Quiet Places

THE PREMISE OF A Quiet Place is that sign language helps a besieged family survive. The Shape of Water and Wonderstruck, too, were centrally about Deaf characters. [1] Baby Driver also had a Deaf actor, and the short film The Silent Child featured a Deaf actress. Most of these latter films were nominated for Academy Awards, and two won. Unlike films in which deafness is featured as an oddity, a lack, or a sign of difference, most of these new films point to deafness as a positive and useful thing. This cinematic trend is in keeping with advances in Deaf studies. Dirksen Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, for example, have come up with the term “Deaf gain” to counter the idea of “hearing loss.” They argue that society has seen deafness as a deficit but that it should be seen as an asset. Their terminology, they write, highlights “the myriad ways in which both deaf people and society at large have benefited from the existence of deaf people and sign language throughout recorded human history.”

Co-written and directed by John Krasinski, A Quiet Place is a post-apocalyptic horror film about Deaf gain. Starring Emily Blunt and Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, the film follows the Abbotts, a family living in a world in which blind, ravenous, hideous aliens have invaded the Earth apparently for the sole purpose of devouring humans. Since the aliens are blind, they have incredibly sensitive hearing, and the slightest sound will bring them to the audible source in a matter of seconds. Fortunately for the Abbotts, their daughter Regan is Deaf and speaks American Sign Language (ASL). We have to assume that the family all learned to speak it in order to communicate with Regan. Because of their “gain” from ASL, they can communicate with each other silently, thus giving them an advantage over all the other humans who didn’t and are presumably dead.

The film asks us to consider deafness and silence. There is minimal dialogue, mostly in ASL, with subtitles for the hearing audience. When we get Regan’s point of view, the soundtrack drops out of the film entirely so we just hear the ambient sounds in the theater — rustling of paper, eating of popcorn, whispers. We are reminded that silence is both noise and absence, that there really is no silence in the world except for the profoundly deaf. The film also can be raucous and cacophonous when the alien appears, but more than other films, A Quiet Place puts us in the position of listening very carefully — to the creak in the floorboards, the whimper of a baby, the groan of pain from a minor accident — all of which can trigger a horrific attack on the sound maker.

In a telling moment, Lee, the father, played by Krasinski, takes his young son on a dangerous expedition to open fish traps in a nearby river. The son, who presumably spent his last 475 days post-invasion being as quiet as possible, is terrified of making noise and attracting the monsters. But the father makes the point that a louder noise can mask lesser ones. Behind a massive waterfall, Lee yells as loudly as possible to the terror of his son, who then learns that he, too, can lustily yell because the waterfall creates its curtain of white noise. The camera angle moves us from the power of the human scream to another position where we see them yelling but can only hear the waterfall. The viewers are being taught the nuances and gradients of sounds and silence as the sound design in the film becomes central to the viewing experience.

Without a noisy soundtrack to distract us, we also are taught to look at the visuals with a more leisurely and enhanced cinematic eye. As Ben Bahan has described Deaf people with the phrase “people of the eye,” so the viewer becomes more visually attuned when watching. If you see this movie in a theater, you will have to sit through 20 minutes of trailers which are an assault on sight and sound — the standard fare of films that rely on upping the ante for habituated viewers who need more and more powerful stimuli to get a kick from their movie fix. Dropping out sound and most dialogue makes us pay attention to the visual details — the rows of corn in the field, the trails of sand laid out to avoid making crunching footfalls, the strings of lights in the night that serve as warnings when they all turn red. Even the backstory of the film is represented visually, with no aural cues, through notes and newspaper articles that Lee has tacked onto his workroom wall to try and figure out what happened and what, if any, are the weaknesses of the insect-like overlords.

The Deaf gain of the film reaches its peak as Regan realizes something about the external processor she is wearing, a perpetually broken cochlear implant. Her father, who is a technical wiz and tinkerer, is trying to fix the device. In his subterranean laboratory with banks of black-and-white televisions and various dials, microphones, and gear that harken back to 1950s sci-fi films, he solders the processor and offers it to his daughter who refuses, signing: “They don’t work. They never work.” Nevertheless, she puts it on with teenage disgust, and when we get her audio POV, we hear the silence that, paradoxically, indicates that it doesn’t work.

It is precisely this “not working” that ends up saving the family. In a scary crisis amid all the other frightening ones (this is, after all, a horror film), the alien approaches Regan and she experiences brain-cracking feedback from the implant that makes her double up in pain, but so does the alien who writhes along with her. We begin to realize, as does Regan, that because of the alien’s exquisite hearing, visualized in the film by a mucus-filled, throbbing orifice that is its ear, the monster cannot stand the feedback either, which seems to interact with its proprioception and jams it. The cochlear implant, not to make too light of this, turns out to be the monster’s kryptonite. And the only person who can perceive this and knows what to do about it, is the Deaf character. Deaf gain indeed.

¤

As A Quiet Place is set back in time, so, too, is Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck. Based on the novel by Brian Selznick, and also featuring the same Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, Wonderstruck takes place in two eras — the 1920s and the 1970s. Selznick’s novel uses only pictures to tell the story of Rose, the daughter of a silent film star, in the 1920s. Haynes transforms that telling into a black-and-white silent film, featuring intertitles and pantomime.

We call films before 1929 “silent films,” but for the original viewers, these were just films: Deaf people could go to the movies on an equal par with hearing viewers. Deaf actors, playing hearing characters, were then highly valued for their facial expressions and communicative body language. But when sound entered film, it changed our relationship to the image. Aside from banning deaf people from the theater and the production lot, it also changed the way we see movies, diluting the purely visual with the audiovisual. This is, in fact, a plot point in Wonderstruck: one of the inciting incidents for Rose’s pursuit of her actress mother in Manhattan is the temporary closing of a local film theater that is transitioning to talkies.

Both the book and film also take on the controversy between oralism and signing. Deaf education began in the 18th and 19th centuries with Deaf teachers teaching sign language to Deaf students. But by the mid-19th century, the pendulum had swung toward oral-only education — what is now considered an oppressive intervention by hearing people into the lives of the Deaf. Rose is pictured as the victim of this educational trend. Her father insists that she read a book about oralism written by her private tutor. Haynes has us look at purely anatomical pictures of the mouth and throat, which Rose sees as hideous and tears out the pages of the book, a reduction of herself to a medical problem. Eventually, saved by her brother Walter, she attends a Deaf school where she learns sign language; she lives a fuller life within Deaf culture and meets her future husband.

Parallel with Rose’s story is that of Ben (Oakes Fegley), a boy from Minnesota who is struck by lightning and becomes deaf temporarily but doesn’t know sign language. The clunky plot of the movie has him try to find his father in New York City and ultimately to meet up with Rose, now an older woman played by Julianne Moore, who turns out to be his grandmother. Todd Haynes and Brian Selznick consulted with Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, both well-known experts in Deafness and both Deaf themselves, so the story has an informed feeling. But there was controversy within the Deaf community about casting hearing actress Moore to play the adult Rose when there are so many capable Deaf actresses who might have stepped in. Amelia Hensley, a Deaf actor from Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening blogged under the hashtag #fuckwonderstruck: “to have hearing person to play as deaf role was really hard for me to watch it. I couldn’t really enjoy the movie. I was restless. After the movie is over, I have to go to bathroom to cry … I couldn’t handle anymore. Enough is enough.” She also objected to using Simmonds, who speaks ASL, in a purely silent and mute role, while Moore, who isn’t fluent in ASL, plays the Rose who uses signs.

While both A Quiet Place and Wonderstruck might be said to have benefited from a Deaf perspective — whether from the hearing director working with the Deaf actress herself or from Deaf consultants — The Shape of Water falls into clichés about mutism and sign language that betray its all-hearing production. The film suggests that mute characters, like the Deaf, are simple people who have a kind of innocence and that sign language is just gesture and therefore equally simple and easy to understand.

The film’s main character, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), is mute and uses ASL to speak. How she lost her voice is a bit vague. We learn that as an infant she was discovered next to a river with scars on her neck that apparently damaged her vocal cords. She grew up in an orphanage, but how she learned ASL is left equally vague. There are only two people she communicates with in the film: her gay next-door neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) and her African-American co-worker Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer). The film’s hackneyed representation of mutism as disability and sign language as primitive may well be because Guillermo del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor had little experience with the realities of sign language. Or it may be because the film is set up so that the true identity of Elisa is left deliberately vague — is she a human or actually a sea-creature herself? Is this a fairy tale or a realist story?

It may seem deliberately dense to make Deaf activist complaints about the film since it fits into the genre of magical realism and, true enough, the main character isn’t deaf, just mute. But there is a very large body of criticism on disability stereotypes in literature and film that makes it hard to see this film without becoming aware of its pitfalls.

To begin with, the mute character falls into a long line of naïfs who are disabled and isolated. You can think of Lon Chaney’s deaf hunchback, the character played by Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda, or John Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Such characters are both simple and idealized. Sally Hawkins described how she understood her character: “Finding the purity of Elisa, and getting her soul right […] That purity of her soul was important […] I think it’s something we are often really, really missing in this world.” Mute Elisa is the typical Deaf innocent even though she can hear.

In addition, Elisa has no Deaf friends. But sign language is a social language, learned and practiced with other Deaf people. The blithe way that Giles and Zelda “understand” Elisa belies what ASL is all about. There is even a scene in which Giles is looking in a mirror and not at Elisa but he responds to her signing without seeing her. Moreover, the complexity of ASL communication is undercut by the screenplay, which has Elisa speak in the simplest of words. In fact, for the majority of the movie, Elisa says no more than two or three words at a time. And the only scene in which she really has a substantial monologue is voiced by the hearing Giles because she awkwardly asks him to “say what I sign.” Clearly this gambit is the director’s attempt to make the monologue more meaningful to a hearing audience by having it voiced. Or, as del Toro put it, “I knew that because I had a mute character […] I wanted a monologue. I knew the monologue would be interesting because it needed to be verbalized through a second character.”

