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Smooth Spaces, Fuzzy Lives

Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Rachel Andrews | Brick | Summer 2018 | 18 minutes (4,831 words)

A photograph in an Irish newspaper depicts a member of the Garda Síochána shaking hands with his counterpart from the Police Service of Northern Ireland at one of the points where the territory of the Republic turns into that of Northern Ireland. The photograph, published in November 2015, seven months before Britain voted to exit the European Union, accompanies an article on plans for a “border corridor,” whereby police on both sides of the border can pursue fleeing criminals into each other’s region.

There’s a kind of joviality to the photograph: firm clasping of hands, big smiles. Behind the two men is the Irish landscape, rolling, misted, a river cutting through fields of green. The officers wear different uniforms, but the only obvious territorial demarcation, the only hint that they inhabit different countries, with different laws, health systems, and currencies, is a sharp change in road color, from black to sudden grey.

I remember this non-distinctiveness, the dawning awareness that I had crossed a boundary, from the many trips I took to Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2010, when I worked on an essay that documented the systematic demolition of the Maze prison, a story that presented itself symbolically and — as it turned out — all too simplistically as one of a settling of the past and a coming together for the future.

I never went North as a child. I remember a drawing in a newspaper depicting a map of Ireland. In the sliver of space that is Northern Ireland, the cartoonist had penned: “there be dragons.” In truth, it was worse than that. Ask me as a 6-year-old, a 12-year-old, about Northern Ireland and I would have responded: bombs and blood. Ask my young daughter today and she might look at you blankly. It means nothing to her, and that is a good thing.

There were ways it meant nothing to us too. I grew up in Cork, in the very south of Ireland, and that meant growing up a world away from bombs and blood. As children in the 1970s and 1980s, we were safe from soldiers in the back gardens, from streets we couldn’t walk down. But things filtered into our child worlds. From television: the dark loom of the watchtower, the helicopters, the aerial prison shots following the 1983 Maze escape; Gordon Wilson, who lost his 20-year-old daughter in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing: “I shall pray for those people tonight and every night.” Of the few discussions in school, I remember one: the classmate who had relatives in Belfast, and her upset, her anger, at our fear, our distancing and distaste.

As I got older and traveled in Europe, the easy comfort of that distancing — you and I are not alike — was undercut. “So where did you hide the bomb?” a French colleague joked when I worked for a summer at a hotel in Munich. “Until I met you, I thought all Irish people were savages,” a German girl told me during my Erasmus year in France. This was the early to mid-90s and everywhere I went, there it was. “We in Australia just can’t understand it,” said the visitor to my apartment in London. I still remember the insult of his bemusement and sincerity, as well as my own avoidance. As far as everyone on the outside was concerned, I was them and they were me. I knew better — I mean, was it not obvious?

The first time I went North was in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement, after the Omagh bombing and the howl of anguish that went with it, after it became imaginable, almost normal, for me to drive in my tiny Southern-registered Fiat from Dublin to Belfast and back again as I researched a writing project on women working in politics in Northern Ireland. I was in my late 20s by then, and I wasn’t afraid in Belfast’s city center, which had the same familiar department store names as any British or Irish main street; nor on the Falls Road, which wrapped me in a warm blanket of tri-colors and Celtic symbols; but I felt heavy and intimidated as I made my way up the red, white, and blue pavements on Shankill Road to the offices of the Progressive Unionist Party, hesitant to speak in the corner store lest I betray myself through the soft spill of my Southern tones. But then this dissolved too, and seven years later, when I spent time interviewing former prison officers at the Maze, as well as the residents who had grown up beside the prison, all from a Unionist background, the sing of my Cork accent felt more like a benign curiosity than anything traitorous or threatening.

“Merging is dangerous,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “at least to the boundaries and definition of the self.” Is that why we wrestle against it so? The border with Northern Ireland, once a site of blocked roads and lookout towers, has evaporated, at least on the surface of things, but it remains a place of struggle, of contest, a tussle between those who wish to take it one way and those who would move in another direction, either within the boundaries of a unified Ireland or into the space of clarity that tells us where we end and they begin. The amorphous situation that has existed along the border for nearly twenty years, a fudge that has resisted discrete categorizations and that we seemed to have found a way to live with, or live within, is under pressure in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the clamor to once again define what we are and what we are not, begins to accelerate. We look for the solace of certainty, of knowing if we are one thing or the other, rather than allow ourselves to remain within the complicated, messy space of the both/and, a state made possible by the exhaustion left after thirty years of violence.

Hannah Arendt had a particular view of merging. As she searched out a meaningful concept of a Jew’s place in the world following the sundering caused by the Second World War, she ultimately rejected a form of Zionism that connected citizenship to ethnicity and tethered both to the boundaries of the nation-state. On the other hand, she wrote scathingly of those European Jews who would assimilate, who would ape the Gentiles in an effort to find their way into the ranks of the human, who would, she wrote in disgust, become “good Frenchmen in France,” “good Germans in Germany.” Arendt, you could say, had been one such good German. As a child she did not know that she or her family were Jewish; she learned of her ethnicity only through the anti-Semitic taunts of children on the street. But it was the shocking stripping of her German citizenship as an adult in the 1930s that ultimately woke her to the helpless vulnerability of the assimilated Jew and formed her conviction that Jews must stand defiantly aloof from the boundaries of nationality, turning instead toward the belonging of the citizen; the belonging that attaches to full and complete membership of a political community; the belonging that confers the right to meaningfully speak, act, and be heard in such a community; the belonging that means inhabiting a territory without subscribing to an overarching identity narrative. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples — if they keep their identity,” she wrote. Today her sentiments do not appear so different from those of Dina Nayeri, an Iranian refugee who received U.S. citizenship at 15 and became a French national at 30, and who wrote in the Guardian that she had lost interest in the need to rub out her face as tribute for these benefactions. “As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here,” she said, although a third culture appears to be the choice made by Arendt’s beloved Heinrich Heine, at least as she described it, which was to live as both a German and a Jew rather than deny his Jewishness as the price of belonging. “He simply ignored the condition which had characterized emancipation everywhere in Europe — namely, that the Jew might only become a man when he ceased to be a Jew,” she wrote.

Arendt came out of a Europe that had, she witnessed, conclusively intertwined national rights with human rights, which left her as mistrustful of a national, bordered identity as she was of the “abstraction” of any solemn notions of the inalienable rights of man. Heine, the Prussian-born poet and literary critic, came of age in the early nineteenth century, an era of political instability and contentiousness in his homeland; his conversion to Lutheranism was reluctant, regretted, and carried out only as the price of “admission into European culture.” In the early years of the twenty-first century, there was a feeling —I had the feeling — that Europe, at least on some parts of its continent, had found its way beyond these aspects of its shattering history and was on the turn toward the global and the flexible. In 2002, when I lived for a time in Paris, I could board a plane in France and emerge in Italy, where I could retrieve my bags and leave the airport without showing any identification, without queues or questions. This identity-less travel, the result of the then seven-year-old Schengen Agreement and so opposite to my conditioned, normalized experience of waiting in dutiful lines, gave me the very real sense of being a human in the world. The continent of Europe — the part of it that now had a common currency and permeable frontiers, and even onwards toward the rapidly opening East — felt magical, enlightened even, as if we were all in this together. The distinctions between us, forged through cultural, religious, and geographic experience, appeared shapeless now. I could be both Irish and European; I felt that I could, as Arendt wrote, “speak the language of a free man and sing the songs of a natural one.”

