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Sunday
Today is “Christ the King Sunday,” which is “a feast in the liturgical year which emphasizes the true kingship of Christ” (Wikipedia). I have problems with the metaphor of Christ as king– I suspect Jesus himself would have balked at the description–but if I understand it to mean that Jesus functions as our supreme guide and inspiration, then it somewhat works. Poet Malcolm Guite makes it clear that he sees Jesus as such in “Everything Holds Together,” a sonnet he wrote for the festival.
Sadly I missed Guite when he visited Sewanee this past month as I was in Slovenia. He is one of my favorite religious poets and I would have loved to have met him. In his sonnet he invokes a God that runs the gamut from galaxies to quarks. (I love how stellar sparks of light become “secret seeds that open every spring.”) Eucharistic Prayer C in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer has a line that I love and that may have contributed to the poem:
At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. By your will they were created and have their being.
God can become too small when invoked in ideological battles. As Anne Lamott has wisely said, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” If, on the other hand, we see ourselves created in God’s image, then the ego falls away and the immensity of the universe opens within us and before us. Our defensive boundaries crumble in the presence of a God that is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think. Here’s the poem:
Everything holds together, everything, From stars that pierce the dark like living sparks, To secret seeds that open every spring, From spanning galaxies to spinning quarks, Everything holds together and coheres,
Unfolding from the center whence it came. And now that hidden heart of things appears, The first-born of creation takes a name. And shall I see the one through whom I am? Shall I behold the one for whom I’m made, The light in light, the flame within the flame, Eikon tou theou, image of my God? He comes, a little child, to bless my sight, That I might come to him for life and light.
In his letter to the Colossians (1:15), Paul uses the phrase, “eikon tou theou tou aoratou,” meaning “the express image of the invisible God.” In other words, if Christ is described as king, it is because he came as close as anyone ever has (or so Christians believe) to grasping, articulating, and living out our divine potential. Jesus connected, in ways unfathomable to us, to that which holds everything together, to the “hidden heart of things.” Or, to borrow from Dante, to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
In Guite’s words, Jesus is “the one through whom I am” and “the one for whom I’m made.” Light in light and flame within flame, Jesus comes as “a little child to bless my sight.” He does so that we might, in turn, come to him “for life and light.”
Becoming subjects of a king is one way of expressing this journey. I prefer Guite’s images, however, which see us as a light in the light that is in the light and as a flame within the flame that is within the flame.
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Friday
The election of an adjudicated rapist, along with such gloating from Trumpists as “your body, my choice,” has certain American women turning to the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata. Or at least they’re citing a South Korean movement that is following the strategy set forth in the play.
According to a Rachel Triesman NPR article, a South Korean movement known as 4B or the 4 No’s (bi means “not” in Korean) calls for the refusal of (1) dating men (biyeonae), (2) sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), (3) heterosexual marriage (bihon) and (4) childbirth (bichulsan). Triesman reports,
Interest in the 4B movement has surged in the days since the election, with Google searches spiking and the hashtag taking off on social media. Scores of young women are exploring and promoting the idea in posts on platforms like TikTok and X.
In Aristophanes’ 411 BCE comedy, the women of Greece launch a sex strike to bring an end to the years-long Peloponnesian War (431-404). We hear about female frustrations from Lysistrata, an Athenian woman who becomes the movement’s leader:
Lysistrata: All the long years when the hopeless war dragged along we, unassuming, forgotten in quiet, Endured without question, endured in our loneliness all your incessant child’s antics and riot. Our lips we kept tied, though aching with silence, though well all the while in our silence we knew How wretchedly everything still was progressing by listening dumbly the day long to you. For always at home you continued discussing the war and its politics loudly, and we Sometimes would ask you, our hearts deep with sorrowing though we spoke lightly, though happy to see, “What’s to be inscribed on the side of the Treaty-stone What, dear, was said in the Assembly today?” “Mind your own business,” he’d answer me growlingly, “hold your tongue, woman, or else go away.” And so I would hold it.
