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Enlarge / In 1900, Charles Stewart Rolls (one of the founders of Rolls-Royce) said, "The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration. They should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged." Now, that's happened, and they are indeed very useful. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
A fully electric Rolls-Royce has been some years in the making. Back in 1900, Charles Stewart Rolls proclaimed the electric motor's suitability for automobiles—silent, smooth, and exhaust-free are all great attributes for a luxury car. Back then, the problem was a lack of charging stations, something that appears to be improving 123 years later. That means the world is now ready for the Spectre.
As you might expect of a car wearing the pantheon grille and Spirit of Ecstasy mascot—subtly redesigned here for improved aerodynamic efficiency—there is little shy or retiring about the Spectre, particularly when it's a vivid purple, as was the case for our test car.
My favorite design detail isn't captured well, but the way the spoiler kicks up subtly at the rear is wonderful. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
It's a two-door, four-seat coupe, and big one, too: 215.6 inches (5,475 mm) long, 79.4 inches (2,017 mm) wide, and 61.9 inches (1,573 mm) tall, with a curb weight of 6,371 lbs (2,890 kg). Despite that, the somewhat Art Deco-inspired shape cleaves the air with a drag coefficient of 0.25—the shape spent more than 800 hours being refined in the wind tunnel, which is about twice as much time as F1 cars are currently allowed.
During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.
I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.
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The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?
Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.
Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?
Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.
Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?
Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.
Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.
Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.
Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.
Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.
Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?
Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today. Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.
Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?
Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.
Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?
Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.
Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?
Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.
Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.
Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.
Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?
Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!
Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.
Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?
Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?
Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.
Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?
Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.
Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?
Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.
Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.
Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.
Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.
Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?
Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.
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Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle
I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.
Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.
Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).
I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.
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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?
Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.
Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?
Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.
Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?
Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.
I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.
Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?
Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.
Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.
Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.
Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?
Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.
Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?
Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?
Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.
At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.
Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?
Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.
My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?
Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.
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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi
Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.
Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.
These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.
Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.
Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.
Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.
When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.
Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.
Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.
In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”
Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.
Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.
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After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.
In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.
We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.
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The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?
Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?
Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”
Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?
Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.
Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?
Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.
Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?
Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.
My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.
My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.
I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.
Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?
Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.
Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?
Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.
The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.
Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?
Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.
However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.
It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.
Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?
Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.
Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?
Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.
Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?
Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.
Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?
Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.
Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?
Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.
Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?
Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”
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Author photo by Bryan Derballa
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books…
New:
Revised:
Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals ∅
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
Compiled by Michael Glawson
BONUS: Personal longtermism
The post Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update first appeared on Daily Nous.
Music star Taylor Swift is currently on tour. There have been countless recent articles about her, her popularity, her shows, her music, her wealth, her interactions with other celebrities, and even her fans using an app to make fake audio clips of her talking. What has been missing from all this coverage? Philosophers. Until now.
In this edition of Philosophers On, nine philosophers turn their attention to drawing out what’s philosophically interesting or provocative about Taylor Swift and her music.
The idea for this edition came from Ryan Davis (Brigham Young University/Georgetown University). I appreciate the work he put in as guest editor for this collection of posts. The other contributors to this installment are: Lindsay Brainard (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Jessica Flanigan (University of Richmond), Emily Hulme (University of Sydney), Jordan MacKenzie (Virginia Tech), Brandon Polite (Knox College), Luke Russell (University of Sydney), Keshav Singh (University of Alabama at Birmingham), and Brynn Welch (University of Alabama at Birmingham).
Philosophers On is an occasional series of group posts on issues of current interest, with the aim of showing what the kinds of thinking characteristic of philosophers (and occasionally scholars in related fields) can bring to popular ongoing conversations. The contributions that the authors make to these posts are not fully worked out position papers, but rather brief thoughts that can serve as prompts for further reflection and discussion.
Contents
Swift on Love and Madness by Keshav Singh
Taylor Swift’s “Lover”: Between Novelty and Conservatism by Jordan MacKenzie
Forgiveness, Transformation, and “Happiness” by Brynn Welch
Can Gut Feelings Solve “Champagne Problems”? by Lindsay Brainard
A Literally Cathartic Reading of “All Too Well” by Emily Hulme
Can You Be an Authentic Mastermind? by Ryan Davis
Revis(it)ing the Past (Taylor’s Version) by Brandon Polite
Taylor Swift is Never Ever Going to Forgive You by Luke Russell
In “Don’t Blame Me,” Taylor Swift sings, “Don’t blame me, love made me crazy / If it doesn’t, you ain’t doing it right.” These lines evoke some of the central philosophical issues about love and its relationship to rationality and morality.
The idea that love is a kind of madness is familiar in the history of philosophy. Socrates claims precisely this in Plato’s Phaedrus. Nietzsche writes that “there is always some madness in love.” But in what sense does Swift take love to involve madness? Swift doesn’t claim in her lines that love necessarily makes one crazy, but rather that it should. If we think of madness as a departure from rationality, this claim is especially interesting. If we are enjoined to engage in a kind of madness in love, is following Swift’s guidance thus (paradoxically) a form of rational irrationality? How can love at once be subject to standards of fittingness or appropriateness and be such that what makes it fitting or appropriate is beyond the bounds of reason?
Moreover, Swift raises questions about whether acts borne out of this mad love are excused from blame. Should we excuse such actions because doing love right requires a kind of madness that blocks responsibility for one’s actions? Or is Swift describing things from the perspective of an unhealthy, obsessive kind of love that can lead us to justify terrible things to ourselves?
Falling in love is a paradoxical experience. On the one hand, love feels novel. You feel as though nobody has felt the way you feel before, like you’re making up the rules as you go along, like you’re experiencing the world through a fresh set of eyes. And so too does the object of your love feel like some wonderful mystery to unravel. And yet, at the same time that love feels novel, so too does it invite a certain conservatism. When we fall in love, we often retreat into cliches. We buy heart shaped boxes of chocolate and carve our initials into park benches. We fantasize about making a home together, about having a forever. The people we love, too, feel so familiar. Even if they’re new to us, we can’t help but feel as though we’ve known them our entire lives.
Taylor Swift’s “Lover” captures this tension perfectly. The song starts with a declaration: “We can leave the Christmas lights up ’til January—this is our place, we make the rules”. And on the one hand, this feels so original—we’re making up the rules on our love! But on the other hand, it’s clearly not—who actually takes their Christmas lights down in December? Even Taylor’s ersatz wedding ceremony in the song’s bridge mixes together love’s conservatism and novelty. It plays around with familiar marriage vows (Swift promises to be lovers, not spouses), but doesn’t abandon them.
What exactly should we make of this tension? Why does love always feel so new and yet so timeless? Are we just deceiving ourselves when we think that there’s something novel about our first, second, or thirteenth love? I think that this paradoxical feature of love can be explained by the sort of improvisational agency that sharing a loving relationship with another person involves. As the philosopher Benjamin Bagley has observed, we really do create something new when we step into a loving relationship. Love, then, is novel and unique in much the same way that a piece of improvisational jazz is novel and unique. But to improvise with others effectively, we need some shared understanding of what we’re doing together: we can’t, for instance, successfully riff on a chord progression that we don’t know. The improvisational nature of love thus explains both its novelty and its conservatism: it is when we are at our most improvisational that we are also (paradoxically) often at our most conservative.
Let’s start with an understatement: long-term relationships are complicated.
In “Happiness,” Taylor Swift’s protagonist describes the demise of a long-term relationship and her efforts to anticipate what things will be like on the other side of what she describes as a transformative experience (Paul, 2014). Although she knows that things will be very different, she is neither able nor ready to imagine it: “And in the disbelief, I can’t face reinvention. I haven’t met the new me yet.” The song concludes with Swift pointing to a further and perhaps even more interesting question for long-term relationships when the protagonist tells her former partner, “All you want from me now is the green light of forgiveness. You haven’t met the new me yet, and I think she’ll give you that.”
Wait. Let’s take a closer look: all you want is forgiveness, and now-me thinks new-me is likely to give you that. But according to the lyrics, now-me and new-me aren’t the same person! Now-me has met her now-former partner, so if he hasn’t met new-me yet, then new-me and now-me are different people. Thus, even if now-me can anticipate what new-me will think, feel, or do—a notion that the song itself challenges—does new-me have any right to forgive wrongs done to now-me? Or is forgiveness effectively off the table in long-term relationships?
One of the most empowering and perplexing themes in Taylor’s corpus is her fixation on intense moments of personal clarity—sudden bursts of profound self-knowledge. The epiphanies she celebrates are depicted as moments of self-discovery to be embraced and respected, even when it’s not obvious where this wisdom is coming from or why it should be trusted.
For instance, in “Champagne Problems“, Swift’s narrator may be facing what Ruth Chang calls a hard choice—a choice in which neither option is better than the other overall, though each is better in some respects.[1] She must accept or decline the marriage proposal before her, but she lets us know that her reasons have run out. When pressed to explain why she declines the proposal, she laments “I couldn’t give a reason.” Yet without reason to settle the matter, she finds clarity in the moment of truth. Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ’til someone’s on their knees and asks you.
We see the same intuition celebrated in “It’s time to Go”:
That old familiar body ache
The snaps from the same little breaks in your soul
You know when it’s time to go
This is both relatable and mysterious. When it comes to momentous choices, we’re often relieved when clarity finds us in this embodied way—more relieved, even, than when our reasons settle the matter. We want to feel the right answer in our gut. But is that reasonable?
[1] For a helpful overview, see “Hard Choices (2016). The American Philosophical Association Journal of Philosophy, 92: 586-620. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2017.7
Why do we enjoy art about things we hate in real life? No one wants to be drawn into the lair of Hannibal, but he draws us into theatres. The loathsome characters depicted in The White Lotus would make awful friends, but tremendous binge watching. And no one looks forward to a break up—but we look forward to the hundredth listen of “All Too Well (10 minute version)”. Why?
I suggest that we can profitably read “All Too Well” as a tragedy, in the classic, even Aristotelian, sense. This doesn’t just mean it is a sad song (although that is also true). It means that, as a work of art, it has a particular structure that makes it powerful, and uses a specific battery of literary devices to transform the incredibly painful emotions of an individual, by some kind of bittersweet, elegiac, poetic magic, into something beautiful and communal. This occurs by means of what Aristotle termed catharsis, something he took to be the consequence (and payoff) of a well-articulated plot in which the hero’s (or heroine’s) downfall is perceived as equally shocking and inevitable. Exploring this song in this way will let us understand the elusive concept of catharsis—a device shared across a huge range of artistic forms—better and, as a not insignificant bonus, give us a new way to understand what a pivotal and much discussed image, the red scarf, means.
Taylor Swift says she is the mastermind behind her relationship. What seemed like accidents pushing them together was just her expertly concealed strategy. She is the wind in their sails and the liquor in their cocktails. But then, a confession: “And I swear, I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care.” It’s the first time she’s admitted it. Everything up till now has been staged, but in this moment, she’s speaking sincerely. And on the surface interpretation, what she says is sincere. He was on to her game all along, and loved her for being the mastermind. But another interpretive possibility is lurking. Perhaps she confesses her cryptic Machiavellianism precisely because she knows he’ll love her for her confession. That’s not to say their love isn’t real. Forever may be the sweetest con, but it’s still a con.
If Taylor really is the mastermind, shouldn’t we suppose that she’s still the mastermind when admitting to that very thing? David Velleman notices that we can always re-read confessions of strategic thinking as, themselves, strategically motivated. But he says we shouldn’t worry. “The thought that instrumental calculations are revived at the prospect that I might be interpreted as thinking expressively and hence as sincere—that thought occurred to me just now, not in my imagined capacity as an agent…but rather in my capacity as a philosopher accommodating his reader’s bias in favor of instrumental thinking.” Velleman doubts an agent could keep up the layers of pretense. “Those calculations would be unstable” over time. And I think Taylor agrees, at least usually. She’s no fan of the uncaring mastermind. The polite letter from the latest Mr. Perfectly Fine. Cold concealment of real feelings is just fogging up the glass to understanding another person. You can’t keep up the fake niceties forever.
