling there was a seemingly ineluctable drive on the part of almost every group to reduce the region’s cultural diversity, and that much of the violence required to do so was perpetrated by one neighbour against another.” Dan Stone’s Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction does exactly what the title offers. It covers an impressive amount of material—Nazi and Stalinist camps feature most prominently, no surprise, but they are by no means the sole focus—in only a few pages. Rebecca Clifford’s Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust skillfully combines archival and anthropological material (interviews with twenty child survivors) to show how much effort postwar helpers, despite their best intentions, put into taking away the agency of these young people.
Because my sense of how long things will take me to do is so terrible (it’s terrible), I’m always making plans I can’t keep. I should either stop or become more of a time realist. I do have a couple of group readings lined up for the first part of the year: Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel in February, and L. P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy in March. I’ve enjoyed, these past months, having a long classic on the go, and will keep that up until the end of my sabbatical. Having just completed War and Peace—guaranteed to be on this list in a year’s time—I might read more Russians. We’ll see. I want to read more Spanish-language literature—though I’ve been saying that for years and mostly not doing it. I want to read more writers of colour, especially African American writers. I took a course in college but have so many gaps to fill. I’m reading more nonfiction with greater pleasure than ever before—the surest sign of middle age I know; I’m sure that will continue in 2021. I read almost no comics/graphic novels last year, unusual for me, but I’m already rectifying that omission. I’ll read more science fiction in 2021, I suspect; it feels vital in a way crime fiction hasn’t much, lately. My two prime candidates for “deep dives” this year are Edith Wharton and Toni Morrison. Now that I am an American I should know the literature better!
What I’ll probably do, though, is butterfly my way through the reading year, getting distracted by shiny new books and genre fiction and things that aren’t yet even on my radar. No matter what, though, I’ll keep talking about it with you. That is, I’ll put my thoughts out here, and hope you’ll find something useful in them, and maybe even that you’ll be moved to share your own with me. Thanks to all my readers. Your comments and reactions and opinions—that connection—means everything to me.
In the early 90s, Kate Clanchy was a young teacher in a decaying mining town in Scotland. Tasked with teaching her thirteen-year-olds about HIV, she soon realizes the children know nothing about sex. She has them write their questions anonymously and promises to answer them, no matter what. Never since in her thirty years in the classroom, Clancy avers in Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, has she been so frightened. But the sex education class goes well: the children are interested, relieved, full of relieved laughter. What if you’re having sex and need to pee? Can you have sex while menstruating? Most of the questions, she explains in a characteristically deft phrase, are “not about juices, but about love: could anybody love; could gay people love; could you change later on. I only had to say the words aloud and say yes.”
As a prize-winning writer, Clanchy is in the classroom less often these days, but she can still silence a fractious room with a glance or chasten obnoxious teenagers on a bus. Yet despite these formidable qualities, she invariably appears in the book as the kind of teacher she was in that moment in Scotland: someone who makes things possible, someone who offers a model. I only had to say the words aloud and say yes.
In the Scottish classroom, lesson completed, Callum sidles up to her. Callam, who, “in a class of undersized, undeveloped children,” is “by far the least tall, the least developed.” The boy asks:
‘Whit wis the name for men and men?’
‘That was homosexuality, Callum.’
‘Aye. And whit wis the name for women and men?’
‘That’s heterosexuality, Callum.’
‘Aye. Well, when I grow up, I’m no’ going to have either o’ them. Ah think Ah’ll just have a big dog.’
But Kids Say The Darndest Things is not, thank God, Clanchy’s modus operandi. Here’s what she says next:
No one said ‘fluid’ back then—gender fluid, fluid identity—but fluid is a good word for that afternoon. The room seemed liquid, lacking in barriers. And fluid was what those children were, behind their stern names and rigid codes. Changeable, molten, and warm as any child; waiting for a mould, hoping there would be space for the swelling, shrinking, and unknowable quantity of themselves. For Callum, that space needed to include the possibility of living on his own, and that was as important to him as the possibility, for surely one child in that class, and very probably more, of falling in love with someone of your own sex. So, I didn’t say that would be bestiality, Callum, though the thought flickered across my mind. I said yes, yes, Callum, you could do that. A dog would be very nice. That, Callum, would be grand.