Determined not to remain passive anymore, Lysistrata teams up with the Spartan Lampito to take action. It’s not easy, however, as women love sex just as much as men do. Lysistrata learns early on the challenges ahead:
Lysistrata: We must refrain from every depth of love…. Why do you turn your backs? Where are you going? Why do you bite your lips and shake your heads? Why are your faces blanched? Why do you weep? Will you or won’t you, or what do you mean? Myrrhine: No, I won’t do it. Let the war proceed… Calonice: Anything else? O bid me walk in fire But do not rob us of that darling joy. What else is like it, dearest Lysistrata?
Lysistrata stands firm, however, and outlines strategies to make the strike more effective:
Lysistrata: By the two Goddesses, now can’t you see All we have to do is idly sit indoors With smooth roses powdered on our cheeks, Our bodies burning naked through the folds Of shining Amorgos’ silk, and meet the men With our dear Venus-plats plucked trim and neat. Their stirring love will rise up furiously, They’ll beg our arms to open. That’s our time! We’ll disregard their knocking, beat them off– And they will soon be rabid for a Peace. I’m sure of it.
The danger of forced sex—what we call marital rape—is mentioned, but Lysistrata has a plan for that as well:
Calonice: But if they should force us? Lysistrata: Yield then, but with a sluggish, cold indifference. There is no joy to them in sullen mating. Besides we have other ways to madden them; They cannot stand up long, and they’ve no delight Unless we fit their aim with merry succour.
The women then all repeat the following oath after Lysistrata, which they follow up by sacrificing a bowl of wine:
Lysistrata: SO, grasp the brim, you, Lampito, and all. You, Calonice, repeat for the rest Each word I say. Then you must all take oath And pledge your arms to the same stern conditions– To husband or lover I’ll not open arms Though love and denial may enlarge his charms. But still at home, ignoring him, I’ll stay, Beautiful, clad in saffron silks all day. If then he seizes me by dint of force, I’ll give him reason for a long remorse. I’ll never lie and stare up at the ceiling, Nor like a lion on all fours go kneeling. If I keep faith, then bounteous cups be mine. If not, to nauseous water change this wine. Do you all swear to this? Myrrhine: We do, we do. Lysistrata: Then I shall immolate the victim thus. (drinks from the bowl)
For all their resolve, however, the women have difficulty denying their sexual cravings. Lysistrata must remain vigilant to keep them in line:
Lysistrata: What use is Zeus to our anatomy? Here is the gaping calamity I meant: I cannot shut their ravenous appetites A moment more now. They are all deserting. The first I caught was sidling through the postern Close by the Cave of Pan: the next hoisting herself With rope and pulley down: a third on the point Of slipping past: while a fourth malcontent, seated For instant flight to visit Orsilochus On bird-back, I dragged off by the hair in time…. They are all snatching excuses to sneak home.
In the following interchange with a couple of these women, sexual innuendo involving female anatomy ranges wild and free:
1st woman: I must get home. I’ve some Milesian wool Packed wasting away, and moths are pushing through it. Lysistrata: Fine moths indeed, I know. Get back within. 1st woman: By the Goddesses, I’ll return instantly. I only want to stretch it on my bed. Lysistrata: You shall stretch nothing and go nowhere either. 1st woman: Must I never use my wool then? Lysistrata: If needs be. 2nd woman: How unfortunate I am! O my poor flax! It’s left at home unstript. Lysistrata: So here’s another That wishes to go home and strip her flax. Inside again!