At the same time, you might worry you’re still the mastermind even when trying not to be. What if you’re the kind of agent who can hold yourself together with a smile and not come undone? What if you can keep reflecting to everyone exactly what they want to see? What if your agency is robust enough that calculation doesn’t give way to instability, even long after the horses and clowns and other pretenders have all gone home? The worry that your own confession might be strategic is a worry you can have about yourself.
Taylor Swift is like Nozick and Bob Dylan is like Rawls—which is to say: Taylor’s conclusions are not for everyone, but like Nozick, for those who find her conclusions compelling, they are SO compelling. Lots of people love Taylor because she leaves so little room for interpretation that whatever puzzles remain in her unambiguous lyrics are compelling because they pose clear and vivid challenges to our way of seeing things. Swift crafts metaphors, characters, and scenes that reveal as much as Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain or experience machine. And like Nozick, she is a master of the craft when it comes to building an argument/song.
In contrast, like Rawls, Bob Dylan develops indeterminate arguments that can be interpreted in a million ways. Every concept, every track, is full of contradictions surrounded by his silence. But the vibes are familiar and fancy and he came to the scene at just the right time in just the right way. (Sound familiar?) Lots of people love Bob Dylan because they can find some way of interpreting it that affirms whomever they are. Anything follows from a contradiction, so every Dylan song (or Rawlsianism) can be adapted and covered a million different ways.
These four philosophers represent, very broadly, two different philosophical dispositions. Philosophy holds a mirror up to the human experience. But some philosophers show people what they want to see while others show them who they really are.
When Taylor Swift’s former record label was sold in 2019, legal rights to the master recordings of the six albums she’d produced for them came under the control of a person whom she’s accused of years of bullying and abuse: Kanye West’s former manager Scooter Braun. In response, Swift chose to record near-duplicate versions of those albums. With all of the profits made from selling, streaming, and licensing these “Taylor’s Versions” going to Swift herself, she could deprive Braun of potentially billions of dollars in revenues. The gambit has already paid off. The first two Taylor’s Versions, of her albums Fearless (2008) and Red (2012), both released in 2021, debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard charts and have sold over two-million copies worldwide so far.
Swift isn’t the first artist of our era to re-record previously released work. For example, Def Leppard produced near-perfect “forgeries” of three of their biggest hits, and the bands Squeeze, Journey (with their then-new singer), and ELO (well, only Jeff Lynne) re-recorded songs for new greatest hits collections. Similar to Swift, these artists were compelled to re-record their tracks for financial reasons, as they felt they were being deprived of royalties by the companies that owned their masters.
But the aims of Swift’s project and its scope far exceed mere financial interests. She is also using it as an opportunity to creatively explore her earlier work and, in the process, connect even more deeply with her fans. She isn’t merely releasing re-recorded versions of the albums themselves, but also of previously released bonus tracks and unreleased songs. Of all the extras she’s released so far, the one that’s had the largest cultural impact is the 10-minute, unabridged version of “All Too Well” from Red (Taylor’s Verizon).
As she discussed recently on The Graham Norton Show, “All Too Well” was a fan favorite from Red that was never released as a single. She let slip in an interview years ago that she had to cut the song down from its original 10-minute length to be included on Red, and her fans had been clamoring to hear the full song ever since. Revisiting the album afforded Swift the opportunity to give her fans what they wanted. (Be sure to check out her jaw-dropping performance of the song on Saturday Night Live.) It also allowed Swift to engage with her earlier work, and who she was when she produced it, in new and creative ways. By recording “All Too Well” in its entirety and releasing it as a short film that she wrote and directed herself, Swift subtly changes the song’s vibe and deepens its meaning.
This is an effect, I argue, that the re-recording process has had on all of the songs she’s released so far. Taylor’s Versions are new works of art that, while giving us access to the meanings of the songs in their original forms, add new layers of meaning that can be appreciated by those listeners who are aware of the context surrounding their production. Among other things, by making the songs truly her own by releasing versions of them that she truly owns, Swift further emphasizes the theme of independence that’s been present in her work since the start of her career. This is certainly true with “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version),” a song in which Swift dwells on a sad event from her past and defiantly transforms it. In this way, the track perfectly embodies the broader ethos of Swift’s re-recording project as a whole, fitting it . . . all too well.
In her song “I Forgot that You Existed”, Taylor Swift sings about the emotional burden of carrying the resentment that she feels towards an ex who is “Free rent, livin’ in my mind”. The remedy, surely, is for Swift to forgive him. Swift would have been told countless times—by therapists, by preachers, by Oprah—that forgiveness heals the wounds created by wrongdoing. Many advocates of forgiveness claim that it is virtuous to forgive unconditionally, without waiting for the wrongdoer to repent and apologize.
But Swift is not willing to forgive. Her ex is unapologetic, her anger righteous. Why should she forgive someone who does not deserve it? We might worry that Swift’s refusal to forgive means that she is now trapped by this unrepentant wrongdoer, doomed forever to be a resentful victim. In the chorus of the song, Swift declares that this is not the case, singing: “But then something happened one magical night / I forgot that you existed / It isn’t love, it isn’t hate/ It’s just indifference”. Swift has echoed these thoughts in interviews, claiming that some victims are justified in refusing to forgive, and that it is possible for them to move on without forgiving.
Both of these claims raise interesting philosophical questions. Some philosophers join Swift in rejecting the moral ideal of unconditional forgiveness, claiming instead that we ought to forgive only when the wrongdoer has earned it, or, at least, only when the wrongdoer poses no further threat. Others maintain that unconditional forgiveness is admirably generous and is never prohibitively dangerous. While many philosophers agree that coming to be indifferent does not count as forgiving, they disagree as to why. Is it because forgiving, like promising, is an essentially communicative act? Or is it because forgiving necessarily includes a commitment on the part of the forgiver? Or is it that forgiveness requires good will or benevolence that goes beyond mere indifference?
In addition to all of these puzzles, Swift’s song also prompts us to wonder whether she has genuinely moved on or is instead professing her indifference as a means of expressing contempt towards the person who wronged her. If she genuinely forgot that her ex existed, why is she still singing about him?
Discussion welcome.
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Illustration by Anne Le Guern
برای نسخه ی فارسی مقاله به این لینک مراجعه کنید
An icy wind slaps my face as I step onto Rahahan (Railway) Square, one of Tehran’s busiest transit hubs. I walk by a grass field next to a rectangular pool; the train station, a wide marble building with lengthwise windows like multiple eyes, stares at me from the other end. As a child during another war — between 1980 and 1988, between Iran and Iraq — my family’s journey home, after summertime visits to relatives in Tehran, began from this place; I’d carry our bag of chicken slaw sandwiches as we ran to catch the train back to our hometown in southern Iran, where battle raged at the border. Today I pass a young trash picker, maybe thirteen, pulling himself out of a garbage bin. A mother is squatting with a child in her lap, her face covered by her navy scarf and her hand held up for alms.
It is January of 2021, and Iran’s third COVID-19 wave has just plateaued. For months now, I’ve been trying to write a story about what it has been like for a country to experience US sanctions and a pandemic at the same time. There has been an invisible war on my country throughout my lifetime. And then there came a disease. Even as we fought live during a pandemic, we were already ravaged by an unseen conflict. Two chaoses merged.
Today, I am looking for people who were first in the line of fire. I’ve come to the train station to meet Ms. Alizadeh*, a forty-four-year-old technician at the neonatal intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.
We see each other and say hello behind our masks. She has milky-white skin and eyes the shape of eucalyptus leaves, oval and elongated. She wears a green flower-print scarf pinned at the chin under her black chador. I’ve met her at the hospital before and know she moved to Tehran a decade ago, from a village five hours away.
When her only child was two years old, her husband was diagnosed with a chronic illness that left him unable to work, and Alizadeh became her family’s sole breadwinner. “On some days, I had nothing to feed us but dry bread and water,” she remembers. Alizadeh had to quickly devise a plan out of hunger. She looked for work at the hospital, starting out on the cleaning staff. It was immense physical labor, but it also meant that Alizadeh could afford to feed the three of them. “My money then had barkat (blessings); I could stretch it to pay for our needs,” she says.
This is no longer the case. Less than a year after the US government restored sanctions against Iran, in 2018, food prices soared. Alizadeh had to cut down beef consumption to a single kilogram a month. She chopped it into pieces the size of peas, which she put into stews. Alizadeh ate the broth and gave the meat to her husband and child, who “needed the nutrients,” she says.
They were experiencing what the economic analyst Yar Batmanghelij calls “the weaponization of inflation” — an inflation forced upon people in countries under economic blockades. Sanctions have been suffocating Iran’s sources of revenue, devaluing our currency and strangulating our economy. The most immediate impact on the street is soaring prices.
Around the same time, Alizadeh started feeling “immense joint and muscle pain, as if my body was hollow and I would collapse to the ground.” Walking and even breathing became difficult. After multiple doctors and rounds of testing, she ended up in an oncologist’s office. He told her that she had cancer. The chemotherapy normally recommended was now off limits. It was made in the European Union, and because of American sanctions, official imports had stopped altogether, and therefore, insurance companies had stopped covering it. Sanctions on Iran are extraterritorial — they prohibit non-American businesses from trading with Iran — and Alizadeh’s prescription was now a black-market commodity; one dose would cost years of her salary. For weeks she assumed she would die of her illness without a chance at chemo. But Iranian pharmaceutical companies routinely develop domestic alternatives to foreign drugs. The doctor found her a substitute that was covered by insurance. She was relieved — so much more briefly than she expected.
And then, March of 2020. A twenty-nine-year-old nurse at the hospital where she worked died of a mysterious new illness. Alizadeh wanted to flee; she knew that catching it might leave her child an orphan, and her exposure was excessive: a two-hour commute on crowded subways and buses to then work in a hospital that could only provide surgical masks and latex gloves in limited numbers to employees. Her job could lead to her death, but without a job, she and her child would surely die anyway.
And so she continued to teach mothers how to breastfeed, even as they waited for their PCR tests. She had to iron the masks and reuse them. She visited the hospital lab multiple times a day, walking past patients waiting for their COVID test results.
I ask how she has kept herself together. She says she has been driven by a conviction: “God would allow me to care for my child.”
Alizadeh’s shift is beginning soon, so we start walking to the hospital. We pass women, men, and children asking for money or food. She stops to give money to a woman whose children are selling sheets of poetry. Despite her meager earnings, she makes donations to charity every week, recording them in her monthly budget notebook. “I remember when there were hardly any beggars in this neighborhood,” she says. “That’s why I give. There is such a narrow space between being able to live on the pride of one’s own work and being left to the streets.” She speaks with icy eyes and tight lips.
At the hospital entrance, she invites me inside for tea — a warm, fragrant cardamom tea with poolaki, a very thin, coin-like piece of candy infused with saffron and dried lime. In a white marble hall, we sit at a table next to four other nurses who are discussing a mother with opium addiction. We women — the nurses, Ms. Alizadeh, and I — sit facing the babies in incubators — a new generation born to this war.
All the women in this room have lived two wars now. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 was the backdrop of our childhood. The second war, which is perhaps more accurately a continuation of the last one, has no name. I call it a US-led war on Iran. To show it to you, I need to go back to before I was born — to 1979, the year a revolutionary movement overthrew Iran’s last monarch.
The king’s country was a friendly US client state where American military officers enjoyed diplomatic immunity, Henry Kissinger smoked hookah as a belly dancer frolicked around him, and the blond, blue-eyed model Lauren Hutton strutted on the ancient stone columns of Persepolis for Vogue. Then, in 1979, Iran was reborn — into a nation indignant about its place as the playground of empire. Iran’s revolutionary movement toppled the king and, when the US government gave him refuge on US soil, took Americans in Tehran hostage.
On the cover of Time, Iran’s leader was caricatured as a devilish cleric with red, sinister eyes. The Joker was chosen to represent Iran at the United Nations in an issue of the comic book Batman. Iran’s uprising would quickly solidify her into an evil nemesis. Sanctions — global economic blockades — became the primary American weapon against us.