But there was a “them.” From my window in Stalingrad, the quartier in the north of Paris where I lived from September to Christmas, I watched men in jeans and jackets congregate outside in the early darkness of the winter evenings, lining up in huddled rows on a Friday for weekly prayers. I looked on, curious — what are they doing? — before I understood. This was one year before the Iraq War, which fractured the Arab world, but already and for long years it was not easy to be Muslim in France, even if you were the French-born descendant of those who had come in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the first wave of migrant workers from northern Africa who stayed in search of a better life; even if you identified as both Muslim and French, as really all, or at least so many, of such descendants do, and as French civic society, with its emphasis on the primacy of the citoyen, encourages — in theory anyway. The exclus, they used to call them. The excluded. If I lived in Stalingrad today, the men across the street would no longer be there; in 2011, politicians banned the saying of street prayers in Paris following far-right protests about creeping Islamization. Instead, near the street I lived on, under the bridge where the metro station lay, there would almost certainly be tents and other makeshift shelters constructed by refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, part of a new and different wave of migration that, along with the 2008 economic crisis, has upended all of Europe. In 2002, I also went to Greece on a reporting assignment. There was no graffiti then comparing Angela Merkel to Hitler; today many in the desperately-indebted country view the dominance of German capital as the source of their woes. In Italy, France, Germany, a radicalized electorate now supports nationalist parties, looks at the European Union with deep suspicion. We were never all in this together.

For the moment, I can travel from Ireland to Britain without a passport. For the moment, I can drive from Dublin to Belfast without stopping, as the road melts from the N1 to the A1 and the white and black sign informs me that speed limits are now being monitored in miles rather than kilometers. (How different to John McGahern’s experience in the early 1990s, recounted in the essay “County Leitrim: The Sky Above Us”: “There are ramps and screens and barriers and a tall camouflaged lookout tower,” he said of the border crossing at Swanlinbar in County Cavan. “A line of cars waits behind a red light. A quick change to green signals each single car forward. In the middle of this maze armed soldiers call out the motor vehicle number and driver’s identification to a hidden computer. Only when they are cleared will the cars be waved through. Suspect vehicles are searched. The soldiers are young and courteous and look very professional.”) By the time I will have finished writing this article, British Prime Minister Theresa May will have triggered Article 50, and the movements I have become used to taking between cities and countries will have been thrown into confusion. Since the terrorist attacks of November 2015, France has been in a state of emergency that includes a firm policing of its borders. For more than a year and a half, commuters travelling from Malmö in Sweden to Copenhagen in Denmark had to present their IDs. Temporary border controls have also been introduced by Germany, Austria, and Norway. Merging is dangerous. Those hoping for a united Ireland — and I am surely one — forget this. On his blog, the journalist and Northern analyst Andy Pollak notes that Andrew Crawford, the former special adviser to current Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Arlene Foster, used to go through reports from one North-South body removing the phrase “all-Ireland.” Perhaps the action of deletion helped Crawford forge certainty, was part of an attempt to make sense of how he existed in time and space. Forging certainty helps us all as we construct both story and identity in order to figure out how to live, but certainty, or at least a fixed destination, gets us into trouble too: we blind ourselves to possibilities, to the creative potential that lies outside of the either/or, to what can happen when we follow Arendt, say, or Deleuze, that great demolisher of dualisms, into the space of the non-being, the uncertain, the becoming.

In her photographic series Kinderwunsch, Ana Casas Broda depicts her body in thrall to those of her children, an artist willing to lose herself in conversation with flux, with change, with overwhelm. The photos are intimate and direct. Casas Broda often stares unsmilingly at the camera: a candid, life-worn Olympia, her pregnant body naked and big, uncomfortable-looking with her second child, or scarred and slack following fertility treatment and birth. In one of the images, her children have marked her face and torso with crayon; she both encouraged this and passively accepted the results. “I am their canvas: they play with me and change me,” she said in an interview. Kinderwunsch means “desire to have children,” and Casas Broda submits, it appears to me, to the terror and the unknown of that primal desire. She tumbles downwards, inwards. In the photographs, her children clothe her in tissue paper, they cover her in Play-Doh. “I see their scribbles on my body as a symbol of how motherhood has changed me,” she said. What she is really depicting is dissolution (of a former self), symbiosis — and something else. In some of the images, she and her children appear as one, interwoven, but there are others where she is alone, or they are indifferent to her: a son plays a video game as she lies naked on a couch, in between mother and person, neither here nor there, her body nonetheless relaxed, strangely at ease in the moment.

Around the time I began my Maze project, I was experiencing the greatest disintegration of self I had ever felt. Crossing the border from North to South represented moments of enormous exhilaration and giddy freedom: dazed as I was, when I lay in a border hotel without the baby, who had just turned seven months, I thought that I could see a way back to myself, that the place where I ended and the child began, would somehow become obvious again, clearly defined. I was wrong about that: there was no going backward. There was no going forward either, at least not in the way I wanted or imagined. Since the birth of my daughter, I remain in limbo land, the borders of a self so carefully constructed over nearly four decades now shifting. She arrived and I disappeared, something like that anyway. The categories I had thought surrounded me have dissipated into confusion and nothingness, and that, if I think about it too much, can be terrifying. Did I turn into you, I used to ask her when she was a baby, or have you become me?

When Colm Tóibín walked the border between North and South in 1987, he bumped into questioning British soldiers; a blown-up bridge on a road that once led from Dublin to Enniskillen; and, in Derry, a march led by former DUP leader Peter Robinson, then in the ascendant. Tóibín feared opening his mouth during the march, lest the crowd (young men in the main, some drunk) spot him as a Southerner. Despite the disappearance of the island’s physical frontier, the hangover from these tensions remains. My friend, a middle-class Northerner from a Catholic background who has lived in Dublin for nearly twenty years, at times employs turns of phrase that leave me reaching for a Cockney rhyming slang dictionary. Yet she and I both use colloquialisms a person born in England will never have heard. Nonetheless, for a long time my friend was lost and lonely in Dublin, reluctant to move back to a society still undercut by a deep lack of trust but without solid ground in the cultural space of the South; she felt different. “I was different,” she told me, as I tried to grasp her feelings of statelessness. It’s not as if we are from different countries, I told myself, not really anyway. But the thing is, we are, both literally and metaphorically. The border has dissolved, but trauma, so deep, so wounding, cuts us off from one another, makes strangers of us in the same land, pulls me one way, pushes her another; trauma turns a society inward, and it has turned Northern Ireland, in the words of retired Oxford professor of Irish history Roy Foster, into more of its own little place than ever. What we have in common is this (and this is easy to write and hard to live): we are more the same than we are different.

