Though Jesus’s Parable of the Talents is often invoked when churches ask congregants for their yearly pledges, thanks to Amy Frykholm (in today’s Journey to Jesus), Diana Butler Bass, and Debie Thomas, I’m now reading it in an entirely different way. The master in the story should not be seen as God, she argues, but rather as a greedy master who wants his underlings to make as much money for him as possible.
In the story, two servants invest the money given them, earning the master’s praise when he demands a percentage, while the third buries it. Bass says that the story should be titled, “The Story of the Courageous Whistleblower,” commending the third servant for telling the truth. In doing so, “he’s cast out. He lost everything,” to which Bass adds, “But Jesus loves outcasts and the poor. It is among them where the Kingdom can be found.”
Here’s enough of the story for you to see her point:
Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
As Thomas observes,
Jesus asks nothing of us that he has not done himself. Just days after telling this parable, he was “cast into the outer darkness” of crucifixion, torment, and death. Like the third slave, he was deemed “worthless” and expendable by the people who wielded power and influence in his day. Like the third slave’s costly talent, he was buried in a rock-hewn tomb.
Apparently, there is a good kind of “worthless” in the economy of God. May we find the courage to embody it.
Frykholm, meanwhile, recounts how her minister gave each of the members of his congregation $20 and instructed them to follow the example of the first two servants. After agonizing for weeks, she finally just anonymously returned the money to the church, the equivalent of burying rather than investing it. While the third servant is relatively powerless in the system, Frykholm says that “when he does have an opportunity to call it out, he uses that opportunity to tell the truth and to pay the price.”
She then applies a Richard Rohr observation to her mental tumult:
If something goes to you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it is the choice of God. (The Universal Christ)
The fact that grace was not flowing, Frykholm writes, should have been her first clue. It returned when she opted out of the exercise entirely. She concludes her argument with a George Herbert account of free-flowing grace. Somewhat like Bob Dylan in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Herbert stacks up nine metaphors to describe the process:
Come, My Way By George Herbert
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life: Such a way as gives us breath; Such a truth as ends all strife, Such a life as killeth death.
Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength: Such a light as shows a feast, Such a feast as mends in length, Such a strength as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart: Such a joy as none can move, Such a love as none can part, Such a heart as joys in love.
If Jesus is the third servant, choosing a heart that loves over money games, then outer darkness does not get the last word.
As I list books that shook my work, I don’t insist that I remember exactly where I was when first reading them. Nevertheless, when I do, it’s a good indication that the poem or story belongs in this series. I was a 27-year-old graduate student in the building that houses Emory University’s English Department when I sat down to read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
It was a Sunday afternoon on a pleasant autumn day so the building was empty. I was in the graduate students’ lounge preparing to teach the story, which appeared in a fiction anthology graduate students taught. Because I had never encountered O’Connor before, I had no idea what to expect.
I emerged from the story half an hour later entirely disoriented. I remember stumbling out of the building in a state of shock as I made my way home. I felt that I myself had been in the Georgia countryside witnessing a psycho killer gun down a family.
Shock is O’Connor’s intended effect as the story’s opening gives no indication of what is to come. The early part reads like comic social satire as an unpleasant grandmother and her unpleasant family are preparing to take a weekend excursion into the countryside. A disagreeable narcissist, she trades jibes with the two older children, both thoroughly disagreeable themselves. Meanwhile, her long-suffering son takes the wheel. The mother, who carries a baby on her lap, is pretty much silent throughout the story.
Thanks to the grandmother’s faulty memory, the family gets lost. Then disaster happens when the family cat, which she has smuggled aboard against orders from her son, gets loose and jumps on him, causing the car to run off the road and flip over. His wife suffers a broken shoulder, the injury catching the reader off guard. Like the car, the story has veered into unexpected terrain.
It only gets worse. Three men find them and the grandmother unfortunately blurts out the identity of the leader, whom she has seen on wanted posters. Known as the Misfit, he is a killer who has escaped from jail. While the situation has changed, however, she remains as aggravating as ever, causing her son to swear at her. The Misfit might have killed the family anyway, but being recognized seems to seal the deal.
