COMMUNITY BOARD
Goodreads / Letterboxd / Instagram / Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)
Calling my fellow scholars: RAFTM1 Tia Glista (of
) and I have proposed a panel for the American Comparative Literature Association’s conference next spring on regard and care. If you or anyone you know think you have a paper/presentation/idea that fits, take a look at our call for papers and consider sending along an abstract.
Earlier this week, I had the incredible privilege to host and be in conversation with the poet m. nourbeSe philip for an event I co-organized at school. I had wanted to invite philip to celebrate the publication of the fifteenth anniversary edition of her seminal work, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, as soon as I heard there was one in the works. If you’re unfamiliar, Zong! is book-length poem that takes as its subject the massacre of some 150 enslaved Africans on the slave ship Zong over a period of ten days in 1781. At the time, the incident only came to public attention because it was the subject of an insurance case, in which the ship’s owners and the insurers of the ship disputed who would shoulder the cost for the murdered slaves, who were merely seen as lost cargo and lost profit. It is the legal decision that emerged out of the case, Gregson v. Gilbert, that philip takes as her source material, using only the words that appear in its two pages to construct her poem. Through various poetic strategies such as erasure, redaction, and fragmentation, philip produces an alternative and expansive account of the massacre that challenges the narrowness of the legal document. It’s an incredible piece of work that has influenced scholars, critics, and poets alike, and being able to talk to philip about it in-person and to read it out loud with her was incredibly transformative and special.
While I was preparing for our conversation, I read an interview philip did with the poet and playwright Dfiza Benson for The Poetry Society in 2021. One of the things that came up that really struck me was what philip had to say about why she thinks people tend to value writing differently than other arts. Noting that because the writer’s medium is language and language is used by everyone, every day, “[t]he challenge for us as writers…is that we have to use the same medium that is so misused and abused in such a way that our audience hears it in a way that speaks to them and holds their attention.” She also suggests that “because we all live in language,” it is harder for people to recognize “the skill in what we [writers] do.” This is, of a course, a subject I spend a lot of time thinking about. Less because I want to delegate who can and should be a writer, but more so because I’m often concerned with what it actually means to call myself my writer and to do the task of writing for an audience. (RAFTM Michelle Santiago Cortés recently mused on this in the first dispatch of her newsletter.) philip—who has written about language as “a foreign anguish”—imagines the writer’s task to be one of making the familiar feel somewhat foreign, making visible all the beliefs, experiences, and attitudes that hang around words. These hang-ups often disappear as words get absorbed into our every day lexicon and we use them as if they emerge clean cut from the ether. But there’s something generative about dealing with the messiness of words and allowing familiar words to get submerged by their various associations. That messiness creates a sort of alienation for both writer and reader that can be really productive. I find that this kind of attention to language tends to be seen as the work of poets or those who trade in florid prose. Yet, I’m reminded that it is also the subtle work of those writers whose treatment of language produces such a sense of familiarity that what they’re doing seems self-evident. I was reading Mike Nichols: A Life yesterday morning and Mark Harris noted the way in which Nichols and the playwright Tom Stoppard connected over their personal histories as emigrés who, as children, came to English as a foreign language and therefore were able to appreciate its “eccentricities, double meanings, and rhythms” in a way that a native speaker might not. Their alienation from the language allowed them to find beauty in it and to also express its strangeness, allowing them to tell much richer stories that transformed the most every day interactions into earth-shattering, mind-bending art.
OPEN TABS
Recent reads that were so good I didn’t want to close the tab
Andrea Long Chu’s review of Intermezzo.2 Loved Chu ending this with the reveal that she’s recently engaged.
Rachel Tashjian on Substack and fashion. This is so sharp and well-reported and funny! I was so absorbed by it I missed my stop on the train.
Cathy Horyn on her style, love, and finding a good suit.
RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; respectfully stolen from my RAFTM Rachel Tashjian
Just picked Ms Rooney’s latest a few days ago and planning on starting today!
Congratulations on organizing and hosting this event! You’re so cool!