The artist Rita Duffy grew up Catholic in a largely Protestant area of Belfast; she is the progeny of a Southern mother and a father whose own father, a Catholic from the Falls Road, died at the Somme. Her two great-uncles on her mother’s side supported and may have been actively involved in the 1916 rebellion, which ultimately led to Irish independence, a civil war, and the fracturing of the island of Ireland. “I was continually fluctuating between nationalities, between identities, curious to know could I somehow land up in the middle somewhere that satisfied me today,” she told a symposium I attended in 2016. In recent years, Duffy has established herself within the space of the liminal: “I crept out to the edges of Ulster and we bought a little piece of the border. We built a house and I now have a studio just a mile and a half on the Southern side, and I live a mile and a half on the Northern side, so I kind of live in neither-here-nor-there land, which is a really interesting place to be as an artist. It’s very confusing and out of that springs the best imaginative possibilities for me.” Out of those imaginative possibilities have arrived big, bold ideas. The Titanic passenger liner was built in Belfast; the tragedy of its unfulfilled promise can be viewed as a metaphor for the long years the North lost to violence. In 2005, Duffy founded Thaw, a company set up to fund the towing of an iceberg from the Arctic to Belfast, where it would be moored outside the city and allowed to melt, in the process encouraging the shrinking of the deep, frozen divisions that still exist within Northern Irish society. Duffy has not yet found the means to drag her iceberg to Belfast, but since 2003 her paintings have been replete with the mythology of those hulking, frozen structures. She has created figurative images that appear trapped, encased in ice: Father Edward Daly, crouching, waving his handkerchief; a close-up of an arm, gesturing, holding a white handkerchief that may itself be an iceberg in miniature; in another painting, there is a Pieta, a mother holding a dying son, both emerging out of the bulk of an ice structure.

Duffy paints these images in greys and yellows, sometimes browns or greens, always muted. But in the middle, or in the distance, there is something, a speck of brightness, a blob, the white-grey of Father Daly’s handkerchief-iceberg, the light that draws your eye and that looks and feels like a breath of gulping air. If you thaw the frozenness, if you let it melt into the Irish Sea, then a space can open up, the iceberg no longer blocks your view and holds you in its frozen time. Behind you lies the city, with its plurality of people, before you the sky and the vastness of the ocean, deep and bold and cerulean blue. Duffy’s iceberg queen, a mammoth, back-turned Victoria, ascends into that blue, the blue of space, the blue of a possibility that allowed for an impossible friendship during the short time that former IRA member Martin McGuinness and the once-trenchant defender of Unionism, Reverend Ian Paisley, worked together in government in Northern Ireland. If you thaw the frozenness, a space opens up, and into that space walked Ian Paisley Jr., son of the good preacher, on various radio stations in January 2017, offering “humble and honest thanks” to Martin McGuinness on the occasion of the latter’s retirement.

In the North Atlantic, the largest iceberg on record was measured at 550 feet above sea level, the same height as a 55-story building; less tremendous ice structures can still reach more than 200 feet high. The Titanic, travelling at top speed on a calm night, crashed into an iceberg that was more than a mile long and 100 feet high and had been growing into its dense mass of packed ice since the time of Tutankhamun, although once such an iceberg drifts from the Arctic to the warmer waters of the North Atlantic, which this one had, it will normally melt in two or three years. To an impatient human eye, this melting will be imperceptible until it is close to completion. My daughter likes to play with ice cubes; she takes them from her glass of water and lays them on the table, where she can contemplate their light, their translucence. When she first started this game, I watched benignly; these days I place a tissue or napkin on the table to soak up the water that spreads out so suddenly as the cube, whole only a moment before, turns liquid before our eyes.

In Bosnia, where I’ve been doing research, the iceberg is still solid, a mountainous whole that blocks ethnicities from seeing across to each other. The Bosnian peace deal of 1995 somehow managed to avoid the formation of literal borders; instead, the populace has retreated into different enclaves across the country, Muslims stick with Muslims, Serbs with Serbs, and so forth. The saddest example of this is Sarajevo, which now sits within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of two political entities that compose Bosnia. Sarajevo’s population is now almost 90 percent Muslim, many of them newcomers since the ending of the war; former residents, most of whom will never go back, mourn the city that was once multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan. Everything has changed, they will tell you, shaking their heads; the city is totally different. There is still separatist agitation, particularly in the Republika Srpska, the political entity that sits closest to Serbia proper, whose nationalist leaders threaten to form their own tiny state, but the frozen iceberg contains more than that: it holds the pain of deceit, of mistrust, of horrors, of loss, of history and geography, of denial and defense. Most of my time in Bosnia was spent in the Republika Srpska, in the east of the country, where I found myself crossing and recrossing the border with Serbia. At each crossing, I encountered the checkpoints: the wait, the documents handed over, the computer clearance, the questions on occasion, the stamps. My husband, a photographer, made the crossing alone once and was held for two hours while guards went through his equipment, his backpack, his wallet. The determined absorption of different religions and cultures into the shape of a single Yugoslavia after the First and Second World Wars had its problems too, but those Bosnians old enough to remember the time when the many amalgamated into the one speak of it wistfully, softly, as if it were a fairy tale they used to tell themselves as children. Their iceberg was waiting, biding its time out at sea, before it floated inland to lodge itself forcibly among them. The disappearance of the border between North and South Ireland has not sunk our icebergs. But over the past sixteen years, until the schism that was June 23, 2016, we had found ways to float one with the other, moored and not, comfortable and not, settled and not.

Is it possible to hold two contrary ideas at the same time: that sense that merging is both terrifying and monumental, the knowledge that we are all different, but that we live within a common world, that we can choose to be something and not? Although Alice Notley wrote that the birth of her child had left her “undone” — “feel as if I will / never be, was never born” — she could still see the other side: “Of two poems one sentimental and one not / I choose both / of his birth and my painful unbirth I choose both.” She hung in the balance, remained midway, gave herself over to not settling in. The child that was a baby when I began my Maze project recently turned ten and is in process, in transition. She is a self that I am not, although that self, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is only “a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.” Her identity is no more fixed than mine is, than mine ever was, for all that I have scrambled to chase it. “What is real,” write the philosophers, “is the becoming itself. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.” There is confusion, and much relief, in such malleable thinking.

I was wrong, of course, in the assumptions I made about the Maze story. After the initial openness that followed the prison’s closure in 2000, when the paramilitary prisoners were let out and the public allowed in, political wrangling slowly strangled the goodwill until the great gates swung shut again; they have stayed shut, more or less, ever since. When I talked to people in and around the prison about politics and the peace, they felt bitter and hurt and sad, and that was not easy to hear. But any hard edges of fear and certainty seemed also to have blurred into a resignation that meant we could at least stand outside of compartmentalizations and inside the fuzzy space that doubt tends to uncover.

It was almost always cold at the Maze; even during summer, the fog hung heavy over its vast flatness. When I was in need of warming, I would retreat to the small security hut at the entrance to the site, where a handful of guards took phone calls and processed visitors. What I recollect about these visits are the moments of recognition. One of the men, a gentle soul, English-accented, who had lost his wife too early and now lived a simple life of work and extended family, was the chatty type. I still remember how he once articulated my fear. “You dip your finger in a pool of water, swirl it about for a while, and when you take it out, the water will return to the way it was. Then it will be as if you never were.”

***

This essay first appeared in Brick, the biannual print journal of nonfiction based in Canada and read throughout the world. Our thanks to Rachel Andrews and the staff at Brick for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

What Ever Happened To the Truth?