The book is full of generous and smart reflections of this sort. It would have been easy (but wrong) to joke about this provincial child. And Clanchy is honest enough to suggest that she thought about it. Instead she gets a laugh without a joke, and a warm laugh at that. Plus, she shows us how important flexibility is to good teaching. Look how alive her prose is, studded with precise, mobile adjectives—students are “changeable, molten, and warm,” wanting their “swelling, shrinking, unknowable” selves to find a place in the world. We don’t create ourselves from nothing, no matter what bootstrap conservatives would have us believe, we need models, moulds to use Clanchy’s word. Family—especially extended family, especially that extended family of friends and mentors and people who wish us well we have if we are lucky, a topic Clanchy explores brilliantly in her earlier memoir, Antigona and Me—often provides such a mould. And so does school.
In addition to her narrative non-fiction, Clanchy has written a novel and a book of short stories. But she is best known as a poet; in addition to her own verse, she has complied anthologies of poetry written by her students, mostly from the multicultural school in Oxford where she teaches. Students speak dozens of languages at home; no ethnic/racial group makes up a minority. It is a truly diverse place, an exhilarating but also difficult reality, especially for someone trying to teach poetry. The landscapes Clanchy’s students have grown up in are not “ones with lakes and low hills and houses filled with grandmothers in aprons who baked sponge cakes”; thanks to unconsciously imbibed structural racism, the students don’t understand their experiences as proper subjects for poems. (She tells an anecdote about two girls from the subcontinent who write adventures stories together, stories set in American summer camps they have no experience with. The stories are awkward, misshapen. “‘The thing is,’” she gently points out, “‘canoes don’t have engines? Usually.’”)
So Clanchy brings to class examples from young poets, written by POC whenever possible. More than the subject matter, though, or the background of the writer, what matters is her method. She passes around a poem, asks the students to read it, then starts talking with them, not interpreting the poem so much as just seeing what conversation it sparks. Then she sets them to writing their own poems, maybe asking them to copy the structure of the example, or giving them a line to repeat. They write amazing poems.
Everything Clanchy does with students follows this credo, music to my ears:
We are learning to write by reading and to read by writing.
She adds:
We will know we are learning to read well when we recognize beauty and truth in our own writing and in others’ writing. We will know we are progressing in writing at those times when we go beyond ourselves; when we express what we did not even know we meant in a graceful synthesis of words and sounds that is both ours alone and part of the richness of our languages and literatures. We will know we have learned much about English at various points in the future, near and far, when we express ourselves confidently in writing, and when we find joy and humour and wisdom in reading.
I almost balked at “beauty and truth,” but this isn’t Keats or Arnold (not that I imagine Clanchy has any problem with them). And I love the “going beyond ourselves” formulation (not least because of that inclusive “our”—these words apply to Clanchy as much as her kids). I believe in this idea too, I chant it at my students, I’ve seenithappen. When you give students time, and encouragement, and good models, when you help them let go of the idea that writing is a mere transcription of some preexisting idea, and show them that writing is thinking, is creating, you get exciting results. Moreover, you don’t always know the full extent of what they will achieve. You plant the seeds and trust in the flower, though you’re not often around to see it.
Interestingly, Clanchy doesn’t follow the prevailing (in the US, anyway) wisdom that writing, especially creative writing, is self-expression. She is uninterested in using writing to process trauma, especially for students who are refugees or poor or both (as many of Clanchy’s students are) and who know trauma first-hand. She admits, though, that her philosophy has changed: she has come to see how expression matters inasmuch as it leads to detachment, distance, and control: “The writing of a poem does not open the writer to a desperate blurt… rather, it orders the experience it recounts and gives the writer a grip on it.” Even when they exaggerate or self-aggrandize, as her student poets often do, they are controlling their experience. And if they do more, “if they dig deep, and find effective images, and make a good poem out of the truths of their lives, then that is not just control, but power. It is different from being happy; it isn’t a cure for anything, but it is profoundly worth having.”