The father, mother, and children are taken off by the gang members, and we hear the shots as they are murdered. Needless to say, at this point in the story we have reached the point of no return.
O’Connor, however, still has a surprise awaiting us. It appears that only something this drastic can penetrate the grandmother’s narcissism, getting her to care for someone beside herself. Unexpectedly, her concern is for the Misfit:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
The story is striking in and of itself, but I think other reasons account for why it affected me as deeply as it did. While I’m not the narcissist the grandmother is, like her I have lived a life of privilege, cocooned from the world by my education and middle-class upbringing. Until I graduated from college and married Julia, other people had been largely responsible for my well-being.
Meanwhile, my father’s hoping that his children would restore his innocence after witnessing the horrors of Dachau led me to close my eyes to human depravity. I had read about human evil, of course—the Birmingham church bombing, the Kent State killings, the My Lai massacre—but they were abstract. A short story somehow made evil real for me.
Because of this, the grandmother’s moment of compassion, comparable to Jesus’s forgiveness on the cross, felt all the more extraordinary. Although, like Peter, she betrays Christ—” Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” she says to the Misfit after failing to soften him by invoking Jesus—in the end she understands Jesus’s love for the first time in her life.
Although I wouldn’t become a church member for another 15 years (I described myself as a secular humanist), the symbolism hit home. Maybe love was more powerful than death. My sense of disorientation arose over how the story shook up various certainties.
The Misfit is witness to this transcendent moment. The grandmother has penetrated the shield he has erected around his humanity, which is buried so deep he himself doesn’t know it’s there. I think of the final moment in the movie Dead Man Walking, where a man who has committed a horrific murder glimpses “the peace that passeth all understanding” in the moment before the executioner’s lethal injection ends his life. Sister Prejean has been telling him about God’s love throughout his time on death row, but only at the end does he get it.
The Misfit had thought that he and the grandmother are fellow narcissists and to this point he has been right. Terrified by the world her love opens up for him, however, he leaps back and kills her. Better to eradicate the new possibilities than acknowledge them.
The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
His wise but darkly comic summation shows that the moment has hit home. “She would of been a good woman,” he says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
And then, because he has glimpsed the light before choosing to reject it, he sums up life from the perspective of one to whom the world appears darker than it ever has before. It comes as he chastises gang member Billy, who is experiencing a sadistic high from the group’s murderous joyride:
“Shut up, Bobby Lee” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
I was a long way from embracing Christian faith at this point in my life, but I can see how the story articulated my sense that my rational mind, with its materialistic understanding of the universe, could only take me so far. O’Connor took me into realms I had no language for. Episcopalian ritual and the Book of Common Prayer have gotten me a little closer.
Jesus has proved the good man who was hard to find.
Yesterday (or perhaps today, depending on where you are in the world) was Veterans Day so I share a poem beloved of my father, a translator for the Third Army during World War II. He included Harry Reed’s “Naming of Parts” in his poetry anthology Poems of War Resistance (Grossman, 1969),but I’m only now understanding its significance for him.
Most of the great war poems understandably feature combat. Scott Bates, however, used to observe that books about the army usually fail to capture the soldier’s full experience. I remember him writing to Paul Fussell and Studds Terkel, authors of books about World War II, pointing out they had left out soldier sex. While he didn’t stray himself—we Bateses are fairly Puritanical when it comes to sex—he witnessed much while carrying out military police duties in liberated Paris and occupied Berlin. Terkel wrote back acknowledging that he should indeed have included the subject.
“Naming of Parts” gets at another aspect of the military that often gets missed, which makes it a good poem for Veterans Day: my father used to mention the mind-numbing boredom. Reed’s poem starts with the voice of a drill instructor and then follows a recruit’s thoughts while the man is nattering on. The Latin inscription is from a Horace love poem in which the Roman poet employs war imagery to describe his sexual exploits: “Recently I lived suitable for warfare, and I soldiered on not without glory.” Alan Michell, to whom the poem is dedicated, was a friend of Reed when the two were engaged in Japanese code-breaking at Bletchley Park:
The Naming of Parts By Henry Reed
To Alan Michell Vixi duellis nuper idoneus Et militavi non sine gloria
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got. The branches Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt, And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, For today we have naming of parts.