Elisa at this point “speaks” through Giles after he says that the creature is a “thing.” She responds through Giles’s ventriloquism: “And what am I? I move my mouth — like him — and I make no sound — like him. What does that make me?” Then she goes on, “The way he looks at me, he doesn’t know what I lack … or how I am incomplete.” For many disabled and Deaf people, such a statement echoes the response they face from “normal” people who continually see them as being incomplete or flawed. While del Toro wants us to see that love conquers all, he nevertheless leaves us with the idea that not speaking is a minus rather than a “gain.”

¤

It is hard to say why Deafness is suddenly grabbing the attention of the film industry. Perhaps the work of Deaf scholars and activists is finally percolating down into the creative unconscious. Disability and Deafness are latecomers to the diversity movement and perhaps filmmakers see these as ways to deal with relatively untreated subjects in the portrayal of minority identities.

Paradoxically, though, as Deafness becomes the next big thing, it is also represented as something increasingly historical. It is worth noting that A Quiet Place, Wonderstruck, and The Shape of Water are either period pieces or strongly evoke the past. Could this be because hearing people are increasingly seeing deafness as a historical condition? It has long been argued in the Deaf community that cochlear implants are an attempt by hearing people to eliminate the Deaf community, its history and language. While this may be an overstatement, the reality is that because 95 percent of deaf babies are born to hearing parents, there is a strong push on the part of audiologists and cochlear device companies to implant these electronics on as many deaf infants as possible and as early as possible. While these implants don’t restore hearing, they are perceived by the general public as doing so. That public is then writing screenplays, directing films, and going to the movies with the thought that deafness has gone the way of the horse and buggy.

While it is exciting to see these films, among others, trying to show us Deafness as a part of diversity and as something that is a “gain” rather than a loss, we won’t fully get the Deaf experience on screen until writers, directors, and actors are actually Deaf people themselves. Right now we have movies about Deafness for hearing people. We can hope for a future with many Deaf and disabled stars, but till that time, we must remain content to be “people of the eye” on rare occasions and get our gains when and where we can.

¤

Lennard J. Davis is a professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

¤

[1] I’ll be using upper-case “Deaf” to indicate those who are part of the Deaf culture and community and use sign language. Lower-case “deaf” simply refers to those with a hearing impairment.

The post Quiet Places appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2qMJbNo

The Art of Nameless Violence

The Dichotomy of Remembrance: Négar Djavadi’s “Disoriental”

I’m always chasing after the present. But the present doesn’t exist. It’s only an intermission, a temporary respite, which might at any moment be swept away, destroyed, pulverized, by the escaped djinns of the past.

— Négar Djavadi, Disoriental

¤

DISORIENTAL, A STYLISTICALLY FRAGMENTED novel by the French-Iranian Négar Djavadi, reads like a multilayered pastiche of unrelated themes, yet all connected to Kimiâ Sadr’s troubled life. A daughter, a sister, a political refugee, a bisexual, going through an existential crisis, needing to write. From the opening, we realize the novel’s main protagonist, Kimiâ, is writing for an audience, almost as if the audience is one of the characters of the novel. The reader becomes the silent witness, on whom she calls for help, approval, and compassion.

But you know as well as I do that, to claim to get inside a man’s head, first you need to really know him—to absorb all of the lives he has lived, and all of his struggles, and all of his ghosts. And believe me, If I start there […] I’ll never get around to telling you what I am about to tell you.

The French title, Désorientale, intelligently combines the two words Oriental (anyone from the East) and désorienter (one losing her orientation or direction). This word also summarizes one of the novel’s main story lines: at 10, Kimiâ leaves the East (Iran) to live in the West (France), but growing up in France, her malaise de vie and a deep sense of alienation leave her confused and disoriented. A marginal at the margin of a society to which she has been trained to conform.

Djavadi’s writing paints the most complex human emotions with ease and depth. The reader cannot remain indifferent to Kimiâ’s rawness and vulnerability. Like Scheherazade, Djavadi’s protagonist is a storyteller, but unlike her, she doesn’t use storytelling as a device to please or feel loved. Neither is she motivated by her struggle as an immigrant, nor by her confusion over her sexual orientation. She writes to define and engrave the meaning of her father’s life — to glorify him — and not to let his family’s story vanish in the ruins of passing time. As she says:

With the passage of time, the flesh of events decomposes, leaving only a skeleton of impressions on which to embroider. Undoubtedly there will come a day when even the impressions will only be a memory. And then there won’t be anything left to tell.

Disoriental, a family saga with similarities to the writer’s own life, goes over generations of Sadrs through Kimiâ’s eyes. She is the youngest daughter of Darius and Sara Sadr. Darius, a journalist and political activist before and after the Islamic Revolution, against both the Shah and Khomeini, remains the same mysterious figure throughout the novel. Kimiâ’s mother, Sara, the other central figure, like any good mother is pragmatic and dedicated. She has learned to live in the shadow of her husband, Darius, her existence intertwined in the existence of his, living only to express her love and devotion to her man. But Darius is mostly absent, or spends his time in his room, consumed by big dreams of change and revolution.

Darius’s roots go back to Mazandaran, a small province in the north of Iran, blessed with beauty and rain. His grandfather ruled his world with his 50-plus wives and uncounted children, keeping them all in “Andarouni,” a place hidden from the eyes of strangers. In his kingdom, women compete for a simple attention from the ruler of this archaic world. But we can’t ignore how much the novel focuses more on Darius’s family history, because “this is a man, man’s world.”

Sara’s past appears less remarkable. Her main achievement has been to make Darius Sadr, the shining star of the Sadrs’ clan (and the bad boy who has left a girl at the altar), fall in love with her at 22. They get married despite a big gap in age, but who cares? Sara should feel lucky.

Kimiâ’s act of writing is a tribute, the remembrance of an exceptional being, a man who doesn’t resemble any of us, even though “[o]ur memories select, eliminate, exaggerate, minimize, glorify, denigrate.” So the reader wonders: What is true? What is not?

On the day Darius Sadr decides to write and publish a letter to the dictator of the moment, he becomes a political activist, the rebel in a totalitarian world where any rebellion would end up in arrest, torture, and death. On the other hand, he is also portrayed as a whiskey-loving-porn-watching bourgeois who wants to save the religious-less-fortunate, those who would never accept him as one of their own. This contrast, visible to the reader early on, seems oblivious to Kimiâ. Darius is the kind of protagonist born to fight and defy in order to shine without interruption, almost flawless, a man who (in exile) wouldn’t even take the escalator, because “this kind of luxury was sort of abuse, if not outright theft […] Escalators are for them,” he says. By them, he means the audience, those who read this book and pay their taxes: the good citizens with income, welcoming and tolerant, and not for any immigrant indebted to the country to which he owes his life. Darius Sadr is a complicated character we barely get to know. Djavadi — by holding off the full revelation of this character — creates a mystic figure, a beloved creature admired for obvious reasons. After all, he is the father any daughter dreams of. A father she regrets not having known better, while at the same time she is afraid of bringing him down to human level: “To want to understand everything about him would have been to destroy him.”

Due to threats to his life, Darius escapes Iran and goes to France. After a few months, his family follows his steps and, with the help of human smugglers, joins him. They live in Paris and, as much as the two older sisters thrive in the new environment, Kimiâ has difficulty integrating, and grows up to become a misfit: “To really integrate into a culture, I can tell you that you have to disintegrate first … from your own.”

Kimiâ’s difficulty in adapting amid her deep connaissance of French language and culture jolts her into constant conflicts with her mother and her old-fashioned discipline, which leads her to complete alienation from both her past and her present.

In Paris, we didn’t talk to each other anymore, about anything. None of us. Each of us was shut up in a silence mode of stupefaction and adjustment. In a state of unconsciousness. The past was just anecdotes now, that could be retold, but were only a vast, white, ruined wasteland.

She is pushed back to the margin of a society she cannot deal with. She leaves her house to become a punk and to live with junkies. Until the Big Event happens and “loss,” in the collective meaning of the term, brings her back home.

Kimiâ not only cherishes her father, but also admires most male characters such as her uncles and their ancestors. She comes from a patriarchal world where the birth of sons is celebrated, while daughters are born into homes where women have few rights. No wonder the dichotomy of her character transforms her into a girl who wants to be a boy, the boy her father dreamed of taking in and duplicating in his own image.

Born into an upper-class family in Tehran and raised by highly educated parents, Kimiâ has become used to a sense of privilege and superiority. The condescending undertone each time she refers to average Iranians might seem a bit exaggerated for non-Iranians, but familiar to Iranian readers: “If there is a God of Lies, Trickery, and Hypocrisy, He must be both Persian and extremely resilient, hiding in a corner of our [we Iranians] brain, ready to jump up and remind us who we are and where we come from.” Kimiâ, as an Iranian stereotyping other Iranians, shows the consequences of living in a society where the immigrants are always looked down upon, and unconsciously have accepted their own inferiority. It also depicts her own mechanism of self-defense against the harsh world. By telling white lies, she pretends to be one of them (the Westerners). This duality is one of the main characteristics of Kimiâ. Girl versus boy, traditional versus modern, good-family-loving daughter versus the rebellious punk, loving Iran versus hating it.