Clanchy’s insistence that feeling oneself a valid, meaningful person—being legible to others as a fellow human being, sadly much rarer than you’d think—lies at the root of the book’s most inspiring idea. She calls it “patrimony,” by which she means the abilities, interests, and dispositions a child brings to an educational situation. Instead of worrying—as middle-class parents in the US and UK routinely do—what school will give their kid, we should consider what their kid will bring to school. Writing about the decision she and many of her well-educated friends face—do we send our kid to the local school (more diverse, less highly ranked) or to the “better” one?—she concludes, “You are taking something away from the community when you withdraw your child.” Moreover, to do so is to destroy a virtuous circle. Because it isn’t just the community that gains; it’s also the child. Here’s the balance she draws up after she and a friend decide, inciting much neighbourhood consternation, to send their boys to the local school:
What they received at school: those grades [her son did just as well as he would have done at the “better” school], a special card from Faroq entitling them to free minicab rides in exchange for all the help in Maths, the ability to knit, an acquaintanceship with kids from every corner of the globe, and the confidence that if they walked across any rough park in town, late at night, and were approached by a hooded gang, it would probably just be Mo and Izzat, saying hi. What they gave: their own oddity in the rich mix of the school, their Maths coaching, their articulate voices in class, their academic demands, their parents’ informed labour, their high grades to spike the stats, their evident wellness and cheer to act as advertisement for other parents… And one other thing they got: the knowledge that they had something to give—a patrimony—as well as something to take, from the communities they joined.
Clanchy disparages academic streaming: “the good done to the selected minority is always smaller than the bad done to the rejected majority.” By contrast, she values special classes for struggling students—what at least at the time of writing was called in the UK Inclusion Units (IU). These beliefs are contradictory only from the position of equality, rather than that of equity. Many, even in the education system, disparage the IU as holding lower performing kids to lower standards. But “higher standards” is almost always a code for “what rich, white, well-adjusted kids know how to do.” Standards in the IU, where Clanchy teaches poetry once a week, are in fact challenging. “It’s just that the IU acknowledged that for some kids, very simple things were challenging.”
I love how Clanchy’s mixes tartness (evident when she demolishes streaming) and generosity (evident in her writing about the IU). She’s always ready to counter received wisdom, always ready to imagine why people do what they do, even when those actions seem self-defeating or dismaying to middle-class norms. Writing about why so many girls in the IU got pregnant, for example, she concludes:
The IU girls did it to contribute to the family home, to be like their families, or because even six months in the council mother-and-baby unit as you waited for a flat was better than living in an unhappy home. [From a US perspective, it’s amazing how generous the UK benefits system seems. That is not a compliment to the UK.] They did it because they didn’t know anyone who had done it differently, and middle-class choices such as university seemed completely unreal. They did it because they weren’t willing to reject everything about their own upbringing, especially when people from different backgrounds had not been helpful to them. They did it because they wanted someone to love, and because they believed, as we all do, that they could make a better job of it than their own mothers. They did it because it was the only route to a bit of independence and status realistically available to them. They did it because they weren’t stupid, not because they were.
These analyses are even easier to take on board because Clanchy doesn’t spare herself. Take, for example, the story of Kristell, a girl in the IU who is bombarded with unwanted attention by boys (they snatch her papers, they read aloud over her shoulder, they harass her in all sorts of petty, maddening ways). One day Kristell plaintively asks why they do it. Because you’re so beautiful, Clanchy replies, because they want your attention, because they like you.
Kristell’s face crumples: You’ve got it all wrong, she says. They hate me. No, Clanchy tuts, that’s not right. But later she concedes that Kristell knew what’s what. And the problem wasn’t just the boys. She was right
to tell me that the boys’ attention was a form of hate; it was, and so was my attitude to her, so was the attitude of our entire society, the attitude that identifies disruption as coming from the young girl, not the gazing man, that attributes power to such a powerless person.