The juxtaposition of poetic lyricism with the dull but deadly mechanics of war reminds me of a similar contrast in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” perhaps the greatest of all anti-war poems:
Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
Reed’s poem for the most part implies rather than directly comments. Only towards the end, after balancing the two points of view, does he note that humans lack balance. Nature goes on naturing while we obsess over weapons of war.
The poem’s phallic imagery (bolt, breech, cocking piece) led me to wonder whether Reed was homosexual and whether Alan Michell was his lover. A quick check of the internet informed me that he was indeed gay and had a lover at Bletchley, but this lover was not Michell but one Michael Ramsbotham. At any rate, the contrast between fertile nature (“the early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers”) and mechanistic warfare brings to mind Stanley Kubrick’s movie Doctor Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
I’ve written in the past about the film’s depiction of mechanistic sex. It concludes with a masturbatory Captain Kong riding the bomb down to nuclear annihilation, the ultimate orgasm. Strange love indeed.
The movie is unfortunately only too relevant as our current “Secretary of War” (as Pete Hegseth calls himself) appears to model himself on General Jack D. Ripper. The name is a pun, and Hegseth, charged in the past with sexual assault, is as obsessed with testosterone as Ripper is with “precious bodily fluids.” Pray that the film doesn’t prove predictive, with Trump and Hegseth “dropping the big one” on Iran in an attempt to salvage their manhood.
But back to Reed’s poem. I think of how my poet father, a lover of nature, may have allowed his mind to wander as drill sergeants bellowed out instructions about sling swivels. Seldom in America have we seen a clearer instance than eros pitted against death. There’s no better way to honor our veterans than by keeping America out of future wars.
Speaking of sex: When my father returned to Carleton College in January of 1946, he got in trouble with President Larry Gould for publishing a story in the literary magazine about a repressed young soldier who suddenly encounters a Paris brothel, does a 180, and in the ensuing months contracts multiple cases of venereal disease. One sees in the story my father’s fascination with the road he didn’t take, but one wasn’t supposed to talk openly of such matters on college campuses in those days.
In a related story, which my mother used to tell with great relish, another of her soldier boyfriends—as innocent as my father—went to a Paris brothel thinking it was a restaurant. When he asked the prostitute at the door where he should go, he was told (imagine this being delivered with batted eyes and in a sultry voice), “Upstairs.” Every once in a while, out of the blue, my mother would smile mischievously and intone in the thickest French accent she could muster, “Upstairs!”
While we are properly joyous about last Tuesday’s rejection of Trumpism, we don’t know how much damage the president and fascist enabler Stephen Miller can do over the next two years. The final scene in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose haunts me with one dark possibility.
I’m traveling and so don’t have the novel before me, but (as I recall) disaster strikes after justice has seemingly prevailed. Franciscan monk William of Baskerville (the Sherlock Holmes reference is deliberate) has been called in to solve a murder in a Benedictine abbey with an impressive library. Further murders are committed while he is there, some of them involving blackened lips and fingers. Ultimately we learn that a rediscovered Aristotle manuscript is at the heart of the mayhem.
Before moving on, here’s an observation about the library by Baskerville’s assistant Adso of Melk:
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
Adso comes to realize how vulnerable books are:
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Given the dangers of oblivion, the monks find intoxicating the discovery of an Aristotle manuscript discussing the virtues of comedy that no one knew existed. A sequel to The Poetics, the philosopher’sexploration of tragedy. the work is so important that no monk who comes across it can resist opening it and diving in.
The blind monk Jorge, however, believes the book to be an abomination because he regards laughter as a sin. Given the veneration that monastic scholarship accords to Aristotle, he fears that a book celebrating comedy will corrupt all who read it. He therefore coats the edges of the manuscript with arsenic, correctly anticipating that anyone reading it will lick his finger to turn the pages.
