F. Lloyd, Woman Walking in the Woods with Two Children
Friday
Apparently today, April 8, is both Buddha’s birthday and something called “National All Is Ours Day.” While I haven’t heard of it before, the latter holiday sounds very much in accord with Buddha’s teachings in that it calls for us to (1) pay special attention to our natural surroundings, (2) appreciate all that we have been given and (3) share our bounty with others.
Essentially summing up both occasions is this poem by Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hahn, who died this past January. Walk and touch peace:
Walk and touch peace every moment. Walk and touch happiness every moment. Each step brings a fresh breeze. Each step makes a flower bloom. Kiss the Earth with your feet. Bring the Earth your love and happiness. The Earth will be safe when we feel safe in ourselves.
Yesterday I reported on my Sewanee students writing about Twelfth Night so today I turn to those writing about Othello, the other option. Here again most of them focused on relationship issues. But whereas with Twelfth Night their focus was on how relationships can be saved, with Othello they mostly wrote about why relationships fall apart. That’s not a bad way to contrast comedy with tragedy.
Their decision to write about relationship issues isn’t surprising. They are still at the age where, according to psychologist Eric Erickson, they are wrestling with issues of identity. Fighting against socially imposed identities in order to discover one’s actual identity is to be expected. In fact, this is why I chose “identity” as the course’s theme. Still, I’ve been impressed at the variety of ways they have been exploring that theme.
Merrit, for instance, wrote about the Iago-Emilia marriage, seeing it as both toxic and all too familiar. Emilia is essentially a doormat wife, handing all her power over to her husband without question. Why else would she steal the fatal handkerchief from her best friend under orders from her husband without asking why? At one point, in a discussion with Desdemona, she says she would sacrifice her honor for her husband if it meant making him the ruler of the world. It’s a hypothetical debate they’re having but reveals that she values submission over honor.
Merrit noted that, by choosing such a wife, Iago reveals his own masculine insecurities, which help explain his evil deeds. Because he is not as self-confident as he seems, he marries a submissive wife to feel masculine. (In conference, Merrit and I discussed how his constant insults of women, while supposedly delivered in jest, may reveal this underlying insecurity.) In fact, Merrit noted that the one time we see Iago lose his composure is when his wife, realizing how her husband has destroyed Desdemona, stands up to him, revealing his perfidy. At that point he stabs her in front of witnesses, an uncharacteristic move given how secretive he normally is. His extreme reaction may reveal just how threatening to his manhood he finds her rebellion. She, meanwhile, reveals that she has some integrity after all, even though it costs her her life. She will not, in the last instance, whore herself for her husband.
Another student, Brooke, tackled the Othello-Desdemona marriage and concluded that, even had Iago not intervened, it was probably doomed from the start. The marriage involves the exchange of two fantasies that reality cannot sustain, Brooke argued. On the one hand, Desdemona fantasizes about the warrior life, which contrasts with her own sedentary existence. Othello is her opportunity to escape from her controlling father into what she sees as an exotic alternative. Othello, for his part, is in love with the fact that Desdemona loves him, even though he is a dark outsider. If society can accept their marriage, then he really has overcome the racism of Venetian society.
This means, however, that it’s not difficult to have doubts about her, even without Iago’s insinuations. If he has insecurities about his outsider status, then fears that Desdemona might second guess her choice of him are not far behind. Iago has but to play on these insecurities for the marriage to turn tragic.
I found myself resisting Brooke’s conclusions, wanting to believe in the Desdemona-Othello marriage. I feared her arguments led to the conclusion that interracial marriages in general are doomed from the start. (To be sure, Brooke did not argue this.) I must admit, however, that her essay shook my easy faith in the love match. At the very least, Brooke convincingly showed that, if a relationship has nothing more to it than shallow fantasies, then social obstacles will probably ensure its long-term failure.