Clanchy’s writing pedagogy aims to chip against this structural disparity, to replace, even just a little, even for the kids as expert in self-sabotage as Kristell—that is, as resourceful in finding even this desperate and Pyrrhic strategy for responding to the impossible situations of their lives: Kristell writes poems about self-harm and rape—powerlessness with power.
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me has many fine qualities. It’s often funny—a student at a debate tournament makes a long speech “about climate change, linked, as it so often is, to littering.” It’s often heartfelt—to a colleague who, having dedicated herself to the IU and done so much for so little recognition, despairs over the value of her work, Clanchy stoutly insists, “‘It was a great thing, what you did in the IU. One of the best things I’ve ever seen.’” And, as these and the many other examples I’ve been compelled to quote suggest, it’s always wise and generous.
I wish this book would be published in the US, but I bet it won’t. US publishers are parochial and the book’s necessarily specific to the UK education system: seldom have I so enjoyed a book I understood so little of. But Some Kids will speak even to readers who, like me, don’t know what GCSE stands for or what a comprehensive is. Not because growing up is the same everywhere (though some bits are) or because everyone could learn from Clanchy’s way of teaching (though many could). But because to write carefully about particular situations—to indulge our fascination about the details of our lives—is to write for wide appeal. Some Kids recently won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Maybe that will entice someone to give it a try over here.
Clanchy starts the book with a little hymn to September, “school’s New Year.” A time to start afresh, to meet new students, to see how old students have become new people over the summer. A time when it’s easy to remember the wonderful parts of teaching, perhaps most importantly, she suggests, how the classroom takes her out of herself.
This line resonated strongly with me—I’ve always found the classroom a way of both being and escaping myself. That’s how this introvert can thrive in that performance space; that’s why the crap of daily life can fall away for an hour. This September will be the first time in twenty years I won’t be in the classroom—given how fraught, how dangerous this fall is likely to be, I’m even more grateful for a fortunately timed sabbatical—and I know I’ll miss it. But I’ll be thinking about it. Instead of being in the classroom I’ll be writing about it—or trying to, anyway. It’s time to give myself the chance to write a long-imagined book on teaching the Holocaust. I’m frightened of this opportunity, at least half-convinced I’m not up to the task. I read Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me as an example of what I might write. Often I was daunted. How will I ever write anything this good? How will I capture my students so vividly? How will I blend narrative and analysis so elegantly? Then I thought about Clanchy’s idea of models. I remembered what she said about writing poems. First you read some, and then you try them on for size. You imitate them, you tinker, you improvise, you bring your inimitable self to the thing you’re copying.
Both of my Swiss grandmothers loved to garden—vegetables more than flowers. They came of age in the 1930s, when thrift, frugality, parsimoniousness, always characteristic Swiss traditions, were especially valuable. Decades later, as a child, I would spend the summer in Switzerland every four years or so. These trips were the most indelible experiences of my life.
After especially busy sessions in the garden, my paternal grandmother (we called her Grossmami) would be almost laid-up with back pain. Nothing could actually incapacitate her: she was always in motion, a doer more than a thinker. She allowed herself the occasional nap, but that was it. Idleness was not for her.
I was never as close to Grossmami as to my maternal grandmother, my Grossmueti, but I loved her: she was sweet and witty and sassy and had gorgeous, opulent hair she was vain about. I inherited the hair and the vanity.
In the summer of 1986, when I was 14, my sister and I spent a month in Switzerland on our own before our parents joined us. We ate a lot of vegetables from the garden: lettuce, tomatoes, rutabagas (gross) and green beans, so many green beans. (In retrospect, I wonder how much radiation we consumed with them—the Chernobyl disaster had happened only a few months earlier.)
Once, when Grossmami came in from the garden, hands on her back, bent forward, I asked how she had hurt herself. She spoke no English, really; my Swiss German was good but hardly perfect. She told me she had a Hexenschuss. I did not know this word, it seemed strange and ominous. Something about a witch?