Baskerville confronts Jorge with his crime and, very much in the manner of Holmes, explains how he has penetrated the mystery. As I recall, he exhibits some of the same smug self-satisfaction that we see in Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective. Readers, meanwhile, are glad the crime has been solved. We’re at the point in my political parallel where America rejoices over the country’s rejection of Trumpism.
Unfortunately, the self-destructive blind monk still has a trick up his sleeve. First, he begins to eat the poisoned pages. Then, when a horrified Adso rushes forward to prevent him, he grabs the lantern (he can sense its heat) and disappears into the stacks. Before long, the entire library is aflame and the great collection is destroyed. Baskerville and his assistant escape the conflagration but are broken men.
Will Trump and Miller do something comparable, setting the world on fire now that they are desperate. Rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson, who has become critical of the president, fears that he will drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. Miller, meanwhile, burns with the fanaticism of the true believer, which means that he may double down on his attacks on immigrants, small fishing vessels, and people he disagrees with. We can expect that Budget and Management Director Russell Vought, a primary architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to be similarly fanatical. Their goal is maximum destruction.
At the end of the novel we are told Adso returns to the ruins of the abbey years later. His goal: to salvage scraps and fragments and begin building a new library. We need our own rebuilding project.
I’m teaching Richard II in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class today and boy does it look different than when I taught it two years ago. Then, of course, Joe Biden was president, so when I looked at the play, the passages about corruption landed differently. They hit home now.
In the play, Shakespeare addresses an impossible situation: an incompetent monarch is destabilizing a country that relies on a hereditary monarchy for social stability. As bad as Richard II is—I’ll get to his screw-ups in the moment–overthrowing him has consequences that last for generations.
Democracies are superior to monarchies (and autocracies) because the institutions are more important than the ruler: impeaching a leader does not harm the institution because provisions for impeachment are written into the Constitution. That document, affirmed by the original colonies and amended since, is essentially our monarchy. Our own dire consequences occur when the Constitution is assaulted.
I therefore found myself thinking of Trump as a mixture of Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke/ Henry IV. On the one hand, Trump, like Richard, is incompetent, narcissistic, sadistic, and corrupt. But like Henry, his assaults on the fundamental social contract—the Constitution in Trump’s case, the divine right of kings in Henry’s—threatens to unleash social upheaval.
In the course of the play Richard proves to be
—incompetent: he botches a quarrel between two noblemen; —corrupt: he confiscates Henry Bolingbroke’s land to pay for his Irish war; —susceptible to impulsive actions and wild mood swings; —arrogant and deaf to good advice; —enabling of corruption in others:: Bushy, Bagot, and Green are characterized as “caterpillars of the commonwealth,” feeding off its green foliage.
As this last image indicates, Shakespeare uses gardening analogies to capture corruption’s effect on England. The image begins with the gardener’s assistant asking why he must keep working with the country in turmoil. His account describes what Trump and his grifters are doing to the nation:
Servant: Why should we in the compass of a pale Keep law and form and due proportion, Showing, as in a model, our firm estate, When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin’d, Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars?
The gardener sounds like Democrats predicting corruption investigations. The king that allowed “this disordered spring,” he says, “hath now himself met with the fall of leaf.” As a result, the grifters are no longer protected:
Trump has been promising the shelter of leafy-green pardons for all his fellow grifters. We will see.
I feel the gardener’s subsequent lament in my bones. What could America have accomplished if it lopped away this corrupt conman rather than electing him twice to the presidency?
Gardener: O, what pity is it That he [Richard] had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land As we this garden! We at time of year Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees, Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood, With too much riches it confound itself: Had he done so to great and growing men, They might have lived to bear and he to taste Their fruits of duty: superfluous branches We lop away, that bearing boughs may live: Had he done so, himself had borne the crown, Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.
Instead we got a sadist in chief, who takes the same delight in cruelty that Richard does when he visits John of Gaunt on his deathbed. Having exiled Henry, Richard plans to seize his father’s wealth the instant he dies:
Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind To help him to his grave immediately! The lining of his coffers shall make coats To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars. Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him: Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!
