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The Daily

December 12, 2018
Look

Castles as Coffins

By The Paris Review
The artist Paa Joe makes coffins. But these aren’t your standard-issue pine boxes—they are red snappers, Spalding basketballs, giant shoes. In the Ghanaian tradition of abeduu adekai (roughly translated, “receptacles of proverbs”), the dead are honored via figurative coffins that reflect the lives of those interred. A street vendor might be buried in a soda bottle, a gynecologist in a casket shaped like a uterus. In 2004, Joe veered from his typical fare and created thirteen large-scale models of the still-standing slave castles and forts on the coast of Ghana. These buildings served as processing centers for the more than six million people enslaved and sent to the Americas and the Caribbean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seven of Joe’s sculptures are on view until February 24 at the American Folk Art Museum, in New York, for the exhibition “Gates of No Return,” named for the doors through which countless souls passed on their entry into forced servitude. “Nobody would be buried in a slave castle coffin,” Joe has said, but these miniatures signify death just the same, looming as reminders of the millions of lives lost to and the histories decimated by the slave trade.

Paa Joe, Fort St. Anthony—Axim. 1515 Portugal, 1642 Netherlands, 1872 Britain, 2004–05 and 2017, emele wood and enamel, 48 1/2″ x 100″ x 84 1/2″. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo © Paa Joe.

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December 12, 2018
Inside the Issue

Reading While Nursing

By Leslie Jamison
Hyuro. BCN Transit Walls Festival. Barcelona, Spain. September 2016. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

This year I read mostly while nursing. My daughter was born in January, and those short winter days gave way to long nights spent with her sleeping against my chest—a tiny burrito in zip-up pajamas, her rhythmic breath against my neck—or waking up to eat, nearly falling asleep in that primal bliss, with the radiator hissing and clanking behind us, my finger stroking her cheek to wake her up again. I read so much about motherhood. Or maybe it was that everything I read seemed to be about motherhood. Grad school had taught me new ways to read, through various theoretical lenses, and so did my daughter. She taught me how to read with one arm, in stolen chunks of time, in half-delirium, in the long hormonal soup of the fourth trimester. Read More
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December 11, 2018
Redux

Redux: Reflexively Self-Revising

By The Paris Review
Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Adam Phillips.

This week, we bring you Adam Phillips’s 2014 Art of Nonfiction interview, Geoff Dyer’s essay “Into the Zone,” and Robyn Selman’s poem “Essay in the Form of a Russian Doll.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7
Issue no. 208 (Spring 2014)

An essay is a mixture of the conversational and the coherent and has, to me, the advantages of both. There doesn’t have to be a beginning, a middle, and an end, as there tends to be in a short story. Essays can wander, they can meander. Also, the nineteenth-century essayists whom I like, like Emerson and Lamb and Hazlitt, are all people who are undogmatic but very moralistic, though it’s not quite clear what that moralism is. That’s to say, they are clearly people of very strong views who are trying not to be fanatical. The essay is very rarely a fanatical form, it seems to me, partly because you’d just run out of steam. It would just be propaganda of the most boring sort. In order to write a compelling essay, you have to be able to change tone. I think you also have to be reflexively self-revising. It’s not that these things are impossible in other genres, but they’re very possible in essays. As the word essay suggests, it’s about trying something out, it’s about an experiment. From the time I began writing—although this wasn’t conscious—I think that was the tradition I was writing in.

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December 11, 2018
Arts & Culture

Imagining a Free Palestine

By George Abraham
An ekphrasis on a fragmented nationalism.

Installation view, Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, stainless steel and neon glass tube. Photo: KhaoulaSharjah [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.

Somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israeli citizens are walking through an art exhibition called “Stolen Arab Art.” The title is not a metaphor—the show features four unattributed video art installations created by Arab artists, without the consent of those Arab artists. Here, the word Arab is a placeholder for Palestinian, but I suppose that goes without saying. In every interview, the curator (an Israeli who is not Palestinian) defends the installation as a comment against the cultural boycott of the Zionist state, claiming the exhibition is a “performative action,” hence all visitors are performers, and everyone—curators, attendees, and artists—is implicated in the theft.

In a way, the curator is correct. At the center of all settler colonial projects is theft. All interactions with the settler colonial project, be they cultural or economic, normalize the existence of the aforementioned settler colonial project, which, again, is contingent upon theft by construction. The premise of the installation is a contradiction, much like the Zionist state: the curator, intending to criticize boycotts of the Zionist state, perpetuates the precise colonial theft being criticized.

“Stolen Arab Art” is not an isolated phenomenon; earlier this year, an Israeli publisher released a translated collection of essays by Arab women without their consent to translate, print, or distribute the text. The publisher, Resling Books, titled the collection Huriya, which translates to “freedom” in Arabic. The contradictory metaphor is self-evident, and the trend is unsurprising in a historical sense. Within the walls of an exhibition and the pages of a book, Israelis dare to imagine works of Palestinian imagination as their own. Isn’t that how this all began? Read More
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December 11, 2018
Arts & Culture

But I Don’t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin

By Rebecca Bengal
LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN

There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence; Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. Less drag, high velocity; the story propels forward. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.”

Berlin’s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range; the second, Evening in Paradise, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life.

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December 10, 2018
Arts & Culture

The Faces of Ferrante

By Miranda Popkey
Still from the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend

In most respects, HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is merely serviceable. It’s a re-creation, competent and faithful, of the events described in the first novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The performances are convincing, the movement from scene to scene is pleasurable, the music is complementary but unobtrusive, and the set decoration is impeccable. One expects, from a production branded with the HBO logo, nothing less. And yet, in one respect, the series is in fact brilliant. Take it from this terrone: they got the faces right.

My Brilliant Friend is an account, painstaking and digressive and emotionally devastating, of the friendship between Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo between the ages of six and sixteen. (The adult Lenù, now a successful writer in late middle age, narrates all four novels.) But it is also a portrait, universalizing precisely because of its attention to particulars, of small-town Southern Italy in the years after World War II, years during which economic privation and casual violence were the rule, years during which (very recently ex-) Fascists retained local power, their authority, like their comparative wealth, unquestioned.

I say comparative wealth because even those who had money had little, and what they could buy with it was meager: a small convertible, a single television. My Brilliant Friend ends in the year 1960, midway through the Italian “economic miracle”—il boom—that helped modernize the then-rural South. But the effects of Northern industrialization seem to have barely trickled down to Ferrante’s Neapolitan suburb; the poverty, the miseria, is still everywhere.

Sara Casani and Laura Muccino, the Italian casting directors, understand what that miseria looks like, how the body wears struggle. They know that what we call beauty is often just another marker of class. They know that if you don’t feel like you belong, you’ll never look like you do, either. And so they have populated Lenù’s neighborhood with, my god, such faces: sloppier and saggier, more wrinkled and more weathered and more crooked than many American readers will have imagined for these characters.

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