Eventually all the women sign on, however, and some even engage in effective guerilla tactics, such as teasing their husbands and then running away at the critical moment. The playwright conveys the resultant desperation of the men by having them carry long poles, which bulge conspicuously under their tunics. Soon they are having conversations such as the following, which once again feature non-stop innuendo:
Chorus: Here come the Spartan envoys with long, worried beards. Hail, Spartans how do you fare? Did anything new arise? Spartans: No need for a clutter o’ words. Do ye see our condition? Chorus: The situation swells to greater tension. Something will explode soon. Spartans: It’s awful truly. But come, let us with the best speed we may Scribble a Peace. Chorus: I notice that our men Like wrestlers poised for contest, hold their clothes Out from their bellies. An athlete’s malady! Since exercise alone can bring relief. Athenians: Can anyone tell us where Lysistrata is? There is no need to describe our men’s condition, It shows up plainly enough. Chorus: It’s the same disease. Do you feel a jerking throbbing in the morning? Athenians: By Zeus, yes! In these straits, I’m racked all through. Unless Peace is soon declared, we shall be driven In the void of women to try Cleisthenes.
In the end, it is clear to all that everyone should be making love, not war. Those of our own citizens who fantasize about dominant men and submissive women would benefit from this vision where everyone gets what he or she wants. At the end of the play, joy reigns supreme:
Lysistrata: In the end, Earth is delighted now, peace is the voice of earth. Spartans, sort out your wives: Athenians, yours. Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy, Dance out his thanks, be grateful in music, And promise reformation with his heels. Athenians: O Dancers, forward. Lead out the Graces, Call Artemis out; Then her brother, the Dancer of Skies, That gracious Apollo. Invoke with a shout Dionysus out of whose eyes Breaks fire on the maenads that follow; And Zeus with his flares of quick lightning, and call, Happy Hera, Queen of all, And all the Daimons summon hither to be Witnesses of our revelry And of the noble Peace we have made, Aphrodite our aid.
Although tragedy lays claim to more literary glory than comedy, the latter, with its emphasis on sex and the body, articulates a powerful life force that will not be denied. To be sure, Lysistrata did not bring an end to Athens-Sparta hostilities, and I’m skeptical of the long-term effectiveness of the 4B movement. But such comic drama, by providing the powerless with a voice, can bolster their spirits and keep them going in the face of oppression. Throughout human history, comedy has always played this vital social role.
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Thursday
I post today on a Dante passage that a political commentator uses and then withdraws to capture his feelings about Donald Trump’s election victory. It’s a nice instance of how, even when not altogether applicable, literature opens up rich opportunities for exploration.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, former basketball great (some think the greatest) and a remarkably thoughtful observer, talks of feeling betrayed by those Americans who elected “a conman who represents the opposite of what the U.S. Constitution stands for.” He says watching those “who made his ascension possible” is like “finding your drug-addict son robbing your safe to buy drugs.”
“You still love him,” Abdul-Jabbar comments, “but you grieve over who he has become. The first is the grief of immediate fear, the second is the grief of damaged love.”
Then comes the allusion to Dante’s Inferno Circle #9, which is the circle of betrayal. It involves four levels: betrayal of family, of country, of guests and of benefactors. The souls there are encased in ice because betrayal involves a cold closing down of the heart, entirely shutting out God’s love.
Abdul-Jabbar misremembers the episode slightly, putting Cain as well as Judas in the lowest level. (The first level, Caina, is named after Cain but he doesn’t himself appear.) The other two figures who join Judas in the jaws of Satan—perpetually devoured by the three heads of the ultimate betrayer–are Brutus and Cassius. Their cold-blooded betrayal of their friend and benefactor Julius Caesar, whom Dante regarded as an essential part of God’s plan for human happiness, makes them worse than every other sinner in human history. Well, except for Judas.
So are we to see Trump supporters as irredeemable sinners who have sabotaged democracy and all hope for human happiness? You can see why a man of color would feel that way towards people who supported a racist that openly courted White supremacists. But Abdul-Jabbar then makes it clear that this is only how it feels to him—how he feels betrayed—rather than what these people are actually like. And he ends his short essay on the hopeful note that Trump voters will come to see the error of their ways. “I’m hopeful,” he writes,
that as the next four years progress, they will eventually slap their foreheads and cry out, “What was I thinking!?!” And reason and compassion will once again prevail. Or, as Joni Mitchell sings in “Woodstock”: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
The souls in Dante’s Inferno are incapable of such rethinking, which is why they are there in the first place. Those who, however bad their behavior, ultimately open themselves to God’s love—to divine reason and compassion—end up in Purgatory, not in Hell.