Tyranny expert Tim Snyder talks about those law firms, universities, and others who have “bent the knee” to Trump. Richard is all about people bending knees. Here he is addressing rebellious Henry:
We are amazed; and thus long have we stood To watch the fearful bending of thy knee, Because we thought ourself thy lawful king: And if we be, how dare thy joints forget To pay their awful duty to our presence?
As we watch DJT despoil the nation, John of Gaunt’s deathbed lament could be ours:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry… This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out…
England may stand strong against foreign enemies, Gaunt goes on to say, but now it is conquering itself:
That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death!
I said that Trump is a combination of Richard and Henry so let’s now switch hats. Richard becomes poetic once he is being deposed, and I imagine America suffering the fate he predicts for England were the Constitution to be overthrown:
That every stride he makes upon my land Is dangerous treason: he is come to open The purple testament of bleeding war; But ere the crown he looks for live in peace, Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons Shall ill become the flower of England’s face, Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace To scarlet indignation and bedew Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.
Richard talking to the men who have come to arrest him could be Democrats talking to Attorney General Todd Blanche. Once a president can order the Department of Justice to go after his enemies, what’s to keep a Democratic president from sending governmental attorneys after you? For that matter, why wait for a Democratic president? If you fall out of favor with Trump, as Northumberland will with Henry, then you could be the next victim. That’s what you get when you disregard the rule of law:
And he shall think that thou, which know’st the way To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again, Being ne’er so little urged, another way To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne. The love of wicked men converts to fear; That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both To worthy danger and deserved death.
Richard can predict confidently here because Shakespeare knew historically that Northumberland and his son Hotspur would rebel against Henry in Henry IV, Part I. Put expediency over the law and this is what you get. Our rightwing Supreme Court needs to hear this speech.
To sum up, Trump attempted a Bolingbroke-like coup on January 6, and more recently his caterpillars have been eating away at the commonwealth, with him the hungriest caterpillar of them all. It’s time for Democratic gardeners to start pulling weeds.
I’m using today’s post to sort through some of the material in a postcolonial course I’m teaching at the University of Ljubljana. The course aims to introduce the students to works by authors from the former British colonies, along with various theories that help unlock them.
Amongst the works are Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Nigeria); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children andArundhati Roy’s God of Small Things (India); Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (although the colonizer in this case is the United States); and either Black Leopard, Red Wolf or A Brief History of Seven Killings (Jamaica’s Marlon James). We will also be looking at authors with hybrid nationalities, such as Anglo-Jamaican Zadie Smith (Playtime); Anglo-Pakistani Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia);Indian-Canadian Rohinton Mistry; Indian American Kiran Desai (The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny); and Scottish-Sudanese Leila Aboulela (Elsewhere Home).
As I teach the course, I wish I could revise my postcolonialism chapter in Better Living through Literature. Focused as it is on Frantz Fanon, it omits any mention of Edward Said or Homi Bhabha, who are critical to understanding the dynamics at play.
It’s not that Fanon doesn’t deserve a chapter. Regarded as the father of Postcolonial Studies, Fanon showed how literature helped the colonizers justify conquest, with them more or less saying, “We’re superior because we have Shakespeare/ Racine/ Goethe.” Literature couldn’t carry out the conquest all on its own, of course. One needs guns for that. But hard power requires soft power to ensure acceptance of its rule.
To fight back, Fanon called upon native authors to create new national literatures, what he called “literature of combat.” Novels especially would prove invaluable allies to resistance movements.
It’s important to note that works of combat need not be overtly political to accomplish such aims. As Achebe wrote about his own groundbreaking novels,
This is my answer to those who say that a writer should be writing about contemporary issues–about politics in 1964, about city life, about the last coup d’etat. Of course, these are legitimate themes for the writer but as far as I am concerned the fundamental theme must first be disposed of. This theme–put quite simply–is that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans, that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African peoples all but lost in the colonial period, and it is this dignity that they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost.
Then, as he does so often in Things Fall Apart, Achebe turns to his folk origins:
There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After all the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history.