The voice of the narration changes to a more journalistic tone when summarizing Iran’s recent political history, which interrupts the normal flow of the novel; this could help or disturb, depending on the reader. This could actually benefit the non-Iranian reader in understanding where these characters come from. Yet the reader should be aware that the simplification of history might not serve its purpose. For the Iranian reader, these sections are not necessary. Every living Iranian has a history of their own, or a “Revolution” story, even if they weren’t born before 1979. In all Persian gatherings, in every first “rencontre,” Iranians eye each other discreetly to figure out what could be this new person’s “Revolution” story. It goes beyond a simple memory; it has become an identity — the way they judge and/or accept other Iranians. But Djavadi, by choosing to include most political and historical events in the footnote, has made a brilliant choice. Iranian or not, most could feel satisfied.

Djavadi’s writing is not linear. She masterfully takes her reader through multiple parallel journeys in time and space. But all the Sadrs’ backstories, mostly told to Kimiâ at a tender age, and now retold to the reader, have some kind of fairy-tale quality, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism. The reader might resist believing them, and to doubt Kimiâ’s credibility. The effect is provocative and, in the end, enriches the reading experience.

The novel, originally written in French and translated by Tina Kover, leaves a different impression in English. The French language, by nature, uses a more complex sentence structure. Djavadi’s prose is rich, deep, lyrical, with cinematographic quality, and the structure of her sentences adds more elegance to the flow of narration. But as this prose is translated, faithfully, into English, the well-crafted French sentence sometimes becomes the long English paragraph, where the subject and verb have lost each other.

In spite of the novel’s heavy themes, Djavadi, by smart use of humor at tragic moments, lifts her reader’s spirit and alleviates the atmosphere. On the other hand, it could be perceived as Kimiâ’s weakness, as she hides her sorrow behind a facade, acting as if everything is fine. Kimiâ is used to escaping, to lying, and to pretending. But no matter how deeply she loves and hates her roots, no matter how absurdly her words reveal and hide her true emotions, the disaster of “The EVENT” (something the reader has been warned about in the first pages) is the defining moment in this daughter’s life from which she cannot escape.

The novel ends with a deep sense of void emerging, an empathy for lost times à la Proust, and regrets for missed opportunities. As Roland Barthes says, “[T]o know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love.” Kimiâ might feel disappointed at the end of the novel, but this place is where she was destined to arrive all along.

¤

Azarin Sadegh is a 2011 PEN USA Emerging Voices fellow. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Coast Magazine, Iranian.com, and various anthologies.

The post The Dichotomy of Remembrance: Négar Djavadi’s “Disoriental” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GP1BH3

Fury, Kitten, Dude: On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

This week on Dear Television: Lili Loofbourow and Irene Yoon talk through the third season finale of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. There are spoilers in here, so if you haven’t seen the episode, “Nathaniel is Irrelevant,” please do so, for your own sake!

LILI LOOFBOUROW: In honor of the CW officially renewing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for a fourth season, we decided to have a yak about the season three finale and where we think the show is headed next. We also love this tremendous show deeply and consider Rachel Bloom a genius. And yet we were both … troubled … by the finale. Is that fair to say?

IRENE YOON: Totally. Paula’s song, “The Miracle of Birth,” at the top of the episode was one of my favorite moments all season. Everything from the costumes and set to the lyrics and Champlin’s delivery carried the show’s signature stamp of brilliantly over the top and uncomfortably on point at the same time. So it seemed strange for the episode to end in what felt like a rather uncoordinated jump to grounding epiphany, storyline wobble, and series cliffhanger all at once!

LL: There are issues! They might be genuine problems, or they might be hints at where the show plans to go next. SHALL WE COMMENCE?

IY: Yes! Let’s talk first about how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend usually handles finales. I want to love the trajectory that the three finales collectively suggest for the show, but I’m a little uneasy. Season 1 ends with a bewildered and vaguely horrified Josh Chan cuddling Rebecca as she waxes poetic about their love story finally taking off (in the backseat of a car, as love stories do). Season 2 ends with Paula and Rebecca holding hands, flanked by Valencia and Heather, in a reconfiguration of the thwarted wedding scene as they vow to destroy Josh together. Season 3’s “Nathaniel is Irrelevant” ends with the camera moving between close-ups of Rebecca and Paula in the courtroom. Both Nathaniel and Josh are in the room, but it doesn’t really matter. Paula silently conveys her approval and forgiveness for Rebecca as the latter pleads guilty—in a bewildering twist—to the attempted murder of Trent.

With its four-season arc (Rachel Bloom recently confirmed the fourth season as its last), the show seems to be building up to some apotheosis of Rebecca and Paula’s friendship, finally outside of the auspices of scheming for or against Josh Chan. I just wish the grounds for this moment of seeming self-awareness and mutual recognition weren’t so troubling! Namely, why on earth would pleading guilty to attempted murder by reason of insanity or pleading guilty to attempted murder by reason of needing to be, like, a better person in general be the only available options?

LL: Yes! This does seem extreme.

IY: The choices double down on the narratives of Rebecca as the under-medicated and over-invested ex-girlfriend (who, as others in the episode remind her, has shown up at a party where two of her ex-boyfriends are and thrown one of them off the roof) or the evil, scheming, dark-haired villain fueled by criminal intent. We’ve been there and done that a couple of seasons over—by the end of season three, it feels like there should be another option—from both a legal and a narrative perspective.

Also, why would Paula nod approvingly at her best friend unnecessarily pleading guilty to attempted murder? It doesn’t seem quite the proportional response to their friendship issues, but maybe that’s the point?

LL: Like, atonement, you mean? Something like that?

IY: Atonement maybe, but the show also seems invested in flagging the resolution’s own insufficiency (or excessive sufficiency? over-sufficiency?) in an interesting way. There’s so much in this episode and in all of the preceding seasons, that seems set up to make us read this courtroom scene as a moment of personal triumph for Rebecca and Paula, but it feels very purposefully off-kilter and weird.

LL: Off-kilter and weird is right! I’ve watched the finale three times now, and I agree with you that the moment Paula and Rebecca lock eyes feels pregnant (heh) with meaning: to the extent that Paula acts as Rebecca’s conscience here, it’s clear that they’ve mutually decided that this is, indeed, the Right Thing.

Which is, as you point out, ludicrous! (I had the same fears you did—I worried that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had literally lost the plot.) But having rewatched it twice now, I think—this is my gamble—that the show knows exactly how ludicrous this solution to the problem of Rebecca’s malfeasance is. I suspect, in fact, that in preparation for a fourth season that’s ostensibly about recovery, the finale is making a point about the faux-epiphanies both our heroines are prone to—and the massive overcorrections in which they repeatedly engage.

These are both characters who struggle to Take Responsibility™. And I think the show is trying to figure out what true responsibility means within the really egregious frames we use to talk about love in this culture.

IY: Yes, absolutely! I really like that reading. It reminds me of the excessiveness of Rebecca’s affair with Greg’s dad—and the strange persistence of its spectre on the show. Her epiphany can’t stop with her recognizing that she and Greg shouldn’t be together. She needs to take it a very large and toxic step further and to berate herself publicly for it—including putting it on all three lists of wrongs she committed against Nathaniel, Josh, and Paula, respectively. The transgression didn’t really belong on any of their lists, much as it didn’t really seem to factor into any of the plotlines that followed its occurrence, but Rebecca insists nonetheless “everyone should know.”

LL: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend started out satirizing a certain script about romance; specifically, the way men always talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriends. The brilliance of that parody was its double-edge: yes, it proved that the “crazy” ex-girlfriend in question—our Rebecca—was in fact charismatic, professional, intelligent, and lovable. But she was also excusing a million kinds of inappropriate behavior and justifying herself by referring to our culture’s toxic scripts about love.

In other words, this was always a send-up of both the kind of man who dismisses his exes as “crazy” without examining his own complicity. But it’s also a send-up of the woman who uses LOVE and a particular kind of manipulative femininity to indulge her worst impulses.  

By the S3 finale, Rebecca—as the credits to this season neatly illustrate—has somehow come to occupy every position in this toxic love script. She’s the vengeful fury, the sex kitten, and the dude. (The Trent parallel really drives this last bit home.)

But the “crazy” label definitely lost some of its ironic edge this season. Granted, the “craziness” Rachel Bloom set out to satirize might not be exactly real by the end of Season 3, but Rebecca does have a diagnosis. She has Borderline Personality Disorder, and the show’s portrayal of her messy progress and messier backsliding has been entirely believable and a little hard to watch. Rebecca is willing to do as much homework as you want her to—that feels so right—but in her real life, she just keeps making mistakes. Frankly, I’m not sure “mistakes” is even the right word, especially given how much Rebecca and Nathaniel’s song lampoons that framework. That she repeatedly threatens to kill herself and blame George in order to get him to do her bidding isn’t a mistake. It’s an obvious index of how destructive and manipulative she remains. Despite the occasional sincerity of her efforts (her decision to break up with Nathaniel was heartbreaking) Rebecca hasn’t actually been in recovery. She’s been in denial.  

And this episode did, after all, take the trouble to remind us of exactly how awful Rebecca has been.  

IY: So true. The episode seems to want to call attention to both how awful Rebecca has been and how her behavior marks her distance from the more sincere (if fewer) moments of reckoning with her mental illness. I also like thinking of the unevenness as quite intentional here in light of the longer arc of the season and show—especially where the messiness of her (non-)recovery is concerned.

The title of the finale recalls episode 6 of the season, “Josh is Irrelevant,” where Rebecca comes to terms with her friends in the aftermath of her suicide attempt. The echoes seem particularly, well, relevant.