Until they rethink, however, Abdul Jabbar says that “our goal for now is to fasten our seatbelts, fling our arms across the chests of our children to protect them, and hang in there. Americans have corrected course before…”
So, Inferno—which many times I’ve applied to Trump himself–may not describe his supporters.
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Wednesday
I’m reposting an essay written seven years ago when someone else close to me was dying of cancer. Lucille Clifton knew whereof she spoke when she wrote these poems.
Reposted from July 5, 2017
Lucille Clifton’s cancer poems mean a lot more to me since I spent several days in a Bronx oncology ward with my friend Rachel Kranz, who is battling ovarian cancer. I promised Joyce A. Asante, her wonderfully supportive nurse, that I would write a post on those poems so here it is.
Clifton became acquainted with the illness when her husband Fred, who didn’t smoke, came down with lung cancer and died at 49. In Next (1987), Clifton writes both about Fred’s cancer and that of other patients she met in the cancer ward. The book gets its title from a two-line poem that reminds us that the bell tolls for all of us:
the one in the next bed is dying. mother we are all next. or next.
Clifton is struck by how cancer cells appear to “bloom,” normally a positive, life-affirming process. Not in this instance, however:
something is growing in the strong man. it is blooming, they say, but not a flower. he has planted so much in me, so much. I am not willing, gardener, to give you up to this.
The cancer treatment process seems to violate the natural order in numerous ways, most notably by injecting poisonous medicines into the body. Instead of mothers with nurturing remedies, Clifton sees cold God-like doctors administering chemicals to cure the disease. In “chemotherapy,” she cries out that none of it makes sense:
my hair is pain. my mouth is a cave of cries. my room is filled with white coats shaped like God. they are moving their fingers along their stethoscopes. they are testing their chemical faith. chemicals chemicals oh mother mary where is your living child?
In a poem dedicated to 21-year-old “joanne c.,” probably a patient that Clifton met in the ward, Clifton gets at another confusing aspect of cancer: the body is at war with itself. (The Gettysburg reference signals that it’s a civil war.) Also contradictory is cancer’s “murderous cure”:
the death of joanne c. 11/30/82 aged 21
i am the battleground that shrieks like a girl. to myself i call myself gettysburg. Laughing, twisting the i.v., laughing or crying, i can’t tell which anymore, i host the furious battling of a suicidal body and a murderous cure.
Clifton is struck by how the very word “cancer” can reduce us to a helpless state. In “incantation,” she imagines that an evil magician has transformed the patient into a puppet. Unlike my friend Rachel, who is an exemplary and therefore difficult patient because she demands that every procedure be explained and justified, the patient in Clifton’s poem has surrendered her autonomy:
incantation overheard in hospital
pluck the hairs from the head of a virgin. sweep them into the hall. take a needle thin as a lash, puncture the doorway to her blood. here is the magic word: cancer. cancer. repeat it, she will become her own ghost. repeat it, she will follow you she will do whatever you say.
Rachel and I were both struck by how many of the hospital’s doctors engage in power struggles and prefer docile patients to questioning patients. Clifton is never one who will do “whatever you say,” however, and she insists that we own our own emotions. In “leukemia as white rabbit,” she draws on Alice in Wonderland to show a patient acknowledging just how “furious” she is.
Alice encounters the White Rabbit and his pocket watch at the start of her adventures and is struck by his obsession with time. Time, of course, being of paramount importance to one who is dying. To set up the poem, here are a couple of the relevant passages from Alice:
[The White Rabbit] came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, ‘Oh! the Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! won’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!’
and
[I]n a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.
leukemia as white rabbit
running always running murmuring she will be furious she will be furious, following a great cabbage of a watch that ells only terminal time, down deep into a rabbit hole of diagnosticians shouting off with her hair off with her skin and i am i am i am furious.