Following up on Fanon’s cultural observations almost two decades later, Said pointed out how literary caricatures of “the Orient” helped European powers rationalize their colonial takeovers. Because “Orientals” were depicted as irrational, depraved, fallen, childlike, and altogether “different” (my class examined Rider Haggard’s She, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”), Europeans could perceive themselves as rational, virtuous, mature, and “normal.” As Marlow in Heart of Darkness notes, colonialism needed a noble idea to justify smash and grab exploitation, and various authors helped provide it with that idea.
While Fanon and Said were important in setting the groundwork for colonial studies, Indian scholar Homi Bhabha helps us understand what has emerged since the former colonies have broken free. Although cultures may seem distinct, they are never set in stone but rather continually evolve as they interact. (Culture is like clay and is continually being “enunciated,” Bhabha writes.) This was true in the time of colonization and it’s even more true now.
For instance, the sense of what it means to be British has been changing as the empire has written back (to borrow Rushdie’s useful phrase). Increasingly, traditional Brits have found themselves framed by narratives originating elsewhere. Nor has the experience been entirely virtual as West Indians, South Asians, and Sub-Saharan Africans move to the island.
In their interactions, no one remains the same. This new “hybridity” (Bhabha’s term) is being captured by extraordinary new works of literature. Bhabha calls what emerges “the Third Space,” which is the in-between space where culture and identity are negotiated.
In some ways, the class I am teaching functions as a third space. Of the eight students, two are Slovenian, two Macedonian, two Serbian, one Belgian, and one Austrian (these last two from the European Union’s Erasmus exchange program). In the fiction they have chosen to write about, we see two generational takes on Nigerian independence (Achebe and Adichie); Aboulela, Kureishi, Andrea Levy, and Ishiguro wrestling with their Scottish-Soudanese, Anglo-Pakistani, Anglo-Jamaican, and Anglo-Japanese identities respectively; and Afrikaner Coetzee exploring white identity in post-apartheid South African. Some of my students have their own hybrid identities, which makes the works particularly relevant.
Two of Bhabha’s concepts that are proving particularly useful are mimicry and ambivalence. The colonizers expect the colonized to become western—to mimic white behavior—only to find it disturbing when they do. They may feel ambivalent that the differences are not as great as they thought (as Marlow does in Heart of Darkness) or over the fact that they are simultaneously exploitative and nurturing (or at least see themselves as nurturing).
For their part, colonized or previously colonized subjects may mimic the colonizers for a number of reasons, whether to survive, to mock, or to join. Some really want to leave behind old identities.
I’ve written about how, in the United States, immigrants sometimes want to “become white,” thereby joining the upper echelon of America’s (unofficial) racial caste system. That’s one way of understanding “Latinos for Trump” and “Muslims for Trump.” Many who voted for DJT in 2024, however, swung back heavily to the Democrats in 2026 when they discovered that white nationalists were rejecting their attempts to fit in. To cite one egregious example, a Texas candidate posted a photo of Indian-American students, some wearing cowboy hats, celebrating a University of Texas football comeback, along with the observation,
Like bodycams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.
In a follow-up post he wrote,
I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.
In short, the politician was horrified by what he saw as mimicry, even though the students thought they were just like every other student. Thanks in part to Latino votes, he was soundly trounced in the election.
Debates over who is authentic and who is alien cause conflict everywhere, often stirred up by autocratic demagogues tapping into racial and ethnic resentment. Postcolonial literature provides an invaluable service by capturing individuals in their full complexity while the forces of history swirl around them. My students, meanwhile, are not only fulfilling an academic assignment but figuring out how to find their way in an increasingly confusing global community.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Beata Beatrix, ca 1864-70.