Manu Karuka calls sanctions “imperialist siege warfare.” This economic war is waged on weaker countries by the world’s most powerful financial and military powers. The sanctioning economy is up to four hundred times larger than that of the target, argue Davis and Engerman. Sanctions appear to have no consequence for the imposing side yet devastate the livelihood of nations on which they are inflicted. Nicholas Mulder writes that sanctions “put a country on the road to social collapse.” In postrevolutionary Iran, this descendant of the medieval siege has been refined on the bodies of Iranians.
Ms. Alizadeh fought for her life throughout the Trump years, when Iran’s financial strangulation was led by the most unhinged American administration to date. Just as Trump reneged on the nuclear agreement that had given Iran some sanctions relief, he restored past sanctions and added new ones, vowing to bring “Iran’s oil to zero.” Oil exports are Iran’s main source of revenue; they dove from two million barrels per day in 2016 to two hundred thousand in 2019. In his memoir, Trump’s second secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, brags that “from 2017 to 2020, Iran’s GDP sank from $445 billion to $192 billion.” Iran’s working-class people, like Alizadeh, are always first to feel the blow of each sanctions regime: recession, inflation, and shortages, and all at once.
The US president reinforced the blockade with tweets of carnage and threats of military force. Sanctions and psychological warfare are intricately interlinked. The siege amplifies its immensity with threats of military force, which can materialize into total war. A day after ordering the assassination of Iran’s top general, Trump tweeted: “Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
We had experienced this under previous American presidents, including Barack Obama. He, too, put “all options,” including military onslaught, on the table. Four years into his presidency, in 2012, Obama tweeted his vice president’s boastful words about their administration’s sanctions: “These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions. Period.” Richard Nephew, Obama’s principal deputy coordinator for sanctions policy, described sanctions as “pain” deployed on the “tendons, ligaments, and joints” of the “Iranian body economic.”
On the bodies of the sick, like my father, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, Obama and Nephew’s war was felt with minute precision. His chemotherapy was dispensed under strict protocols at a central public drugstore. My mother, brother, or I spent hours in line for each prescription; we met people from across Iran waiting for a plethora of drugs. If my father’s chemotherapy regimen turned out to be unavailable, we chased alternatives or treatment plan changes, rushing in loops from doctor to drugstore and back. We spent full days on the phone and at the insurance office trying to sort out our co-pay because of price increases. The hospital faced a nursing shortage, as well as wear and tear across the building, so my brother washed our father in the nephrology ward’s one working bathroom.
My father died of cancer while his country was under an economic blockade. The impact of sanctions would only be exacerbated in the years after, by the compounding sanctions regime and by COVID. Economist Djavad Salehi Isfahani writes that the pandemic “caught Iran at its weakest economic state since the end of the war with Iraq three decades ago.” He directly attributes the economic weakness the sanctions created with thousands more COVID deaths than would have happened were Iran not under sanctions.
Fatemeh Mohammadi-Nasrabadi, a scholar at the National Nutrition and Food Technology Research Institute, brings it back to the body. “Sanctions are making Iranians sicker,” she tells me, “by inducing malnourishment and limiting access to medical care. The pandemic has made it worse. Yet there is no system” — in Iran or anywhere else — “for tracking and tracing sanctions’ casualties.”
And so it is left to Iranians like Mohammadi-Nasrabadi to piece the picture together. One in three Iranians was living below the poverty line in 2019, a year after the US sanctions were reinstated, according to a report by the newspaper Donya-e-Eqtesad (World of Economics); the report attributes this to the high rate of inflation. Researchers Jalal Hejazi and Sara Emamgholipour found that food insecurity increased dramatically between 2017 and 2019 in urban and rural areas — a result, they conclude, of the economic vulnerability the sanctions caused. Since 2019, meat and fruit consumption have nearly halved; chickpeas, historically a staple food of the Iranian peasant, jumped in price by 112 percent in 2021 alone.
Iran’s health-care workers are key witnesses to the compounding impacts of hunger, medical shortages, and COVID. I had been following their tribulations in the hospital since 2018, when the sanctions sparked a new pharmaceutical crisis. Relatives and friends were suddenly calling contacts at drugstores to find medicine. Tweets pleading for help finding pharmaceuticals were retweeted hundreds of times. By 2021, the pharmaceutical crisis had become a care crisis — one that swallowed patients and care workers alike.
Dr. Foroughi is a doctor of internal medicine. As soon as the first suspected COVID-19 cases were announced, he volunteered to be on a team of frontline workers in the COVID ward. Dr. Foroughi’s wife is immunocompromised. They have two children, who were four and six when the pandemic began. To protect them against COVID, he lived at the hospital.
We speak in 2021. I ask him if, in those early days, he was afraid of dying and leaving his family. He says that both he and his wife were unafraid; that he couldn’t have made this decision without her support; that they both felt a patriotic call. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give meaning to one’s life by standing on the front line for our homeland,” he says, comparing himself to the volunteers in the Iran-Iraq War. But this time he saw his country up against enemies that were “hidden” — both the virus and the global pressure piling up on Iran before COVID, which he had seen greatly jeopardize the health-care system.
“We were used to pharmaceutical shortages, but after Trump it was a whole new level of scarcity,” he explains. And not only of medicine, he stresses. The hospital itself — its brick, mortar, and equipment — was in “slow demolition.” A malfunctioning CT scanner or MRI machine might take months to repair, delaying testing and treatment. But for him, material scarcity was not as devastating as the deterioration of the life of Iran’s health-care force. This, he tells me, is how sanctions “hollow out” a health-care system: “How can you expect a nurse or technician who shows up to work hungry to do their job?”
Sara Karimi*, the head nurse of an intensive care unit, has been a witness to the unraveling of Iran’s health-care force. I am visiting her for a second time at her home in March of 2021. She sits on the kitchen floor cross-legged, in a tank top and flowery maxi skirt, picking out stems of herbs. She’s making lamb curry with herbed pilaf for her colleagues. Washing blood and goo from glossy pink pieces of lamb shank, she points to the bag it came in, which includes some chicken and shrimp. “One and a half million tomans [$50] for this,” she says. “My monthly salary is eight million,” which was worth about $300 at the time. Her father, a developer, is able to supplement her income; and yet. Her alert black eyes flash kindness and anger at once.
Karimi has been working for twelve years. When she started, her colleagues were middle-class people, she says, with “decent” material well-being. It was in more recent years, “even before the pandemic,” she tells me, that things began to change. When I ask her to explain what they’ve experienced on the job, she mentions shortages — not only of medicine but of IV fluid and heparin locks, of hospital equipment that breaks down, of salaries that arrive late.
Karimi says that “in the last few years” her colleagues have been taking home hospital meals, provided to them on shifts for free, because of tightening food budgets. They moved farther south or west of Tehran, the only places where they could afford rent, and commuted three to four hours a day. She reiterates what I have heard from other nurses; she has seen her colleagues “get poorer and poorer.” When she recounts the timeline, it follows the one described by Alizadeh: the worst began in 2018.
The same socioeconomic descent was taking place in the lives of teachers, park janitors, and taxi drivers. But hospital workers then faced more extreme exposure to COVID. “We watched people die in scores in front of our eyes,” Karimi says. She lost her brother as well as several close colleagues.
Now, she says, nurses are “fleeing” — immigrating. COVID has made them highly sought after by the Global North and Persian Gulf countries. She mentions a nurse practitioner who works at three hospitals to make ends meet and has burned out under pressure. “It’s gotten to a point where he doesn’t give a damn about who lives and who dies; the dead become just a number.” She says this while describing how meticulously nurses must watch out for every patient in the ICU. “Exhaustion leads to despair and lethargy,” she says. “To get as many people as you can to survive on each shift, you have to fight it.”
Karimi blames both COVID and the ruling class for the difficulties nurses face. “We are being swindled by an oppressive sheriff,” she says. She is speaking of fasad, the corruption of the ruling elite she calls the sheriff, and she points to doctors’ special-interest lobbies, the growing black market for pharmaceuticals, and the jet-setting lifestyle of children of Iranian officials on Instagram.
I wonder if Karimi thinks sanctions impact her work in any way. She tells me that she thinks of the word sanctions as a false flag. “It is a word they use to cover their incompetence.”
In Persian we refer to sanctions by the Arabic word tahrim (to make haram, or forbidden). The economic weekly Tejarat-e-Farda reports that tahrim strengthens the informal economy and increases economic corruption. Bryan Early and Dursun Peksen argue that sanctions contribute to the proliferation of the shadow economy, and Jill Jermano writes that they lead to “endemic state corruption.” When transparency must be eschewed for survival, more of the economy moves underground. Illicit financial activity thrives in the dark. It keeps the economy from total collapse, but it functions as both a lifeline and a sinkhole.
We notice it at both the local level, among those we know, and among the political elite. Coupled with other factors, like inflation and scarcity, once-robust institutions — hospitals, for instance — crumble while the source causing the instability remains contested.
Once, as a country, we knew what to call the force from which we were trying to protect ourselves, when our bodies pressed tightly together in refuge from air raids. This time around, we have no unity in calling out the weapon targeting us. There is a thread of over four hundred comments on Persian-language Twitter about whether medicine shortages are due to tahrim. I met others in the health-care force who, like Sara Karimi, denied that sanctions have anything to do with scarcity. They believe it is not tahrim but “internal corruption” that has led us to where we are today.
Ehsan Mostafavi, an epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute of Tehran, says some Iranians believe in this internal corruption as the source of all of Iran’s problems because of a “fiction” that humanitarian goods, presumably including medicine, aren’t sanctioned. Those who impose sanctions on Iran, he argues, intentionally diminish the human cost.
The mechanism by which sanctions extract that from the bodies of Iranians remains invisible to most of us, but not to Mostafavi, who learned how the system works in 2020, when he was, he says, “directly involved” in Iran’s attempt to buy flu vaccines. “Banks holding our reserves aren’t willing to release our money,” he says. And if they did, to whom? “Banks won’t take Iran’s money, and pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to work with us or even answer our emails.” As he speaks, he rotates his index finger in a circle to indicate a loop that can’t be broken. The very purpose of a sanctions regime is to create a pariah state out of a country so that no entity – bank, business or company – is willing to trade with it. This is how, he explains, medicine becomes increasingly scarce and the black market proliferates.
Sanctions rhetoric is by no means consistent about the human suffering that sanctions cause. Even as US presidents intensify the war against us, they declare devotion to the people of Iran. “We continue to stand with the people of Iran in your quest for freedom, prosperity, honest and effective government,” George W. Bush said while decimating our prospect of attaining any of those things. Sanctions aim to hit a space where the enemy-state is weakened but the people of the nation remain unscathed. No such space exists. Sanctions destroy nation-states by simultaneously weakening institutions and inflicting harm on civilians.
There are moments when US officials readily admit that civilians are directly targeted by sanctions. Pompeo has said that he hopes US policy toward Iran will lead Iranians to regime change. “Regime change” must be decoded to mean that Iran’s internal chaos will lead to societal collapse. In sanctions rhetoric, “civil war” is cleaned up as “a people’s uprising.” Nephew, who analyzed how sanctions might best strain our tendons, ligaments, and joints, writes that the US government analyzes national data from Iran to find how “civil unrest or, at a minimum, civil discontent” can be provoked. Elsewhere he notes that he and other sanctions officials instigated inflation and currency crises to “drive up the pressure on the Iranian government from internal sources” and to “pry apart the regime and the population.” The “internal sources” and the “population” to which he refers are Iranians.
The ethics scholar Joy Gordon, who has studied the ramifications of sanctions on both Iran and Iraq, calls sanctions an invisible war — hidden with language that is intentionally “innocuous and vague.” What is hidden is harder to name. The sanctions regime presents itself as less destructive to civilian populations than military onslaught. It is enforced by an economic power that, like its military counterpart, no one will want to enrage. The world obeys and looks away from the human toll.