Corbis Historical / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | July 2018 | 7 minutes (1,841)

It isn’t often that a book review makes headlines, but legendary New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani did just that in 2016. Published about six weeks before the presidential election — one day after the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, when it seemed Clinton’s win was inevitable — Kakutani’s review of Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich went viral when it was perceived as an attack on then-candidate Trump. The review itself was dominated by bullet-points drawing out ways in which Adolf Hitler went from a “‘Munich rabble-rouser’ — regarded by many as a self-obsessed ‘clown’ with a strangely ‘scattershot, impulsive style’” to Fuhrer in a country regarded as one of the poles of civilization. Trump’s name was nowhere in the review, but publications jumped on the apparent comparison. “Trump-Hitler comparison seen in New York Times book review,” said CNN; “This New York Times ‘Hitler’ book review sure reads like a thinly veiled Trump comparison,” from the Washington Post; “A review of a new Hitler biography is not so subtly all about Trump,” according to Vox. Even later reviews of the book itself were shaded by Kakutani’s seeming comparison.

Almost two years later, a subtle comparison between Hitler and now-President Trump feels incredibly tame and undeserving of such heavy scrutiny. But at the time, such comparisons weren’t altogether common in the mainstream; Trump seemed destined to lose and fade into whatever post-campaign activity he chose to channel his not-insignificant celebrity towards. Instead, of course, he won, and comparisons like Kakutani’s became far more common as it became clear that the presidency would not temper his stated goals and ambitions.

The review would prove to be one of Kakutani’s last in her position as the New York Times Book Critic, a role in which she proved a formidable force within the literary world. It was announced in July, 2017 that she would be stepping down after three and a half decades. Famously distant from the public eye, Kakutani’s seemingly abrupt departure so soon after causing a media firestorm left many questioning her next moves. Now, one year later, we have an answer: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Read more…

Behind The Writing: On Interviewing

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,817 words)

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

To tackle this column, I took the standard approach I’ve developed over my early career as a writer: look to the women. Women writers still face entrenched stereotypes and biases, underrepresentation in reviews, and a significant byline gap in publishing. I have found that one silver lining to this discrimination can be women writers’ commitment to helping one another out, supporting one another’s work, and navigating what often feels like an inscrutable insiders’ network together. With that spirit in mind, for this first column on the subject of interviewing, I looked to three women writers whose work I deeply admire: Lauren Markham, Sarah Smarsh, and Jennifer Percy. I read and reread their remarkable books, then spoke with each of them about the skill, art, and technique of the interview.


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One reason I chose these three women’s work was because each of their books leans heavily on reconstructed narrative: scenes from characters’ pasts that the writer didn’t witness and that need to be put together in vivid detail from interviews. Much of my work as a journalist has relied on reconstructed narrative, and I am fascinated by the puzzle of interviewing the same subject over and over again in order to flesh out the shape and texture of their life. It is not a linear process. It does not proceed like: Tell me about the day you did X. How did that feel? What did it look like? What happened next? Now tell me about the day you did Y. For me, it often involves getting a big gush of information in the first interview, then going through it to highlight areas of particular interest or ambiguity, then going back and asking more about those areas, then repeating this process ad infinitum until the information becomes a story.

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

These moments, Markham suggests, are not ones you can necessarily ask about directly. “If you say to any of us,” she told me, “‘What are some of the most foundational memories from your childhood?’ we’re like, ‘wahhhhh?’” But if you’re willing to make the investment of time, you eventually find a way in through the side door.

Another day, Markham went on a bike ride with the twins and they told her a story about how when they were little in El Salvador they’d stolen corn and used it to buy a bike; it was such a perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. To elicit this type of early experience in particular, Markham relied much more on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects than on the expertly crafted interview question. She told me, “I think building real, honest, genuine relationships from your heart with whomever you’re interviewing makes for better journalism and more humane journalism. And of course there have to be boundaries and there has to be the clarity of OK we’re not friends and I’m still a journalist, but you can still be operating from a place of deep compassion and connection with someone.”

Writing about immigrants who attended the high school where Markham works in Oakland, California, posed an ethical dilemma that terrified her initially. She did not want the twins to feel obligated to participate in her project; she did not want to seem like she was taking advantage of her position; she didn’t want to blend her role coordinating services and programs at the school with her role as a journalist. She agonized over this with her boss at work until finally she told her, “Listen, we let journalists in here all the time to connect with immigrant communities, and we are constantly making a calculation of do we feel this person is trustworthy and do we feel that we trust them enough to connect them with students or families. Of all the people I’d want to write this story, it’d be you.” Markham was still uncertain about putting an undue burden on the twins until finally, she told me, she realized, “I was so freaked out about these young people’s ‘inability’ to make a decision and understand the kind of nuances of my dual role, that in fact I was infantilizing them. They walked from El Salvador to the United States, and I was sort of projecting on them this inability for them to understand or to make a decision on their own.” She sat down with them, explained her project, and told them they didn’t have to make a decision right away. By this point, they were no longer students and were 18 years old. She was surprised when they immediately agreed. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to be heard.

Throughout the entire writing process Markham was hyper-aware of the clichés inherent in writing about immigrants: painting them as the perfect, sad heroes, as one-dimensional victims. She wanted to include all the complications of their lives, their shitty decisions, their adolescence. They were teenagers, after all, living by themselves in a foreign country. “Showing them in their roundness was a way to crack open the trope of immigration,” she told me.

Her commitment to showing her characters’ full, complex humanity comes through in so many details of daily life and personality: the way the twins’ faces form “matching masks of dread” when they are late for an appointment; the bright red the Mexican snack food Takis stains their lips; the comfort they feel as they cuddle in a pilled blanket with their brother’s girlfriend’s chihuahua; the movies they watch (Finding Nemo) contrasted with their Facebook posts (tough-guy proclamations and shirtless pics); the way each holds a baby (Ernesto, “cautiously, like a bowl filled with water,” and Raul comfortably, “his face soften[ing] into an old expression something like innocence or wonder”). The most potent information, Markham said, came from just talking to and observing them, but it should also be said that her interview process was extensive and methodical. She had a regular interview schedule with the twins and over the course of years developed a “crazy mosaic” of information: details related to the car and the court date, to the journey northward from El Salvador, to the desert, to their time in an immigrant detention center. She knew that the power of the narrative would ride on detail, and whatever she didn’t glean from observation over time, she tried to ask about: What color was the sofa? What about so-and-so’s shirt? Maybe they didn’t remember the sofa or the shirt, but they did recall the wallpaper, and she’d write that down.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this. “We already told you!” the twins would say, but they would tell it again, and when a detail changed she’d ask about it. She learned this in a workshop with Rebecca Skloot, who said that if you only have the testimony of one person and can’t corroborate, interview that person over and over and see where there are discrepancies. These discrepancies, Markham told me, are often “portals into more complex questions and realities of the story.”

