The one who sticks out the most is someone who I had my senior year of high school, and it wasn’t the thumbsucking habit-breaker. Everyone who went to my Catholic high school had him senior year. It was technically called Morality.

He is a gruff man with a rough exterior, a raspy voice and no room in his memory for student names, but he taught us real life lessons. In fact, in my early 20s, I would still get in touch with him to get some words of wisdom and advice.

One particular lesson he spoke of in this morality class strikes me just as hard today as it did the day he taught it in class.

“Feelings are important. We can’t always compare situations, but we relate to each other because of the feelings behind the situations,” he said. I even remember the exact words he used to drive home his point, 10 years later.

He said, “Whether a parent intentionally leaves their child to be with another family or a parent passes away, the child still suffers a loss of a parent. Whether the parent who is lost is dead or living, both children in this situation feels the sense of loss. That is what is important when understanding each other. We cannot say that one child suffered more or less because the particular loss. That isn’t what is important. The importance is that both children lost a parent and need to be consoled.”

I often refer back to this sentiment, and others he spoke of, while dealing with adult situations. I recently caught myself referring to this particular sentiment while reading books.

While reading, some of us might try to relate to, sympathize with or empathize with the main character or supporting characters. In the past six weeks I find myself really, over-the-top really, relating to the characters in every book that I’ve picked up.

I just finished “Cowboy Wants a Baby” by Jo Leigh and “The Summons” by John Grisham.

I found myself relating to the characters in each one of these novels, subconsciously channeling my high school morality teacher.

Grisham’s book is about what a son does with the will, estate, and found money after his father dies, which involves a brother who has a drug addiction. While I cannot personally relate to immediate family members having drug addictions, I found myself relating to the main character not based on situations, but on the feelings.

Sometimes I don’t jive with my family but am stuck in close quarters with them—sometimes laughing and sometimes dealing with pent up resentment. I, too, have no idea what I would do with my father’s estate and struggle to share it with my dopey brother. My imagination helps me understand another person’s plight when I imagine our situations are similar. I, too, have a father who is loved by a community like Grisham’s character of The Judge was. But I related to these characters based not only on situations, but on the feelings behind the situations.

“Cowboy Wants a Baby” was especially fun to relate to: Who wouldn’t want to fall in love with a handsome, successful cowboy?

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theatre,

The post Teaching and Learning Empathy appeared first on Newfound.

But this easy dismissal takes on a more sinister cast in the midst of an election year, the kind of year that reveals the worst of our collective cultural tendency to systematize identity, locating and marking boundaries between ourselves and others.

In the media and at the polls, we become demographic statistics and voting blocks, delineated by age, race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, and other categories which seek to place our actions and reactions in predictable narratives. This urge to entrench and delimit identities in easy-to-consume packages becomes the primary interface, a feature of American culture writ large that emerges in its most virulent form in deeply political years.

These impulses are closely linked.

At the end of her essay on the value of reading widely, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we need to take art seriously: “Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”

When you only consume “relatable” art, you make a world that only looks like yourself.

To judge art on whether or not you can relate to it makes the particular universal. When we find something relatable, we find ourselves reflected in it. For Rebecca Mead, relatability becomes a greater “scourge” because of the demands it places on art: “that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer.” Likewise, relatability bothers Rebecca Onion “because it presumes that the speaker’s experiences and tastes are common and normative. . . It’s shorthand that masquerades as description.” Relatability shapes our horizons by limiting them.

But it also ignores what we do when we read. Reading is a deeply vulnerable act. You give yourself over to the words on the page. You lend a book your body. But reading also demands effort and collaboration – a willingness to invest yourself.

In “From Work to Text“, Roland Barthes distinguishes reading-for-consumption and reading-as-collaboration. The text, Barthes argues, “asks the reader for an active collaboration.” It demands “play, task, production, and activity.” You become a co-writer, helping the text come alive. Boredom and disengagement, the inability to relate, becomes a failure of the imagination, an unwillingness to “play it, open it out, make it go.”