I can testify, from watching Rachel go through the medical system, that “rabbit hole of diagnosticians” is a perfect description. Each department had its own theory of what was wrong with Rachel and what needed to be treated first—after the Emergency Room, she went first to the cardiac ward and then to the oncology ward, which is probably where she should have been from the first.
In the face of institutional anonymity, Clifton has a fantasy of a powerful and positive incantation, unlike the disempowering “cancer” incantation of the doctors. She imagines her mother, clad as a powerful witch, incanting the words she most needs to hear:
enter my mother wearing a peaked hat. her cape billows, her broom sweeps the nurses away, she is flying, the witch of the ward, my mother pulls me up by the scruff of the spine incanting Live Live Live!
Living, to be sure, may not be an option, as it wasn’t with joanne c. In that instance, a dignified surrender will do. The blood as a white flag may be a reference to declining white blood count:
the message of jo
my body is a war nobody is winning my birthdays are tired. my blood is a white flag, waving. surrender, my mother darling, death is life.
Clifton may, in this acceptance of death, have in mind a poem by Mary Oliver, who was a friend. The influence goes back and forth as Oliver herself borrows Clifton’s image of bones, which appear throughout her poetry as a metaphor for that which is foundational. In “In Blackwater Woods,” Oliver tells us how we should live and how we should die:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
To sum up the trajectory of this post, Clifton moves from confusion to anger to acceptance. The acceptance extends not only to the patient but to those left behind. As she imagines Fred sending her messages, she picks up one that is particularly important:
the message of fred clifton
I rise up from the dead before you a nimbus of dark light to say that the only mercy is memory, to say that the only hell is regret
Regret grows out of anger, memory out of love. Only one is healthy.
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Tuesday
I’m struck by how much my attitude to George Orwell’s 1984 has changed over the years. When I first encountered the novel as a bookish teenager, I reveled in it as a stimulating thought experiment. When I served on a college discussion panel in 1984 during the virulently anti-communist Ronald Reagan administration, it struck me as somewhat over-the-top paranoia about the dangers of totalitarianism. Now I see it as an essential resource for combating Trumpism.
The first time I fully realized the novel’s applicability was when newly elected Trump began telling easily disprovable lies, such as that his inauguration was larger than Barack Obama’s. The point of such lying, Orwell points out, is not to persuade people. After all, there’s compelling photographic evidence on crowd sizes. The point is to get you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” This, the author tells us, is the Party’s “final, most essential command.”
Trump got virtually the entire Republican party to reject the clear and compelling evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and he has ridden their slavish loyalty to a second term in office in 2024. Now it appears that he has come up with another test: will Republican senators support, for cabinet positions, a nominee for the law that is anti-law, a nominee for national intelligence that is anti-intelligence, a nominee for national defense that is anti-defense and a nominee for science that is anti-science.
I am using paraphrasing here from an excellent John Stoehr essay in his Substack blog The Editorial Page. Stoehr then goes on to quote Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The plain awfulness of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Stoehr argues, is the point. The Senate really will become no more that clay in his hands if if surrenders to (1) an alleged statutory rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general; (2) a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence; (3) a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense; and (4) an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist as secretary of health and human resources.
There’s another explanation, one not mentioned in 1984, for why Trump has made such awful picks. In addition to them being a test of Senate loyalty, Stoehr writes that totalitarians
fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.
Stoerh concludes by quoting Hannah Arendt:
“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. Totalitarianism “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).
We’re all waiting to see how low the Senate will go.
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Monday
In the past, when I’ve returned home after an extended visit elsewhere, I’ve sometimes recited “The Road goes ever on and on,” just as Bilbo does at the end of The Hobbit. Upon coming back to the United States this time after spending seven weeks in Slovenia, I’m thinking of a different hobbit homecoming.
