January 21, 2020 Arts & Culture A Slap in the Face of Stalinism By Alissa Valles Varlam Shalamov in 1929. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “Every story of mine is a slap in the face of Stalinism,” Varlam Shalamov wrote to his friend Irina Sirotinskaya in 1971, “and like any slap in the face, has laws of a purely muscular character.” He returns to the idea a little later in the letter, contrasting his own ideal of prose to the expansive “spadework” of Tolstoy: “A slap in the face must be short, resonant.” Most of Shalamov’s stories are indeed short, some extremely so, and constitute an argument both with the great nineteenth-century Russian novels and with the wretched ones of the Stalinist era that sought to pour the pap of socialist realism into a pseudo-epic form. The slap works simultaneously as a figure for aesthetic form and political protest, and in Shalamov’s late essays and letters, it functions as a motto of sorts, a creed of laconic defiance echoing, distantly, the Russian futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste and—more intimately and immediately—the famous opening of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope against Hope: “After slapping Aleksey Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.” Mandelstam sent the manuscript of her memoir about life with the poet Osip Mandelstam to Shalamov in 1965, and while neither could hope to publish their prose in the Soviet Union at that time, the two established in the correspondence that followed a shared sense of purpose. He writes: “If I had to give a literature course on the second half of the twentieth century, I would start by burning all the textbooks on the podium, in front of the students. The link between eras, between cultures has been broken; the exchange has been interrupted and our mission is to pick up the ends of string and tie them back together.” She replies: “I don’t think we should burn textbooks: it’s too classical a gesture … Let’s just not use any”; her main concern, too, she writes, is “the link that connects one era to another, the only thing that allows society to be human, a human being to be human.” Read More
January 21, 2020 At Work Errant Daughters: A Conversation between Saidiya Hartman and Hazel Carby By Saidiya Hartman Left: Hazel Carby. Right: Saidiya Hartman. On a rainy winter morning, Hazel Carby arrived at my office in Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall to discuss her new book, Imperial Intimacies, which is a history of empire, slavery, colonialism, and migration written in the form of a memoir. This eloquent and moving account of the entanglements of empire is narrated from the perspective of a young black girl of Welsh and Jamaican descent trying to survive in postwar Britain, a world that would prefer for her not to exist at all and that never for a moment fails to see her as an outsider, an eternal alien. “Where are you from?” is the question that each day challenges her right to belong, that routinely marks her as a foreigner in the country where she was born. The narrative advances on dual tracks and the story oscillates between “the girl” and the “I” of the adult narrator, a scholar and researcher, in search of the pieces of her past and reckoning with what it means to be black and British. Imperial Intimacies sets out to challenge “the binary thinking that opposed colonial center and colonized margin” and the conviction that British identity is predicated on the non-belonging of black and brown people, whether citizens, migrants, or refugees. The book does so by traversing the “geographies of pain” that emerge in the wake of empire; connecting the rural hamlets of Wales and Jamaica; linking the factory, workhouse, and plantation; following the dense web of connections between the lives of peasants and workers, soldiers and the enslaved; and tracing “the perverse lines of descent” created by racial slavery. The movement of conscripts and migrants and young working women and errant daughters reveal the forms of violence and domination, exploitation and precariousness that connect the imperial metropole to the colony. Imperial Intimacies is an assemblage comprised of the recollections of a precocious and lonely young girl in postwar Britain and the arduous research of a scholar “pitting memory, history and poetics against each other” to produce a story comfortable with the unresolvable contradictions and mysteries of the past. Stories shared in the kitchen and recollected from the sick bed compete with the archive regarding the truth of what happened when. The scholar’s research discloses the rifts and failures that no one can bear to admit—a stint in the work house and the lines of kinship ruptured by the categories of human and slave, master and object of property, free black and chattel. Imperial Intimacies explores and intensifies the conflict between familial stories, national histories, imperial accounts, and archival documents. Carby writes across these registers to trouble and unsettle national and imperial projects. Hers is an account of Britain articulated in the relation between two islands and in the explication of personal and public inventories, which range from the political arithmetic of imperial governance and the double-entry bookkeeping of the slave ledger to the brutal and terrifying acts staged in a kitchen—a mother’s lessons in duty and sacrifice and a suicidal father lying unconscious on the linoleum floor. At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking. Read More