When you refuse to relate to literature, film, television, etc., you close yourself to the potential for discomfort, confusion, vulnerability, and failure but also the exhilaration of art.

Reading, really reading, is risky.

Katie Dyson is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. When she’s not teaching or working on her dissertation, she reads the internet.

The post Reading, Relatability, and Risk appeared first on Newfound.

The Red Tent is a fictional (yet thoroughly researched) first-person account of the life of Dinah, the only daughter of Biblical patriarch Jacob (who is more famous for having twelve sons). With Dinah’s help, women’s histories are traced matrilineally; daughters, sisters and mothers are remembered and honored. Through Dinah’s eyes we see women come of age, begin menstruating, fall in love, make love, bear children, bear losses, age and die. It is by turns tender and irreverent. Oh yes, there are love scenes.

I was totally unprepared for this book.

Just to give some context to my reading life up until that point: I was scandalized when I read about Rachel, Jacob’s most beautiful wife, using traditional medicine to help her conceive—specifically a mandrake root, which  “looked so much like an aroused husband.” I was also confused. Mandrakes are used for magical purposes in the world of Harry Potter! I had no idea what “an aroused husband” looked like, and I couldn’t imagine running into one on the Hogwarts campus.

I was a sophomore in Catholic high school and I felt this book’s impacts immediately. Studying the Old Testament in religion class, the injustice of learning of only Biblical patriarchs was made starkly apparent to me. I’d played the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat in seventh grade, so I felt a connection to Jacob’s favorite son. But Dinah’s silence, I realized, wasn’t a temporary injustice of the “Close Every Door” variety. Jacob’s only daughter was never saved or resurrected during my U.S. Catholic education. I had to find her on my own.

In class, I shuddered when a fellow student had to read out loud the list of Jacob’s children and mispronounced Dinah’s name. Dinah introduces herself in the opening passage, “the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows. Dee-nah.” But everyone in my classroom said it in the “Mama’s in the kitchen with Dinah” way, and I could only grit my teeth.

This book’s impacts on me deepened with time.

I never stopped wondering about the women of the Bible, and was unsatisfied with the limited ways their actions, intentions and words were recorded. This book gave me a lifelong thirst for women’s voices in my fiction. (And history. And spirituality.)

The Red Tent itself was where women in Dinah’s family went during menstruation. They were secluded from their husbands or sons, but rather than feeling shame in this, they comforted each other and celebrated the power of their bodies. This book made me very comfortable with menstruation. I don’t think I could have been such a supporter of The Vagina Monologues in college if I hadn’t read this as a teenager.

But I am skipping ahead: When I went away to college, I covered my extra-long twin dorm bed in fire-red sheets. When a new friend visited my room, she saw a sheet hanging off my top bunk bed and said my dorm was the Red Tent. I got the reference and started gushing about Diamant’s book, which she had also read. I was amazed by the ways she told me that book had inspired her.

I learned that she’d already picked out her first daughter’s name: Dinah. When I visited her parents’ house, I saw a painting she’d made of how she imagined the character Dinah’s face.

That year we forged a lifelong friendship with ancient tales of mothers, sisters and daughters as its bedrock. This friend is a nurse and midwife, now—fulfilling another dream inspired by The Red Tent.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Journalism. 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.

The post The Book I Read Before I Was Ready: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant appeared first on Newfound.

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.

In a recent interview with SG Magazine, Malaysian writer and resident of Singapore, Tash Aw, criticized Singapore’s lack of literary culture. Calling out the country’s educational system, Aw says, “the whole thing about writing requires you to question stuff in general. Not necessarily political things, but from a personal point of view. It needs you to question stuff that’s going on inside yourself. Very basic things, like family. That’s not something the Singaporean educational system encourages.” Aw goes on to point out the Singaporean peoples’ general disregard for literature and self-history, their emphasis on work and social standing, as well as other cultural ideas.