I feel as though I’m returning to a country that has been seized by Saruman in my absence. Although the genial Joe Biden is still in charge, we’re about to see Lotho Baggins installed as “Chief,” a new position giving him authoritarian powers. And if Lotho is Trump, then Saruman would be one of his puppet masters, say Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel.
The hobbits’ first shock upon their return is to find a hostile reception awaiting them as they pound upon the city gates:
‘Who’s that? Be off! You can’t come in. Can’t you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?’
‘Of course we can’t read the notice in the dark,’ Sam shouted back. ‘And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I’ll tear down your notice when I find it.’
Then there are reports of hard-won earnings going to tax cuts for the wealthy “gatherers” and “sharers”:
‘What’s the matter with the place?’ said Merry. ‘Has it been a bad year, or what? I thought it had been a fine summer and harvest.’ ‘Well no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘‘gatherers’’ and ‘‘sharers’’, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’
Among the new shortages is the Shire’s famous pipeweed:
‘There isn’t no pipe-weed now,’ said Hob; ‘at least only for the Chief’s men. All the stocks seem to have gone. We do hear that waggon-loads of it went away down the old road out of the Southfarthing, over Sarn Ford way. That would be the end o’ last year, after you left. But it had been going away quietly before that, in a small way. That Lotho——’
‘Now you shut up, Hob Hayward!’ cried several of the others. ‘You know talk o’ that sort isn’t allowed. The Chief will hear of it, and we’ll all be in trouble.’
The Hobbits learn more as they go along, including how Lotho done his own version of weaponizing the justice department, which is establishing “the Chief’s men” to go after perceived enemies. One hobbit informs the returning travelers about how the new system works:
‘If we all got angry together something might be done. But it’s these Men, Sam, the Chief’s Men. He sends them round everywhere, and if any of us small folk stand up our rights, they drag him off to the Lockholes. They took old Flourdumpling, old Will Whitfoot the Mayor, first, and they’ve taken a lot more. Lately it’s been getting worse. Often they beat ’em now.’
‘Then why do you do their work for them?’ said Sam angrily. ‘Who sent you to Frogmorton?’
‘No one did. We stay here in the big Shirriff-house. We’re the First Eastfarthing Troop now. There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big. And there’s worse than that: there’s a few as do spy-work for the Chief and his Men.’
One of the new toughs in town sounds a lot like Steve Bannon, who recently threatened Trump’s enemies with the declaration, “[You] don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity…You deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.” For comparison, check out one of the toughs enforcing the new dispensation:
‘This country wants waking up and setting to rights,’ said the ruffian, “and Sharkey’s going to do it; and make it hard, if you drive him to it. You need a bigger Boss. And you’ll get one before the year is out, if there’s any more trouble. Then you’ll learn a thing or two, you little rat-folk.’
In response Frodo and company, drawing on tradition, arouse the Shire in revolt—“Awake! Awake! Fear, Fire, Foes! Awake! Fire, Foes! Awake!”–and take back their country, disposing of Saruman in the process. Although the country’s wealth has been looted and the environment devastated, in the end the citizens take collective action and restore civil society.
Sadly, our own attempt to raise the Shire was the election and that failed, leaving the “Gatherers and Sharers,” the thugs and the autocrats, in charge. Whether they can maintain power remains to be seen, but we’ll be taking a beating for a while.
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Sunday
Dan Clendenin’s indispensable blog Journey to Jesus alerted me to this Laura Kelly Fanucci poem. In response to those describing Donald Trump’s victory in apocalyptic terms, Clendenin says the poem—which he calls a prayer—can help us regain our bearings.
“When This Is Over” provides timely reminders including, most importantly, our potential “to become better for each other because of the worst.”
When This is Over By Laura Kelly Fanucci
When this is over, may we never again take for granted A handshake with a stranger Full shelves at the store Conversations with neighbors A crowded theater Friday night out The taste of communion A routine checkup The school rush each morning Coffee with a friend The stadium roaring Each deep breath A boring Tuesday Life itself.