Jennifer Percy also relied on this technique during the three years she spent reporting and writing Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, the harrowing story of a soldier who, after a traumatic event in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of his best friend, returns home to the United States with PTSD and attempts to cure himself and other suffering vets using exorcism in small town Georgia. Percy found herself asking for the same story over and over, trying to break down the heroic version she initially heard. She needed to get through that stiffness of the rehearsed narrative to something rougher and more authentic. She was not after the same kind of authenticity as Markham; where Markham wanted to convey in precise detail the nature of her subjects’ journey northward, Percy wanted to illustrate the emotional and psychological power of war stories, the way they are constructed, the way they can be unreliable, the complex questions that unreliability poses.

Percy was heavily influenced by James Agee’s Let Us All Praise Famous Men and by the notion that nonfiction will always operate with limitations and will never be able to represent the world as it is. These limitations are some of the central tensions of her book; she portrays herself as the writer, the interviewer, struggling to understand across a gulf that is also the gulf between the average American and the soldier returning from war with PTSD. In the parts of the book in which she herself is present as a character, actually depicted interviewing on the page, the reader interviews through her in a way, struggling to make sense of experiences that in the end are impossible to untangle by everyday reasoning. “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals,” she writes. The sense of the terrifying foreignness of both the questions and the answers is palpable. Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through. “It didn’t really feel like I was trying to be an expert on the subject,” she told me, “but rather going into it as a question, with questions. That was what was driving the book.” Here the awkwardness of the interview is the story itself: How does someone who has never been to war understand war, and how does someone who has been to war make it comprehensible?

Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through.

Percy obtained many concrete details — the height the aircraft at the heart of the narrative was flying when it crashed, its position, its specs — from sources other than her main subject, Caleb. With him, she focused predominantly on how he was struggling to make sense of an extremely traumatic experience.

This meant learning when to stay silent and when to push back. At first, she told me, her tendency was to react to these stories of trauma in the way she would react to a friend who was grieving: to respond empathetically, to ask sensitive questions, to tread very carefully, until she realized that this wasn’t actually what her subjects needed. They wanted her to listen, so she grew quiet and listened.

She eventually became less nervous about asking difficult questions, and as her relationship with Caleb evolved over years and he increasingly insisted on bringing her in line with his vision of the world, she pushed back a little harder against it. This delicate line in interviewing between privileging a subject’s view of the world, trying to comprehend it with as much nuance as possible, and challenging some of the improbable or biased or ethically dubious aspects of that view is one that Percy navigates masterfully. The narrative is tense with interactions like the following, in which Percy gestures to the gulf between her experience and her narrator’s, and to her own doubt, and at the same time gives credence to the necessity and fullness of his convictions. In this scene, she challenges Caleb and he challenges her back, and in the interplay between them lies the trauma.

“I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says,” but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think it might have?”

I don’t say anything.

Then a few breaths later in that same scene, Percy asks:

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

In the first third of Demon Camp, which is written like fiction — a lyrical, haunting story of a vet growing up, going to war, and experiencing its horrors — Percy wanted to convey Caleb’s point of view. She taped many conversations and appropriated his language and rhythms directly from those transcripts. She also prepared him for interviews by saying, “I’m going to ask a lot of questions that seem really irrelevant. Can you spend a lot more time talking about this random object in the corner of the room?” She would tell him, “Slow time down to where you’re going to take me an hour to describe ten minutes.” What emerges from this is an almost embodied nonfiction, where Percy is in a way channeling her character. Of the night Caleb lost his virginity, Percy writes, “She showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin.” Of his eagerness to believe in deliverance at a conference in Rhode Island where people came to be rid of PTSD, she writes, “He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.” Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person. She does, however, attribute the particularly lyric style of Demon Camp to the fact that it was her first experience of reporting, and she came into it “without any baggage in that realm.” I, too, feel that I now have too much baggage as a reporter to write as freely as I want, and I find Demon Camp exciting in how it breaks convention with much of standard literary journalism. It illustrates the possibility of being rigorous with interviewing and reporting while still writing a haunting, transporting work, harking back to the writing of earlier literary journalists like Didion and Wolfe.

Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person.

In her highly anticipated debut, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Sarah Smarsh also wanted to illustrate the imperfections and limitations of nonfiction, and the fact that the stories she is telling are not the ultimate, absolute truth but rather the subjective recollections of individual human beings. She wanted to emphasize the wit, insight, and personality of her characters — her family, blue collar workers who have so often been depicted mainly in demeaning stereotypes, or denied a voice at all in American culture. At first, Smarsh intended to immerse the reader in a narrative that read like fiction, a seamless recounting that made her interviewing invisible. But then, she told me, she realized that “for me, the family members who I was interviewing, who are dynamic characters in the book, are so original and funny and vibrant in their own words that I found however much I honed a narrative based on the things they told me, it was leaving one of the greatest strengths of the story on the table if I didn’t let them do some speaking for themselves.” This was also, she explained, “a subtle way of reminding the reader … (a) I’m not making this shit up, and (b) it’s not all about me. I’m building this from hopefully empathic conversations with people whose stories go back further from my own.” This tactic of forgoing the unbroken enchantment of a narrative that reads like fiction for a sense of real people telling stories allows Smarsh to pull off a remarkable feat: Although her book is a memoir, her voice and presence feel secondary to that of her family, and her consciousness, though it is actually writing and constructing the story, does not feel as though it is what drives the book.

Take, for example, Smarsh’s description of her grandmother Betty’s move from Wichita to Smarsh’s grandfather Arnie’s wheat farm:

Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies — she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

“It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals.

Heartland is driven by Smarsh’s memories and framed by her childhood, but in the end the book is not really so much about her — that is, her interior self and struggle — nor is it propelled by her voice in the MFA-ish sense of “voice.” I was amazed by this when I read the book, and it speaks in large part to the power of her interviewing. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Smarsh notes that she researched and wrote the book over the course of 15 years, conducting “uncounted hours of interviews.” The resulting narrative demonstrates not only the extent of these interviews, but also Smarsh’s particular understanding of this world and these people and the empathy she has for them. While much of the uniqueness and insight of Percy’s book came from positioning herself as an outsider, trying to figure this world out — she told me that she doesn’t think the book would have had the same resonance had she come into it as a seasoned war reporter — Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place. Much of the narrative, and of the conversations in the book, revolve around the tangibles of places, houses, jobs: the emotion is implied and pulses subtly and largely unstated beneath these facts. She was not asking her grandmother, “What did you feel? What did you think?”

Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place.

When your own society hasn’t cared about you for decades, she told me, “those truths are experienced at some strata that is below words and articulation.” The lack of articulation of these truths in fact drove her to become a journalist in an attempt to articulate them. What makes her book so singular is the fact that she is able to convey this repressed or buried emotion in the language and the worldview of her characters. She doesn’t try to speak for them in what she calls “fancy English.” (She told me she speaks two forms of English: country and fancy.) She uses her understanding of this place and this worldview not to translate it but to convey it, with the skills and ethics of what she describes as “an old-fashioned hard-ass twentieth-century newspaper training.” We chatted briefly about Katherine Boo, whose work shares much in common with hers, and she remarked that Boo’s writing is exceptional because Boo doesn’t impose “her own inevitably socialized way of seeing reality” onto the people she’s writing about. The same could be said of Smarsh.