For verification of this dynamic, Brooke referenced a popular reality television show. As she put it in her opening paragraph,
While critics slander [The Bachelor] as trash TV, its exploration of relationships, perpetual melodrama, and devastating dose of heartbreak are strikingly similar to Shakespeare’s poetic masterpiece, The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice. From years of Bachelor Nation fandom and watch parties, I can confidently conclude that the most important ingredients for a recipe of happily ever after are communication, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, trust, and respect. While Othello and Desdemona’s romance is seemingly blissful and uncontentious at the beginning of the play, the couple shortly thereafter disregard the cookbook of love. With dissimilar backgrounds, fantastical perceptions of one another, and divided duties, Othello and Desdemona are unfit for each other; their marriage is unrealistic and destined for failure, even without Iago’s intervention.
My Pakistani student Hamza certainly saw dissimilar backgrounds as a problem, especially the society’s racism. Hamza noted that, in Venetian society as depicted by Shakespeare, Black men are stereotyped as sexual animals, which is why Iago thinks that Othello must have slept with his wife (which he and I find unlikely). Because of the stereotype, Iago feels he is superior to Othello, which makes Othello’s command over him—not to mention Othello’s power to elevate other men over Iago—particularly galling. (Hamza didn’t mention white supremacist rage over Obama’s election but I found myself making the connection.) No wonder Iago wants to take down Othello, along with the woman who has (in his eyes) desecrated herself by marrying him.
In setting up the culture’s racial stereotypes, Hamza quoted Desdemona’s father after learning that she has eloped. Brabantio’s conclusion is that Othello must have employed special African magic:
To further make his case, Hamza could have quoted the argument of sexualized racism that Iago uses to convince Roderigo that Desdemona will tire of Othello and he of her. In this vision, women are as driven by lust as men of color:
Iago: It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor,…nor he his to her: it was a violent commencement, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration: …These Moors are changeable in their wills:… the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice: she must have change…
To be sure, like those GOP legislators passing anti-LBGTQ laws left and right, the only people talking about sex in the play are the bigots, not Othello and Desdemona.
Another student, Charles, used Iago as an opportunity to figure out why people commit evil acts, always an important topic and one that seems especially relevant at the moment as Russian massacres of Ukrainian civilians come to light. While Charles is still sorting through various explanations, the notion of Iago’s insecurity –and perhaps a fear of being nothing—made its appearance several times in the essay. Perhaps someone who feels a vast emptiness rages against those who appear to have everything. Perhaps Iago believes he will find relief only if he renders those people as miserable as he himself is.
Bo, working with a similar idea, saw jealousy as the determining factor. Interestingly, some of the play’s most memorable passages about jealousy are uttered by Iago. He may be projecting in the following passage:
A final student, Zoe, was struck by the extent to which Iago abuses the trust that others have in him. A very trusting person herself, she set out to understand how it is that people are duped. Should Othello, Desdemona, and their friend Cassio have been able to see through Iago? If not, is she herself fated to be duped by the con artists of the world? We haven’t yet had a chance to discuss her essay, but I want to discuss with her if the victims of Iago’s deceptions are at all responsible for their victimization. What ingredients go into naive trust?
Given that America at present is swarming with liars, grifters, and con artists, it’s a question that urgently needs answers.
Stubbs, Carter, Stephens as Viola, Olivia, Orsino in 12th Night
Wednesday
After a full day of revision conferences with my “Composition and Literature” students, I report today (with the students’ permission) on their ideas about Twelfth Night. Tomorrow I’ll share the ideas of those writing about Othello, the other essay option. As you will see, my students are hungry for authentic relationships and see in Shakespeare’s 1601 comedy guidelines for achieving them.
To give you a quick overview of the play, Viola is separated from her twin brother Sebastian in a storm, which each thinking the other is dead. After she disguises herself as a man (Cesario) so that she can work for Count Orsino, the count comes to appreciate her/him and appoints her/him as emissary in his wooing of the Lady Olivia. Olivia instead falls in love with Viola/Cesario, who in turn is in love with Orsino, making for an impossible situation. All ends well, however: after a series of comic misunderstandings, Orsino marries Viola while Olivia marries Sebastian, who looks just like his sister.
Three other characters show up in the student essays: Sebastian’s friend Antonio (who has a homosexual crush on Sebastian), Olivia’s uptight steward Malvolio, and Olivia’s jester Feste.