I mean, I was not totally crazy. Eine Hexe is a witch. Ein Schuss is a shot. A shot from a witch? A witchy shot? Surely not. She tried to explain: it came from bending over in the garden too long, it happened when you got older, it hurt, it went away in a day or two. It was no fun but it was no big deal.
The next time I was at my maternal grandmother’s (the grandmothers lived about 20 minutes apart) I looked in a German-English dictionary. Grossmueti spoke only a little more English than Grossmami, but hers was a house of books.
The few books owned by my paternal grandparents were clearly for show, unwanted sediment from some long-forgotten Book of the Month Club-type membership. I still remember a gilt-backed Crime and Punishment, a book I’m sure they never read but that I knew I would. (Even then I was good at using the thought of reading something—as opposed to actually reading it—to mark the person I wanted to be.) My maternal grandmother, by contrast, had lots of books. They were mostly my grandfather’s, a Marxist machinist who loved Charlie Chaplin but who never seemed funny to me, on the contrary, he was stern and unsmiling and had always scared me (he died of a heart infection when I was ten). Some of the books were her own, mostly about women in religion; in her quiet way she was a feminist, it seemed to me to fit with her quiet dignity (she was very tall, especially for a woman of that time, that might have contributed to my sense—when I think of her I see her on her bicycle, she took it everywhere and never learned to drive). Even as kid it was clear how different Grossmueti’s house was from Grossmami’s. Grossmueti lived in a town, Grossmami in the country. Grossmueti’s kitchen had no need of flypaper. Her living room had no television. Television was a big deal at Grossmami’s, although this was back when there were no programs during the day. All of these things made their houses seem totally different to me. What I might say now is that although my father’s parents were richer, my mother’s parents had more cultural capital.
Which takes me back to the dictionary. Ein Hexenschuss, I read, was “lumbago.” (The dictionary was clearly British.) That didn’t help. I knew the word from Agatha Christie mysteries, where people, mostly curates, sometimes suffered from it, but I didn’t know what it meant. It always sounded vaguely like a dance, though I knew that couldn’t be right. Hexenschuss, the word as inscrutable as my grandmother’s pain, remained one of those cross-cultural mysteries, those gaps in communication that made me feel more helpless and childish than I was, and that always left a gap between me and my relatives. It was frustrating to be a bookish child, in love with language, yet unable to communicate to family with ease and nuance.
Flash forward thirty-five years and now I know that the pinching feeling I get when I vacuum is lumbago. Every week, as I push the bloody thing around in a losing battle against the dog hair that coats the house, the word runs through my head (Hexenschuss, Hexenschuss, Hexenschuss) and I think of my grandmother Madeleine Stuber, née Muriset, who was from a town known in German as Biel and French as Bienne (like the writer Robert Walser whom I almost wrote my dissertation on) and whose first language was French and who was as elegant as people in that part of rural Switzerland got, and who would have surely been happier with another husband but who, I think, had a good life, certainly a long one, and might in fact even still be alive had she not elected in 2015 to take up her right, under Swiss law, to end her life.
She was in her mid 90s then, depressed and ground down by age but still mentally and mostly physically together. She shuffled a bit, worried about falling. She was probably developing Parkinson’s. Her decision to kill herself through physician-assisted suicide did not go over well with her children, my father and my aunts. (No one ever knew what my uncle was thinking.)
I’m reminded now that hexen means to do witchcraft, to perform black magic, to do ill—this is where the English word “hex” comes from. Our word “hag” has the same origins; eine Hexe is also a pejorative for a woman, a minx, a hussy, at least it used to be, the term might be old-fashioned and definitely should be retired. Madeleine was not a minx, though it’s the kind of thing people in my father’s family might say: the Stubers were into snappy retorts and teasing, all very funny, but with an undercurrent of meanness, as teasing always carries. So Hexe is also a curse, which is probably the primary referent in Hexenschuss—that pain makes you feel cursed all right. I feel sad about the end of my grandmother’s life, but not angry. I don’t think her life was curses, or her suicide a curse on her descendants. No crime, no punishment.