In defense of his country, though, Aw offers this: “I think Singapore is very creative, with great film-makers and visual artists. Literature is the one thing that’s lagging behind. The Great Singapore Novel isn’t going to happen for a long time, because to have any novel, let alone a great one, you need to be able to draw upon reserves of experience. If you’re going to rely on that post-’65 narrative, then Singapore is a young country. Somewhere like Britain has had hundreds of years.”

Singapore’s literary culture is however, budding. Cyril Wong, Simon Tay, Su-Chen Christine Lim, Alvin Pang, and Grace Chia, among others, are at the forefront of Singaporean literature in English, pushing against cultural friction since independence in 1965. Small presses such as Math Paper Press and Ethos Books are iconic in the Singaporean literary landscape. Tiong Bahru, Jalan Besar, Alexandra, and Keong Saik are emerging neighborhoods—with independent bookstores—attracting young artists.

At the foundation of this emerging literary scene is Singapore’s library system. Twenty-six libraries and national archives dot the island. All libraries include collections in all four national languages—English, Tamil, Chinese and Malay. The flagship of the system is the National Library, a sixteen-story tower in the central business district, between the bustling markets of Bugis and the quiet museums of Bras Basah.

The National Library was established in 1844 to educate the local populace. The present-day building was founded in 1960 and expanded outward and upward. It is, in fact, two libraries in one: the Central Public Library beginning in the basement with general reading stacks, and the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library from the seventh to the thirteenth floors.

Other libraries in Singapore’s system of libraries have a similar environment to libraries in the United States. The National Library, however, stands out. The place embodies what defines a public space, integrating the natural and built environment with vaulted ceilings in reading rooms and cozy crannies in courtyards. Patrons sit in the bamboo garden, flipping pages of The Straits Times. They take naps on the sofas in the Central Library. They chitchat in the plaza in front of the library. They study in the expansive ends of the reference library on the seventh through ninth floors, trying to not be distracted by skyline adorned in pastels made alive by the blue sky. They sit on the floor next to elevator doors, creating their own private space. They walk through, around and about installations made by various local artists, attempting to decipher meaning.

The National Library also includes a theater, in which local playwrights showcase their work, and exhibitions examining national history (on one floor, a central space was devoted to the history of literature in Singapore). All in all, the library itself is a cultural and social hub for all Singaporeans.

Singapore thrives in its rigidity—45-hour work weeks, projects finished ahead of schedule—its people are a work-centric people. The country’s first—and arguably most influential—Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, once said, “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford.” The National Library is an oasis as a free-flowing space that bends the rules of purpose and definition. It is the cultural backbone that can lead to the creation of “the Great Singapore Novel” in due time.

Ravi Venkataraman is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chengdu, China and serves on the editorial board of MaLa: The China Bookworm Literary Journal. When he isn’t teaching, playing ultimate frisbee or binge-watching TV shows, he writes fiction and poetry. His work was previously featured in That Lit Site and Papercuts, and is forthcoming in Journal of Microliterature.

The post Singapore’s Literary Culture and the Power of a National Library appeared first on Newfound.

As the word “subversion” rolls around the mouth, it’s also a word, in action, that deconstructs and challenges. It’s a hard-working word, frightening to those who hold power. The word comes from the Latin subertere, meaning “to overthrow.” I love the definition of the word: “An attempt to transform established social order and its structures of power, authority, and hierarchy.”

I can think of writers who have subverted my understanding of the world—Rebecca Solnit, Sonya Huber, Alice Walker, C.S. Lewis, James Baldwin, Roxane Gay, Cormac McCarthy, St. John the Apostle. While the definition of “subvert,” as a verb, is more negative—“to overthrow; to cause the downfall, ruin, destruction of; to undermine the principles of; corrupt”—I prefer to think of their influence in my life as a something constructive, a gift. Being corrupted is only a matter of perspective. Sometimes being corrupted against the established power, authority, and hierarchy is, in reality, more like finding redemption.

Being subversive, of course, isn’t a prerequisite to becoming a writer. There are plenty of phenomenal writers who uphold and benefit from the status quo and who might be loathe to see it change. (I’m thinking specifically the number of men versus the number of women who are published in the most prestigious literary venues. See Vida, a subversive organization dedicated to women’s literary art, for their annual Vida Count).