Even the operatives are unseen. Juan Zarate, former deputy security advisor under George W. Bush, brags that this war is perpetuated by officers of the Treasury, “bureaucratic insurgents — guerrillas in gray suits.” It is a conflict waged by economic policy advisors who intricately know how the global financial system works, and how to cut off a country’s lifelines. Sanctions are backed by the aura of America’s army but are instigated by noncombatants who co-opt the language of economics and law to invoke legitimacy and neutrality. By blurring the lines between wartime and peacetime policy, they can destroy an “enemy” on autopilot, at little cost to their constituents.
But is Iran taking note of the immensity of the weapon that targets it or doing enough to respond? I go to Hanieh Sajjadi, a professor of health policy at the University of Tehran, with that question in March of 2021. Sajjadi is one of few academics focused on sanctions and the health of Iranians. She sits upright in a navy monto and a black cowl. I can make out, above her mask, her ink-black unibrow and thick eyelashes. She speaks like a lecturer trying to convey the urgency of a matter, her voice rising to a pitch every so often. She believes time is running out. In 2019, Sajjadi and her coauthors wrote in the medical journal Lancet that six million Iranians went without necessary medical treatment because of sanctions.
Sanctions don’t just continue over four decades, Sajjadi tells me; they compound. Iran’s postrevolutionary health-care system to Sajjadi is a case in point. Once resoundingly successful at improving public health, Iran today faces rising maternal mortality rates in its poorest provinces, an upshoot in the spread of noncommunicable diseases, and an increasing lack of access to medical care and critical medicine. Inflation inadvertently means less access to public health.
“Is Iran doing enough to resist sanctions?” I ask her again.
When citizens are attacked with military hardware, she says, they rally in solidarity. But sanctions do not provoke the same survival response because the sources remain firmly concealed. They are camouflaged by time and by “absurdist language which claims concern for human life,” says Sajjadi. “Like termites beneath the structure of a house no one can see, they silently and purposefully eat away at the wholeness of a society.”
For years, she says, “that we were untouched by sanctions was a strategy of fighting this war.” During the first two decades of the Revolution, access to public goods — health care, education, electricity, and clean water — improved while Iran was under sanctions. “There was a sense that the blockade could always be overcome,” she says. The sanctions regime intensified, but Iran’s leadership did not take the change seriously. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, called sanctions “worthless shreds of paper.” Sajjadi calls this “time lost.”
In 2013, Hassan Rouhani, once Iran’s lead negotiator with the West, launched a presidential campaign and won resoundingly on a platform to remove sanctions and the threat of war against Iran. His top diplomat, foreign minister Javad Zarif, negotiated the so-called Iran nuclear deal with the US, the UK, Germany, France, China, and Russia. Iran agreed to limits on its nuclear enrichment program — justification used by the American and European powers to expand their blockade — in exchange for sanctions relief.
Zarif called sanctions not shreds of paper but “economic terrorism.” He gave that tool of war a name and enlisted public health officials and academics to document the ways in which sanctions had hurt the health of Iranians. Sajjadi thinks that Zarif’s diplomatic overture was a major breakthrough in not only minimizing sanctions’ harm but also getting Iranians to pay more attention to their destructive impact. But it wouldn’t be enough.
Iran did not receive the full relief promised to it, and Trump reneged on the deal and reimposed Obama’s sanctions. Then he piled them on. The current American administration calls Trump’s withdrawal “a catastrophic mistake” — while continuing its exact policies. No matter the state of the nuclear deal, the US obsession with Iran as a prime enemy upon which it can easily inflict pain has not ceased.
Today, Iran’s political leadership may be more eager to engage with the West to ease sanctions, but it also has more knowledge about the impossibility of “full sanctions removal,” a claim that Rouhani once made after the deal was signed. Every cog in the sanctions machine — the designation of Iran’s banks and financial institutions, our ability to conduct international transactions and trade, our reserves in various countries, our oil and commodity exports — is gridlocked individually. Sanctions were intentionally designed as a labyrinth too complex to escape.
Sajjadi says a generation of sanctions have already damaged the unborn. Mass suffering — collective punishment — is the essence of every sanctions regime, to an uncertain but certainly deadly end. Iranians will live increasingly more difficult lives as their internal discord grows. Intermittently, threats of military force will build on our sense of annihilation. Our fate will be determined by the counternarrative that we devise — the war story that we tell ourselves. We must respond effectively to a conflict that manifests among us as growing corruption and instability while resisting societal breakdown. “We need to see the war and those it is most hurting,” Sajjadi says. “A war that has left intergenerational repercussions requires intergenerational sacrifice.”
No matter the outcome of talks between Iran and the West, postrevolutionary Iran is now a categorized victim of siege warfare. The “Iran model” is today used by American academics and policymakers as a mock-up summarizing sanctions methodology and its impacts. For this footnote in journal articles and on Twitter, Iranians have paid with their lives.
The writer and editor Kurosh Aliyani believes that Iran can’t push back against this war through diplomacy alone. In this “unrestricted war,” as he calls it, sanctions are just one facet; others are covert ops, efforts at destabilization, a constant threat of war, and the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders. “We need a new language and new metaphors to begin talking about a new kind of warfare — an invisible war,” Aliyani, trained as a linguist, tells me as we sit in an outdoor café in downtown Tehran. Through his snow-gray beard, Aliyani speaks with a monotonous calm but narrows his eyes behind his glasses to express urgency or outrage.
Aliyani says that this war is invisible because those on whom it inflicts pain are unseen — an erasure that works in levels. On the world stage, Iranians are deemed dispensable. A US Secretary of State once said that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under sanctions were “worth it” — a remark that says all that’s needed about the ways American foreign policy justifies the suffering it inflicts on civilians.
The erasure also operates within. Iran is fighting a battle in which mass suffering is inflicted upon the Iranian people. But the disappointment of those with the privilege to despair — “those with the voice,” as Aliyani calls them — has taken center stage. People who complain about the price of lamb chops, private school, or European vacations. To contrast, he recalls his recent hospitalization, during which he overheard an ill nurse talk about being unable to afford her medication. “While I was admitted, nurses received a bonus, and she was ecstatic” — Aliyani pauses — “that she could pay for medicine. That was her life’s issue. But who’s talking about her?”
Iran today feels like an angrier, more fractured place than the one I was born into. The political establishment appears more incompetent; street violence and poverty have reached the highest levels I’ve ever seen. Nurses, teachers, and the retired sporadically protest late or low pay. There is widespread despair.
If our solidarity has waned, if we can’t see our greatest wounds, I ask Aliyani, doesn’t that signify a deterioration in our morale, without which defeat is certain?
In response he recites a line from a poem: “Siyah lashkar nayayad bekar, yeki mardeh jangi beh az sad hezar” (One good warrior is better than a thousand extras). We have survived thus far; Iran is wounded, but it exists. He refers to wartime commanders who rose among our massive volunteer forces during the Iran-Iraq War and who have been etched into the Iranian imagination as martyred saints. And he concludes with another question: “Do you think Iranians can no longer rise to the occasion?”
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz writes that the ultimate aim of an opponent is to make “one incapable of further resistance.” Defeat is a time and place where resistance to war ceases to exist. I remember the many times when people I spoke to for this story — scientists, doctors, nurses — compared themselves to the heroes of the Iran-Iraq War. They spoke of their willingness to risk their well-being for the collective, which they defined as the people of their vatan, their homeland. We can hope to overcome war when we are still willing to subject our bodies to hardship or even death. So long as Iranians are willing to save Iran, Iran can hope to be saved.
Narjes Khanalizadeh’s village in northern Iran is tucked away under a mushroom of citrus trees near the Caspian Sea. The first time I visit, I see her face on a large poster at the beginning of the road before I find the name of the village. I get out of the car and walk a lush, narrow path, asking directions as I go. The air smells of burned wood and peeled oranges. “Head straight and find the mosque,” an old man on a bicycle tells me. I pass by wooden homes with pyramidal hip roofs covered in dried rice stems. Cusped like a bird’s nest between the mosque and a few houses is a patch of land. There I find the graveyard orchard, and Narjes.
Narjes, who was a nurse, is now known as one of Iran’s first Martyrs to Defend the Path of Health — health-care workers who died fighting COVID-19. Narjes died during a pandemic that killed health-care workers worldwide, but the term martyr invokes heroes of the Iran-Iraq War. She has been placed on the continuum of the first war.
Her mother, Assieh, visits Narjes’s grave every day before sunset to wash the stone, water the flowers, and say a prayer. That’s where she agrees to meet with me. “Narjes lost her sense of smell weeks before her death,” Assieh says. Then came frequent headaches, loss of appetite, and fatigue. “But corona wasn’t yet fully known here, ” she says. Narjes continued going to work, even staying at the hospital when it was snowed in. “She could have taken time off; I’ll never know why she didn’t. In her last weeks, she was driven by an urgency to give care,” says Assieh, wiping tears from her cheeks.
On February 20, 2020, Narjes collapsed in the hospital with a high fever. She died on February 25 at the age of twenty-five. Within a day, photos of her went viral on social media, many of them shared by Assieh. Narjes, with soft brown eyes and pink lips, is seen in the green prairies of her hometown or in a hospital uniform. Her long, wavy locks cascade from beneath her head covering.
Through Iran’s first COVID-19 cases were confirmed a month before, it was Narjes’s death that announced the outbreak of COVID and its threat to health-care workers in Iran. Narjes’s lifeless body was the first to be tested for the virus in her home province, Gilan, and was buried under strict protocols. “It’s all a blur,” Assieh says. “I just remember my father in a hazmat suit digging her grave.” By that time, Assieh herself had COVID and went into isolation for twenty days.
On one visit, Assieh takes me to the graves located inside a closed gate right behind where Narjes is buried. They belong to the ten martyrs of the village — war volunteers and those on military duty, young men who died in battle during the Iran-Iraq War. Four of them are Assieh’s cousins, second cousins, or neighbors. Some of the graves are empty because the bodies never came home. “I never imagined that my daughter would come to lie here as the queen of Iran’s martyrs,” Assieh says, telling me that they all “sacrificed their lives for Iran in wartime.”
On each of my subsequent visits to the village, Narjes’s grave burgeons with new details — one time a curved metal shade, the next a glass gravestone cover, and then green silk ties and military-style identification tags etched with prayers. It has become a pilgrimage site where Iran-Iraq War veterans and groups of health-care workers come to pay their respects. I imagine, in some future time, a tomb erected here.
Iran has survived thus far not only because of the willingness of Iranians to protect her, but also because of a culture that immortalizes them. Every time I get back to Tehran, the Iran-Iraq War veteran who introduced me to Assieh says, “Ziyarat ghabool” (May your pilgrimage be accepted by God). The grave of a martyr is sacred space to be passed on to later generations. In war, death is not an ending but a possibility for our future selves.
*These names are pseudonyms.
Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a meditation on the meaning of belonging, home, and the mysteries of fate. Shanahan wrote it after sustaining serious injuries in a bus accident in Morocco, while he was a Fulbright Scholar researching his mother’s homeland. Shanahan’s poems ask difficult questions for which he provides no easy answers. He encourages us to engage with complexities, nuances, and narratives that may differ from our own. There is pain in these poems, but also joy and hope. At the heart of Shanahan’s work is love and the belief we are all interconnected, changed by every encounter we experience. One cannot read Shanahan’s words without being changed.
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with Charif Shanahan over Zoom about identity constructs, the complexity and nuance found in life, and the “spiritual fact” of our oneness.
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The Rumpus: Congratulations on this truly amazing collection. Can you share how it came about?
Charif Shanahan: In 2015, I left my job and my apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright to research my family genealogy and representations of Blackness in the Maghreb. About two months into my time there, I was on an overnight bus that crashed. I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I was in the hospital for two months. I had three surgeries. After I left the hospital, I ended up back in the Bronx, where I was born and raised, for a long convalescence—in my childhood bedroom.