January 20, 2020 Document August Wilson on the Legacy of Martin Luther King By The Paris Review On this archival recording, playwright August Wilson celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with a reading at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center on January 21, 1991. Wilson reads poems and selections from the plays Fences and Two Trains Running (which had yet to be produced), and participates in an extended audience Q&A. Before reading from Fences, set in Pittsburgh in the fifties, he reads the play’s introduction: Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers’ ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and moneylenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true. The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tar paper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream. That they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon. By 1957, the hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the industrial might of America. War had been confronted and won with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel. Life was rich, full and flourishing. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and the hot winds of change that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous and provocative decade had not yet begun to blow full. Listen to the full recording from the event below: <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>
January 17, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Diamonds, Dionysus, and Drowning By The Paris Review Silvina Ocampo. Photo: Adolfo Bioy Casares. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I love a good hundred-page novel. Too many books go for quantity over quality, choosing to bloat their page counts with unnecessary plot twists—and don’t even get me started on that silly term novella. Not so for Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, recently translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell. Ocampo—an aristocratic Argentine who was friendly with Borges and whose elder sister Victoria was the founder of the prestigious literary journal Sur—purportedly took twenty-five years to finish The Promise, and every sentence glints with precision. The plot is minimal at best: While traveling from Buenos Aires to Cape Town to visit family, the narrator falls ill. On the way back to Argentina, she falls off the side of the ship and spends the rest of the book swimming—and presumably, eventually drowning—as she recalls various persons and experiences from her life back home. A few characters reoccur: Leandro, an untrustworthy doctor; Irene, his lover; and Gabriela, also known as Gabriel, Irene’s daughter. Entire paragraphs repeat themselves with small variations, and water seeps in again and again. The confusion is part of the appeal—what you’re after are the sentences, which have the feel of epigrams: “I envy people who cry; they show off their tears like necklaces,” goes one. “Women love with their eyes closed, men with their eyes open,” goes another. I think I took a photo of nearly every other page so as not to forget them. The twenty-five years of work were worth it. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
January 17, 2020 The Last Year First Snow By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It ran every Friday in November, and returns this winter month, then will return again in the spring and summer. A silver mixing bowl, that’s what I remember my mother handing me. I was five. My first snow ice cream. For five years, my daughter and I have lived in this Texas town. For five years, no snow. But this morning, snow rushed down as my daughter slept. I snuck outside and cupped enough from the hood of her car. Milk, vanilla, sugar, and a pinch of salt. My mother’s bowl. This is not missing. This is us, living. Read earlier installments of The Last Year here. Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.
January 16, 2020 First Person Inner Climate Change By Howard Axelrod Joseph Farquharson, The Shortening Winter’s Day Is Near a Close, ca. 1903. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. After living alone for nearly two years in a house in the northern Vermont woods, I returned to the city alert in all the wrong ways. The timpani of the symphony playing in a Chinese restaurant struck me as a herd of deer soon to bound through the wall. At first glance, every street light seemed a full moon. I’d gone through a kind of inner climate change: my attention had dilated to take in the subtleties of the woods and weather; my memory had sharpened to navigate miles of drifted snow. Reacclimating to the city would have been challenge enough, but there was an extra challenge. It was the early aughts, screens were suddenly everywhere, and everyone else was going through inner climate change, too. On my daily snowshoe treks through the trees, I’d begun to be able to see black-capped chickadees, no matter the camouflage of the snowy branches. My eyes gone soft, the space between the trees would flicker with movement. On rare phone calls with my friend Ray, I realized I was listening the same way—not hunting for what he wasn’t saying about his medical-school unease but just picturing everything he said and waiting for a flicker in the spaces between. My memory was opening, too. As I unloaded groceries from the village market, the songs that had been playing on the overhead speakers would follow like a souvenir map—without any effort, I could remember my progress, lyric by lyric, through the aisles. Read More