Tag: US

Taken, not taken: The Nail in the Tree – Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis

I accepted this book as a review copy when it first came out, just over three years ago now. I put on the shelf with all the best intentions, and then forgot it. When I rediscovered it there, lost among assorted volumes of nonfiction, I felt ashamed by my negligence. Surely I could have read it earlier, if not when I first received it, at the very least during the trial of Alex Jones for the outrageous conspiracy theories that hurt so many people and ushered in a whole new form of denial, or a few months later when the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting was marked last December. But The US seems an endless supplier of senseless and tragic school shootings so it’s no surprise that, when I finally did take the time to read The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood, I happened to finish it on the one year anniversary of Uvalde.

Poet and essayist Carol Ann Davis was newly relocated to Newtown, Connecticut, with her husband and two young sons when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. They lived close to the site but, due to zoning, the boys attended another school. Willem was in fourth grade at the time, Luke in kindergarten. They were safe, but not untouched. “And this is what it is not to suffer that day,” she tells herself when recalling the shooting, “This is the not-suffering, happy ending story.” But, of course, it’s not that simple. The trauma sends lasting ripples throughout the community in way that leaves no one unaffected:

Sacerdos, from the French and earlier from Latin, literally meaning “offerer of sacrifices.” The children who live here, perhaps it’s strange to say, now glow. They do, they glow. No one can approach unmoved, and the children, understanding their role, shoulder, take on, burden themselves with us. Their skin nearly translucent, they walk around like that, glowing. They offer themselves like bits of mirror, and we accept.

The adults, by virtue of wider perspective, suddenly become acutely aware of the fragility of childhood. For those who still have to send their children back to school, trust them to the school bus each morning, there is the conflicted desire to both protect and prepare. Older siblings want to look out for their younger brothers and sisters. No one wants to trigger memories that may or may not even exist.

It is within the altered dynamic of the six years that follow the tragedy, that Davis endeavours to articulate and make sense of what it means to raise children in the aftermath of violence. In a series of essays that make their way slowly but not strictly chronologically away from the pivotal event, she turns to poetry and art to understand how artistic practice might be a productive way of integrating trauma into life moving forward—for herself and for her sons.

This is not a typical grief memoir, nor does it delve into the specifics of the shooting or the political fallout. The event itself rests as a horror too large to think about directly—it sits, unspoken, in all aspects of community life, especially at the bus stop, in the schools and on the playing field. Yet Davis seeks answers at her desk, beneath the hummingbird feeder, at art galleries and museums and, ultimately swimming in the open ocean, the one desperately longed-for release her newly adopted, landlocked hometown denies her. Along the way, among others, she turns to the work of Hélène Cixous and poet Miklós Radnóti and, for an extended period, she follows the lead of (and argues with) Rumi. She engages with the art of Eva Hesse to better understand the poetic process, and when, four years after the fact she has to fully explain to Luke, now that he is old enough to know, the extent of what happened at Sandy Hook, she draws on Paul Celan and Armenian born artist Arshile Gorky to help her untangle the enormity of her own grief.

Davis’s writing is poetic, pulling images, quotes and refrains through her essays, like threads to link or unravel her thoughts as needed. And she is an astute observer of art who is able to find in a number of artists, their techniques and philosophies about their practice, clues to appreciating how she is growing and, more importantly, how the boys are not only coping, but finding their own ways to thrive. More than once the boys are dragged through exhibitions, like one of Picasso’s sculptures in New York, or shown a show catalogue, like that of American abstract painter Agnes Martin. Davis hopes that Luke, who is a budding draftsman will find some connection in Martin’s geometrically precise but somewhat dissonant canvases (he does not). The message in the artist’s work and her method, however, is less for the child than his mother:

I’m suddenly afraid: I am not ready to admit to myself, as Martin has, that the purpose of art may be to unlock an inner happiness in the viewer. I am doubtful such a happiness is inherent, and unsure whether it is larger than forces with which I’ve engaged in my own work (such as grief and difficulty). I am uncertain I can place the function of art, art-making, its practice, in the category of making-happy, given all I’ve seen and felt in the last five years, all my children have endured in the service of gaining a working understanding of the world into which they’ve been thrown. Of course, any difficulty can be a subset of happiness, Martin’s work virtually shouts at me. Don’t be so narrow-minded.

Throughout these original, thoughtful essays, it becomes clear that the search for meaningful expression—even happiness—after trauma is Davis’s personal journey, one within which her children are her motivation and measure of progress, but not her exactly creative companions. One cannot grieve for anyone else as much a parent might wish shield their child from their own inevitable process. With luck and their parents’ support, Willem and Luke will hopefully have the resources to come, in time, to their own mature understandings of the event that they escaped only by chance. Sadly, with school shootings such a regular occurrence in the US, shadows of the horror that erupted at Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012 may be hard for any of the Newtown residents to fully move beyond.