My grandmother Madeleine with my grandfather Paul
Instead I think that at least I spend an hour or so thinking about her each week. As I busy myself with the vacuum, taking grim satisfaction in making order from mess—I’m a little grossed out by dirt, gardening has never been my thing, the vacuum is my rake, my hoe, the rug and the floorboards my garden—I feel the pinch in my lower back and think about Madeleine, who knew I was different from her and everyone else on that side of the family, but didn’t mind, wasn’t made insecure by that difference, never forced her gangly, awkward grandson into the garden, left him to his books. Takes my mind off the pain of the lumbago.
Some years I’m lucky enough to teach a course I’ve designed called Writing for Life. In it, I help students write personal statements for scholarships, internships, or professional and graduate schools. I also work with them as they write personal essays. My aim is to help students see that writing is inextricable from thinking, and, as such, that writing is an important part of a reflective life, no matter what one’s eventual life path.
All students have been affected by COVID-19. But I have particular sympathy for the students of the Class of 2020, who have been denied those important, bittersweet last moments of triumph, expectation, and longing that compose the final weeks of a college career.
As a small way of compensating some of those students–as well as to highlight some outstanding work from my class–I asked three students who wrote particularly excellent final essays if I could share their work here.
The final assignment was to write about an important object in their lives in a way that case light on the object, on the writer, and on some concept or idea that could only be reached by thinking about the relationship between writer and object. This year, I gave students the choice of reflecting on their experience of the pandemic. I think it will be clear which direction each student chose. At the end of the essay, you can learn more about the writer.
Today’s essay is by Chloe Harris. It is titled The Book of Chloe. You can read the two earlier essays in this series here and here.
The author’s mother showing off some of her crosses.
The Book of Chloe
I like to read. I used to love to read. My younger self dove into book after book, living vicariously through the main characters, losing all touch with reality while my eyes drank in the details. You would find me curled up on a bench during recess, sneaking to the bathroom during dinner or with a flashlight late at night, catching up with my favorite friends.
When my focus returned to the present, I was involved in a program called National Girls Ministries from Kindergarten to 8th grade. In the later years of the program, we were expected to read the bible every week and write about what we learned. My initial resentment of the assignment for taking me away from the mystical world of wizards and dragons wore away when I started reading more of this Good Book. War, love, sacrifice, betrayal – I couldn’t put it down, reading more than I was assigned every night. I read the entire collection cover to cover, rereading the books that interested me the most. I always skipped Numbers, but Exodus, Thessalonians, Ezekiel, Job and Revelations had pages nearly ripped at the spine from the many times I flipped back through the stories.
I was forging my own sermons by the time I was 11 and even wrote a song for the choir to sing during a Sunday morning service. For each resonating passage I found, I’d practice the way I’d interpret it in front of my mirror, throwing in phrases I’d heard in church and long pauses to build suspense. I suppose this is the first place I found my love for taking leadership, expressing my opinions, connecting with those around me. When I think about the bible, I often think about my father. We shared many moments discussing the verses and relating words written nearly 3000 years ago to twenty-first-century society. He taught me how to see beyond the words, finding meaning hidden in the verses. Our back-and-forth sharpened my mind, opening my eyes to perspectives I hadn’t considered in my initial readings of the captivating stories.
My relationship with religion, and with my father, was commensal. I was a remora fish suctioned on to the belly of large shark. I gained a lot from the shark when I was younger: Protection, nutrients, a great community. Eventually, though, I realized the shark was not gaining anything from me, ignoring my presence when I asked where we were going or suggested an alternate route. Something once so integral to my identity is now only a fading memory.
My parents had been divorced for many years, but my mother opened a new case for custody when I was in 8th grade. She won, and after moving out of my father’s home, I was able to start forming my own opinions. I started questioning the connections we drew from the scriptures more often during the weekends I spent with him. My father’s responses were condescending, rigid, and offered little for my understanding. The more I asked, the harsher his reactions became. A shark snapping at the small fish that swam too close to its snout.