That experience is the genesis of the book, and its center. The other two sections of the book, which is a tryptic, take up themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, queer love and sexuality.
The beating heart of the whole thing, of my first book also, and probably of my vision as an artist, is love, in all its expressions, what denies it and what makes it possible. The grief that accompanies that love has to do with the separateness of our species, how we have divided ourselves, sometimes in ways that feel positive, sometimes in ways that are apparently neutral, and sometimes in obviously corrosive and violent ways. I believe that a unified sense of “us” is our initial state of being in the world– before we are named, gendered, raced, and cultivated into a self, a person. In my poems, I am trying to return us there, to bring the singing voice of the poem and the reader back to that space.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about the poem that centers the collection: “On the Overnight from Agadir.”
There’s tension, deciding whether to make the trip to your mother’s homeland, the tension between the desire to discover and the desire to disappear—or maybe to just get a dog. The search for place, for home, for meaning, your thoughts about time, about the meaning of your work. The poem is so huge in its reach and heart. While you were recuperating, in a forced stillness physically, did you do a lot of writing? Even if it were just in your head?
Shanahan: Poetry was nowhere near my consciousness in the acute moments after the accident, or in the months after. There was supposed to be only one surgery, then there was a second, then a third. With complication after complication, I just wanted to get the fuck out, to get to the other side of it.
I began to explore the experience in poems when I arrived in California, the September after the accident, and it’s amazing how fate carried me into that process. My first book was picked up shortly after I had arrived in Morocco, so my intention that fall had been to apply for fellowships and university teaching positions around the country, to see where I would end up after Morocco.
The accident happened at the time when I would’ve started doing that. While I was in the hospital one morning, between surgeries two and three, I thought to myself, If you get out of this, you’re going to need something to do! It was December 2. I remembered that the deadline for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford was December 1, so it had passed that midnight. I was disappointed. Then it occurred to me that because Zurich was nine hours ahead of California, the deadline hadn’t yet passed in local time! I had thirty-five minutes to throw together the application, which I managed to do, using pre-existing application materials. Months later, recovering in the Bronx, I was lamenting my circumstances, wondering what was next, when ding! an email came in from Eavan Boland. I arrived in California that September, and it was there that I began to metabolize the experience creatively.
Rumpus: It feels like this was a poem you had to write.
Shanahan: The experience was so complex and layered that I needed to process what had happened to me, and language is one of the tools I use to contemplate, to process experience. The poem was the eventual byproduct of that process, which, at its start, was about something else, about integrating experience. Somewhere along the way, the processing had occurred and I began thinking aesthetically.
Rumpus: How did you decide to put that poem in the middle of the book?
Shanahan: The first question I had was whether it could be a book-length poem. I generated many, many, many, many pages. In my discussions with Louise Glück at Stanford, from whom I had the privilege of learning, and in my own thinking about the poem, it became clear that it could be a book-length poem, but didn’t need to be. I whittled down the pages and distilled the poem into its current form. In its shortened version, it would exist alongside other work, and centering it then felt intuitive to me.
Rumpus: You write a lot about social identity and physical positioning. All of this is done to find the place of belonging we call “home.” Has the accident, the aftermath, and the process of metabolizing the experience into poems changed your concept of what constitutes home?
Shanahan: It returned me to an understanding, a wisdom, that had always been inside of me that I had lost touch with somehow. There is a truth, I believe, inside each of us, whether we are connected to it or not, that we are at home wherever we are. We are at home in the body. Sure, certain spaces might comfort or energize us more than others. There are places where we feel a sense of kinship to the physical earth, the people, the culture that’s expressed there. But we are diminished, I think, when we begin to depend on something outside of ourselves for a sense of safety, or self-possession.
I have an older poet friend who, in a long spiritual conversation we once had, said, completely earnestly, “Home is a sentimental fantasy!” I understand now more clearly what she meant.
Rumpus: “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon,’” a brilliant poem that appears early in the collection, begins with what seems like a universal need to express one’s self: “I want to tell you what for me it has been like.”
The barriers you experience to that expression are not universal, however: “To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” You are both, as you say, “A part and apart.”
This feels like a really impossible situation. Can you speak to how that position/non-position and language are connected and how existing in that liminal space adds both an urgency to the need to be heard and, at the same time, a questioning of whether that’s possible?
Shanahan: The poem meditates on that very question and, importantly, I think, doesn’t reach a conclusion. I’m not really interested in posturing at irrefutable conclusions, or easy answers; I want instead to put a spotlight on complexity, on nuance. I believe that racial discourse in this country is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives, probably in part because many people are resistant to even the clearest and most urgent issues—police brutality, for example. I don’t mean to say those narratives, or the portions of the conversation, that are most central today should not be as central as they are. I’m saying that there are many narratives. If you are in a body, you are racialized. You are having a racialized experience. What if integrating an experience, like my own, seemingly adjacent to larger mainstream narratives, or other narratives that are less familiar, into the larger racial discourse, can actually help us advance that discourse? I believe it can and does.
As for the poem, one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you “position” (name) that? So yes, let’s keep talking, let’s put everything, and everyone’s experience, on the table.
Rumpus: The way you write about your mom is so beautiful. I’m thinking of “Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story,” of “Trace Evidence,” and of “Two Rooms Down the Hall,” in which you write “When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you. / She’s saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished / He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face / And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance/ told her I love you, and you are crazy.”
Your mom taught you a lot about identity, and while her own view of herself seems solid, it didn’t match the spaces in which people saw her.
Shanahan: That dissonance has been a primary question of my own identity and has required me to examine the instability of identity constructs, and in particular racial constructs, over time and space. My mother is from the Maghreb, born and raised in Morocco, identifies as Arab, as Muslim, as Moroccan, as woman. These were the identity markers germane to her experience.
It wasn’t that the color of her skin did not have meaning in Morocco. It of course did. But when my mother arrived here, to a new cultural and national context, with its terms of identity, its pathologies, her Blackness took on new meaning, new significance—and often contentiously. Now, it’s not that I think a person in her circumstances would need to revise their self-concept, but I think it becomes especially important to consider those circumstances when children are involved, when a first-generation Black American experience is happening outside of an African American lineage. I’m writing into that generational dissonance. As I ask in a poem that didn’t make it into the collection, “Why are the parts of her that she cannot see / the only parts of me that I can?”
Rumpus: This title made me laugh: “While I Wash My Face, I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me,” because, Charif, you ask impossible questions all the time!
Shanahan: Guilty.
Rumpus: What I found interesting in this poem and several others is that you address yourself in the second person. You directly ask yourself questions. How did that choice come about?
Shanahan: The first piece is the distancing effect of using the “you as I,” the permission it grants you to inhabit a different mind space around your subjects, to separate from them in a way. The self that I’m addressing is part of me, is inside me, but I’m able to inhabit or situate myself in a different internal position vis-a-vis the material at hand.
The gesture is also necessitated by something I believe and that I think a fair amount of people I know would find difficult to trust: the self speaking to you right now, is not the self I inhabited (or that inhabited me) at the beginning of this conversation. We have changed one another in this dialogue of thirty or forty-five minutes. It doesn’t mean that this change needs to be profound, or on a constitutive level. It means a shifting occurs, by virtue of our “contact.” There is information about living, art, human connection, language, race—about everything that is alive inside this interaction—that you have integrated, or that at least is inside you waiting to be integrated. The same is true for me.
Rumpus: We talked about interpretations, and the way people bring with them their views of others when they meet them. Is it scary to put yourself on the page this way, while knowing people are going to hear what they hear and see what they see through their own lens?
Shanahan: I love what you’re saying because it’s an element of my work that can be easily misunderstood. A reader might say these are “confessional” poems or poems that seem generated by a psychological or emotional compulsion to reveal, to be seen. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. I think honesty, or transparency, is an aesthetic choice.
We shouldn’t assume anything that happens within the body of any poem is an event that has actually been lived. In the moments when I am most apparently honest about experiences that one might be expected to hide or keep to themselves, I am more than sharing myself or reflecting myself to an individual, I am reflecting the reader back to the reader. I am reflecting you back to you. One of the lines in “Fig Tree” is, in a similar vein: “Do I apologize? I am of this same world.” I didn’t ask for any of this, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.
I genuinely believe that I am you. It’s a notion that, again, many find hard to accept, or trust. I don’t mean to flatten our differences or to suggest that we’re having the same experience. The constructed world, though constructed, is real. In a way, it’s the first level of experience. My story has to be your story on some level, and yours, mine. We are beholden to one another. We are here at the same time.
Rumpus: What would you like people to get from this book?
Shanahan: I would like them to recognize themselves in a life that isn’t theirs, or maybe even like any they’ve known. I’d like them to be reminded of, again, the spiritual fact of our oneness—in a way that doesn’t feel irrelevant to how we live but can actually animate how we live, that can shape how we move through these lives and these bodies, at this time. I hope there are people who inhabit identity positions very different from my own, who can nonetheless see themselves in this book. I hope the book will awaken some people to the complexities of racial identity, especially today in an increasingly globalized world. I hope that the book can reach people’s hearts and souls and generate new conversation around the subjects I’m exploring.
Rumpus: Do you find that message, this book is especially necessary today?
Shanahan: I often ask my students, “The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?” There are many answers to that question, of course, but chiefly, for me, it’s about the elevation of consciousness, the understanding of portions of human experience, even when that experience is far from our own, that poetry enables.
As a species, we can’t even agree, for example, that the climate crisis is real, or, as I put it in a poem in the book, that “we are all the same animal.” We can’t get on the same page about scientific fact, even when it requires our urgent, collective attention if we’re going to make it. And that must be rooted in the competing priorities generated by our separateness.
So yes, I think now is as good a time as any to spread a message of oneness.
Rumpus: What’s next for you?
Shanahan: I am working on a memoir that treats, in prose, the same subjects as the books of poetry, and I’ve also started my third book of poetry—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness. The poem is poly-vocal, written by many “authors,” and moves across time and space. There’s a section that comes out of the seventh century Arab slave trade, for example, preceding a section that comes out of the contemporary Bronx. It’s very global in orientation, as I am as a person and a poet, and I’m excited to keep ‘finding’ it.
***
Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books…
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Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.
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The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books…
and a reminder about the new “Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals” section.
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The Forerunner 955 continues that tradition. It sits atop the Forerunner series as the most feature-packed watch in the bunch, and this year it gains some modern touches like a touchscreen and daily exercise readiness assessments (à la Fitbit's Daily Readiness feature, but free to users), while introducing new features not present on any other Garmin watch. That includes the higher-end Fenix series of watches, from which the Forerunner 955 is also starting to steal some cues, like solar-charging options and multi-band GPS.
We trained with the Forerunner 955 for a few weeks to see how its newest features improve on a platform we already love and to determine just how afraid Garmin should be about Apple or Fitbit catching up.
In the past forty years, South Asian writers writing in English have made a significant showing at the Booker Prizes, the literary awards for the best book published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie (who has been nominated seven times, and whose novel Midnight’s Children won in 1981, introducing South Asian literature in English to the world with a bang), Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga—and even in 2022, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
But the big news was sixty-five-year-old Indian writer Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand—translated by Daisy Rockwell—bringing home the Booker International Prize, the first time a book translated from Hindi had won in the prize’s nearly twenty-year history. Shree’s experimental and playful novel tells the story of Ma—an eighty-year-old bedridden woman who gets a new lease on life and goes on a journey back across a border that she thought she would never cross again. The English translation was originally published by Tilted Axis Press in the UK, and is now available from HarperCollins in the United States.
“Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and in other South Asian languages,” Shree said in her acceptance speech. “World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages, the vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”
I spoke to Shree on Zoom one late night in California / mid-day in Delhi in between a flurry of events and appearances that have flooded her calendar since the prize was announced in October of 2022. The author of four other novels, Shree’s melodic voice and serene and vibrant demeanor made me wish I could teleport to her city and hear her speak in one of the many storied literary spaces there.
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The Rumpus: Why do you write in Hindi?
