What a bunch of babies, all those people crying about Atticus turning out to be racist! I was more shocked by Jean Louise’s uncle punching her in the face and busting her lip to calm her down at the end of the book. And then by how she does calm down, and they proceed to have a drink and a reasonable conversation. The whole thing was very, hey, you know, sometimes you just need to smack a hysterical woman.

But that’s not what this post is about. Or maybe it is, obliquely, in that it’s about irresponsible and socially damaging attitudes that are deeply entrenched within a culture, and at which no one so much as bats an eye.

In short, I liked that Atticus turned out to be a racist. Not because I like racism, but because as a writer and a deeply flawed human being, I appreciate writing that reflects other human beings as human-being-like, which is to say, both deeply flawed and yet capable of good. At our very best, this is all that anyone can hope to be. But my appreciation for the besmirching of Atticus’s character goes further. I think Lee was making a point about racism itself, one that is every bit as valid today as it was in the 1950s.

Her point, I think, is this: Sometimes people who don’t think of themselves as racists, are. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, but it begs the question, If it was true of Atticus Finch, could it also be true of me? Atticus, after all, does not see himself as a racist person. Neither do Jean Louise’s aunt or fiancé. Rather, they see themselves as kindly toward Black people. Their opinions on the habits, culture and limitations of Black people are, they believe, based upon observations and therefore constitute plain facts. The racism at which Lee is striking out, I believe, is different than the overt, blunt-trauma variety of Mockingbird. It’s more insidious, and depending upon your milieu, more socially accepted.

To wit: I grew up in a proudly Southern community. We didn’t have a Confederate flag on our school lawn or anything, but more than once I heard it defended as a symbol of “heritage.” As a child, I also heard the argument that the South’s position in the Civil War wasn’t about slavery per se, it was about state’s rights, and it was economic (never mind that the economy of the South was based upon slave labor). So when Atticus breaks it down to Jean Louise at the end of the book, explaining The Way Things Are, it all felt very familiar to me.

At the same time, none of the adults I knew growing up would have considered themselves racist. It was a Christian community; KKK-style racism wold have been condemned. Nevertheless, racist jokes were told. Mixed-race dating was discouraged. The reason? Differences between “them” and “us” were insurmountable — and then there was the supposed censure of society at large to contend with.

This is the reality: unlike Jean Louise, most of us are not “born color blind.” In our country, people who are not racist have to be ultra-conscious, willing to evaluate every thought they have about “the other” — whatever color their skin may be. They have to learn to recognize racism’s variform manifestations, and to yank it out of themselves by the roots. It’s a lot of work, actually. Sort of like weeding a garden, every day.

The flaws of Watchman are manifold, I can’t argue with that. It’s unfortunate that for whatever reason, Lee wasn’t willing or able to give this novel the same careful attention she gave to Mockingbird, revising and polishing it into a real gem. But even if she had, I think it would still have been reviled. The book is meant to make us uncomfortable — in our own culture, in our own skins. “I’m tired of having my heroes knocked down,” someone recently complained to me, shortly after the book’s release. But if we don’t have heroes on some pedestal being saintly for us, then the work isn’t finished; it remains up to us.

E. D. Watson is Newfound’s Blog Editor. A writer by day and a library clerk by night, her stories have appeared in Bodega, [PANK], Narrative, and THIS., among other publications. She eats cheddar-and-mayonnaise sandwiches when no one is looking.

The post In Defense of ‘A Watchman’ appeared first on Newfound.

I was captivated.

When I decided to reread it nine years later, all I could remember was that it was indulgent. In the opening pages, eighty-year-old Chris Minaar sets up the premise: He’ll recount every woman with whom he’s slept over the course of his long, debauched life as a white South African novelist.

Things get interesting when we meet a lover named Daphne. It’s the 1970s; apartheid is at its height in South Africa. Minaar is twenty-something and Daphne is a willowy, blonde dancer. During a private dance, she reveals that she always wears a tight rope belt around her midriff. She is bruised, in constant pain, and abstains from sex. The reason she gives for torturing herself: “It’s this country. Don’t you see?”

A little background: This encounter takes place after the Soweto uprising of 1976, in which tens of thousands of Black African student protesters demonstrated against the designation of Afrikaans as the official language of national education. These peaceful protests were met with violent government retaliation. Many Afrikaans-speaking whites felt helpless and frustrated by the government’s injustice.

As I reread the book, I wondered about Daphne, and found myself wishing Brink had given her more of a voice. Daphne’s belt reminded me of Simone Weil’s hunger strike, and I was intrigued by the way she adopted her country’s agonies into her own body. Given more than one line of dialogue, would Daphne have expressed something similar to Weil? At twenty, I was the consummate student. I sought more words to consume, more information. I wanted authors to speak to me and I wanted to hang on every word.

Nine years of studying and reading and critiquing later, I am comfortable taking a book to task. This time around, it was Minaar’s character that stood out to me as most lacking.

Minaar likens himself to Scheherazade, claiming he retells the stories of his loves to amuse others and make sense of his life. This promises the reader exaggeration and magic, which Minaar delivers.

Nevertheless, Minaar differs from Scheherazade in a crucial way: Scheherazade is fighting for her life, against terrible odds. Minaar, on the other hand, is the portrait of privilege: white, straight, male, professionally successful. He’s more like King Shahryar, who beds and kills a new wife every night. Upon this reading, I felt that the novel fails because readers cannot draw convincing parallels between Minaar and Scheherezade.

Most of Minaar’s lovers have been white South Africans or Europeans, with a few exceptions. When we catch up to the modern day, Minaar is nostalgic over a Black South African woman he employed as a “Girl Friday.”

The nudge-nudge language suggests readers should be charmed by such a naughty tryst. But on my recent read, my antennae raised: this woman is much younger, from a historically disadvantaged ethnic group and social class, and Minaar’s employee. Can a relationship with such an unequal power dynamic have started with consent at all? We cannot know—we’re never told how it began, only that it ends, “ Like so many others. Married…what a waste.”

In fact, every woman of color with whom Minaar sleeps is his employee. While a pretty accurate portrayal of racial separateness in the New South Africa, the issue is never taken head-on by the narrator, nor discussed by any other character. The narrator’s blindness to these inequalities is his biggest shortcoming; the book’s is its reticence to comment on such matters.

I am also critical now of how convenient so many of the fantastical parts are. Minaar’s lovers are impossibly good-looking and insatiable; of course they could only be satisfied by a weedy novelist. Taken with an ironic avoidance of the realities of race and class in the New South Africa and some murky issues with consent, there were times I could not believe I used to love this novel.

Rereading the book was like holding up a mirror and seeing a past self. The past reader loved any words that were strung together, and wanted others to tell her how the world worked. Reading again, I wanted to demand that she demand more of what she read.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. Her laptop screen got cracked during a year in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never stopped her from writing. Her publications list lives here.

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