Sidney was fascinated by the Sebastian-Antonio relationship, which she then compared with the Olivia-Viola relationship. Both Sebastian and Olivia find themselves worshipped (Sebastian by Antonio, Olivia by Orsino) and experience their pedestal position as traps. After all, when someone worships you, he (or she) wants to possess you in their idealization of you. As Sidney put it, neither Sebastian nor Lady Olivia feel “seen” by the people who profess to love them.
As a result, both keep their distance, with Sebastian attempting to leave Antonio and Lady Olivia rejecting the advances of Count Orsino. Viola, on the other hand, sees Olivia as a human being, not as an angel, and Olivia finds this exhilarating. As Sidney put it, “It’s a breath of fresh air to Olivia. Someone’s finally having genuine conversations with her, challenging her, and being honest with her.” Reminding me somewhat Aristotle in his discussion of friendship (in Nicomachean Ethics), Sidney concluded that true friendship—the kind of friendship she wants—consists of honoring the other in the fullness of his or her individuality.
Laney thought similarly except that, in her case, she compared Viola with Lady Olivia’s fool Feste. Both, she argued, rejuvenate a society that is hung up on static role playing. Lady Olivia feels that, to be a perfect lady, she must mourn her late brother for seven years before she accepts marriage proposals. Feste and Viola, by contrast, want people to live and love. Feste uses humor to loosen Olivia up, after which Viola presents her with an alternative way to live life: take risks and follow your heart. As a result of this encounter, Olivia abandons her former resolve and goes running after Viola, whom she thinks is a man.
For her part, Grace saw Viola pushing against a similar stasis as that described by Laney, only Grace saw gender stereotypes at work. In this world, men feel they have to be stereotypically male (hard and emotionless), women stereotypically female (angelic and ultra-sensitive). Orsino and Olivia both come to see these gendered roles as traps, with Orsino longing to access his female side and Olivia her male side. Both fall in love with Viola/Cesario because she seems able to balance male-female: she is sensitive (which Orsino appreciates because he can talk to her/him about feelings) and enterprising (she launches herself into the world rather than looking for a man to protect her). Grace noted that men and women, even today, find themselves trapped in stereotypical gender behavior, and she appreciated how Shakespeare shows us a way out.
Finally, there was Hayden’s essay on the necessity of comedy in the world. We get in trouble, Hayden contended, when we get hung up on life’s seriousness. When Olivia decides to mourn her brother’s death for seven years, thereby depriving the world of a potentially vibrant woman, she has the approval of Malvolio but not of Feste. Feste makes a joke that helps return her to the world of living relationships:
Feste: Good madonna, why mournest thou? Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death. Feste: I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Feste: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
When Olivia asks Malvolio for his opinion, he disapproves of what he regards as a frivolous approach to life:
I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal: I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he’s out of his guard already; unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged. I protest, I take these wise men, that crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the fools’ zanies.
To which Olivia replies:
Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets: there is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail…
Olivia is on her way to reconnecting with life and love. As Laney and Grace argue, she needs only Viola to complete the transition.
Malvolio, by contrast, Hayden sees as beyond saving. When, through a prank played upon him by Twelfth Night revelers, he ends up (temporarily) in a madhouse, Hayden notes that the fool—disguised as a pedant—once again “tells someone exactly what they need to hear”:
Feste explains how Malvolio is ignorant when he says, “there is no darkness but ignorance” (IV ii). Feste is saying something more important than what it seems. He alludes to how Malvolio lives in ignorance and darkness because he is so serious all the time….In order for Malvolio to get out of his prison,…he must be able to see the comedy within life. If he cannot, then he will live the rest of his life in a metaphorical prison of being too serious.
Great literature connects us with our best selves. In their essays, I saw Sidney, Laney, Grace and Hayden seeking to articulate and to get in touch with these selves.
Bertolt Brecht is my go-to political poet for moments when the world spins out of control. Today’s poem applies to Russians who continue to support Vladimir Putin, especially those who should know better. Even with Putin’s propaganda, it takes a special kind of self-deception to ignore what is going on in Ukraine.