I think I became a writer partly because I love ideas and I love figuring out how to subvert people’s perceptions and expectations. I recently had a conversation with a friend about our attraction to body art, including tattoos and piercings. I mentioned that part of the reason I like tattoos for myself is because they subvert people’s first impression of me. Since my husband is a pastor in a conservative evangelical denomination in the Midwest, I’m often pegged, at first, as a traditional pastor’s wife whose only significant use is having babies and offering emotional support for my husband.

In the past, when my husband has been interviewed for senior pastor positions, I’ve been asked how many children I have and how I see my role as his wife in the church (spouses of pastors are often interviewed along with the pastoral candidate). Both are disheartening questions. Being a mother is a job I’m not sure I would be very good at, but besides that, my husband and I have never been able to have children. In addition, I find deep fulfillment in my own job as a writing professor, rather than standing behind my husband as he ministers to a congregation. I’m not all tatted up, but I have a few tattoos, and they are a physical way I can reveal that the preconceived notions most of us hold are worthless.

The same is true with story and with writing. Story disarms. When you can get a reader emotionally involved in your own, personal story or the story of a human character, they’re more likely to see themselves within the pages and recognize that the status quo, which mostly benefits those who are in power, isn’t what it first appears. When someone’s on top, someone else is always on the bottom, and story can give us a picture of the person on the bottom in a way that helps us recognize her as human in the same way we, ourselves, are human.

In my writing and literature classes, I tend to assign readings that are in some way subversive. I’m always quick to point out how the writer subverts our expectations when it comes to a form or a character so that those students in the class who are drawn to the subversive can see how it’s done and why it’s important. Art as a quiet, or sometimes loud, protest can transform the individual in order to transform harmful power structures and ideas.

 Jennifer Ochstein has published essays with Connotation Press, The Lindenwood Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Evening Street Review and The Cresset. She as published book reviews with Brevity and River Teeth blog. Follow her at her blog jenniferochstein.com.

The post The Purpose of Subversive Writing, Or, The Pastor’s Wife Has Tattoos appeared first on Newfound.

And yet, access to books and the written word is limited for many South Africans, due to the past law of apartheid and its remnants in daily life. Books are a rare commodity and fiercely guarded in South Africa. I still haven’t worked through what my reading life in Cape Town has meant.

I spent a year as a grad student at the University of Cape Town in 2011, and I adored the main library’s Recreational Reading Room. It was a cozy wood-floored room filled with loveseats and novels by African and British writers, whose books never made it to American circulation desks.

Another gem of UCT was the library at Hiddingh Campus—an enclave of just a few Dutch colonial buildings in Cape Town proper. Hiddingh Campus was the Art School. The art and philosophy library (next to the campus art supply store) was my heaven amidst the madness of Cape Town. Walking there meant being aggressively (and I mean physically) pan-handled by strung-out child beggars.

However, anyone who set foot in either of these libraries without an active university ID would be denied entry by the dogmatic (and armed!) university security guards. The guards might take people to a clandestine location to interrogate them. If you tried to get into one of these libraries and couldn’t produce university ID, you were “renditioned” for a day.

(Do I need to state that this never happened to me, a white American student? But that for a time I was dating a South African student, a Coloured student, an absent-minded student, who once forgot his ID and tried to get into the library and ended up cuffed to a chair in the basement instead? I checked out books for him for the rest of the semester. But that’s not justice, is it?)

And so, books for South Africans who aren’t university students can be hard to come by.  Cape Town had some nice book shops, but the price of new books was prohibitively expensive. $30 USD for a new paperback is steep to me, even by current US standards. But in that world where wages and general standard of living were lower, $30 translated back into South African Rands was a pile of money. I couldn’t see how anyone could afford to read new books. When I last lived in Cape Town, the country also had no broadband infrastructure—so Internet access was prohibitively expensive, too. A world of words is online, but proved too expensive to dive into.