“I don’t understand why God allowed Job to be tortured” My words tip-toed from my mouth as I skimmed over the pages of one of my favorite chapters.
“Mmm? Why’s that?” His eyes peered through his reading glasses as he sorted through papers scattered across the coffee table, too preoccupied to see my furrowed brow.
“Aren’t we supposed to resist Satan’s temptation? It seems like Satan was goading God and rather than ignoring it, God felt challenged and Job suffered for it.” I glanced up from the passage to see my father glaring at me, his glasses pulled away from his face as if to make sure the small windows weren’t impeding his anger. He regurgitated the lesson on how God will test us and the next day, our devotion was centered around what happens to those whose faith strays.
My questions soon turned into statements of disbelief and angry mutterings as my relationship with God became seemingly one-sided and futile. I was tired of hearing “read these verses and pray about it” when I wanted validation. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but the book I used to love transformed into a tiresome riddle that I was weary of reading. Anger lingered around me for a long time. My anger grew when I couldn’t justify my faith any longer or discuss scripture with my youth group without a cynical shadow looming over the conversations. It exploded when my mom finally told me that the church had shunned her, the kindest woman I have ever known, even as the pastor preached acceptance and community in every sermon. It simmered when I realized the only connection I had with my father was our shared love of the bible and mine was dissipating. I was just angry, and all my rage was directed at God and everything about him.
My father and I never recovered our relationship after I rejected my faith. I haven’t seen him since the summer after my 9th grade year and reading the bible only opens a wound that isn’t fully healed. I stopped going to church services, removed myself from youth group chats and threw away the extensive scripture journal I kept, distancing myself from any reminders of religion. I became the shark, refusing to acknowledge any part of my past that remained attached to me. At least until my mom came home with an obsession with crosses.
My mom’s crazy addiction for the simple shape made seeing them bearable. The excitement and joy she radiated when a new cross settled into its space on the wall made it difficult to look at the shape with disdain. I found myself drawn to her reactions. All giggles and scrunched noses and happy dances while she hung the ones my brothers and I would give her. Mom’s joy was infectious. She was always 100% herself, with chaotic decorations, loud laughter, and random bursts of energy.
During my years in high school, I saw my momma cry for herself for the first time and many more times. Her post-partum depression deepened when we found out she needed surgery to remove a tumor from her cervix. Her hormonal instability worsened when menopause wreaked her endocrine system and she found out my little sister had sensory OCD. Her heart broke when her husband cheated on her and she was facing yet another divorce that she knew would be difficult for everyone involved. I watched her strain to maintain her happiness while the world continually threw shots at her, as if it were trying to find her breaking point. But she never broke. I think the crosses had something to do with it. Despite loving her reactions to them, I was not exactly thrilled about the dozens of crosses gracing the wall right across from our front door. They were obnoxious and loud, with giant gemstones, bright colors, and mismatched patterns painted on the limbs, but I think I think the crosses made her feel closer to God. They reminded her she could shift some of the weight of her burdens onto His shoulders and He would take them, the same way Jesus took them when He carried a cross through Jerusalem.
I started to appreciate God for helping my mom even if I could not bring myself to repair my relationship with Him. He was helping her be who she really was underneath the pain and those crosses reminded her of that. They reminded her of the love she was able to give. During my Pentecostal upbringing, countless sermons reminded me to let the Lord’s light shine from within us. “Show others the kindness and mercy of our savior, let Him lead them to the light through you.” I cannot think of a more light-filled person than mom. Working as a nurse for more than half her life, the patients my mom has taken care of remember her. The words “nurse Kristy” shout to her from across parking lots and in grocery stores when people recognize the woman who took the time to care about who they were rather than what they were diagnosed with. Visiting her at work and seeing the smiles she could bring to the faces of those riddled with cancer and losing hope fueled my determination to make a difference in the medical field – to have her light shining from within me. I strove for many years to shine the way she does, letting the love of God fill her so that when people are around her, they can feel the love too. Her selflessness, empathy, and wholehearted kindness leak from her as if she’s made of a porous material that cannot contain it all. She took a small, simple symbol, and shaped it into something that gave her strength, resilience, openness, and the ability to change.