Sunday
Episcopal churches can choose to read today the gorgeous depiction of Wisdom from The Book of Wisdom (or Book of Solomon). Personified as a woman, the figure is merged with Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, conducting him from Purgatorio to Paradiso. Here’s the passage:
Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for she will be found sitting at the gate. To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding, and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care, because she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought. (Wisdom 6:12–16)
For an extended account of how a young woman that Dante met only once became his muse, I recommend Darrell Falconburg’s essay at Voegelin View Apparently the poet’s brief encounter with the young woman, who died at 24, pushed him so study philosophy. As he explains,
I quickly determined that Philosophy, who was the lady of these authors, sciences, and books, was a great thing. I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady, and I could not imagine her in any attitude except one of compassion, so that the part of my mind that perceives truth gazed on her so willingly that I could barely turn away from her. I began to go where she was truly revealed, namely to the schools of the religious orders and to the disputations held by the philosophers, so that in a short period of time, perhaps some thirty months, I began to feel her sweetness so much that the love of her dispelled and destroyed every other thought.
In Divine Comedy it is Beatrice, at the behest of the Virgin Mary, who instructs Virgil to seek out Dante and lead him through Inferno and Purgatorio. As a pre-Christian, Virgil can’t take Dante further so Beatrice leads Dante into and through the various levels of Paradise. Dante first encounters her in the Garden of Eden atop Purgatorio:
With eyes upon the everlasting wheels Stood Beatrice all intent, and I, on her Fixing my vision from above removed,
Such at her aspect inwardly became As Glaucus, tasting of the herb that made him Peer of the other gods beneath the sea.
To represent transhumanise in words Impossible were…
Through those eyes, he is able to ascend into Paradiso:
And as an arrow that upon the mark Strikes ere the bowstring quiet hath become, So did we speed into the second realm.
My Lady there so joyful I beheld, As into the brightness of that heaven she entered, More luminous thereat the planet grew;
And if the star itself was changed and smiled, What became I, who by my nature am Exceeding mutable in every guise!
As, in a fish-pond which is pure and tranquil, The fishes draw to that which from without Comes in such fashion that their food they deem it;
So I beheld more than a thousand splendors Drawing towards us, and in each was heard: “Lo, this is she who shall increase our love.”
Dante is not yet at the stage where he can look directly at Paradise, requiring Beatrice’s mediation. With his eyes focused on her, his affection “from every other longing was released”:
And the Lady who to God was leading me Said: “Change thy thought; consider that I am Near unto Him who every wrong disburdens.”
Unto the loving accents of my comfort I turned me round, and then what love I saw Within those holy eyes I here relinquish;
Not only that my language I distrust, But that my mind cannot return so far Above itself, unless another guide it.
Thus much upon that point can I repeat, That, her again beholding, my affection From every other longing was released.
While the eternal pleasure, which direct Rayed upon Beatrice, from her fair face Contented me with its reflected aspect,
Conquering me with the radiance of a smile, She said to me, “Turn thee about and listen; Not in mine eyes alone is Paradise.”
Because, through Beatrice, he finally cleanses his heart—the process he has been undergoing ever since being lost in a dark wood—he is finally able to gaze upon the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity.
Or as today’s reading puts it:
Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.
I recall exactly where I was when I first encountered T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At Sewanee Military Academy we sat for lunch at tables with an officer and a faculty member. I was a first-year student, still shocked by the drills and how we sat at attention before we were allowed to eat. Suddenly, however, I overheard the officer and the teacher, who taught senior English, talking excitedly about a poem.
I can’t remember if they were exchanging the line about the evening being spread out “like a patient etherized upon a table” or the line about the women who “come and go,/ Talking of Michelangelo.” In any event, I sensed I was in the presence of elegance and sophistication. I wanted to be part of a community that had such discussions.
Why would I, at 14, be captivated by a poem about someone undergoing a midlife crisis? After all, much in the poem eluded me. For instance,
–What’s up with restless nights in one-night cheap hotels (I know now)? –What’s the big thing he wants to get off his chest and why does it somehow involve lonely men in shirt-sleeves? –What’s all this talk about peaches, men’s hair styles, and trousers (rolled, flannel)?
I also didn’t relate to the high society in which Prufrock moves. The women in my life didn’t wear floor-length gowns, stretch out languorously on couches, and have arms that were braceleted and white and bare (but in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!).