When this ends may we find that we have become more like the people we wanted to be we were called to be we hoped to be and may we stay that way — better for each other because of the worst.
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Friday
In my last Postcolonial Literature class at the University of Ljubljana—Julia and I return to the United States tomorrow—I introduced the students to Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time. The novel made a good bookend to the six weeks I have spent with the students.
We began the course by examining how authors like H. Ryder Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad exoticized, orientalized, demonized, and demeaned other cultures. Two groundbreaking theoretical works, Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, showed us how (1) the colonizers framed the Other for their own benefit while (2) often getting the colonized to look down on their own culture and even their own bodies. What is needed, Fanon declared, is a “literature of combat” that helps form a new national consciousness.
From there we moved on to works by the colonized. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus exposed the colonialists’ project while pushing towards a new consciousness, as did, to a lesser extent, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Thing and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Then there are writers who have found ways to hybridize clashing cultures to form a third option that draws on the strengths of each. Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony explores how to preserve the integrity of the Laguna Pueblo nation within White America while pointing out ways that America desperately needs the Pueblo vision for its own health. Going back in time, I also looked at the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through a postcolonial lens, examining how a Christian culture that had turned against the body in the wake of the Black Plague needed to reconnect with the Green Man, a pagan fertility god that Christianity had never been able to expel, if it was to regain a fruitful relationship with nature.
Some of the authors we read, such as Adichie and Rushdie, don’t only criticize the colonial project but also look at problems that have arisen in postcolonial society. Roy, meanwhile, observes that India has had problems, especially its caste system, that predate colonialism by centuries.
And then there is Zadie Smith, who shows how the colonized, in returning to the motherland, are upsetting traditional distinctions. The new national consciousness here does not involve the former colonies but England itself.
A very funny chapter in Swing Time captures this new reality. In it, the narrator describes working in a crappy pizza parlor after graduating from college. The restaurant is run by an Iranian named Bahran and staffed by immigrants from all over the world, including Republic of the Congo, Somalia, and Bosnia. Narrator Fern, like Smith herself, is Anglo-Afro-Jamaican.
Bahran is one of those immigrants whose longing to belong to the privileged Anglo demographic is so transparent that he is a figure of self-parody. When he claims that polo is his favorite sport, his staff explodes into laughter. Fern observes
a flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.
Thinking at first that Fern is Persian because of her nose, Bahran is solicitous and complimentary. When he discovers her mother is from Jamaica, however, he turns on her, telling her that her people “don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth.”
Because she needs the money, however, Fern tells us she “couldn’t afford to be offended.”
Tensions are turned up a notch when the restaurant television begins showing Wimbledon matches involving Ben Shelton, a mixed-race American tennis player. Fern reports,
As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton had never heard of him really before [Somalian] Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I brought little American flags to work on the days of his games…Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries…all slip away until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.
It all comes to a head when Shelton, in the third round, comes up Karim Alami, an Arab player from Morocco. The atmosphere in the pizza parlor becomes electric:
Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began.
Through the match, Bahram chain-smokes Gauloises cigarettes and offers a running commentary that “had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults.” This includes delineating the differences between Arabs and those from Sub-Saharan Africa:
The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.
“But,” Fern reports,
he was not lost: he took the set seven-five and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some highlife he had going on the transiter radio he carried everywhere.
The euphoria does not last, however, as Shelton loses the next set 6-1, leading to a Bahran attack on Black Africans in general. “Wherever you go in world,” he tells Anwar, “you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people aways lose.”
Meanwhile, with the score 2-1 sets in favor of Shelton, the game goes into a fourth set, at which point
we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth almost perfectly matched—battling towards an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, five-seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.
And then, in a passage that my Slovenians and one Macedonian appreciated as it features a former countryman from the Yugoslav days,
“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall.
When Shelton wins the fifth and deciding set, the reaction is electric:
Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out.