The older I get, the more I see how much of my mother seeps out of me. I laugh while I’m crying when watching sappy movies, I jump up and down, singing out my words when I’m excited, I cry for my friends and dance to songs in my head when I’m bored. Though my interior design skills are far superior, I am so proud to be her mirror image. The first cross my mom bought was large, nearly 3 feet of bronze decorated with elegant twirls of metal, twisting in and out of large gaps found at the end of each limb. The middle of the cross was a raised hemisphere with small curled knobs circling it, once a dark brown, now shining with oil from the many times my mom rubbed it as she passed. A small gesture reminding her she was okay.
“What you don’t like this one? EEEEK I love it! Y’all know I have my special style!” I raised an eyebrow as mom threw up her arms and pretended to cock a shotgun holding the hot-pink trimmed zebra printed cross in her hands. Hiding my grin, I rolled my eyes and watched her struggle to find space for it on the crowded wall. My eyes skimmed over the bedazzled, glittering objects, falling on the Dallas Cowboys themed cross she was moving to the side and laughing as I cringed. She started humming some hymn I vaguely recognized from church. I felt my chest squeeze tight and the grin drop from my mouth as that familiar feeling of resentment settled over me.
Though my mother and I are so similar, I am sometimes lacking in her ability to let things go, change her thinking and move forward without burdens. My anger toward God fueled an ongoing battle between my past self and the person I was becoming. It took a lot of energy to house all that hatred, to blame a single entity for every negative aspect of my past and work to forget a lifetime of experiences. For a long time, I saw my religious past and the relationship I had with my father as something that needed to be cut off so that I could grow into who I was meant to be. I realize now that I did not lose a part of myself when my opinions and beliefs contradicted the rigid interpretations my father had laid out for me. I reshaped it. I reshaped it the way my mom is constantly reshaping herself so she is not consumed by morbid and harmful realities and can accept the world as it is.
My religious past gave me critical thinking skills. Sitting criss-cross applesauce at the end of my bed, my neck craned over the yellowing pages of a bible, I saw more than laws and stories. I found my opinions. I owned my voice. When reading essays and research articles, I appreciate their beauty and intelligence, but still critique and interpret their meanings. The bible gave me a curious mind and a desire to understand the afflictions of those suffering. I am not easily satisfied with unanswered questions. I push and I speculate, and I can change my mind. My mom’s relationship with crosses reminded me of my ability to see things in different perspectives while respecting each one. She helped to put aside the pain I held onto. I am still a shark. Swimming along with my remora fish, no longer ignoring the suggestions and lessons they have, I use their guidance to build my own path. I do not have the same relationship with my father or God as I once did, but I am grateful for the things they taught me.
“This is great, Chloe Anne-Marie. You wrote this all by yourself?” I struggle to picture the blurry face of my father as he said these words the first time I brought him a sermon. Written in purple marker with small yellow flowers, orange fish and blue crosses decorating the borders, the paper filled me with pride. “You need to reference the bible more often though,” his cheery tone turned flat, “or these are just your words and not words that were given to you by God.” I watched as he stenciled in possible verses, slashing his black ball point pen through the words I had practiced a dozen times in the mirror. My eyes glued themselves to the wrinkles lining his forehead while my teeth dug into the soft flesh of my cheek. I wrote two sermons later that night. One was written in pen, with the addition of versus and quotes from the bible lying neatly on my father’s desk. The other, a replica of the original, hanging beside my bed, signed Chloe Harris.
Fin
Born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Chloe Harris graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in biochemistry and molecular biology from Hendrix College. She will go on to work in a urology clinic during her gap year before attending medical school next fall. When she isn’t making detailed lists or talking off her friends’ ears, she’s covered in paint and hunched over a canvas.
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 