Similar self-deception is Brecht’s target in “War Has Been Given a Bad Name.” By 1945, when Brecht wrote the poem, reports of the concentration camps had gotten back to America. The exiled Brecht calls out those Germans who had enabled Hitler. The enablers, he writes, want to separate the war itself from “the extermination of certain peoples” and the “bloody manhunts.”
War Has Been Given a Bad Name
I am told that the best people have begun saying How, from a oral point of view, the Second World War Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists Are said to regret the bloody manhunts Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The intellectuals So I heard, condemn industry’s demand for slave workers Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short the feeling Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland. A lamentably bad turn, and that war While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been Discredited for some time to come.
I’m sure Russia’s oligarchs, who supported Putin in exchange for wealth, would just as soon that Russia was not committing atrocities in Ukraine. They might still own their yachts if that were the case. Perhaps the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who loves Putin’s gay bashing, would prefer that the war were not forcing him into ethical jiujitsu. (Two days ago, in a service for Russian soldiers, he announced, “We absolutely do not strive for war or to do anything that could harm others. But we have been raised throughout our history to love our fatherland. And we will be ready to protect it, as only Russians can defend their country.”) I’m sure announcers for Russian Television would prefer not to have to contend that the dead civilians in Bucha, Mariupol, and elsewhere are actually crisis actors. I’m sure that Russian diplomats would prefer not to have to defend the indefensible.
In other words, thanks to Putin’s Ukraine invasion, war, as Russians see it, has been given a bad name. How much better if Ukrainians had greeted Russian troops as liberators and cheered as they paraded down central Kyiv.
Following the withdrawal of Russian troops from certain Ukrainian towns they had seized, we are getting a full measure of the evil that Vladimir Putin is visiting upon the country. According to the mayor of now liberated Bucha, some 270 civilians were found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.
Not that we should be surprised. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, observes that Russia has fought wars this way for some time. “They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender,” he observes, pointing out that this is how Putin’s forces “fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II.” Putin cares neither about Ukrainian lives nor Russian lives.”
I’ve come to think of Vladimir Putin as Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Vlad Dracula), one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s vampire. The 15th century Vlad used horror, especially impaling people (including women and their babies) to cement his authority and terrorize his enemies. Like Stoker’s Dracula, Putin lives off the blood of others, a leech who takes kickbacks from Russian mineral extraction without using the windfall to grow the economy and create a lasting prosperity. Indeed, rampant corruption is one reason why Russia’s military has failed so badly.
We should pay attention to the horror we currently feel because there’s a danger that we will become inured to it. So warns Bertolt Brecht in his poem “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain.”
Brecht, a German who had to flee Nazi Germany, witnessed how the world closed its eyes to Hitler’s evil-doing until it became too evident to ignore. Until Ukraine, the world similarly closed its eyes to Putin’s atrocities, so it could do so again. In his poem, Brecht notes the different ways we manage to ignore people who have witnessed horrors:
When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain
Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office hours: the counter is already closed. Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks another language. They do not understand him. Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at the door where he has four times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry. Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.
So do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.
The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
May what is happening in Bucha, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities never become invisible. It will require all our powers of empathy to keep our focus on the Ukrainian people, however. Their suffering, already unendurable, looks as though it will continue for some time.
Painting from Church of St Mary Magdalene in Catalonia
Spiritual Sunday
Reprinted from March, 2016
I’ve long been puzzled by today’s Gospel reading in which Mary anoints Jesus’s feet with costly perfume, only to be chastised by Judas for wastefulness. There’s something sensual about her wiping the feet with her hair, but what role does the episode play in Jesus’s journey?
Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)
My friend John Morrow, a retired Episcopal priest, tells me that Jesus is looking ahead to the crucifixion and essentially saying that the current focus must be on that. He is definitely not advocating a lackadaisical attitude towards poverty, although that is how his response to Judas has sometimes been interpreted. The time will come again when the disciples will be expected to minister to the poor.
Although this explanation sounds right, I nevertheless find myself focusing on another element. Judas in the account sounds like one of those earnest activists that take people to task when they pause for refreshment. Mary, who elsewhere gets criticized by Martha for listening to Jesus rather than helping out in the kitchen, here is criticized for not focusing at all times on the movement’s goals. Jesus, in such a reading, is telling Judas that there is a time to play as well as a time to work, a time to enjoy as well as a time to minister.