“Josh is Irrelevant,” like “Nathaniel is Irrelevant,” features a moment of reckoning and apology. While Rebecca is in the bathroom playing the music video viewing scene of the S3 Theme Song (cue: fury, kitten, dude!), Paula, Heather, and Valencia worry that she might be attempting suicide again. The four share a poignant and difficult moment in which Rebecca apologizes for the terrible things she had said to them earlier and the stress she’s causing now and admits that she can’t promise that she won’t ever try to kill herself again, as much as she wishes she could–one of the most powerful moments in a season dedicated to facing squarely difficult and painful aspects of mental illness. The first apologies Rebecca makes in the season finale, however, are not nearly so organic or heartfelt. Convinced that she’s begun hallucinating images of Trent as a manifestation of her guilt, Rebecca types up blanket confessions focused on alleviating her own feelings of guilt rather than responding to the hurt she caused her friends unbeknownst to them. Everything in the scene seems a little imbalanced and more than a little weird.

LL: Exactly! It’s the opposite of a true apology! She’s gambling that confessing will save her sanity. It’s really not about them.

IY: And their reactions variously underscore that. While Rebecca has done pretty awful things to everyone—including, significantly for an episode that ends with her in an orange jumpsuit, threatening the lives of people Josh and Nathaniel care about—Josh demonstrates little response to the news that Rebecca possibly tried to have his grandfather killed and father deported except eventually to punch Nathaniel; Nathaniel’s vague surprise and annoyance that Rebecca put a hit on his girlfriend subsides rather quickly. In this moment, indeed, Nathaniel and Josh both become somewhat irrelevant.

Paula, however, having read that Rebecca lied to her to get her help, rushes out of the room in a tearful rage and calls off their friendship in toto!

LL: Right, and the thing about that is that no one’s reaction here scans. The very idea that Paula’s grudge about being lied matters more than attempted murders and deportations is … well, crazy. We get it: lady-friendship matters more than any man. But this is a garbled way of delivering that message. At this point in the finale, the show itself seems dazed and lost.

IY: Yes! And the reprise of the “X is irrelevant” construction shows that we’re drifting away from anything like moral clarity rather than moving toward it. The revelation that registers as a moment of clear-sightedness and self-possession in episode 6, comes off as well, muddled and confusing in the season finale. Rebecca’s declaration of Josh’s irrelevance in episode 6 more or less sealed his irrelevance for the rest of the season: it was right. As much as I love Vincent Rodriguez III on the show, Josh is irrelevant. Instead of a similar organic declaration about Nathaniel here, we have the strange unspoken exchange between Paula and Rebecca in the courtroom.

If Rebecca’s attempts—often disproportionate, self-destructive, and unnecessarily extreme given the circumstances–to demonstrate her love and devotion to her various beaus are out, is the conclusion of season three just another disproportionate, self-destructive, and unnecessarily extreme attempt to demonstrate her devotion to Paula instead?

LL: Right, maybe this is the latest instance of her tendency to inappropriately overlove. (Kind of like how she tried to prove her love for Nathaniel by finding his “sister”?)

IY: Totally. And we have, of course, been alerted to the dangers of both overloving and easy substitution through none other than the attempted murder victim, Trent. As Trent likes to point out repeatedly to Rebecca—and as the show likes to point out to us through his repetition of her songs in a variety of refrains—he’s the crazy ex-boyfriend to her crazy ex-girlfriend. It’s in part Rebecca’s gnawing sense of guilt that this is the case that prompts her to confess her sins to Paula, Josh, and Nathaniel. But, while the season repeatedly demonstrates her willingness to contemplate endangering Josh’s family and Nathaniel’s girlfriend, she always stops short of actually allowing any of it to happen.

LL: Right. She actually does have brakes.

IY: Whereas a deranged Trent is ready to plunge a knife into Nathaniel when Rebecca runs up to them. Rebecca schemes and creates various artificial situations to convince Josh to spend more time with her; Trent actively and repeatedly blackmails her, physically marching her around her office in an uncomfortable and unwanted performance of their relationship. As deeply flawed as Rebecca is, she isn’t quite Trent.

LL: That’s a really good point.

IY: In the opening scene of this episode, where Rebecca dreams about brushing her hair in the afternoon light before her mirror, she sees herself transfigured into Trent doing the same. The fact that the opening scene calls explicit attention to Rebecca and Trent’s hair was notable given how the season opens with Rebecca dyeing her hair dark brown to indicate her vengeful rage for Josh (“I know, my hair is dark so I look evil, but I’m wearing white so it’s ironic”) and ends with Trent in an absurd orange-y wig trying to murder Nathaniel because of his vengeful rage for Rebecca.

Weirdly, the effect of the dream scene’s lighting renders Rebecca’s hair closer to the original light brown, and Trent’s an approximation of the deranged orange to come. So while the scene overall seems to suggest the doubling of their narrative arcs (and less-than-balanced tendencies toward attachment) that’s been heavily underscored by the use of both instrumental and sung refrains of Rebecca’s songs via Trent, there’s also a sense of a key divergence here when they’re examined side-by-side, literally under the same light.

LL: THIS IS HIGH-QUALITY THEMATIC HAIR ANALYSIS. I AM CONVINCED. (At some point, we ought to mention the perfection of Paula’s hair in “The Miracle of Birth” too.) You know, I wonder whether this imperfect parallel between Trent and Rebecca works is a clue re: how to read the other broken road maps in this episode. Take that amazing song of Paula’s (aka one of the most spectacular things to have ever happened on television). It lays out in excruciating detail everything Heather will undergo, but almost none of it (except for the bloody show) seems to accurately reflect Heather’s experience. She’s reading magazines throughout and sweaty but unbothered after giving birth. The same is true for other projected arcs: Trent’s Instagram story scheme doesn’t go the way he thinks it will. Neither does Darryl’s project of having everyone in the room for the delivery. Basically, nothing in this episode follows the carefully-explained plan. The messiness seems deliberate, in other words. It’s thematized, baked-in.

IY: Totally. And the stakes of baked-in messiness are really interesting where Trent as a character is concerned. Trent figures, on the one hand, as an absurd convenience for any sticky plot point, hauled out from one full body cast to move things along before being shoved (literally) into another, and on the other, as the physical embodiment of the violence and harm of Rebecca’s machinations. The last episodes of the season do make clear the ways in which Trent’s presence, in all of his obsessive and threatening behaviors, is a byproduct of Rebecca and Paula’s scheming around Josh.

LL: Trent is such a problem. I can’t work out whether he’s a useful foil or a caricature who isn’t granted the sympathy Rebecca gets, or both? I do think it matters, from a purely pragmatic POV, that Rebecca did push him, and endanger his life, and that she can admit that she did without revving up the excuse machine. Pleading “responsible” is a step that does genuinely matter–morally, even if it’s legal nonsense, and even if it’s a massive ethical hyper-correction. I’m betting that the show has a handle on this, though, and my evidence that it does is the arc we see within Nathaniel and Rebecca’s last song, “Nothing is Ever Anyone’s Fault”:

Before I knew you

I did bad things and didn’t know why

But now, I know you

And I’ve learned to look inside

I understand what makes me

Frightened and sad

So yes, I still do bad things

But are they actually bad?

No!

I love this articulation of how Rebecca and Nathaniel are basically substituting another toxic cultural script–the self-justifying self-help epiphany–for the love narratives Rebecca’s trying to leave behind. That lethal slippage from healthy introspection to nihilistic self-justification is definitely a tendency in America. And it’s one a diagnosis (like Borderline Personality Disorder) can accelerate in people built like Rebecca and Nathaniel. Labeling ourselves can become a way to shirk real responsibility. I love that the show confronts that, and I take these lyrics as a promise that it’s going to keep thinking through these metaphysical conundrums. Here’s hoping the next season tracks Rebecca’s smart and difficult climb out of this, her latest (terribly relatable) trap!  

IY: I love that reading! It also makes so much sense insofar as the wobbliness of expectations in the courtroom scene between Rebecca and Paula is emphatically set up by the surprising reversal of Rebecca and Nathaniel’s “love” song. Nathaniel had gotten awfully nice and sympathetic by this point in the season, and, as you pointed out, Rebecca’s choice to break up with him earlier on was indeed heartbreaking. So the slide into gross self-justification in the guise of an impassioned love song was quite a surprise, though maybe it shouldn’t have been, given their joint cheating and plotting of murders and deportations, etc.

On the flip side, the show’s done a remarkable job of developing Paula and Rebecca’s friendship as one that is deeply loving and deeply flawed. I’m not sure what the next and final installation of the series holds, but I share your optimism that Season 4 won’t disappoint with any oversimplified substitutions of female friendship for romantic relationships with men or of accessible labels for messy responsibilities.

The post Fury, Kitten, Dude: On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2qpkV2V

Complex Harmonies: On Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”

A GRIEVING DAUGHTER pens three carefully diffident, if increasingly determined, letters to an emperor, pleading for the return of her father’s body. While Antigone demanded her brother’s mangled corpse from a king, this woman is different. Her father, an “esteemed” courtier and diplomat, had not died violently — yet he too had been dishonored after his death, in a curious way. In life he had served the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who had created a personal cabinet of curiosities in Vienna. Now both men are dead and Josefine Soliman writes to Emperor Francis I of Austria, who had decided to have the “black-skinned” Angelo Soliman, born “around 1720 in North Africa,” an erstwhile acquaintance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, stuffed after his death and put on display, “wearing only a grass band.”

That daughter’s righteous demand is reflected by the loyalty later demonstrated by a sister, who straps the jar containing her dead brother’s heart to her leg and conceals it beneath her skirt to evade Russian border guards. Ludwika’s brother was the great composer Fryderyk Chopin, and following his death in Paris in 1849, she sets out to fulfill his wish and bring the most precious part of him back to his beloved Poland. Centuries earlier, an equally loyal pupil searches for his dead master’s preserved leg — which had been amputated years ago — in order to complete the master’s burial. Elsewhere, a present-day mother of a seriously ill son attempts to flee her grim daily life in a Moscow apartment bloc. While for a young Polish husband and father of one, a vacation on a Croatian island ends in a nightmare and possible madness.

