Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

We have all heard that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but during dark and difficult times, it’s sometimes a challenge to see it curving in the right direction. History tells us the stories of the great men—charismatic, brave, and doomed—who gave their lives to the struggle for racial equality. While these men earned our praise, we know that they did not change the world alone. Mighty Justice is the story of a great woman, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who dedicated her life to moving the United States closer to ideals outlined in the Constitution. Born in 1914 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dovey Roundtree came into this world with her mind stayed on freedom, as the sixties protest song goes.

Mighty Justice is a love story. Dovey Johnson Roundtree was a patriot, in love with a flawed, unfair, and often cruel nation. One of her earliest memories was the sight of her grandmother’s feet, misshapen and gnarled as a result of violence at the hands of an angry white man. But along with her memory of the damage done to her grandmother’s body, she recalls herself on bended knee, kneading and massaging the same feet, providing comfort to the woman who had been brave enough to say no in the face of power and paid the price. Even as a small child, Dovey Johnson Roundtree understood that the ultimate act of love is service.

I wonder how Dovey Johnson Roundtree would want this work to be discussed. I am sure many will read her story, as I did, and marvel that her name and contributions are not better known. Still, I resist the impulse to call her a “hidden figure,” the term coined to honor the black women whose unsung contributions to NASA helped put a man on the moon. But I can’t imagine that Ms. Roundtree would cotton to such a description. While she was no doubt aware that hers was not a household name, I am not convinced she would consider that a tragedy. There is a hymn well-loved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church that proclaims, “Let the work I’ve done speak for me.” Read More

Tehran skyline

On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet.

Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut.

*

The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given.

Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters.

For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through.

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Gary Lutz (photo: Carol L. Steen)

About a decade ago, I was in Paris with a gathering of French translators and editors, talking about Gary Lutz’s work. Several of them had, at one time or another, tried to translate him, and all of them—some after months of trying—had found this to be impossible. Lutz’s work was too deftly sewn into the English language to be picked free of it. Each story is so much about the specific tonal, sonic, and rhythmic relationships within English, and so much about torquing a given historical moment of that language by injecting it with archaisms and oddity, that to reproduce it in French just didn’t work. It was, one translator told me, more exacting than poetry, and infinitely more complex. “Technically I could translate it,” he told me. “I did translate several pages of it. But, then, rereading it, I realized it had, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, escaped. Then I retranslated those pages a different way. Still it was gone. I could try again, but no. Lutz will always escape.”

These were translators who relished a challenge. They had, between them, translated the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Mark Z. Danielewski, William H. Gass, and David Foster Wallace. One of them had translated a story of mine that contained a list of more than a hundred varieties of barbed wire, arranged to create certain sonic patterns. “What other American writers are untranslatable?” I asked. They shrugged. “Just him,” one of them finally replied.

So when I say that Lutz is unique, I mean this in a much more serious way than how the term is usually applied to writers. Read More

In this previously unpublished essay, the legendary Imagist H.D. muses on the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus.

Photo of H.D. taken from a postcard inscribed “To Marianne Moore, H.D.,” ca. 1921. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where the Greek voice speaks there are rocks. But these Sicilian rocks of Theocritus, particularly of the twentieth Bucolic with which I specifically deal, are sunk a layer beneath rich soil. Theocritean rocks are covered with earth, rich loam and successive sun-baked, sun-broken and un-crumbled layers of oak leaves, blades of rank grass and reeds and many feathery, dusty, dried, and broken herbs and flowers, witches’ herbs and vine leaves and withered berries of grapes. Only by study of this surface, ripe, rich, decadent only in the sense in which a brittle sun-baked July leaf is decadent, do we realize the real quality of those rocks … Greek even if once-removed, Sicilian. In Theocritus are layers of rocks, and under the rocks is fire, ever ready to break out volcanic, infernal one might say, were there for the Greek any inferno but that of suppression and inhibition and actual bodily death.

This is the world of Theocritus, as different from that of Euripides as black earth from limpid water, water surface that reflects images of Olympians, pure spirits, as if the sun threw color and fire, different yet the same, passing through that Athenian intellect. For at Athens there is light and one has never seen such light, not in dream, not in vision, not light reflected from rock-pools, nor light from the ridges of mountains. There is gold in Egypt, there is air doubtless, warmed and colored and steeped in gold in Assyria, in Phoenicia, in Libya, gold beneath and above, there is heat in Assyria; there is color everywhere, there is light in one city. Read More

Writing a weekly column for a Dutch newspaper is a good way to lose heart. Not because whatever topic you choose, you’re bound to receive slews of emails from readers who disagree with you, or because of the amount of hatred people tend to offload in those letters. What gets you down is that some people seem to think that when you contradict them, you lose your right not only to freedom of speech but to your nationality. “That’s not the Dutch way of doing things.”

When I hear this, I often find myself coming back to the James Baldwin passage from the Autobiographical Notes that begin Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Although I have lived here for almost five years now, the country that I love most is not the United States of America. I was born in the Netherlands, and most of my family and friends live there. Still, the notion stays the same: precisely because I love the Netherlands so much, I insist on my right to continuously criticize her.

The aim of that criticism is to better the principles by which that country functions, and because I know no single person—and certainly not me—can be the moral center of a country, my hope is that other Dutch people will do the same. I suggest we start by taking a closer look at our family holidays.

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Advertisement for Mary MacLane’s film Men Who Have Made Love to Me, 1918. Photo: Perfection Pictures / Essanay Film Manufacturing Company / George Kleine System. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I of Womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.” Thus begins one of the most unusual books in our literature, by one of the most scandalous American writers.

When The Story of Mary MacLane was published by the prestigious Chicago firm of Herbert S. Stone and Company in April 1902, its author was skyrocketed to nationwide notoriety. The book was an immediate sensation. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and the fact that it was the work of a teenage girl—living in Butte, Montana, of all places—made the scandal complete. Every Associated Press affiliate in the country ran a front-page story on it. Here for the first time was a young woman’s “inner life shown in its nakedness”:

I have discovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things … I care neither for right nor for wrong? my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness … May I never become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a virtuous woman …

Respectable critics roared their disapproval. “Mary MacLane is mad,” wrote the New York Herald. “She should be put under medical treatment, and pens and paper kept out of her way until she is restored to reason.” The New York Times urged that she be spanked. Other critics raised the charge of “obscenity.” When the Butte Public Library announced that it would not allow the book on its shelves, the Helena Daily Independent applauded, arguing that if this book “should go in, all the self-respecting books in the library would jump out of the window.” Read More