He then, however, figures out a way to salvage some self-respect. Recall that, up to this point, he has been unloading on Shelton and his employees for their African heritage. Now he plays the one card he has left. Showing Fern a photo of Shelton as she is taking phone orders, he says,
“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.” “I’m working.” “Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.” I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled. “Half-winner,” he said. I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.
Shelton, in other words, is Black until it serves a racist agenda to categorize him as White.
I share these extended passages because they get at the heart of Smith’s vision, which is that citizens from the former colonies are transforming the motherland, turning it into a vibrant but bewildering new entity in which traditional distinctions are overwhelmed and new alliances are formed.
Of course, this is also leading to the rise of rightwing nationalism in many nations, along with immigrants who dream of joining those in power. In the United States, over the decades, we have seen various groups seeking to join the upper echelons of our caste system and become “White,” including the Irish, the Scots, the southern Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, and so on. In our recent election, it appears that certain Mexican Americans, in spite of Donald Trump depicting them as “rapists and murders,” were willing to vote for him. Trump also drew more support than expected from South and East Asians. How many Bahrams do we have, one wonders–which is to say, how many are willing to denigrate the descendants of Black Africa in order to become acceptable to White America? What are they willing to sell out to achieve acceptance?
For their part, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, despite being mixed race, did not choose to become Black, despite Trump’s claims. America’s caste system is such that they were inevitably “cast” into that identity. To their credit, they embraced it and became inspirational figures. But race continues to be a major force—maybe the major force—in American political life.
Which is why courses on Postcolonial Literature are so vital. The entire world is experiencing cultural explosions such as those described by Smith, and writers everywhere are exploring them. Teaching this class, which was made up of straight-up Slovenians, hyphenated Slovenians (Serbian-Slovenian, Sudanian-Slovenian), and Erasmus students from Germany, Belgium, Macedonia, and Turkey, made this clearer than ever to me.
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Thursday
Julia and I are just back from a wondrous visit with artist friends in Assisi. Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin, accomplished painters whom we first met when we all lived in southern Maryland, relocated to Italy in 1987 and never returned, raising their two sons as bilingual citizens of the world. I report on the visit here because their immersion in the world of the visual arts has given me perspective on my own immersion in the world of literature.
Fascinated by how people use art in their daily lives, Alan and Lani are constantly combing flea markets for items that people have decorated in their longing for beauty. Often these are humble household objects, farm implements, photographs with homemade frames, and tiny shrines to saints.
Along with these are dolls and old toys, fossilized shells, Italian tiles, stuffed animals, religious icons, woven baskets, clocks, hand-painted pottery, parts of musical instruments (which will never play but which Alan loves for the visuals), Pinocchios of all sizes and shapes, animal skulls and bones, antique photos, carpentry tools, tiny human figures, folded paper cranes, mannequin hands, wooden balls, parts of games, and many, many metallic owls. Sometimes the objects on the walls and in the cabinets show up in Alan and Lani’s paintings.
These anonymous artists have applied their talents in ways that few will ever see, bringing to mind the passage from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.
Alani and Lani marvel at all the different ways that people speak beauty into the world. To borrow from Gray, they do not allow these flowers to “blush unseen”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Along with the items are paintings and photographs, some by Alan and Lani, some by their sons, some by friends. There are also old photographs of anonymous persons, many with fascinating expressions. Rescued from flea market shoeboxes, they get a second life on the walls of the Irwin-Feltus house.
Along with the house, Julia and I benefited from the Feltuses’ artistic immersion when we went out walking. Sometimes we were in holy places with gorgeous paintings and frescoes, such as the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. But Alan also pointed out interesting iron work on railings and the stonework on wall facings where windows or doors had once been. His curious and creative eyes took in everything.
I realized that I use literature in a similar way. Although I don’t make art, I constantly apply the poems and stories that have moved me to the surrounding world. As a result, it’s as though the world is filled with resonance and infused with meaning. Both the visual and the written arts enhance reality and reveal its luminescence.