Such are the fragments of lived lives, transformed through imagination, that form the rich sequence of anecdote, observation, wry aside, personal reflection, extended narrative, and intense speculation about the shape of our world and its future one finds in Flights, a sui generis novel by Polish maverick Olga Tokarczuk, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas. The theme is flight, in all its manifestations. Tokarczuk sees the traveler as an individual on a quest for understanding and true experience, perhaps the ultimate in existence, but also potentially driven by the desire to evade reality, elude the inevitable. In a sequence entitled “Everywhere and Nowhere,” she explains:

Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law of quantum physics that states that a particle may exist in two places at once? […] I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness — these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.

Very early in this wise, observant, and whimsical book, it becomes clear that the reader has found the ideal travel companion, who takes “a different view of time,” and makes one feel that “time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array.” Indeed, Flights is a narrative to accompany one’s life — each new reading reveals a further destination, another idea to excite and engage the imagination.

To date, Tokarczuk has written two volumes of short stories and eight novels, which include House of Day, House of Night (Dom dzienny, dom nocny, 1998; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2002). That earlier work also moves between the past and the present, truth and myth, as it tells the many stories of the locals living in a small town that’s now Polish, but had been considered German, Czech, and Austro-Hungarian in past times. Yet Flights (Bieguni, 2008; translated by Jennifer Croft in 2017) soars higher. It marks an ambitious stylistic shift in her trajectory, and although she has been compared, inevitably, with the German visionary W. G. Sebald — with whom she does indeed have much in common — her approach is far closer to that of the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai. Like Krasznahorkai, Tokarczuk shapes seemingly disparate stories and then, through sleight of hand, identifies their relevance in a wider context. Each narrative, powerful in its own right, acquires further meaning as the journey continues.

Flights shifts and shimmers. Its obsessive characters speak in captivating, distinct voices. A recent widow makes candid confessions to the creepy doctor intent on acquiring her husband’s research project into dead bodies. The distraught Russian mother mentioned above, Annushka, seeks out the bizarre figure who stands at the entrance to the underground, “the strip of untamed land between the wall and the just-lain pavement blocks.” The female stranger is different, standing apart and dressed in many layers of clothing. Her head is also tightly wrapped, her face hidden: “all you can see is her mouth as it emits a ceaseless stream of curses.”

Such scenes bring to mind Samuel Beckett. Like him, Tokarczuk is as witty as she is intense, as playful as she is cerebral. Literary references abound. She certainly brings out the best in a reader — and demands a great deal of a translator. Jennifer Croft’s rendition is magnificently nimble and subtle. She traverses the contrasting verbal and historical registers and shifting tenses with a grace and ingenuity. The text is resoundingly alive.

Flights possesses an allure comparable to that of Mathias Énard’s Compass (Boussole, 2015; translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell in 2017). Both Énard and Tokarczuk are erudite without being pedantic. But while Énard’s heady confection of story and literary allusion remained bound to Franz Ritter — his insomniac narrator, ill or possibly dying in his Vienna apartment — Tokarczuk riskily favors intermittent bulletins, including a hilarious sequence featuring marathon train journeys devised to cater to reluctant air passengers.

And yet, at the center of it all remains Annushka, who needs to run to a church not to pray but to weep. Although she initially fears that she “might even hear her own name” in “the rush of [the screaming stranger’s] furious words,” what she finds instead is fleeting camaraderie. Like Annushka, the woman is a wanderer, eventually identified by the police as a member of a sect called “Bieguni” — the runners — whose mission to remain in motion is the metaphysical engine of this book. Such is the nature of Tokarczuk’s literary universe, where seemingly random elements are made to resonate in complex harmonies.

Do these harmonies offer resolution? Several characters demonstrate little interest in the living; instead, they are intent on preserving dead bodies, while souls are best to be discarded. One might think that Tokarczuk herself sees survival only in movement, in the current of air that animates us. Yet her achievement rests not in any concrete answers or prescriptions, but in the questions she raises. Chopin’s brave and loyal sister emerges as a heroine for sure, as does the distraught Josefine, whose letters requesting the return of her father’s body are among the most beautiful episodes in the novel. That said, equally sympathetic is the cool, deliberate woman who travels across the world to assist a former lover wishing to be released from his dying body.

A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.

¤

Born in California, Eileen Battersby holds a masters degree in English literature from University College Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she was named Arts Journalist of the Year four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012.

The post Complex Harmonies: On Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GP3X92

“The Fearful Verve of the Genre”: On Woody Haut’s “Days of Smoke”

WITH THE COLLAPSE of literary writing into popular culture and the smudging of boundaries between genres, the status of noir fiction may seem uncertain. But then, noir has always been a protean category, a shadowy realm for novelists to develop their signature styles and work out their obsessions. So-called mainstream novelists sometimes make forays into the genre, raiding its attributes. When the culture roils with angst (and when doesn’t it?), noir fiction makes a blunt drama from our distress. No one knows the traditions, mutations, and contemporary aspects of noir fiction better than Woody Haut. In lively studies such as Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (1995) and Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (1999), he has tracked noir from its roots in hardboiled crime stories to the urban narratives of Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, and James Ellroy.

In 2014, Haut produced his first novel, Cry for a Nickel, Die for a Dime. Set in Los Angeles in 1960, as the United States turns the corner toward the Kennedy years, the novel centers around Abe Howard, a freelance photographer whose shots of a murdered jazz musician put him in conflict with the city’s interchangeable criminal and corporate elements. Cry for a Nickel glories in classic noir tropes: it deals with civil disorder and personality conflicts, its clashes are triggered by basic drives, its language sounds as if it were spoken over a tumbler of bourbon, and it thrives on the generation of fear.

Now comes Days of Smoke. The time is June 1968, the place Pasadena. As the action opens, a college-aged woman named Connie Myles observes three men walking into the office of the Pasadena draft board where she works. Mike Howard has arrived to present his petition for classification as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He is accompanied by his father, Abe Howard, who opened a camera shop after a violent ordeal in Cry for a Nickel. Connie thinks of herself as “a kind of secret agent who had successfully infiltrated enemy territory […] she held fast to her guise, doing her job, waiting for her moment.” Meanwhile, Mike “had no intention of going to Vietnam. There was no way he was going to fight in a war he didn’t believe in. Nor did it bother Mike that he was doing his best to finesse the situation; if necessary, scam the draft board into believing his story.” Soon after, Connie finds, or rather, creates her “moment” — she destroys Mike’s file and becomes an updated rendition of a noir femme fatale.

If the noir vibe has shape-shifted over time, it has also evolved in Haut’s work. Days of Smoke places more emphasis on its societal and political contexts than Cry for a Nickel, and also propels its main characters into irresolvable situations. In Pulp Culture, Haut observed that “the 1950s was an era of psychotic behavior and suicidal impulse […] pulp culture writers produced a class-based popular literature, which, with its compelling tales of corruption, violence and obsessive behavior, indicated a nation struggling with itself.” In an email exchange with me, he added, “No matter which class noir has portrayed, it was, and should still be — about subverting the repressive values of that class or the dominant culture.” He extends this mentality to his new novel of 1968, as Connie and Mike each grope for means of resisting the powers that oppress them. While Abe, a former Socialist activist, is now deeply skeptical about politics, the young people embrace Robert Kennedy. Of course, we know what is going to occur at the Ambassador Hotel. But the murder takes an unexpected personal toll on Connie and Mike, leading them into a dark and sinister spiral.

Our unnamed narrator tells the story in the style of a police procedural — as if statements and interrogations had been taken, thoughts and motives revealed, and actions explained. This is a noir novel, after all, and its mordant tone is never tempted to relax nor does its narrative eye ever blink. It does not care at all about charming the reader. Instead, it suggests a frightening common denominator in human behavior, an implication that a sudden turn of circumstance could channel anyone’s best intentions into a series of tragic events. Naturally, I’m loath to reveal any more of Haut’s shapely plotting. I’ll just say this: you’re in for it.

Days of Smoke may be steeped in the culture of 1968, but it strikes me as a novel informed by the paranoia, divisiveness, disillusionment, and anger of our own time. Early in the story, Mike agrees to hide a handgun for a friend despite his father’s adamant opposition. But in Haut’s world, even an honest attempt to dispose of a weapon leads to horror. Abe speaks: “I can’t condone anyone using or, for that matter, possessing a gun. All this armed self-defense is bullshit. I’m sick to death of it. And that includes the goddamn Panthers, as much as I agree with them politically. Because if it comes to shooting, we know who has the fire power.” At the same time, Connie drifts into the protest movement, but it demands more from her than she can abide. Mike is more circumspect about the supposed revolution:

Well, I’ve got nothing against SDS, but they’re really not my thing. I think it has something to do with their attitude. It’s like they know everything, or, at any rate, think they know everything. You know, like they have the correct line on any issue, when they probably don’t know any more than anyone else.

Our friends on social media may be posting links to indicate their outrage at the latest violation of ethics. We may head to the village green to carry placards against guns or misogynists. But we struggle to find effective ways to counter the most brutal forces that impede social justice. Days of Smoke, like any hard-working noir, revels in exposing the morbidity of our communal life, makes space for a range of shady characters, and leaves us with the uncomfortable sense that the trials of Connie and Mike are still ongoing. The novel impresses us with its fealty to the events of that dark year of assassinations, but its attitude is derived from current affairs. It’s hard not to see the contemporary relevance of Mike’s thoughts on violent resistance, which “might work in other places, but it was unlikely to accomplish much in America with its corporate power structure, its military, police force and indentured middle-class, where power trickled down only as far as it was able to serve those at the top.”