Geetanjali Shree: The question itself says so much! That a person should be asked why she writes in her mother tongue, when it should be an absolutely natural thing. What else should I be writing in except in my mother tongue? It’s the first and most natural choice for a writer to be writing in her mother tongue. I think the question to be asked, normally, should be why you’re not writing in the mother tongue. But this says so much about our history, about our colonial past, about the place of English amongst the educated in [India], that it becomes almost unnatural that anyone who is educated to be writing not in English, but in another Indian language.
So yes, I write in Hindi because it’s my mother tongue. And I think, like a lot of us middle class Indians, I’ve also grown up with an English medium education. But when it comes to something like the arts and literature, it’s somehow so close to your bones that almost automatically you go into your mother tongue rather than in the language you have learned formally in school. I must add, because too easily it becomes a story about English versus other languages, that there is no such prejudice in my head or heart about it. Those who find for whatever reasons that English is the language they’ve expressed themselves in—they’re most welcome to do it.
Rumpus: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) was such a pleasure to read! The playfulness of the language really comes across, and the humor—also the deep themes of women and families and mothers and children and borders. You write: “Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.” Do these themes come up in all your books, and what was the inspiration for this one?
Shree: I haven’t sat down and studied what all themes I have written about before, since I don’t think of my books that way; but yes, all the themes you name and a few more as well. It is very pluralistic and very polyphonic and variegated. But yes, women easily and family, these are themes that I am interested in, but the trigger each time would be different.
In terms of inspiration, what has more and more become my way and more and more something that I have understood is that you don’t have to go for anything dramatic and big. The daily and the mundane are imbued with the big and the momentous. Every small and completely inane looking thing is also strangely connected to much bigger things, and each thing can have so many reverberations and echoes. What’s important is to find those layers, you know, as you go along. In almost all of my other works, I let small curiosities take me along.
The great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan, in one of his diaries, he’d written that you don’t have to go looking for the poem, you just have to put yourself in a place where the poem will come to you. I really feel at one with that. You are carrying all your stories in you, from your surroundings, from your imagination, from your reality, from your observation, from your history, from your tradition—you’re carrying them all with you all the time. They’re building up. You just want to find the place where the story, for that moment, is going to emerge and begin to take shape and you can go with it. I just tried to put myself in a kind of mode of retreat and empty myself out and let the layers and whispers and the murmurs from within me become more audible and visible. And then I go along with that.
In this case, I think what set me off was just an image of an old person, an elderly person, lying with her back turned to the family, which is a very, very ordinary image, which is there in every family or everywhere, you know, elderly people who look like they have nothing more to do with this world. That image somehow formed inside me. Maybe it was there, maybe I picked it up from somewhere. And it stayed with me. And then that image stirred up my curiosity. What is it that this back is doing? Is it turning away from the world and from life, or is it turning away from the immediate family behind her? I followed that curiosity and that character, and that character started to do various things, which began to amaze me and amuse me and then a whole novel was on the way to being created.
Rumpus: Your book is dedicated to the Indian writer Krishna Sobti, another Hindi writer. Can you tell us about your relationship with her, and about the Hindi literary community in Delhi. It feels like a real community, as opposed to the United States where it is very institutionalized in terms of MFA programs.
Shree: The literary community in Delhi, well, it’s a very informal community at one level—and there’s everything that goes on within a community—there’s intrigue and politics and pettiness and support. In terms of Krishna Sobti, I consider her my guru and a great writer. She’s someone who people refer to as a “difficult writer,” which I find very unnecessary. I mean, why shouldn’t writing be difficult? The more important thing is whether it is good; difficult and good. Krishna Sobti was not an easy writer. You couldn’t just pick her up and read her in one second. But she was a writer of tremendous variety, and strength, and she was a person of great strength and forthrightness, and a person who you could absolutely iconify. She died a few years ago at the ripe old age of ninety-four, and right to the end she was very alert and aware about everything that was going on, very disturbed with the politics that were shaping up—and very upfront about whatever she had to say.
She was always very senior to me, and when we met, I was very much a new writer, but she was always very encouraging, not just to me but to others also, and she took all of us very seriously. She remembered what we were doing, and she would question us when we met. So right from the start, whenever I had the time, I would go and see her, which was actually not that often, but we just developed this relationship of great respect and affection. She was very, very kind and generous. We would sit down with a small brandy in the evening, which she would almost never finish, and she would ask about my work, and we would have that little evening together. It was lovely.
Rumpus: Your mentorship and community with Sobti makes me think of the many lines in your book about storytelling, and all the references you make to other writers. “Here’s the thing: A story can fly, stop, go, turn, be whatever it wants to be. That’s why our wise author Intizar Hussain once remarked that a story is like a nomad.” Is this an important part of your storytelling?
Shree: It is a line of thought which has probably been growing in me, perhaps something that I’ve been thinking more and more about. Perhaps it also comes from the fact that I am born into a literature which is in its modern form. Hindi literature very much belongs to the period just before [Indian] independence, and then concerns what went on after independence. And I think it was a period when social realism had a huge meaning and purpose for everyone who was writing because it was a new society, and everyone wanted to steer it towards a better future. So, this express purpose became the overriding concern for all the writers. Now that makes complete sense and I’m not deriding them at all, but I think it did become the sort of tacit rule and guideline that when you were writing, that you had to write about society for the betterment of society, and you had to do it in a way which is very easily communicable. You had to follow a certain sort of way which can be comprehended, the proper sort of story that a reader can immediately connect with.
I think somewhere I—when I say ‘I,’ I am not only talking about myself but a whole community of writers and artists—began to push back against social realism. Society comes into your work in so many different ways—it doesn’t have to be a verifiable, empirical, descriptive way. I think that spurred a lot of us on, and freed a lot of us. It’s like that Ramanujan quote again. I would say that we don’t have to go looking for the society, because almost whatever we do, society will come to it. So, just let yourself free in the field of literature and creativity. And, if you’re letting yourself free, then also realize that stories will not just go straight. Stories will go this way and that! There’ll be non sequiturs! There’ll be all kinds of breaks and incompleteness, and it’s okay to celebrate all that and see what happens.
Rumpus: Along with the meta-fictional elements in the book, there is also so much playfulness with the POV and characters and the way the story is being told. Do you feel like there is a lot of experimentation happening amongst modern Indian writers and artists today?
Shree: I don’t know if writers are thinking about that word “experimentation,” but it is happening in the course of searching out ways of saying what we are trying to say. Is there a lot of that kind of writing happening? Yes, the literature is very, very vibrant and many different things are happening. But I’ll also say that it’s not as if this is happening for the first time. I mean, if you go back to ancient literature, perhaps anywhere, and certainly in [India], you see it—look at our epics, take the Mahabharata. And what you’re calling experimentation I mean, come on, it’s full of every way of storytelling. It’s doing everything! It’s almost like there’s nothing new for you to do. In a way, I’m only copying. We carry on from things which have already been done, and we keep renewing them with our zeal and reinventing them and we keep trying to do something new. And sometimes, we manage with the same ingredients. And sometimes perhaps, we discover that we thought we were doing it for the first time, but it’s been done thousands of times before.
Rumpus: You speak so highly of your translators, not only mentioning your English translator Daisy Rockwell in your Booker acceptance speech, but also mentioning your French translator Annie Montaut. Tell me about what your relationship is like with your translators, and what the process of translating Tomb of Sand was like.
Shree: I’m so lucky to have these two translators for this book of mine. With both, actually, I’ve had a very, very rich relationship. I knew Annie, but I only met Daisy in person a few days before the Booker Awards Ceremony. It started with Daisy sending me a sample of the translation. When I saw those few pages, I felt that here’s somebody who really got the sense of things and is clearly enjoying the way I’m using language a bit crookedly—here’s somebody who seems to be in tune with it immediately.
After that, Daisy was sending me long questionnaires about lots of things that she needed clarified, which included messages where she said: “You know, it’s not really needed for the translation, but I need for myself, to have the context in my head when I’m translating.” So it was very fascinating, but quite excruciating sometimes for me because my work is not research based. I had to go back to my work and start sort of researching where I got certain metaphors from, what was the story behind my use of language, because when I am writing it’s just coming out. So, it became a conscious exercise of going back and researching and sometimes just guessing at what made me come to certain points in certain words and so on.
What’s important between the translator and the author is to share a rapport about the way of looking at things, you know, and feeling intensely about those things. So, I think the fact that Daisy felt as much love for language or playing with language made for a very strong foundation, and I think the outcome has been wonderful.
Rumpus: There has been a great deal of attention paid to the fact that Tomb of Sand was the first Indian language book to win the Booker International Prize. Why do you think Indian literature is not being recognized and translated as much as other languages and recognized on a world stage?
Shree: We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language. I think it’s unfortunate that English should become the pool where all literature is to be viewed. There should be more translations across languages; in fact, even across Indian languages. Why should Indians from different parts of the country have to read each other only in English? There’s a lot of things which are skewed in this whole translation story. In fact, in recent years, the quality of translations has really, really improved, so that’s a very hopeful sign. In fact, most of [the literature] that’s going out of South Asia is only literature written in English by South Asians.
Also, I don’t think there’s such a lot of translation being done of Indian languages. So, I think it’s a matter of accessibility—that it’s not been worked on and created. I think the world is really opening up, but it’s also made people quite insular. I hope something like the Booker win might do that. I was told that at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishers were really interested in tapping translated works from Indian languages, rather than just going for the English. So, I think that’s a change one can immediately see, but it would only mean something if it becomes a sustained act.
Rumpus: How does it feel to be an artist in India, at this moment—or really in the world—with such a prevalence of right-wing and Nationalist leaders?
Shree: I’m really, really glad that you added in “the world.” I think that’s important because too often people talk about some places, like that’s where something is happening only. And there are other places where things are really, you know, hunky dory and you can do anything and get away with anything. That’s just not true. There are some trends in the world today, which are disturbing. There’s a tidal wave, you know. The world has opened up, but it’s also become more constricted. Vigilance has increased. Vigilance has become much easier than before, so everyone’s being watched. So, I’m glad you’re not making it India versus the world.
What’s happening in India… look, I mean, we respond to things at various levels. And let me tell you this: In some sense, the word has been endangered for a very long time, perhaps from the beginning. If the word is going to threaten the social order, it has to be stopped. Anything which is going to threaten the social and political order has to be stopped. And this has been going on perhaps forever. But I think writers cannot stop because writing for us is like breathing. We cannot stop. We have to carry on. By and large, I think that is what the situation is in India. So many people are writing and, indeed, I think there is a whole community which is carrying on saying what they want—even in this atmosphere of fear.
New links…
Discussion welcome.
Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.
The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!
If you look at any scripted sentence, especially written in cursive, without any concern for reading or meaning, what do you see? Something like looping lines scrawled on the page, strange glyphs making little drawings and patterns. There is a kind of open mindedness involved in this activity, a willingness to try to see what you normally read. Also a willingness to not know the difference. When I adopt this approach it’s hard to describe the kind of enjoyment I get out of Renee Gladman’s poem drawings or prose architectures.
I first encountered Renee Gladman’s work when she came to speak at my university. It was a strange meeting for a couple reasons. My professor John Beer, a great poet in his own right, relayed to me that he first met Gladman at St. Bonaventure University in New York where he worked with Robert Lax. My uncle Bill taught chemistry there for several years before retiring to my home state of North Carolina. It was an innocuous synchronicity, but enough for me to take as a sign that I needed to attend Gladman’s reading. When Gladman zoomed into the reading, I was struck by the combination of wonder and humility in her voice. She spoke slowly, with a sense that she wasn’t exactly sure where the words were coming from but that they were very real, felt, immanent—the same impression I get when I behold her work. She began reading from her novel Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. Admittedly, being uninitiated to her style, I had no idea what was going on, which is the best place to be for a poet.