Like Percy, Smarsh emphasized the importance of being comfortable with silence. She described the interview as a forced, staged, artificial reproduction of what we do every day: talk to people and elicit interesting stories and information. “It’s sort of like if someone is just naturally hilarious and whenever you sit around and drink beers they crack everybody up, but if you put a microphone in front of that person and you’re like, ‘Be funny!’ they kind of shut down,” she said. This is the awkwardness the interview can generate for writers.

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I asked Smarsh about how interviewing family differed for her from interviewing strangers and if she employed any unique techniques. Her response was that actually approaching family interviews as a journalist — a professional working in a field with specific demands and protocols — made it easier for them to tell her their stories. This approach, she told me, “allowed my family to say, This is just work. I’m a journalist, I’m just doing my job, and if there’s anything my family respects, it’s someone just doing their damn work.” The interviews were not a touchy-feely let’s-all-understand-one-another session or, as Smarsh put it, her family saying in gushing tones, “Let’s support darling Sarah’s work!” Rather, she said, they were “basically the writing version of sharpening some tools in the shed.”

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I, too, have played this I’m-the-journalist role with my family: in particular, with my younger brother, when he went on a soul-searching road trip one summer and I begged to accompany him, as if he were the budding musician and I the rookie reporter for Rolling Stone. I have found it fascinating how much I could not know — and could come to understand — about someone I’ve known my whole life. The space that opens up between family members with that journalistic distance, with the curiosity and novelty of that role, can reveal objects hidden in plain sight. Smarsh describes writing about her family in this way, as a journalist, as “the most transformative process I’ve had as a human being”; in understanding the social, cultural, ground-level factors that made her mother in particular who she was, Smarsh was able to forgive her.

Smarsh described herself at one point as a “journalist of everyday life,” a phrase that seems at once intuitive and uncanny. I’ve come to latch onto it as a guiding principle; I love both its sweep and its specificity. In many ways, the art of interviewing, and of reconstructing the narratives of “regular” people — that is, not celebrities or public figures — is the art of making everyday life exceptional and fascinating, of seeing what we either take for granted, miss, or cast only a passing glance at in our narrow worlds. In the case of all three of these writers, everyday life contained significant traumas that would be foreign to many readers, but it also contained infinite small moments of tenderness, heartbreak, and connection, and the brilliance of their work is the ability to convey both: to map out the forces that shape a life and also all the quirks of individual strength and personality that define it.

The interview can feel like an act of transgression or, at worst, of violation, and at the same time like the ultimate veneration, a low bow before the infinitely layered experience of another human being. It is a unique intimacy, uncomfortable and pleasurable, awkward and at times transcendent, a spark of meaning that flashes between two often very different people. As Smarsh put it, “You are being given a gift.” And as with any gift, the giving and the receiving are complicated: How to reciprocate? How to honor? How to achieve balance? And is that even possible, or the point?

To look at the interview is to understand writing not as the solitary endeavor of the genius performing her sorcery but as relationship, as negotiation, in which a writer is trying to simultaneously remove herself entirely from a story — to in fact scribble out her assumptions and readings — and to purposefully tell that story with all her skill, will, and vision. The interview acts as a prism illuming the ultimate goal of any writing: to use one’s language and self and brain as a way of getting beyond self and language and brain into a larger realm, a shared one, a more universal one built of the most microscopic blocks: And what did the river feel like? Tell me about the wallpaper.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm (Pantheon, 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her second book, about an epidemic of anxiety in American motherhood, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

Why I Lied to Everyone in High School About Knowing Karate

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jabeen Akhtar | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (3,917 words)

In 10th grade, I was chosen to be photographed for a yearbook feature called “Out of the Ordinary Hobbies.” The yearbook staff heard I had a green belt in karate and wanted to do an interview with photos. Anna*, a yearbook editor, approached me about the feature while I was organizing my locker.

“How did you know I knew karate?” I asked her.

She said Rodney told her, who heard it from Julie. Or maybe Heather. I didn’t remember telling Julie. Or Heather.

“I mean, a green belt, wow,” Anna said. “Not many people have those types of skills.” Anna said she always wanted to take a self-defense class. Why didn’t the school offer karate instead of stupid stuff like home economics? She’d rather know how to protect herself than sew a button. Maybe I could give her a few pointers, she said, show her what to do if someone attacks her with a knife from behind.

Author yearbook photo, 1990

I nodded along as Anna spoke, pulling textbooks from my backpack and stacking them in my locker where the poetry collection I had written for third period English sat visibly on the bottom shelf. “SMERSH” the title of the collection said, which was also the name of Stalin’s counterintelligence agency. Below it was the subheading, “Death to Spies.” It was 1990, and though the Cold War had recently smashed into pieces, wall by wall, mallet by mallet, we still spoke its language. It was no surprise to me that things like the USSR, KGB, dead drops, poisoned lipsticks and perestroika would find their way into the stanzas of my electric typewriter-printed pages. Besides, poetry, I had decided, need not be tedious ruminations on flowers or pallid reflections on grief.

My English teacher had disagreed. “Too James Bond,” she wrote across the title page, marking it with a “C.” I placed my civics book over the top of it, hoping Anna didn’t see my grade.

“The yearbook feature is new so we really want the best of the best,” Anna said. “So tell me…are you in?”

Mary Lynn entered the hallway, her wall of freshly lacquered bangs holding steadfast as she shuffled past us towards her boyfriend’s locker. She was one of the few headbangers to penetrate the wealthy student government crowd, however tenuously, clearly trying to hide her behind-the-gym cigarette habit from them with an extra splash of Jean Naté. She glanced at me over her Trapper Keeper, her eyes a mix of curiosity and mild indignation. No one ever stopped by my locker to talk to me and now here was someone from the yearbook staff and the visit looked official. Clearly, I had been chosen, out of the entire student body, for something in the yearbook. Something important. Which meant that in some capacity, I was important.

I couldn’t blame for Mary Lynn for being skeptical.

Anna’s pencil anxiously tapped her notebook. She was waiting for a response. I stuck my hand deep within the bowels of my locker, searching for a purple scrunchie and in my mind, searching for a way to tell her.

“Well?” she asked again. “Will you do the yearbook feature? Are you in?”

I’d been here before, in this same position years ago, and I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop what I had set in motion. Stop things before they went any further, before they perilously and irrevocably went too far. I needed to tell Anna the truth.

I’d never had a day of karate in my life.

I looked down again at my locker, where my “C” hid under a pile of textbooks. I zipped up my backback and swung the locker door shut.

“I’m in,” I told her.
Read more…

Ida B. Wells-Barnett Was Born Today in 1862

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

Today marks the birthday of Ida B. Wells-Barnett — the educator and journalist who pioneered investigative reporting techniques still used today to uncover details of lynchings across the South. Wells-Barnett ran a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, and also helped found the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women.

Wells was born enslaved on July 16, 1862, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She moved to Chicago in 1894 and died there in 1931.

In its series “Overlooked,” launched last March, the New York Times ran obituaries of important figures whose deaths had previously gone unmentioned in the paper. Wells-Barnett’s was among the first wave of belated obituaries:

Wells was already a 30-year-old newspaper editor living in Memphis when she began her anti-lynching campaign, the work for which she is most famous. After [her friend, Thomas] Moss was killed, she set out on a reporting mission, crisscrossing the South over several months as she conducted eyewitness interviews and dug up records on dozens of similar cases.