In 1968, Woody Haut appeared at the office of the Pasadena draft board to reestablish his status as a conscientious objector. The nuances and ambiguities he has invested in Days of Smoke seem to arise from a long cultivation of an inner aversion to being pushed around. What Connie and Mike want most of all is autonomy — the freedom to do as they wish. What noir has to say is: You’re screwed no matter what you do. It’s hard to say whether or not this novel will satisfy the hardcore noir junkie looking for a quick fix, but if you’re of a certain age and your former hatreds of LBJ and Nixon are being revived by today’s presidential meltdown, you may react quite strongly to Days of Smoke. Speaking personally, I can say that Woody Haut has certainly delivered the fearful verve of the genre he knows so well to my already jangled nerves.

¤

Ron Slate’s two poetry collections are The Incentive of the Maggot and The Great Wave. He reviews fiction, poetry, and other genres at “On the Seawall” (ronslate.com).

The post “The Fearful Verve of the Genre”: On Woody Haut’s “Days of Smoke” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2JBS97N

A Brand New Beginning: “Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry”

WHEN SO MUCH is scarce, there are only, as Karen Van Dyck writes in her introduction to Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, “new ways to imagine what can be radically different realities.” This anthology gathers an eruption of voices emerging from Greece in the last decade — where, amid 2008’s economic crisis, hunger and mass unemployment have been widespread, businesses have collapsed, and an outpouring of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iraq has entered the country. Somehow, among all of this, a renaissance in poetry has ignited. The scope is unprecedented: new publishing houses and journals, free public readings, wide digital proliferation, graffiti. The poems in Austerity Measures are urgent, and as varied as the lived experiences of their writers — all of them writing from a certain turmoil. “Poetry is nothing if not equipped for crisis,” C. D. Wright said, and this anthology of innovative, discordant voices is proof enough — an anti-chorus singing itself into the world.

There are no uniform allegiances in these pages, no traceable aesthetics. Some poems force you to flip the book on its side; many are presented with varied columns, margins, and spacing. For the most part, the poems are not in keeping with classical Greek mythology, and in fact most of Greece’s known mythic history is renounced. There are text-message poems, astrology poems, a poem where “[j]untas accessorize their wanks with national emblems.” That last quote comes from Krystalli Glyniadakis (tr. Chloe Haralambous), who works in English, Greek, and Norwegian. The poets here are worldly, but they all write in Greek. And because “diasporic multilingualism [is] so often ignored in national accounts of Greek literary history,” the last section of this anthology brings us to places outside of Greece — where poets are writing surrounded by dominant Middle Eastern and Balkan languages.

The most politically charged portion of this book comes from a section called “Unjust Punishment: Poets Online.” The freedom of the internet has offered these voices a space unburdened by censorship — and here we encounter the Greek rap scene, as well as the poet Thomas Ioannou, who is, the introductory note explains, “far from the traditional image of the activist […] a neurologist whose political poetry struck a chord and went viral.” Here we also find the poet Kyoko Kishida, who, in a poem called “Degenerate Girls Were My Girlfriends” (tr. George Economou), writes, “I like the fracturing of linearity / Art that involves more senses / Asking questions non-stop.” These lines could be read as an assertion of poetics — one that applies to much of the work showcased in this anthology: revolutionary in different ways, by poets who aim to crack the Doric columns of tradition.

Especially of note is the radical poet Jazra Khaleed, who has introduced the work of Amiri Baraka to Greek readership. (He was also interviewed by the poet Max Ritvo for Los Angeles Review of Books a few years ago, here.) In “Words,” the poet announces: 

I have no fatherland 
I live within words 
That are shrouded in black
And held hostage

(tr. Peter Constantine)

Khaleed, along with so many of the poets in Austerity Measures, knows that the “seat of power is in language.” Like Kishida, he proposes something new:

I need a new language, not pimping 
I’m waiting for a revolution to invent me
Hungering for the language of class war
A language that has tasted insurgency

It is exciting to see the original Greek presented alongside the translations, so we can discern the formal challenges and strategies used to bring the poems to English; often, the translators do as much formal footwork as the poets themselves. Take, for example, the excerpt from Dimosthenis Papamarkos (“from Ballad”; tr. Chloe Haralambous), where the long lines of a single stanza in the Greek are trimmed and broken into rhyming ballad quatrains in the English. The form of the original is based on a category of surreal folk songs called paralogues (οι παραλογές), which are a kind of ballad, but which also refer to the paralogical, surreal, or absurd nature of these songs. The two, side by side, look and read strikingly different. Or see how the music changes in Phoebe Giannisi’s poem “Penelope – Έχω πάθος για σένα” (tr. Karen Van Dyck): the original’s unpunctuated lineated stanza becomes a breathless, streaming block of text in the English. As the note points out, this particular poem relies on the reader “comparing the language patterns and shape of the original and the translation, and filling in the missing English.” These are just a few examples of innovative translation techniques gathered in this anthology. Overall, it is important, as Van Dyck observes, to understand how constraints can be sites for new discoveries of form: “The goal is not to reproduce the source text — you can’t — but to learn from it so as to make something else possible in the new linguistic context.”

The poets in this anthology represent varied streams of contact with English-language poetry as well. Emily Dickinson is conjured by a poet from Thessaloniki; the voice of William Carlos Williams echoes in the spare strophes of Glykeria Basdeki’s “Let Down the Chain.” These are poets who have been influenced by, and have introduced Greek audiences to, writers like Paul Celan, Hélène Cixous, Robert Hass, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Carson, Sylvia Plath, and Mina Loy.

In these pages where, amid political crisis, voices have been silenced, it is not uncommon to witness violence being done to language and speech. Previous modes of expression aren’t enough; tongues stretch after a different source of meaning, as in Dimitris Athinakis’s “A Semblance of Order”:

I lick the water dribbling from decaying pipes, 
I stick my tongue into the tube of the boiler. 
I stretch it as far as it’ll go — I keep stretching.

(tr. Peter Constantine)

The violence of boiling appears again in a poem by Thomas Tsalapatis, this time showing the complete inadequacy of written letters:

In the curved part of language 
where words stagnate 
The unused ones, the ones on walls,
the non-smoking ones
In the water
In the steam
And he is
Boiling water, always boiling water
Learning that what is scarce is what takes charge
Learning how Π and Τ lose their flat roofs
How ζ and ξ dry up at the roots
How vowels get murdered
How language bubbles up

(tr. Karen Van Dyck)

And a different kind of violence recurs in a poem by Eftychia Panayiotou (tr. Karen Emmerich), where a gardener is also a menacing silencer who “buries words under the soil. / hurt words, which first he hits / then binds without fear.”

Old myths do not suffice anymore. Where they do appear, they are mutant variations, like in one poem where a tiny siren removes her eyes, “Two glass marbles, green” (Katerina Iliopoulou; tr. A. E. Stallings). Stamatis Polenakis addresses sirens of his own, in a poem called “Poetry Does Not Suffice”:

The sirens don’t sing, nor are they silent,
they merely stay motionless,
dumbstruck by the privatization 
of the waves and no
poetry doesn’t suffice since the sea filled up
with trash and condoms.

(tr. A.E. Stallings)

What good, then, are poems? They are good for clearing a new path, for reinvention. Chloe Koutsoumbeli gives ancient stories a feminist spin and rewrites the myth of Penelope (naming her “Penelope III”) while showing us just why the same myths that are told and retold are not enough. In an updated version of the mythic lotus-eaters (those island dwellers, visited by Odysseus, who lived in a narcotic state by eating lotus flowers), Phoebe Giannisi writes,

you’ve already downed the medicine 
the medicine a flower 
the medicine is the medicine 
forgetfulness is every moment a brand new beginning 
it’s I don’t know where I come from I don’t want to return 
the medicine is always now always now

(tr. Angelos Sakkis)

The word φάρμακον (farmakon) means both medicine and poison, and it is the name of the literary magazine (φρμκ) in which many of the surreal poets of this anthology, including Giannisi, appear. Both healing and harmful, remaking and unmaking — perhaps the work of Austerity Measures is best summed up by Vassilis Amanatidis, in his poem “[supremacy: a riddle]” (tr. Patricia Barbeito): “Self-realization by means of what is said to be the unutterable […] both unapproachable and beyond language.”

“Times turn quickly in Greece,” writes Z. D. Ainalis, “the light goes out abruptly.” This is from a poem titled “September 3rd 1843” (tr. Maria Margaronis), the date of the Greek army’s uprising against King Otto in Athens. In relation to these lines, consider Elena Penga, writing about the passages of art through time: “The roads a stone takes to become a Cycladic figurine, a Picasso woman. The lengths it goes to stay that way. Sculpture that still emits the encounters it had back then, when it was a stone, before it became a sculpture” (tr. Karen Van Dyck). The way time functions in these poems is starkly different, one concerning a historical event and the other the production of art — there are two almost opposing views here — though both are welcome in the “Storytelling” section of Austerity Measures, where “the double sense of the Greek word ιστορία (istoria), ‘history’ and ‘story,’ is foregrounded.” Whether passing into a new age of art, a stone turned over and over, slowly, looking back on its history as a stone before it became a crafted thing (Penga); or the passage of Greek historical time, a light suddenly snuffed (Ainalis) — two sides of the same coin are displayed, and it’s one of the defining strengths of this multifaceted collection.

It is a huge gift to have this anthology, and it widens the frame of Greek poetry for Americans — beyond the scope of mammoths like Ritsos and Cavafy. Because it includes work that isn’t explicitly political (see Doukas Kapantaïs, who is “not interested in poetry as social commentary”), Austerity Measures stands apart from other recent anthologies of Greek poetry. But all of the poets here show us that something is at stake. The responses are always manifold and surprising.

