Selected quotations
Thinking with poignant passages from the books I've just read
Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions.
She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies-yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower.
And could be cherished!1
So begins Gwendolyn Brooks’ sole novel—with an appreciation of beauty that also troubles what beauty is or where we notice it. As I child I found adult’s disdain for dandelions—a weed!—to be ridiculous, so I love Brooks’ characterization of them as “yellow jewels” that are “everyday.” The assertion that “it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower” is perhaps a crucible for so much of what this novel is about: the pursuit of creativity and pleasure, resilience and survival, making a life. This is a quotation to hold onto!
An Image of My Name Enters America, Lucy Ives
I go to see the Unicorn Tapestries. I'm a very young person. I do not recall exactly how old I am in this memory, but I do know that my obsession with My Little Ponies precedes this visit and has prepared me.
[…]
I think: That unicorn is vile.
I am desperate in my disappointment, as the story of the unicorn's capture is further simplified for us by a docent. I think:
This unicorn has a beard and thick square teeth. This unicorn grimaces and rolls his eyes as he is stabbed and pierced, as his pale fur parts to reveal that he is composed not of moonbeams and sparkles but of quivering rosy flesh. Beady-eyed dogs, reeking of sweat and famine, snap at his whitish back. Translucent ichor seeps from his unpleasant wounds. It is thin juice, this blood. It is entirely unlike the bright fake blood we see on television and appears somehow lesser, resentful, staining. In these landscapes, there is no such thing as ketchup splattering a camera Jens. Nothing here is so absolute as a highly pigmented American food product. Here things drip pinkly and gleam; there is no sudden death. Nothing is as definite as that-save for the unicorn's gender. No one must tell me that he is male. I know that the unicorn is male.
I am crushed and enraged that the unicorn is a boy. I cannot love this representation.
I can't comb this in my mind's eye, can't cuddle or pet it. I do not bask in searing beauty. I do not taste transcendent mystery, I do not handle something smoother than smooth, brighter than bright, warmer than heat.
I had been promised something full of charm, an image that would be a friend. I don't get that, don't see that here.
I am not transported out of my body, not even for a second.
I know enough to perceive that this is a garbled scene of carnage, despite the docent's confident description. Metal plunges into the panting flank of a greatly outnumbered, terrified ani-mal. His lips curl in agony. He is not yet dead, but he dies.
Later, he sits like a toy inside a fence obviously too low to contain him. Why does he stay there?
The humans encircling him have spiteful eyes. They are convinced that they should not examine their surroundings too closely. They should not acknowledge the collective rape they've organized. Their looks are limited, cultivated, stupid, and so inward. It scares me to think that this is all that being alive could amount to.
It is a thought that will return to me again and again throughout my childhood: Don't fall into that trap, I'll think. Don't become old and stiff and cruel and forget that you are living. Remain vulnerable, I'll tell myself.
This passage worked for me on a number of levels: first, I remember reading Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn as a teenager and being disgusted by the realization of what these medieval renderings of the majestic animal actually amounted to: pointy, agricultural goblins with all too human features, rather than the lithe and elegant vessels of the more recent popular imagination. It is also the sense that because the unicorn is undoubtedly a “boy” that Ives cannot love it—oomph. I don’t know if this is what she is getting at precisely but this seems to signal the ways in which as a child, aligning oneself with correctly gendered attachments seems so important, and when something slips out of its ‘proper’ place, one might feel confused or ashamed. This is coordinated with the ways in which Gen-Z elders and millennials might also remember the pains of finding that much of the best ‘things’ were marked as masculine; I remember asking for the “boy’s toy” with my Happy Meal in the McDonald’s drive-through because it seemed to always be just a little bit better. In all though, what I love in this section of Ives’ brilliant essay “Of Unicorns” are the sentences, which run from taught to sprawling, which know when to turn on their heels and switch paths or swim on, and demonstrate a diction that is both masterful and fluid. Glug, glug.
Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad
“Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realisation. When someone, a stranger, suddenly comes to know what perhaps they did not want to know. A few months ago, I was in Palestine with a group of international writers for the Palestine Festival of Literature, a travelling festival with a strong pedagogical element: while the evenings are devoted to readings and panel discussions, the daytimes are jam-packed with tours and talks for the visiting writers.
Several of these writers experienced something like tragic awakening. They said things like ‘My youth is gone’ and 'I have walked through a door and it has locked behind me.’ These were not even people who needed to be brought over from a distant political position: they came to Palestine with the desire to learn. They visited Hebron, and saw the soldiers patrolling, guarding settlers; they visited the destroyed town of al-Lydd; they navigated checkpoints; they travelled through Jerusalem and crossed in and out of the West Bank; they listened to statistics of killings and imprisonments and night-time raids and asked careful questions. They seemed genuinely changed by the experience. I was moved to see them moved. At the same time, I couldn't help but feel a kind of despairing déjà vu, the scene of recognition having become at this point rather familiar.”
Hammad’s short speech-cum-book thinks through what it means for Westerners to recognize Palestinian suffering: how this must be cajoled, repeated incessantly, framed in some ways more than others, rendered palatable or conversely, spectacular. Recognition too, comes to be a feature of a certain kind of sympathetic posture in which the realisation of what the Occupation has done may be considered by some a sufficient ends in itself. What does this repeated need to expose and reveal do? What does it condition, on whom does it rely? Hammad sits with this ambivalence throughout the text, including in an account of meeting an Israeli soldier who is in hiding for dessertion: “How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghaouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” I was also struck by how this emphasis on non-fruition is, for Hammad, a part of Palestinian literary narrative too, where texts often lack a climax or resolution, mimicking the ways in which no real ending has ever been conceived, how they have been repeatedly made to wait for justice (Hammad’s own novel, Enter Ghost, models this in exemplary ways, as does Adania Shibli’s masterful Minor Detail, or the film When I Saw You by Annemarie Jacir, all of which I have mentioned previously).
What I’m Reading
Finishing Ives’ An Image of My Name Enters America (above)
Starting Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution and hopefully also some fiction (debating between Carson McCullers, Sunetra Gupta, and Lauren Groff)
What I’m Watching
Parenthood and The White Lotus
I saw Girls Town (1996) at the Paradise last weekend. It’s a 90s hangout movie about a group of teen girls who lose one of their close friends and bond over trashing rapists’ cars. I felt very strong afterward.
What I’m Writing
Always looking for new commissions (I have vet bills to pay now!)
Thank you to Abby for dropping this off after reading my post about short books.