And then, the public library went missing. No, this isn’t a magic realism tale. I lost the Cape Town Public Library.

The Main Collection was at one point located in the City Hall building in Cape Town proper. (On Darling Street. By the taxi rank.) But the last time I lived in Kaapstad, in 2011, no one could tell me where the public library stacks were. THE MAIN COLLECTION OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY WAS MISSING! I was convinced I’d stumbled into a Borges short story, because no one ever cleared this up for me. To this day I have not learned where the main library’s books have been moved.

I read a lot in Cape Town, and I tried to read things that I could only get in South Africa. But the fact that I could do this was a mark of my privilege—as a white person, as a US citizen. The written word isn’t the resource that most Westerners think of exploiting when they think of South Africa. I didn’t want diamonds and I didn’t want gold, I wanted to get to know the works of Alex La Guma, Steve Biko, and Nadine Gordimer.

I still have some ambivalence regarding South Africa, the intractable racism and classism there, and my own compliance with unjust systems. But that isn’t to suggest that there aren’t excellent organizations there, working to make education and access to literature more equitable, or to make South Africa a reading nation.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Journalism. 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.

The post Literary Treasure Hunting in Cape Town appeared first on Newfound.

In a rare interview with the author in the spring 2015 issue of the Paris Review, Ferrante declares herself “still very much interested in testifying against the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal.” She then goes on to explain the creative space that opened up for her when she realized that her anonymity would be protected by her publishers. “[It] made me see something new about writing,” she says. “I felt as though I had released the words from myself.”

The interview gave me pause, and, as someone who’s ambivalent  toward social media, I found Ferrante’s views refreshing. It’s commonly accepted that everyone who’s anyone needs to have an online presence. But here’s a woman who doesn’t care what everyone else is doing; she’s not convinced. Ferrante does, of course, have an online presence—a website presumably maintained by somebody else (sans author photo), and the countless public-forum conversations among her readers—but Ferrante herself seems to have washed her hands of the whole business, and it has done nothing but improve her writing.

But that doesn’t mean #FerranteFever isn’t real. However much it may seem like a ploy devised by the publisher, Europa Editions, or a grown-up version of literary Belieberism, what it describes is in fact a kind of enchantment, a gauzy delirium that descends while reading Ferrante’s novels. I know because I’ve caught it.

I contracted it at work, where I catch most things, colds and enchantments alike. Such are the benefits and hazards of working at a public library. In the stacks one evening, I discovered a slim volume, The Days of Abandonment. I began reading it the following morning, my day off, and—laundry be damned!—I couldn’t stop. Within a few weeks, I’d consumed everything Ferrante has written, including her densely populated Neapolitan novels. Like the rest of her devoted readers, I’m now counting days until September, when the fourth Neapolitan book is scheduled for release.

It’s difficult to say precisely why Ferrante’s novels are so deeply affecting. That Ferrante is a masterful writer is plain—and recognition is due also to the brilliant English translations by Ann Goldstein. But trying to explain why Ferrante’s books are spellbinding would be like trying to explain what is magical about Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. There’s something numinous in her apparently straightforward, elegant prose. She’s not a tricky writer, presenting readers with a basket of puzzle pieces to fit together; she doesn’t rely on literary cleverness. There is a kind of purity in her writing, an intensity. Reading Ferrante is like following a crackling fuse with your eyes; each line of text burns across the page.

But it isn’t just the writing that drives Ferrante’s stories, it’s her willingness to examine an individual’s interior life. I read a lot of books, but Ferrante’s stand out to me for their honesty, and it strikes me as an honesty that is hard won. In the Paris Review interview, Ferrante quotes Leda, her protagonist in The Lost Daughter. “ ‘The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.’ It’s the motto—can I call it that?—at the root of all my books.” Ferrante’s brand of honesty isn’t merely the art-as-mirror acknowledgment that brutality and heartbreak exist in the world, but an investigation into their individual origins and impacts. The Neapolitan novels, for example, are a sweeping examination of a complicated friendship at the center of two women’s lives, which, for better or worse, affects every decision they make.