These poem-makers are architects, experimental filmmakers, physicians, lawyers, rappers, bloggers, and many of them are translators themselves. They are cis and queer, from radical political collectives and working-class families; they’re young, multiethnic and multicultural — they’re not all Greek, but they’re writing in Greek. They were born in France, Chechnya, Germany, Bulgaria, Iran, and other countries. Many are making their debuts. They are enormously wide-ranging in their sensibilities and poetic affinities. Not confined to academic camps or motivations, resisting a political boxing-in — yet still refusing to be silenced or to vanish in their time and their place, which is also our time and our place.

¤

Christopher Janigian was born and raised in Rhode Island. His poems appear in Boston Review, PEN America, and Web Conjunctions, among other places, and he holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia University. 

The post A Brand New Beginning: “Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2IHYKMH

Missed Connections: Hanne Ørstavik’s “Love”

HANNE ØRSTAVIK’S Love is an eerie and formally inventive novella that closely examines the love between a mother and son, or perhaps more accurately, the potential limits and absences of that love. It recounts the story of an icy night in the lives of a mother, Vibeke, and her son, Jon. The next day is Jon’s ninth birthday.

The mother and son have recently moved to a remote village in northern Norway for reasons not entirely clear, though there are occasional allusions to a past life somewhere else. While one might assume that a mother’s world revolves around her son’s as much as her young son’s revolves around her’s, this is untrue for Vibeke. When she and Jon are together in the beginning, she listens to him talk about a picture he’s seen of someone being tortured. “Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, play or something?” And in the next beat, a nearly complete falseness: “‘It’s good of you to think of those in pain,’ she says. ‘If everyone else did the same, the world might be a better place.’”

In these early scenes, Vibeke’s distance from her son is mostly ordinary, a mother trying to mime the movements of care and love to provide her son with what he needs, while mentally disengaging from him to dive internally into her own concerns. She smooths her hand over his head. She says, “Dearest Jon.” But then “[s]he repeats the movement while studying her hand. Her nail polish is pale and sandy with just a hint of pink. She likes to be discreet at work.” This maternal two-facedness is perhaps normal, at least some of the time, but it later becomes clear that it’s the result of an unnerving degree of vanity and self-absorption.

After eating dinner with his mother, Jon goes out to sell raffle tickets for the sports club to people in the neighborhood, and encounters an array of menacing strangers. His first encounter is with an old man who takes him down the steep stairs into the basement. “The place smells rank and strange, Jon thinks it smells of soil.” Jon wants to pee and notices a leather dog collar and a metal chain hanging down from a hook on the wall. In the end, the man is just showing him skates, but the sensation of dread, anxiety, and menace only builds from there.

In another encounter, he meets a much older teenage girl, and there is something off-putting about their exchanges:

My aunt’s got a glass eye, says the girl. She kept looking through keyholes when she was little, only one day my dad was on the other side, he stuck a screwdriver through the hole to stop her spying. Feel like a game of Othello? Before he can say anything she gets the box out from under one of the beds.

Meanwhile, Vibeke takes a bubble bath and is consumed with romantic thoughts of a dark, brown-eyed man at work. Occasionally thoughts related to her work as an arts and culture officer in the local authority also drift into her consciousness. However, it is clear, fairly quickly, that there is a strange difference between Vibeke and Jon. While Jon repeatedly comes back to his mother in his thoughts, returning like a homing pigeon to her, Vibeke almost never thinks of Jon. Almost her entire interior life is marked by his absence.

When Jon returns to the house from the old man’s basement, Vibeke emerges naked from the bathroom. She notices his presence but remarks that she thought he was out, reflecting a total disinterest in his whereabouts. She calls out to him about her body lotion, and generally treats him like a husband rather than a son. Jon notices that she is showering in the evening, something she doesn’t usually do, and assumes she is making plans for his birthday.

In spite of the danger that creeps up in his encounters, Jon continues to return in his mind to his beloved mother, ardently certain she’s thinking of him, too. He assumes she is getting him a train set and that she’s bothered to look at the wish list he left on his desk. However, the reader realizes from the total absence of Jon or anything to do with his birthday in her thoughts, that Vibeke has completely forgotten his birthday.

And the reason for Vibeke’s unexpected shower becomes apparent: she wants to bump into the brown-eyed engineer on whom she has a crush at the library, and wants to make sure she looks “sporty and casual” rather than calculated. After finding the library closed, Vibeke visits the traveling funfair. While playing a carnival game, Vibeke meets Tom, a man working at the fair. They smoke together, and initially she feels sorry for him. When he leaves for a bit, a strange woman with long wig-like white hair and wearing long white gloves, a white cape, and tall white boots appears, then Vibeke buys tickets for a carnival game from her, noting with disdain that even her lips are powdered white. Tom returns and invites her back to his trailer for a coffee.

After this point, the novella darkens. The white-wigged woman shows up again as a character in Jon’s narrative of what happens that night. Jon continues to wait for his mother, to return to thoughts of his mother, to hope for his mother, and his longing is palpable.

It is the radical formal structure of the book — the rapid point of view shifts from one paragraph to the next — that truly dials into something profound about love, about how limited it can be. As if to show the indissoluble bond between Vibeke and Tom, the way in which they are never truly apart, in spite of the mother’s distance from her son, the author alternates between their points of view, occasionally even within the same paragraph. There is a slice of viewpoint here, a sliver of the other viewpoint there. It’s a strange disjunction when we can see clearly that Vibeke is so unconcerned about her son. Her son is never truly apart from her even when she thinks nothing of him. Can this be love?

Often, in novels where the viewpoint shifts from chapter to chapter, authors switch perspectives to tell a story from the point of view of the person for whom the most is emotionally changing. This helps propel the reader forward and keeps her emotionally invested. But, in Love, the closeness of the perspectives, the cramming of them together, as if the mother and son are one person, and yet clearly not, feels less about narrative, and more about the limitations of love. We think we know another person, we feel settled in another person, and yet, perhaps every other consciousness is entirely a mystery. That’s the power of this particular book. The tiny emotional and atmospheric shifts are often barely perceptible, and yet they add up to much more.

The total transparency of the prose while engaged in this formal structure leaves a lot of room for the reader’s own prejudices and biases to surface. We don’t know for sure anything of what the author intended us to feel about Vibeke; there is not a single judgmental comment. However, it is plain that the novella is contesting any idealization of motherhood. In her earlier startling novella The Blue Room, which is also psychological realism, Ørstavik explored and critiqued motherhood through the story of another terrible mother — terrible in a different way from Vibeke — who traps her daughter in a room because she has a boyfriend that’s invited her to go abroad with him.

There is neither effort to redeem Vibeke nor effort to provide authorial commentary on her interior life. In this way, Ørstavik’s work is quite different from her fellow Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who is also concerned with the mundane. In My Struggle, alongside the direct exploration of his own consciousness, he also includes quite a bit of commentary, directing us on what to feel or think about the younger version of himself, and providing insights in dreamy, elaborate sentences. Love also has some of the feel of Hunger, by the earlier Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, in its exploration of the irrational nature of the mind. Unlike Hunger, in which the mind of the narrator is self-contained, it’s the juxtaposition of two minds that gives this novella its weight. Ørstavik closely follows both characters’ minds with all their digressive tendencies, their observations, their self-delusions, and in so doing shows both their closeness and their distance.

As I read from my vantage — a feminist mother who is nevertheless very much mired in our current helicopter parenting mode in middle-class America — it became clear to me that as the narrative careened toward danger, the Trollopian transparency of the story was prodding me, forcing me to find my own way, my own bearings. I found myself completely absorbed in Vibeke’s pathetic sadness, her longing, her search for crumbs of affection from a man who saw nothing in her and who plainly wasn’t interested, her willingness to completely forget about her son in trying to pursue a little piece of happiness for herself, her unwillingness, even later, to extract herself from this limerence.

Conversely, becoming so absorbed in both Vibeke and Jon, and forced to create suspense for myself in the absence of authorial direction, I also found myself placed in the role of a judgmental and harsh society, begrudging this vain mother for her dalliance with a carnival worker even while her son heads deeper and deeper into danger. It pushed me to recognize in myself the social impulse to hold women to high standards, even though, I, as a woman, do not want to be held to such harsh standards myself and do not find them realistic. Yet it also allowed me the room to feel for Jon, so enamored of his mother — and who has not been, at some point, enamored of their mother? I experienced his innocence with a choked sob.

There is another emotional thread running through the mother and son’s story, a story to which we’re not fully privy, a story involving Tom and the white-wigged woman, possibly a romance between co-workers gone awry, but possibly not. We’re never told what this story is, but again, the lack of authorial direction reflects back to us our own fears and prejudices and concerns about mothering, as well as gender itself. Why is Vibeke a bad mother? What does it mean to be a good mother? What can any society do about the problem of the utterly separate consciousness of a mother and her child, about the essential otherness of every other person? Perhaps there’s some irony in a fiction writer posing this question as central, and yet perhaps this is the most important question.

Despite its brevity, Love, effectively rendered into English by Martin Aitken, demands and deserves total concentration. It takes intense focus to toggle back and forth between points of view, to keep understanding that the mother and son are two separate people. In places, the abundance of mundane detail with only subtle emotional movement is excruciating, but these do add up over the course of the novella to produce a larger effect, a sense of the dread and emptiness and loneliness of our everyday lives, of all our missed connections. We can never, perhaps, be as close to another person, as fused with another person, as the idea of love would have us be, even when that person is our parent, even when that person is our child. We are always waiting for and missing one another.

¤

Anita Felicelli has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times (Modern Love), San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and The Rumpus. Her short stories have been published in The Normal School,Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Strangelet Journal, and The Stockholm Review.