For those unfamiliar, it helps to think of Gladman’s work as engaging the imagination the way an architect approaches three-dimensional space with a two-dimensional blueprint. Her art is all about blurring or renegotiating where we draw the line—between writing and drawing, seeing and reading, between knowing and not-knowing, and, by extension, between social constructs. Through the poem-drawings in her newest collection from Wave Books, Plans for Sentences, this latest installment follows up the 2016 book of drawn-writings Prose Architectures as Gladman continues “using the space and time of drawing to explore more deeply the impact of blackness, futurity, and moving/erupting architectures on topographies of the sentence.”
These will set something at the back of something and make it larger; what is smallest
will be at the forefront but also below. These will bend, will contort. They will grain
These sentences will dome the thought; they will make complex gestures and grain on a
curve. They will set memories in overlapping modes of slope and cover, making hollows. (FIG 12. p. 25)
Intricate, yet understated, the poems embody a kind of opacity between specific and vague— buildings, “domes of thought,” “propositions of houses,” compositions that “scaffold the unwritten.” However, the supposed impasse between ‘the specific’ and ‘the vague’ becomes overgrown by all ‘their’ (the sentences) self-allusion. In this way, the book is, referentially, a closed loop, as it recursively gestures to its own structure. Yet, despite the recursive (pun intended) looping, these sentences also endlessly open and bloom and “dream themselves into figuration[s] of planets and satellites.” The very core of language as structural possibility, lends animacy to the things being enacted, so that
one thing leaning and the other sloping will divide the plain just below the densest language and will launch the language of the grain.
The topography of the terrain insinuated through the poem-drawings use this “dense language of the grain” to build and rebuild what might be called various ‘architextual’ structures. “Silos” and “spires” lean and loom. “Sanctuaries” “seamed” in clausal “corridors,” by and for “blackened gatherings.” Take the poem accompanying Figure 23:
They will out quietly in a thin single line of fanning, they will turn, they will counter; they will turn and land and lift off and turn within the meditation, and will blacken gasps into the page
These places will inscribe their own topography: make their shape with their shape. And
will sonar inside the void
These sentences will wind tightly around who we are and how we live and will grow habitations as they wonder; they will cleave from the ground in enclosures of grief and will knoll
Thus, “they” (the sentences) will “blacken gasps onto the page” as the page becomes a space and a surface for “tiny communities,” a multifaceted “substrate” (a word seemingly standing in for “page” used several times throughout Plans for Sentences). A substrate is a surface material for electronic circuitry, or in biochemical terms, a material for enzymes in cell-matrices. In scientific terms, substrates are highly “context-dependent” (Wikipedia), much like the poems’ relation to the drawings. In terms of blackness and futurity, context remains contingent, fluctuating between “a blackening of the figure and a blackening of the ground.”
Legibility is equally context-dependent to the manner of inscription and transcription. Reading these poems is one way to approach the book of drawings. Each stanza lends myriad connotative shades to each meaning, structure, or action described (or inscribed) in the book. For instance, various “castellations” crop up throughout the book, a word defined by Merriam-Webster as “defensive or decorative parapets; battlements.” While ‘the thing being defended’ remains unspecified, the reader can insinuate socioeconomic inferences, where black gathering can stand for the marks on the page and the marked bodies subject to political structures throughout recent space and time.
Gladman’s work literally makes space for blackened gatherings through “geometr[ies] of support.” The significance of the future-subjunctive mood in these sentences not only makes space, but also plans for future spaces—hence the lack of periods at the end of each stanza and proliferation of semicolons, which signifies both separation and continuance, a closing-and-opening. Thus, for all these structures, there are no monoliths. There are plenty of places where ‘they’ “fail” or “void” or “buckle” or “ache;” they even become, colorfully, “a figuration of birds flying above a ground on fire, under fire.”
Readers familiar with Gladman’s work may find a pleasurable surprise in Plans—the increased incorporation of watercolor in several of the drawings. In Fig. 36, the drawings have crooked strokes of ochre and tiny dabs of turquoise. The poem tells us that the sentences “will name little waters that comma” and contain places that “let evening glow through them.” It seems the color gestures or loosely corresponds to certain elements conjured in the poem-drawings. Figures 47 through the end (60) all feature gray (fog), greens (moss, grass), ochre (evening glow). However, these gestures also, in no way, should be reduced to mere symbolism or illustration—a point of contingency Gladman notes in her Acknowledgements. Rather, the color seems to be strictly gestural, they are part of the sentence’s future-plans in the same way the directions, walls, shapes, and other architectural objects are integral to the plans.
Sometimes, looking at the drawings feels like looking at a scape (whether land or city). Then one reads something like: “these places will operate inside a thinning…they will up and over and grain.” We are left, however, only able to guess at the scale of the scape.
(Fig 33. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157379/plans-for-sentences-33)
Are we looking at miniscule close-ups, magnified to scale, or are these structures massive and faraway? Where are we? Who constitutes ‘we’? Are we spectators, tourists? One gets the sense of being a visitor and the visitation is facilitated by Gladman, but she isn’t so much a guide or host as a kind of purveyor. The visitation purveyed by the writing which is also the drawing, that we are somehow looking at and looking on and looking (with)in(side).
Oftentimes, prepositions are treated as verbal, so that “out” and “over” enact movement that simultaneously gestures and figures. Or prepositional phrases function nominally “these sentences will narrow in an out-and-through (Fig 43).” Plans for Sentences draws out and through and all throughout various plans and planes, sometimes plainly sometimes diaphanously. This method of re-tooling or re-building prepositions, situates the reader in a place where ‘figuring out’ what the poems mean, is really an activity of ‘figuring up’, literally drawing a conclusion based on how you use the sentences to configure or shape the meaning. I find my imagination acting like a cursor drawing in a computer program as I follow the ‘lines’ of words:
These sentences will funnel the plain in a bout of weather between the boundary and the
front; they will rotate above and grain below. They will over and back above, will grain and
blacken below. They will make an underground for your breathing, a repeating of devoted
enclosure (Fig. 29)
The sparseness of the “plain” language throughout ex-plains itself in the recursive looping-around and laying-out of words and drawing. Script is conscripted by drawing and re-scripted in each sentence so that the “poetry” occurs in the interstitial spaces between seeing and reading, visualizing and imagining. The writing/drawing involves planar existences and planning becomes a form of forming.
All this is to say, one of the beauties and joys of engaging this book is that there are multiple ways to engage. There is even a section at the end titled “Descriptions of Future Sentences, An Index,” if a reader wants to just browse intriguing and awe-some sentences. The index is broken into something like ‘stanzas’ based on typified beginning phrases throughout the book. For instance, “these places…”, “these sentences…”, “this chapter…” etc. The effect of this realignment of sentences is even more structural variation and possible figurative building.
Gladman’s art is literally figural and figuratively literal. Her renderings turn abstraction substantive as substance becomes abstract. In order to ‘follow’ the lines she’s following, it’s as if the reader must completely invert their own sense of how to make (create) sense. I cannot help but try to ‘read’ the drawings and ‘visualize’ the writing, rather than the other way around. However, the other way around can be just as compelling and constructive in creating an understanding of the ‘architextuality’ of the poems.
An incompleteness, or voided substance, fills and frames each drawing-poem. Each one feels both fixed and in-progress, simultaneously—much like black futurity, within which Renee Gladman’s vision is a beautiful part. Through a particular strain of defamiliarization, Gladman’s book reminds us that we don’t know, maybe can’t ever really know, what we are looking at. We can, however, adjust accordingly—either with or against the curve or the grain or the gathering, but there will always be escapement, void, the unfinished becoming of those sentences that will be.
***
Among the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs; it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader may well fear that this idea is too cerebral for a memoir about the loss of an infant son, on the fourth day after his birth, to a dire heart defect known as HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome). The worry would be misplaced.
Putnam has been thinking about (as well, of course, as enduring) this experience for more than thirty years, and her conclusions about it are bravely earned and are by no means mainly cerebral. But the brain and mind are parts of the self, even the feeling self, and her thinking does matter. So her memoir necessarily includes both many emotions and many kinds of information and analysis. Its genre is memoir, all right, but it incorporates ethics, epistemology, clinical history, philosophy, language, historiography. She speaks as a bereaved parent but also as a friend, a thinker, a mother, a skier, a writer (she has published extensively in poetry and short fiction).
There are two braided narrative threads in this essay of less than fifty pages. One is a recollection of a mostly joyous pregnancy, followed by the traumatic day of Jacob’s birth and the grief-laden, complicated decision that his parents suddenly faced upon learning from their physician that their newborn son “will not be able to live.” (In 1989, “high-resolution ultrasounds at eighteen or twenty weeks were not routinely performed.”)
Even today, when the evolving clinical probabilities have opened more space for hope, the decision to seek a transplant or to commit to a different surgery—one that would reconfigure the infant’s heart so that it can sustain life with only two chambers—even today such a decision is problematical and fraught. Putnam’s discussion of how the context has and has not changed is thoughtful, specific, and compassionate as she considers the choices available to parents now. In 1989, when a recent transplant case had involved the use of a heart removed from a baboon, the dizzying odds informed the language (quoted above) of the Putnams’ physician. In recounting her and her husband’s agonized decision—”an awful choice between a worst thing and another worst thing”—Putnam includes a lucid description of her son’s fatal heart defect itself. Occasionally she attaches a footnote that qualifies a claim about probabilities; this practice is one of many signs of her good faith.
The second thread is the narrative of Putnam’s mourning and thinking, some of it colored by her raising of her (healthy) second son, Julian, born two years after Jacob’s life and death. Putnam recalls her experience of Jacob in her womb and in his few days of post-natal life, which gave her a sense of him as a distinct self, one with a robustness of spirit, a readiness to take things on; she sensed that he was “a difficult person, perhaps, someone with a hard energy, driven.” An early intimation was also true of her second son, Julian, who then seemed “sensitive, artistic, musical, resistant to enclosure.”
One set of Putnam’s observations has to do with how our first selves fare over time—how they may change even as in other respects they remain the same. “I only had enough to go on to be able to say for sure that a distinct person appeared inside me one day and was born to the world. Beyond that, I have no idea who he [Jacob] would have become.” She also thinks about how adults may change. One of her themes is how unprepared she and her husband were for Jacob’s terrible diagnosis, how young they were, how confident they were until Jacob’s birth that all would be well.
Putnam’s thinking about parenting does not lead her to criticism of her husband, even though the marriage eventually ends. Throughout her account of the couple’s decision not to pursue surgery, she uses the first person plural; in this period the marriage is a living partnership, and the decisions about care and surgery are made jointly.
Putnam understands and sometimes shares the reader’s likely skepticism about one’s ability to think clearly in bereavement. And she is wary of religious consolation because she fears it would be a form of self-deception, something that might well serve her but would in some way be disloyal to Jacob by embracing a made-up version of his experience. But she also doesn’t see death as absolute, especially because her maternal experience of intuitive connection makes her wary of empiricism as well. This is where an Emerson poem becomes helpful.
“Threnody” was begun shortly after the death of Emerson’s young son but completed several years later. The poem sees death as not just a deep price we pay for life but as itself a form of participation in the larger design. Putnam welcomes this idea. Parents sign an implicit contract when they conceive a child. Eventual death is of course among the contract’s major terms, but the fine print includes a very small chance of death almost at the moment of birth—a very small chance that this will happen to your child, and in that sense to you. What Emerson arrives at is a reaffirmation of the contract even when he discovers that the small print applies to him. In Putnam’s eyes Emerson has standing in this context not only because he too is a bereaved parent but because he has language for spirit, for soul:
Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow
Whose streams through nature circling go?
Putnam’s own evolving understanding is both intellectual and spiritual. She has read and drawn on (or respectfully declined to follow) other parental histories. Ultimately she chooses “a version of Pascal’s wager”—the conviction that Jacob’s spirit, his soul, “never was not.” She does so in the manner of many more orthodox religious believers, i.e., with tolerance for her own imperfect certainty:
Which kind of jerk would you rather be? The kind who doesn’t want to be made to feel foolish, suckered out of extreme need into having a little faith, or the kind that might dismiss as superstition an attempted communication from your own dead child? Which mistake is more awful?