The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis is published by Tupelo Press.

Some measure of an innovative response to Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature

So I’m sitting here at looking at my copy of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature and feeling sick when I think about whether or not I can, or should, write about it. Which makes it sound like I did not enjoy the book. Or that it is not worth reading. I did. And it is.

But, can I talk about the way it also twists me up inside? That a book that I should connect with on a level beyond the written word leaves me wondering if there is a space for me? On the back cover (which on my copy is terribly warped after a fall on snow-covered ice landed me with a concussion) editor Isabel Waidner is quoted:

If there were a literary avant-garde that were relevant now, it would be what the queers and their allies are doing, at the intersections, across disciplines. This avant-garde would be inclusive, racially and culturally diverse, migrants galore, predominately but not exclusively working-class, transdisciplinary, (gender)queer and politically clued up (left).

I like the sound of this. But is this what the queers and their allies are doing? Possibly. I am the ineptest (gosh I didn’t even know “ineptest” was a word, but Word suggested it and I kind of like it) queer writer ever because, off the page, queer is the loneliest reality I’ve ever known, and the many queer writers included here seem to have lives in which their queerness is essential, not accidental. And that makes me feel as alienated as my real life adventures in queer spaces do. I’m awfully pasty white and ordinary, and although my mother’s family were, at one time, potato famine refugees from Ireland, and I was not born in the country where I live, I am a migrant on an axis other than the here-to-there displacement in space. The only true migration I have ever made—the one that I am always making—is the one from female to male.

And I am not even certain how to think about “working class.” If it’s about wage-labour, a blue- and pink- collar, and sometimes white collar existence, then for the exception of about one decade of my life, I’m your man. But I’ve always preferred to think of myself as under-employed, as if the status was temporary, collarless. Over-educated. Just barely keeping my head above poverty level. You know: What are you going to do with an arts degree? Or two? When things are good where I live, blue collar workers can haul in six-figure incomes. Classless, misfit, my work-life fits into no definable category.

At 57, I’m not even under-employed any more. I’m not employed at all. And too old to start over. (Which leads me to wonder, while we’re being all diverse and intersectional, where disability lies in this re-invigorated literary avant-garde.)

But, enough wound-nursing and equivocating. Back to the task at hand.

I do love the idea of literature that is innovative, experimental, and breaks boundaries especially in my arena, that of the essay/memoir. And, did I mention that nowhere in Isabel’s detailed and entertaining introduction (check it out, if you want, at 3:AM) does that over-used term “genre-bending” appear? The writing she invites the reader to envision, “itself must transgress the various structures through which the avant-garde literary canon has perpetuated itself and its exclusiveness.” Okay, now we’re talking. She goes on to say:

To reiterate, the writing needs to work across various systems of oppression (intersectionality), across formal distinction (prose and poetry, critical and creative, and the various genres), and across disciplines. Same goes for publishing, editing, reading, referencing and designing curricula. Change literature (or what is defined as such) and the discipline will diversify. Diversify the discipline and the literature itself will change. Liberating the canon depends on inclusion and formal innovation in equal measures. The two are interrelated.

And the question then becomes: Just how liberated is this canon? How much of a meaningful advancement have we made toward this ambitious goal by the selections gathered in this anthology?

Honestly, I am not so sure. (Maybe I am.)

I already tend to read a fair amount of innovative literature, and have admitted to a hunger for work that pushes the confines of literary style and form, so the more experimental pieces really, uh, turn me on. The contributions from Mojilsola Abedayo, Joanna Walsh, Isabel Waidner, Timothy Thornton, Mira Mattar, Nisha Ramayyar, Richard Brammer (cheating I skipped this having already the entire book from whence it came) and Nat Raha were, for me, standouts. The most explicitly trans pieces were my least favourite, pushing subject more than form, but as an idiosyncratic, fickle reader—a body dysmorphic, ex-gender dysphoric soul—I am looking for a transvant-garde that speaks to trans in a way that would make me say “HELL, YES.”

This canon still needs to be loosened a little further, I suppose. Or rather, the liberation is just starting.

This book could be considered a primer. An Anglophone primer. An anthology of primarily UK based writers with a few US contributors tossed in for good measure. How about round two? With a glance to Canada (where I am), Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and desi (South Asian and diaspora) writers.

Ah, one can dream. But if this book can exist, anything is possible.

So, there you have it. I have written about Liberating the Canon without really writing about any of the varied pieces contained within. You’ll have to read it, if you dare. Or desire. Or are simply curious.

It’s worth the risk.

Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, edited by Isabel Waidner is available from your friends at Dostoyevsky Wannabe.  To be printed at your pleasure, and obtained through a distributor like that place that starts with A.