Her goal was to question a stereotype that was often used to justify lynchings — that black men were rapists. Instead, she found that in two-thirds of mob murders, rape was never an accusation. And she often found evidence of what had actually been a consensual interracial relationship.

She published her findings in a series of fiery editorials in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. The public, it turned out, was starved for her stories and devoured them voraciously. The Journalist, a mainstream trade publication that covered the media, named her “The Princess of the Press.”

Readers of her work were drawn in by her fine-tooth reporting methods and language that, even by today’s standards, was aberrantly bold.

“There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” Frederick Douglass wrote to her in a letter that hatched their friendship. “I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” he added.

He was referring to writing like the kind that she published in The Free Speech in May 1892.

Wells-Barnett’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster is organizing and fundraising for a monument to the journalist to be built in Chicago.

Read the obituary

 

Silence is a Lonely Country: A Prayer in Twelve Parts

Niilo Isotalo/Unsplash

Sadia Hassan | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,468 words)

I.

On the night of the election, I call my father from the group home I am working in as a residential advisor. Things are eerily silent. No one playing the dozens or making a milkshake way past their bedtime; no one singing at the top of their lungs or crouched behind a fridge ready to jump out and scare the ever-living mess out of me; nobody asking questions about tomorrow, because, of course, nobody believes it will arrive.

At dinner, one of my students wants to know if I voted. I remain aloof.

I watch another student’s hands clench and unclench on the kitchen table.

“Man, if I could vote …

The truth was I could, and I had not. It did not feel like a choice to me. It was a question of degrees and integrity. It was a question of belonging or estrangement; between one drone strike and another genocide. I understood this country could never belong to me, so I did not vote and that night, overcome with the sinking weight of an accumulated shame, I could not catch my breath.

The thoughts ran through my mind: the Muslim ID cards, the internment camps, the CIA black sites, the border, the drones, the undocumented. We will all be [       ].

My father’s voice on the other side of the phone steadies me. I am a river rushing around a single, steady boulder, my father’s voice a buoy. “Aabe macaan,” I begin. “Are you watching the elections?”

“Aabe,” he sighs, the phone shifting awkwardly in his hand. He was clearly in bed.  “We have our children. What can they take from us?”

Even the children, I want to say. Instead, I say nothing.

Baba returns me to my body. When we were kids, he would hold his hands before our faces, slowly folding down each finger until we held his limp-wristed fists faceup in our tiny little hands. We were each of us as vital and necessary to the body of his love as each limb was to his person. Instead of “I love you,” he would say, “You are my two front teeth.” Instead of telling us to shut up, he would ask, “Take a breath.” Perhaps, my father was a poet. For him, the body is the only language that remains after everything falls away.

I put the phone down to get a drink of water. Really, I step away so my father does not hear me cry. I want to take off running.

Read more…

The Town That Camp Built

Vintage large letter postcard illustration, 1940s. (Photo by Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images)

At The Bitter Southerner, Michael Adno profiles renovator and land developer David Wolkowsky, age 98, whose particular brand of charm, philanthropy, joie de vivre, and camp has permanently shaped Key West, Florida’s unique allure.

Wolkowsky tells me the story of how he came to know the word: “camp.”

At a party in Philadelphia while Wolkowsky was still a student, he recognized Lucien Beebe, the bicoastal polymath who had started Nevada’s first newspaper. Beebe approached, and “I just handed him my drink,” Wolkowsky tells me. Beebe laughed and replied, “You’re such a camp.” That was the first mention, the flowering, the thread of solidarity that has stuck with Wolkowsky since.

“Michael, the most important thing is camp,” he tells me. “Very few people have it.” He assures me I have it — “but not completely.”

Pausing the movie, we parse the idea of camp — pulling up websites, laying books on their spines, running through examples to ask: What is camp? Or, more specifically, how do we articulate Wolkowsky’s idea of camp?

He agrees with some denotations we find online — theatrical mannerisms, exaggerated humor, a mingling of high and low that challenges the status quo in art. Of course, as many have tried, the word, its sensibilities, and its proxies have remained elusive and difficult to pin down. But camp is as plain as day in Wolkowsky’s home, with its faux paintings that are nearly indiscernible from the real things, the levity with which he addresses all things, his coded language.

In the town, itself, camp seems essential to Key West’s sense of place. While Susan Sontag was heavily criticized for her explication of the word as a sensibility, as a style, she put it well when she wrote in 1964, “Camp is esoteric — something of a private code. To talk about camp is therefore to betray it.” In other words, depending on where and when or with whom, the word holds different meanings, evading classification for decades, maybe deliberately. And while increasingly difficult to articulate, Key West’s brand of camp reflects Wolkowsky’s understanding — never on the nose, always sideways, a place where anonymity feels like an innate right.

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This Month in Books: ‘What Used To Be Me Before the World Buried It’

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Dear Reader,

Ottessa Moshfegh, in an interview with Hope Reese, says the through line between her first novel, Eileen, and her new one, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is isolation:

The book was challenging because of the essence of it being a woman in an apartment. You know, it’s like writing about someone being in jail, which is my first book…. I needed to write that book [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] to give myself a chance to look at the things that are difficult about being a person alone.

One of those difficult things, as the former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine writes in her new memoir To Throw Away Unopened, is how what’s “worse than… being alone forever is the thought that I’ll grow to love a person very much and won’t have them for very long. Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.” Isolation can become self-perpetuating; it can be easy to convince yourself, once you are experiencing it, that it is inevitable.

Being forced to be alone is a form of torture, and (as I remember from the anthology Hell Is a Very Small Place, a book which I excerpted on Longreads a few years ago) it has always been recognized as such. In their 1833 report on the new practice of solitary confinement in U.S. “penitentiaries,” Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont wrote:

This absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills…. The unfortunates on whom this experiment was made fell into a state of depression so manifest that their keepers were struck with it; their lives seemed in danger if they remained longer in this situation…

In a world in which a form of torture like solitary confinement exists and is so widespread, it can seem callous to talk about loneliness. But there are other kinds of forced loneliness, even if they don’t result in total solitude. A prison, for example, also causes loneliness on the outside. In his interview with Tori Telfer, Issac Bailey talks about how his beloved oldest brother’s incarceration scarred his childhood psyche. His brother’s absence was an open wound which still hasn’t healed:

I was a nine-year-old boy when this happened. I had nothing to do with it but have been punished, in a very real way, nonetheless. It’s one of the reasons I’m convinced I still speak with a stutter all these years later.

And there are other kinds of prisons. Your own body, for instance. In his memoir Inward Empire, Christian Donlan grapples with the effects of MS. He describes the quotidian robbing of his selfhood and the disconcerting isolation he experiences inside the vast emptiness of his failing synapses:

Day to day, I sometimes feel I am chasing a little pool of nothingness around inside me, the way I might tilt an air bubble up and down through a spirit level. Sometimes this nothingness seems to gather in the fingers, a lack of sensation that feels implausibly, paradoxically, raw. Sometimes it pools in the brain, a wordlessness, a theft of language…

In the face of this horror, Donlan jokes: “I have never really liked the fact that I have a brain,” a sentiment with which, incidentally, Moshfegh wholeheartedly agrees:

I am acutely aware of how much I do not like my own mind. When I’m not distracted by my imagination or by something external, time passing feels like I’m just waiting for the time to pass until I die.