Her questions are not defensive aggressions aimed at the reader but rather a recollection of Putnam’s own decision-making. The book’s style and tone vary with the nature of the topic at hand—its presentation of clinical information is precise, even professional, while its reflections are unpretentious but searching. What unifies these elements, besides the subject, is a strong personal voice, somber and determined.
Perhaps what Putnam fears most are the seductions of rationalization, which would feel to her like an abandonment or at least a subtle betrayal of the actual Jacob. The book is in a way an elegy, a gesture of loyalty and respect. “Perhaps”—and its less formal equivalent “maybe”—is a keynote of this bold book. It confronts very difficult questions, questions not just about what we fear but about what is real, some of which is radically contrary to what we wish. Putnam shares not just her pain and her qualified consolations but her methodologies, whose harvests are not guaranteed to align. She is trying to be true both to her son—her sons—and to herself.
Double Negative transcends its own title, at least for the reader. In a world so full of self-justification and blaming, Putnam’s eloquent and unflinching definition of her own tested truths—clinical, psychological, philosophical, relational—is itself a challenging inspiration.
In November of 2015, a dynamic group of poets convened in MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) studios, some of which overlooked the old boiler house building, for a week-long intensive. The eponymous boiler house is left over from Sprague Electric Company, the former factory campus the museum now inhabits.
The bonds the poets forged during that week were so strong that they’ve returned each year (except for the first pandemic year of 2020) to continue writing, working, and growing together. Some poets left the group; others since joined. But as the collective itself evolves, the focus is always on the work. I was lucky enough to attend the reading they did of their work at MASSMoCA during their 2022 session, which was the inspiration for requesting this interview. Poets Joanne Corey, Ann Dernier, Merrill Douglas, Jessica Dubey, Hope Jordan, Marilyn McCabe, and Kay Morgan answered interview questions about their unique collective.
***
The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about that first session?
Ann Dernier: That first year we organized an “unsanctioned” reading in the Boiler House, and videotaped it. That day, in what had been the former boiler room of the Sprague Electric Company, our voices, mixed with the recording component of Stephen Vitiello’s “All Those Vanished Engines” merged us with MASS MoCA and we became The Boiler House Poets.
Marilyn McCabe: The Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.
Kay Morgan: That [reading] was the moment that the Boiler House Poets became a reality.
Dernier: The museum itself is partly why I returned year after year. The ever-changing installations helped to electrify the very thing we writers were endeavoring: to channel our own voices.
Many of the original poets created ekphrastic poems born from the galleries; responses to Louise Bourgeois, Titus Kaphar, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt. There is an atmospheric charge in that place, like a live wire. I wanted to be a part of it again and again.
Morgan: I shared a big studio with Gail DiMaggio and I can’t write this without mentioning the fantastic view of the Airstream Trailer installation which really became a touchstone for me in writing and thinking about the American dream. It is titled “All Utopias Fell,” by Michael Oatman.
Joanne Corey: Because most of our evenings were unstructured [that first year], we took to reading a selection of our poems for each other after dinner. It was the first time I had ever read more than three poems of mine at a time. It was so much fun! We learned a lot about each other’s lives through the poems and our conversations over those evenings. There was a lot of laughter, too.
An installation by Stephen Vitiello (B. 1964, New York City) Lighting Design: Jeremy Choate Text: Paul Park Sound Engineer: Bob Bielecki
Rumpus: How is a day working at the retreat different than a typical day set aside to focus on your work?
McCabe: It is incredibly inspiring to know that everyone around me is (theoretically) hard at work on their ambitions for the week, so out of that creative milieu I’m generally far more productive and focused there than a typical day. Also, it became my practice after that first retreat to do a group project, so I also think hard to come up with something I can engage everyone in. I made a video of each poet reading next to a piece in the museum that had inspired a poem that week, a soundscape using everyone’s voice speaking and singing a word that had significance for them, a videopoem based on an exquisite corpse we generated over the week. Those projects really pushed me out of my comfort zone and into some creative tinkering.
Hope Jordan: There’s really no such thing as a typical day set aside for my writing. I have a full-time job and a family, and I spend a great deal of my energy on those. In a typical week I can steal an hour or two for my writing. At the retreat, I could spend all day every day writing and it was absolutely glorious. I never had to think about making dinner or doing my job. I could focus just on what I wanted to write.
Jessica Dubey: Home is a cacophony of distractions. The beauty of having several continuous days dedicated to the art of writing is that the only distractions are ones that feed my writer’s soul. The first half of the day is what I make of it. I can plant myself in my studio and devote time to writing or editing. I can spend it at the MASS MoCA galleries, taking in new art or reexploring long-term exhibits. I have the town of North Adams to inspire and the Clark Museum as well. It’s up to me how I utilize this time. The rest of the day I’m with the group, critiquing poems, talking shop, or catching up on the lives of these amazing women who I’ve gotten to know over the last several years. Every minute is stimulating and inspiring.
Dernier: The excited pressure of having work upcoming in the afternoon workshop is the best difference.
Rumpus: How has being a member of the collective changed your process?
Corey: While I had written a few ekphrastic poems prior to our first residency, my interest and involvement with ekphrastic work has multiplied because of the BHPC. Several of our members, including Kyle Laws and Gail DiMaggio, have been an inspiration to me to pursue more ekphrastic work. With Kyle’s example and encouragement, I’ve taken part in The Ekphrastic Review Challenge series and had some poems chosen for publication. Also, I’ve recently assembled a chapbook manuscript of MASS MoCA ekphrastic poems and there are a number of ekphrastic poems in my full-length manuscript that centers on the North Adams area, its history, and my personal and family ties there.
My use of space in my work has been enhanced by being a BHPC member. In our initial year as a workshop-in-residence, convened as a collaboration between The Studios at MASS MoCA and Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press, we had an illuminating session led by Cassandra Cleghorn on the use of space in poems. Inspired by that and the example of BHPC poets Ann Denier and Jessica Dubey, I have continued to develop my skills in using spacing as an expressive technique in my work.
One of the things I love about the Boiler House Poets Collective is the opportunity to create collaborative works, such as “Avalon,” the videopoem Marilyn mentioned. It was accepted by the REELpoetry/Houston TX 2023 festival.
Merrill Douglas: The luxury of spending many hours alone at a desk while on retreat reminded me how important it is to be able to experiment, write badly, make false starts, take risks, etc. When writing time is limited, I feel pressure to produce something that seems “finished.” That’s not a good way to go at things! I think one needs (or at least I need) room to stretch out and mess around when working on poems. I get that on a retreat.
Dubey: Being part of the BHPC has made me accountable to work hard throughout the year and show up ready to contribute. Every poet who I’ve had the pleasure of sharing this time with is a poet worthy of respect and admiration. There is a tremendous level of creativity and talent amongst its ranks. From day one I’ve wanted to prove to myself that I deserved to be there.
Morgan: The intensity of Boiler House has taught me to listen more carefully to feedback and to appreciate revision instead of resisting it. It has also forced me to clarify my intention in my poems.
Dernier: I am able to confront issues faster. When I’m working alone at my desk and write a line that is too romantic or too remote, I can hear all the probable comments of those fellow poets.
One year we each had the opportunity to workshop an entire collection or chapbook of in-progress poems with the group. I recorded the group’s responses to my collection on my iPhone, knowing I would not be able to digest it all at once. I have listened to that recording many times. Those generous, hard-core responses help me back into the work.
The continuity of our years together has made the difference too. I know if I can just get myself and my jotted-down poems to North Adams, there is hope. Time folds. We get right back to work. We know how to help each other. We dive in. If something is thorny, confusing or worse, I hear about it. I could not ask for better readers.
Rumpus: Is there a specific line or set of lines that changed through discussion and feedback at one of the sessions that you would be willing to share?
Jordan: I had drafted a poem called “Song for My Grandchildren” and it ended with “Bloom, bloom, bloom.” The members of the group suggested I end it with “Sing, sing, sing,” to make it resonate more with the title and subject of the poem. That made a lot of sense to me. I ended up with “Sing, bloom, sing,” which felt just right to me.
Morgan: In just about every poem I’ve ever written, I have needed to “to cut the connective tissue,” and “get rid of the last two lines.” I am finally internalizing that as I revise!
Inevitably in a workshop session, someone voices an opinion about a line or a phrase, or the structure of the poem and someone else will immediately contradict and say they like it the way it is. That is the nature of the workshop beast, and in the final analysis, it’s up to the writer to decide what to do.
Rumpus: Has being a part of the collective helped you take more risks in your work? Would you be willing to share a specific example?
McCabe: I would never have done those group projects without a group of people I trusted to go on the adventure with me. I was always just kind of feeling my way along, so I would propose an outline of a plan, and the group would just say, “Okay, we’re in!” What a gift.
Corey: Definitely! I grew up near North Adams and attended high school there, so I thought I’d try to write a chapbook about the area and my relationship with it. The chapbook grew into a full-length collection, which I showed to BHPC. They thought I could do better, so I re-conceptualized it and presented it again to the group in a year in which we decided to workshop manuscripts instead of individual poems. Because of those discussions, I tore apart the manuscript, re-imagined, and assembled a third major revision, which I am currently submitting to publishers. It is definitely stronger than anything I would have been able to assemble without their counsel and encouragement. They helped me to take the risk of major revision rather than abandoning the project.
Morgan: For me, it’s just been an inspiration to send out my work more and to see myself as a “real” poet. In the last couple of years, I have taken more risks in terms of writing about some of the more painful parts of my past. I was married for ten years to an abusive husband. Below is a poem I wrote in a class I took with Tracy Brimhall in 2020, focused on The Body.
After Seeing Titian
I thought of you as a bison of a man
and I your blow-up plastic doll
used and squashed flat.
The obligatory you called it
Sunday mornings
after breakfast in bed.
I had no Titian to paint me
with a circlet of flowers in my hair
a long white dress, stark contrast
to your furred body. As hooves
dug into my shins and you bucked
and galloped across the bed,
lightning bolts flashed, thunder
boomed all around the field of sheets.
I never saw cupids fly across the ceiling
bows and arrows at the ready
only the digital clock
red numbers changing
with every minute that passed.
Like Europa,
I grabbed your horn,
then closed my eyes.
after Titian, The Rape of Europa
Dernier: [For me] it all began with Sol LeWitt. I can only describe it as an epiphany in the multi-floor gallery of LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing Retrospective.”
I knew LeWitt wrote “how-to” instructions, and an artist collective created and installed the actual work, but I didn’t know his instructions read like this one:
Within a circle, draw 10,000 black straight lines and 10,000 black not straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed.
LeWitt embraced intentional vagueness. He provided space for interpretation. He set an expiration date, requiring that the walls be painted over at the end of an exhibition. Impermanence was a part of the art. (Returning to the museum year after year and being confronted by massive, elaborate installations; well, honestly, taking a risk in a poem didn’t seem like a very big challenge.) That day, in that space I wanted to embrace vagueness, to allow for varying interpretations and to anticipate impermanence. I was in the presence of those enormous tents of Francesco Clemente’s “Encampment,” Marco Ramirez Erre’s orange jumpsuits in “Them & Us,” and Jenny Holzer’s over-sized redacted detainee documents in “Deeper Look.”
At the center of this residency is the shared experience of the museum and its ever-changing contents. We were ready for anything any one of us tried. We were already on that same page.
What we share at MASS MoCA involves so much more than poems and art and conversation. It is the confluence of inclusive, expressive, impermanent, visionary, passionate yawps. Shout it over the rooftops. It is thrilling!
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Installation photo supplied and used with permission from MASSMoCA
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Left to right: Kay Morgan, Wendy Stewart, Joanne Corey, Jessica Dubey, Kyle Laws, Marilyn McCabe, Merrill Douglas, Hope Jordan (kneeling)
Photo supplied by Marilyn McCabe
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