At a time when much of contemporary American literary fiction seems to be moving away from this kind of deeply personal writing and toward the fantastical and bizarre, Ferrante’s approach to literature is life-affirming. She celebrates what it is to have a human heart, the rawness and apathy and rage, as well as the brief, transcendent moments of happiness.

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

The post Catching #FerranteFever 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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However well-intended and meticulously researched, the journalistic approach of this type of article lacks the essence of the discipline they are discussing. Literature and the arts are not about facts and figures, they are about what it means to be human, hence the label: the Humanities. Literature seeks to expose the truths of human existence, the shared experience, the feeling of being alive. So, in my first post for Newfound, I find myself looking for my place in all this cognitive shifting sand.

Doomsayers typically predict the downfall of the humanities by college enrollments and declared majors. There are more people studying business, medicine, and accounting, they may say. English departments are downsizing due to decreased interest. There are several problems with this argument, but let’s examine the most glaring fallacies. First, people study the subjects they think will get them jobs, e.g., business and medicine. Yet, in a bad economy, there are fewer jobs for everyone regardless of one’s area of expertise. The fact that one studies humanities does not decrease employment opportunities; the economy does that. Second, people don’t necessarily need a university education to succeed in fields such as literature, art and music. Using college majors to determine success seems unfair when you are comparing brain surgeons to painters; it’s apples and oranges.

Those bemoaning the downfall of literature often state that people are reading less—at least for fun. I would counter that people are reading more. When people spend more time staring at their phones than actually talking to people in real life, they are in fact reading. And although a tweet isn’t the same as a novel, perhaps their Twitter feed will read like one. By scrolling through someone’s Facebook, you can read the story of a person’s life, or at least the parts they share. Perhaps it isn’t highbrow literature, but you have to admit it is raw humanity. And it’s fun.

But if everyone is online, then should we study communication or marketing? Often this is the suggestion from these articles. However, these fields teach people to spin, how to be perceived, to control what is admitted. They hide the truth behind created fictions. Writing for corporate communication, marketing and advertising are very different than humanities writing. Literature seeks to reveal the truth through  fiction, to show more than what one usually perceives. There is a reach to provide the reader with an experience, not just an opinion.

Articles concerned with the decline in recreational reading generally mention benefits of reading, such as increased focus and imagination. They will discuss how reading can improve attention spans and promote empathy. This seems to be a turn, but often is no more than a pause to tease the literary reader that what they do might be worthwhile. If only the articles stopped there.

Instead, they usually conclude with more saddening news, such as this statement by Sarah Schwister in Quail Bell Magazine: “Americans are still turning away from serious fiction, and sadly the literary novel may wind up mostly forgotten, like poetry.” Statements such as this one make me furious, and cause me to wonder at the writer’s intent. In my outrage, I find my place, the solid ground on which I stand.

Poetry is not forgotten, not even somewhat forgotten. Not only is poetry still alive in its own right, but poetry is at the heart of every well-turned phrase, every novel surely, but also the clever meme or funny anecdote. The disturbing thing here is that people in the field, the writers who pen such articles,  have already given up on poetry as a form of expression. They have bought into the idea of an America that is turning away from words.

Society does not determine whether the humanities live or die. We do, we that live in the world of the humanities. Some of us work hard every day to promote reading and arts, cultural values and societal change. What is true and always has been is that the hearts and minds of a society’s poets and artists determine its direction, functioning as its moral center. Sure, we are finding new forms of expression, but that does not mean we have to kill off the existing ones. Perhaps multimedia is the future for the humanities, but that does not preclude the writing of books, or even poetry.

It is the artist who makes the difference. Let us not look at the world and have it tell us what will and will not be. Instead, let us look and tell the world what might be. And let that expression take any form. The future is as bright as we paint it. Let us not give up on ourselves just yet.
 

Reggie Carlisle finished his BA in Creative Writing at Weber State University in 2014. His first published story was in the Fall 2013 Mixitini Matrix. He currently resides in Utah with his wife and five daughters.

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