I did know, however, what it was like to lie etherized upon a table (when I had my tonsils out) and so picked up the grogginess he is observing.
I knew about second guessing oneself constantly.
While I knew Eliot is overstating things when he asks, “Do I dare disturb the universe,” in one’s teens one simultaneously feels utterly insignificant (a pair of ragged claws) and the center of everyone’s attention. At that age, you feel that people’s eye pin you to the wall, leaving you wriggling.
“They will say…,” Prufrock says repeatedly, and the teenage you figures that of course everyone is talking about you.
Also at that age, you know how hard it is to say “exactly what I mean” and how impossible it is to be understood. (“That is not what I meant at all;/ That is not it, at all.”) The people around you, you sense, are snickering, even though you are too young for the Eternal Footman to have gotten into the act quite yet.
In short, people are constantly bringing your head in on a platter, even though you have tried to stay in the shadows.
Although you may be a bit obtuse and somewhat of a fool, however, deep down you have beautiful longings. It’s comforting that both you and Prufrock know that, somewhere out there, mermaids are singing. For a moment you hear them.
Then reality comes crashing in and you drown.
Except that you don’t entirely because you’re a teenager and the world is always renewing itself. You’re also constantly being surprised by, for instance, a conversation that reveals a new poetic world. While I understood that Eliot sees those Michelangelo-quoting women as snobs without substance, I wanted someone out there with whom I too could converse about high culture. I mocked and envied at the same time.
One other recollection. When I was a senior the teacher (another one by then) started analyzing the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Dangling Conversation.” When he got to the line, “And we sit and drink our coffee,” I piped up, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Genuinely pissed, he looked at me and burst out, “Bates, why are you so damn smart?!” I had no idea what had irritated him until I realized he was using the song to ease us into “Prufrock.” To set us up for the women talking of Michelangelo, he was preparing to point out the stanza,
And you read your Emily Dickinson And I my Robert Frost And we note our places with bookmarkers That measure what we’ve lost
In short, I had ruined his lesson.
But not the urgency of the poem, which had the potential to impact people our age. Despite Prufrock being a slightly balding middle-aged guy who feels his life is a failure, his anxieties were our anxieties. Add to that its wonderful rhythms, its conversational tone, and its punchy lines, and the poem seems perfect for angst-ridden teens.
Duke Senior in As You Like It (Royal Shakespeare Company)
Thursday
At the same time that Americans were waking up and going to the polls, I was teaching Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which Duke Senior at one point warns politicians about losing touch with reality. DJT’s hold on reality has always been tenuous, but even by his low standards he’s been slipping recently. Who else would boast, “We’re making a freaking fortune”—“we” being himself and the oil companies–while Americans see diesel prices skyrocket? No wonder the GOP got shellacked.
Duke Senior, like the Democrats for six of the past ten years, has been living in the wilderness. His dukedom has been usurped by his brother, and one wonders whether he himself missed critical signals. Did flattering counselors enable a bubble? Maybe that’s why the Forest of Arden, with its flesh-shrinking coldness, seems so bracing to him. He’s finally able to see reality for what it is:
Duke Senior: Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say ‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything. I would not change it.
DJT has buried himself in “painted pomp”—some of the home décor he apparently does himself—and retains counselors who tell him whatever he wants to hear. The “churlish chiding of the winter’s wind” is for other people.
Democrats, who for years have been experiencing the political versions of icy fangs, used these hard times to recruit superior candidates and hone their message. They surveyed the grim landscape and concluded that it was like a precious jewel in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. Making good use of past reversals, they found “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything.”
On the other hand, Republican candidates accustomed to having their Congressional seats handed to them by the MAGA faithful were often unprepared to fight. Such was the case in my Tennessee House district, in which a candidate who attended our tiny No Kings Day rallies has a .2 percent lead over 16-year incumbent Scott Desjarlais (280 votes). 99% of the vote has been counted.
Although Victoria Broderick spent only $87,405.47 on her campaign (which meant no television ads), she may pull it out.
Resilient candidates exclaim, with Duke Senior, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”