The post Missed Connections: Hanne Ørstavik’s “Love” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2qmQz0T

The Surprising Roots of Recent White Extremism

THIS WAS NO ordinary jacket copy. “What will you do when they come to take your guns?” asks white supremacist William Luther Pierce on the back cover of his 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, an enduring literary icon among Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Identitarian Christians, and skinheads. Timothy McVeigh sold it at gun shows and brought pages of the book with him to Oklahoma City when he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in 1995. Pierce immodestly declared his creation “a novel with a message in the venerable tradition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Morris Dees, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, called it “an invitation to kill blacks and Jews.”

Part conspiracy thriller and part race war how-to manual, The Turner Diaries is written as the personal journal of a foot soldier in a guerilla movement against a Jewish-controlled government secured by black enforcers and abetted by white liberals. “The System,” as the government is known, outlaws guns, introduces tax incentives for mixed-raced couples, decriminalizes rape, and declares it a hate crime for white people to defend themselves from people of color. Turner’s resistance movement builds a cell network of ex-military men who execute coordinated terrorist attacks on the System, including the bombing of a federal building that may have inspired McVeigh. The diaries end with Turner crashing a plane into the Pentagon, sacrificing himself for his race. Though the prose is laughable and the premise absurd, it nevertheless put a mirror to a growing subliminal belief in the late 1970s that white men were the real victims of post–civil rights America — that it was time they took their country back.

That belief, Kathleen Belew argues in her new book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, arose from the Vietnam War. The publication of Pierce’s novel coincided with some of the first revisionist Vietnam War films, including Coming Home and the Best Picture–winning The Deer Hunter. These films all, regardless of their more explicit politics, addressed the suffering of white veterans abandoned by their government in Southeast Asia and shunned by civilians at home. The United States pulled out of Vietnam amid an oil crisis and the Watergate scandal. Inflation rose as wages shrank. Manufacturing jobs moved overseas as organized labor came under attack. Some white men, feeling the sting of deindustrialization, blamed the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements and a government that they believed had surrendered to minority demands. The Vietnam veteran became the embodiment of their grievances. Ronald Reagan recognized the value of that story, suggesting in his 1980 presidential campaign that the government had been “afraid to let them win” in Vietnam and had subjected them to “shabby” treatment ever since. So did white supremacist activists, who found in this mythology an idea that would unite a growing white power movement: a belief in government-orchestrated anti-white discrimination. “We know now what we could not know in 1968 — our government never intended to win in Vietnam,” Klan leader Louis Beam wrote in 1983, calling for white vets to “bring [the war] on home.”

Belew, a history professor at the University of Chicago, counters the treatment of white terrorists as “lone wolves” by tracing the contours of an organized white power movement that connected radical white extremists from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and from Waco, Texas, to Oklahoma City. From 1978, when Pierce published his novel, to 1995, when McVeigh bombed the Murrah building, white supremacists banded together like never before, forming alliances through early computer networks, intermarriage, survivalist and paramilitary groups, and literature. But they also hid these connections by adopting the cell structure of Pierce’s fictional resistance movement.

Belew does the hard work of restoring those connections, revealing how white supremacists built a coalition of rural survivalists, urban skinheads, and anti-Semitic Christian Identity believers. The unified white power movement coalesced around stories not of triumph but of defeat. Klansmen and neo-Nazis set aside their differences — some Klan leaders held strong anti-Nazi feelings stemming from their service in World War II — to defend a white race that they believed to be under siege by black radicals, Jews, feminists, global elites, and a federal government that had left good white men for dead in Vietnam.

The late-20th-century white power movement may have been extreme, but it fed off some of the same revanchist discourse circulating in the halls of Congress and on Hollywood sets. That hasn’t changed. In February 2016, then-Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump hesitated to disavow David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, when Duke endorsed him for president. Then he appeared to bless Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and militia groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, as including “some very fine people.” The history of the white power movement suggests that the election of Donald Trump was not a perfect storm but a gale in the American weather.

The Ku Klux Klan has periodically surged and waned since its founding in 1865, and it prospers in the aftermath of war. Louis Beam returned to his home state of Texas in 1968 with a Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism in aerial combat. A violent racist and fervent anticommunist, Beam joined the Texas chapter of the United Klans of America and pinned his combat medals to his white robes, seeing his Klan activities as a continuation of his military service. “The mere fact that I had returned from Vietnam didn’t mean the war was over. It was going on right here in the States,” he told an undercover reporter. “Over here, if you killed the enemy, you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they give you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference.” As white veterans returned from Southeast Asia and joined the Klan and other hate groups, they militarized an emerging white power movement.

Beam purchased 50 acres of swampland outside Houston where he established Camp Puller, a paramilitary training camp dedicated to turning Klansmen into soldiers. His trainees traded their robes for camouflage fatigues, armed themselves with AR-15s, and manufactured landmines. From Camp Puller, Beam founded the Texas Emergency Reserve, the “special forces” of the Ku Klux Klan, to enforce the rule of law where he believed the government had fallen down on the job. He launched a Klan Border Watch to intimidate undocumented immigrants along the US-Mexico border and led a harassment campaign against Vietnamese refugee fishermen who had resettled along the Texas coast, where local white fishermen accused refugees of getting rich off welfare checks and harboring Viet Cong. (In fact, less than nine percent of Houston-area refugees received any kind of welfare, and most had allied with the United States in the war, some having served alongside the Americans.) The New York Times described the harassment campaign as “one of the last pitched battles of the Vietnam War.” The Texas district attorney eventually shut down Camp Puller, but the movement had spread. Other white supremacist groups built training camps across the South and throughout the western states in the late 1970s. The Invisible Empire Knights, a Klan affiliate, even founded a Camp Mai Lai — named for the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers killed some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians — outside Cullman, Alabama.

The Texas Emergency Reserve and other paramilitary groups claimed to be serving the state by enforcing immigration laws and weeding out alleged communists. That changed in 1983, when the white power movement declared war on the government itself. After a judge barred him from running military camps in Texas, Beam relocated to Northern Idaho, where he joined Aryan Nations, an arm of the Christian Identity movement. The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress, held at the groups compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, marked a turning point for the white power movement as white supremacists from different ideological camps gathered to affirm their shared commitment to undermining the federal government. It marked what Belew calls “a tectonic shift for the movement,” a turn to all-out race war on the liberal state.

That year, Beam, then serving as Aryan Nations “ambassador,” published his influential Essays of a Klansman in which he began advocating a “leaderless resistance” that looked an awful lot like the cell-based terrorism of the fictional Earl Turner. Affirming the Aryan Nations declaration of war, he wrote, “The old ways have failed miserably […] Out with the conservatives and in with the radicals! Out with plans for compromise and in with plans for the sword!” The white power movement had consolidated against the legal structure it had once claimed to defend.

From the 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress to the Oklahoma City bombing, the white power movement grew more violent. In 1984, the Order — a white supremacist group named after the resistance movement in The Turner Diaries — murdered liberal talk radio host Alan Berg at his home in Denver and robbed an armored car near Ukiah, California, netting more than three million dollars in stolen cash. The Order gave some of their take to Beam, who used the money to build a computer network, Liberty Net, that connected white supremacist groups across the country through password-protected message boards. Aryan Nations, the Order, the Aryan Brotherhood, and local Klan chapters shared information and coordinated their efforts through Liberty Net, forming the first white supremacist social network of the internet era. In 1987, the federal government, using Liberty Net data as evidence, brought sedition charges against Beam and 13 other men. Beam defended himself by citing his mistreatment as a Vietnam veteran. An all-white jury acquitted him and his co-defendants of all charges.

White power leaders turned the trial into a rallying cry. A few years later, Beam could declare at a summit in Colorado, “For the first time in the 22 years that I have been in the movement, we are all marching to the beat of the same drum!” The war on the state had, he suggested, united the white power movement: “We are all viewed by the government as the same: enemies of the state. When they come for you, the federals will not ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity Covenant believer, Klansman, Nazi, homeschooler, Freeman, New Testament believer, [or] fundamentalist.” These groups didn’t need to agree on everything. They believed in white supremacy and state-sanctioned white oppression. They were at war for the survival of their race.

The white power movement declined in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh was executed in 2001. Pierce died in 2002. Beam, now 71 and living in central Texas, has kept a low profile since the 1990s. But the last few years have made it hard to ignore that the movement is still with us. After 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charlestown, South Carolina, in 2015, his website and Facebook page showed a young man who waved Confederate flags; celebrated the white governance of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa, neither of which existed in his lifetime; flaunted the number 88, a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”; and lifted ideas from the website of the white separatist Council of Conservative Citizens. This may seem incoherent, and it is. But it isn’t without precedent. The white power movement created a culture in which, as Belew writes, “a suburban California skinhead might bear Klan tattoos, read Nazi tracts, and attend meetings of a local Klan chapter, a National Socialist political party, the militant White Aryan Resistance — or all three.”

What motivated Roof’s act of terror? The same thing that drove Pierce, Beam, and McVeigh: a belief in white supremacy mixed with a belief in white oppression, a call for white power augmented by a fear of white disempowerment. Roof did not act alone. He carried a powerful and poisonous story into that church that connects him to the white men who declared war on the government in Hayden Lake, robbed an armored car outside Ukiah, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, and now carry tiki torches down the streets of Charlottesville.

Throughout the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump excoriated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama for refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” But none of these three was willing to call the Charlestown massacre what it was: an act of radical white extremism. Adding those three words to our political vocabulary would represent a small but important first step toward acknowledging that white supremacist violence emerges not from the disordered mind of a lone wolf but from a perceptible and ugly American movement.

¤

Joseph Darda is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University.

The post The Surprising Roots of Recent White Extremism appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2qfLzLo