To hold this reading means that I must disagree with St. John’s explanation that Judas just wants a bigger pot that he can steal. This doesn’t sound plausible to me, especially if, as some scholars think, Judas was in fact a radical Zealot who wanted Jesus to lead a revolt against the Romans. In my alternate interpretation, Jesus is telling Judas to chill for a moment. If we don’t pause to honor an act of love and gratitude, what’s the point of the movement.
This is a lesson that Jesus himself must learn in D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Man Who Died. In Lawrence’s account, which some have found blasphemous, Jesus, upon returning from the dead, realizes that he has never truly lived. He has been so devoted to a life of self-denying service that he hasn’t opened himself up to the plenitude of life. When he meets Mary Magdalene in the garden after the resurrection, he has the following interchange with her:
[Your lovers] were much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation. Don’t run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another death.”
She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and she could not bear to be denied.
“And will you not come back to us?” she said. “Have you risen for yourself alone?”
He heard the sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her beautiful face which still was dense with excessive need for salvation from the woman she had been, the female who had caught men at her will. The cloud of necessity was on her, to be saved from the old, wilful Eve, who had embraced many men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the warm body.
Put aside the fact that Mary Magdalene wasn’t actually a prostitute and also the very male misconception that prostitutes get more than they give. This is a work about moving beyond a life-denying austerity, and by the end of the novella Jesus has learned how to revel in the richness of the world. Crucial in his awakening is a priestess of Isis, with whom he makes love. He comes to the follow realization:
Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love. This is my body–take and eat–my corpse–
A vivid shame went through him. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of love–‘
There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight. “And I told them, blessed are they that mourn,” he said to himself. “Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live. Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more to me now than all my words. For I want to live–“
This story meant a lot to me when I read it in college because I, like Lawrence, was struggling against the Victorian notion that duty was everything and pleasure was a shameful indulgence. Lawrence helped me move into a fuller appreciation of life, which is one reason why I included a Lawrence poem in my wedding ceremony. Reading him led to my own awakening.
I am well aware that one can go too far and take more than one gives. Our society right now has a problem with selfish people who are not willing to sacrifice pleasure for duty. Lawrence himself believes that there must be a balance. But encountering the story when I did helped me find that balance, and the hair-anointing scene remains a useful reminder to stop and smell the perfume.
Sandbags piled to protect Kharkhiv statue of Ukrainian national poet Shevchenko
Thursday
Watching events unfold in Ukraine, I’ve been struck by how Vladimir Putin sees no dividing line between Russia and Ukraine. Experts in the field will be able to speak to the relations between the two countries as I cannot, but I can observe that many of authors and works I associate with Russia either come from Ukrainian cities or speak fondly of them. Perhaps this fact helps convince Russians that Ukraine is, in fact, Russia.
That being said, sometimes you have to let go of what you love. Burning Ukraine’s cities to the ground would identify Russia as an abusive lover.
Chekhov’s sublime “The Lady with the Dog” first got me thinking along these lines. There we have couples strolling along the boardwalk in Yalta, located in the Crimea (which Putin annexed in 2014).
One evening he was dining in the gardens, and the lady in the béret came up slowly to take the next table. Her expression, her gait, her dress, and the way she did her hair told him that she was a lady, that she was married, that she was in Yalta for the first time and alone, and that she was dull there…. The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were for the most part made up by persons who would themselves have been glad to sin if they had been able; but when the lady sat down at the next table three paces from him, he remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly took possession of him.
While Yalta shows up in a lot of Russian fiction, Odessa shows up even more—that same Odessa that is currently readying itself for a Russian attack, including mining popular tourist beaches to ward of a Russian sea invasion. Sally McGrane’s 2013 New Yorker essay on Odessa’s literary past has filled me in on the city’s literary side:
Walking along Pushkin Street on the kind of dazzling spring day the Odessan writer Aleksandr Kuprin warned visitors to avoid—the smell of acacias in bloom, he wrote, can induce newcomers to fall in love and take foolish steps, like getting married—I crossed Bunin Street, named for the Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer, then Zhukovskogo, a street named after the romantic poet said to have been Pushkin’s mentor. Near the opera, a golden sign announced the Odessa Literary Museum.