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Luckily, there are a few voices in this month’s books newsletter who point out the upsides of being alone. In her book dedicated to the subject of solitude, Alone Time, travel writer Stephanie Rosenbloom mentions writers and artists who have been both for and against the practice of eating alone. Nathaniel Hawthorne once called it “the dismallest part of my present experience,” whereas Fran Liebowitz said, “My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book.” Rosenbloom comes down heavily in favor of the practice, somehow managing to make being alone sound simple, pleasurable, and not at all terrifying: “When you’re not sitting across from someone,” she says, “you’re sitting across from the world.”

In her interview with Ryan Chapman, Chelsea Hodson says she finds it intriguing, rather than, say, disturbing, to be acutely aware of inhabiting a specific, lone self — because it gives her the ability to just make it up, to pick and choose her “self,” and to let a version of herself walk away from her:

There’s something about that difficulty — curating the “I,” deciding what to include, deciding what that eye “sees” — that’s really interesting to me. [The “I” in the book] feels very distant actually. It’s this weird thing that’s happened… Somehow, when it’s on my computer it’s still accessible to me. And now that I can’t touch it, it feels far away from me.

Of course, it’s the act of writing that gives her this ability to create a separate self — a revelation shared by Pearl Curran, who, in the early twentieth century, was possessed by the prolific and critically acclaimed novelist, poet, playwright — and, notably, ghost — Patience Worth. In Joy Lanzendorfer’s profile of Curran and Worth, she writes that:

When confined to writing from her own experiences and thoughts, Curran found herself bored by the “conscious effort of the ordinary manner of writing,” adding, “My own writing fatigues me, while the other (Patience Worth’s) exhilarates me. That’s a queer mess of a statement, but quite true.”

The “other” self doesn’t feel like a prison. The “other” is a treasure, a friend who keeps her company, maybe even the truer version of her. Lanzendorfer goes on to tell us that:

In [Curran’s] short story, “Rosa Alvaro, Entrante,” the character Mayme, like Curran, had a drab life until she discovered a beautiful spirit, who, for a time at least, brings her excitement, money, and a sense of purpose. Or, as Mayme says of Rosa: “Oh Gwen, I love her! She’s everything I want to be. Didn’t I find her? It ain’t me. It’s what used to be me before the world buried it.”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Getting Tricked by Helen DeWitt

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Brittany Allen | Longreads | July 2018 | 7 minutes (1,809 words)

Different writers call for different verbs. With Mary Karr, I go galloping. E.M. Forster wants to waltz. I hopscotch with George Saunders and craft, as in beaded amulets, with Helen Oyeyemi. Elena Ferrante is usually trying to slap me, and Denis Johnson is plummeting: out of windows, out of planes. Reading Helen DeWitt is puzzling, but not the kind of puzzling that will eventually resolve and make some pretty picture on a box.

There is the urge to go spelunking through her books, to descend into the mad caves and walk the corridors and labyrinthine tunnels, in search of meaning (or…treasure? Uh-oh, here goes the metaphor). But I discovered — about five stories in to DeWitt’s bursting, bizarre new story collection, Some Trick (New Directions) that the most pleasurable way to be with her fiction calls for a verb that requires no gear. What you really ought to do with DeWitt’s prose is dance with it. But I’m not talking waltz: these words want a fast-paced, hectic, muscular dance. Picture a foxtrot, breakdance, 15-step. I had the most fun getting “tricked” when I elected, as a reader, to live for the flash of poetic symmetry in a DeWittian gesture, parseable in the middle of some huge, hectic movement — the revelation sentence, the left turn ending line, the belly laugh one-liner out of seemingly nowhere. Less joy came from digging through the dark matter and attempting to make some neat narrative from the many objects in this collection. In DeWitt’s case, it is best to simply follow this dizzy mind where it leads, and be delighted. Prepare to sweat on the journey, though. Read more…

Letters from Trenton

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Thomas Swick | Longreads | July 2018 | 19 minutes (4,829 words)

 

In the fall of 1976 I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France. I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times. I wasn’t allowed to see anyone. This was the state capital’s leading newspaper, after all, and I was simply handed a job application. There seemed little reason to play it straight.

What was your last employment?

“Working on a farm.”

What were your duties?

“Picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.”

Why did you leave your last employment?

“I got tired of stepping in cow shit.”

May we contact your last employer?

“Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”

A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview — my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly.

I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton. The features editor looked like a young Virginia Woolf in tortoiseshell glasses. She told me the paper was owned by the Washington Post and that one of her writers, a young man by the name of Blaine Harden, was exceptionally talented. The gist of the interview was that the editor — who, I later learned, had posted my job application on a wall in the newsroom — could not hire someone with no experience, as everyone else had come to the Times from other newspapers. But they would give me a three-month trial writing feature stories.

This suited me fine for, without a place in the newsroom, I was able to conceal the fact that I still wrote in longhand. I was possibly the last American journalist to do so. I knew how to type, but the typewriter was not a friend to the undecided. It was good for deletions — a quick, brash row of superimposed x’s — but for additions, I had to scribble with my pencil between immovable lines and on virgin margins.

In the evening, back home in Phillipsburg, I would write my stories. Then in the morning I’d get in my mother’s car and drive the river road through Milford and Frenchtown (whose bridges I’d worked on during summers in college), Stockton and Lambertville, the docile Delaware often visible through the leafless trees. The scenery was not as dramatic as in Provence, and the towns were not as picturesque as in Alsace, but there was a quiet, unassuming beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.

Once in the newsroom, I’d borrow a desk and type from my half-hidden handwritten pages.

After I was hired full-time, I bought my first car, a sea-green Datsun, and rented a studio apartment in Trenton. Most of the people at the paper lived in the more attractive surrounding towns like Yardley, Lawrenceville, and Princeton. Daisy Fitch, a fellow feature writer, had grown up next door to Albert Einstein. She was one of a dwindling minority of locals at the paper, as it was increasingly being written by out-of-staters who swooped in for a spell, then left to careers at the Post or someplace equally grand. Many were Ivy Leaguers — this was a few years after Woodward and Bernstein made journalism as sexy as it was ever going to get — and some, like Daisy, had interesting backstories. Celestine Bohlen, a young reporter, was the daughter of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who had served as the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Mark Jaffe, a former fencer at Columbia, was living with the daughter of Lyle Stuart, the publisher made rich and famous for putting out the 1969 handbook for women’s sexual pleasure The Sensuous Woman. David Maraniss, who exuded a kind of drowsy gravitas, and for whom everyone predicted glory, was the product of a marriage of editors: mother, books; father, newspaper. I was told that I had just missed the Mercer County careers of John Katzenbach, soon-to-be crime novelist and son of the former U.S. Attorney General, and his wife, Madeleine Blais, both of whose auras still flickered in the brick building on Perry Street.

It was astonishing to find this assembly of near and future luminaries in Trenton, a city I had associated mainly with Champale, whose brewery we used to pass on family drives to the shore. Add the fact that everyone had previous newspaper experience and you can understand if I say I felt a bit out of place. All I brought to the party was an irreverent job application.

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