Writers fall in love with cities all the time. But ever since Pushkin spent thirteen months here in 1823, Odessa has been a city infatuated with its writers. At the Odessa Literary Museum—housed in a dilapidated palace in the city center, it is one of the largest shrines of its kind in the world—docents can tell you the number of days a given writer was here (Chekhov, who once spent half his paycheck on Odessan ice cream, came four times and stayed a total of sixteen days) and who wrote which chapters of their greatest works while in residence (Pushkin completed the second chapter of Eugene Onegin and half of the third here, but despite the popular claim that he began Onegin in Odessa, the poet actually rewrote the first chapter here, which more or less counts). They can also tell you who burned manuscripts written in Odessa (Gogol relegated most of the second part of Dead Souls” to the flames on his return to Moscow after wintering here), whose wife was probably Odessan (Nabokov’s, Vera), which great writers passed through here yet never revisited the city in prose (maybe Nabokov, definitely Leo Tolstoy), who included Odessa in his fiction sight unseen (Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Balzac), who wrote in a letter to a friend of his intentions to visit but never did (Dostoevsky). And that’s just by the by: the museum’s twenty rooms feature some three hundred writers associated in one way or another with this city on the Black Sea that was, once upon a time, the glittering, cosmopolitan third capital of the Russian Empire.
Because the museum harkens back to the Soviet era, it underplays Odessa’s most famous native son, Isaac Babel. Give Ukrainians’ antipathy to Russia, however, I suspect Babel is going to grow in their esteem since he was victimized by the Soviet state. Author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Storiesand acclaimed as “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry” (thanks Wikipedia), Babel was imprisoned and executed by Stalin.
At the time of the New Yorker article, Babel had only four modest displays (and no mention of how he died) in the Odessa Literary Museum. After the current war, Ukrainians may honor him more as they look for authors who can elevate the nation.
Russian authors have long performed this function. One reason that Russians see themselves as exceptional is because they are the country that produced Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (The symbolic significance of the two authors helps explains why tens of thousands of Russians attended their funerals.) A poet currently functioning as a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism is Taras Shevchenko, a 19th century poet who was one of the first to write in Ukrainian and who is now the country’s national poet. At the moment in the besieged city of Karkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, sandbags have been piled high in the city center to protect his statue against Russian shelling.
Years ago, when I visited Slovenia on a Fulbright fellowship, I was struck by the extent to which they honor their authors, most notably Francis Preseren, whose statue overlooks the central square in Ljubljana and who was the first great poet to write in Slovenian. Although authors are sometimes unappreciated when alive, they can grow in symbolic value after they die.
Emmett Till, after whom the new antilynching law is named
Wednesday
It’s progress of a sort, I guess, despite coming so late: Joe Biden has just signed the “Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law,” legislation that southern legislators fought for over a hundred years. As of yesterday, lynching is now a federal hate crime.
According to this NBC news article, anti-lynch legislation has been voted down over 200 times since 1900. That’s because lynching was the muscular threat that undergirded Jim Crow segregation, especially when it came to African Americans voting. White terrorism has long reigned in much of America but it was especially evident in the American south in the century following the Civil War. Nor has it entirely ended, as Biden noted as he signed the legislation:
From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, countless victims known and unknown, the same racial hatred that drove the mob to hang a noose brought that mob carrying torches out of the fields of Charlottesville just a few years ago.
There is much African American literature that refers to lynching. James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” has a particularly graphic account of a lynching and is based on the actual lynching of Jesse Washington, in Waco Texas on May 15, 1916. There’s also Billy Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit” (original poem by Abel Meerpool):
Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
Langston Hughes too wrote a number of poems about the subject, one of which particularly haunts me. In it we see a “dark girl” mourning her lover:
Song for a Dark Girl
Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover To a crossroads tree.
Way Down South in Dixie (Bruised body high in air) I asked the white Lord Jesus What was the use of prayer.
Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree.
The deep sadness tears my heart in two while the power of the final two lines throws me back in my seat. No bill can make up for the tragedies undergone by America’s African American community but at least it’s something.
