Summaries and Overviews for UBC English 111, "Displaced Persons"

A few of the students in my first-year undergraduate course at UBC requested what amount to executive summaries of the six principal texts on the course syllabus (which can be found here: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kmcneill/111_2019.htm). Lecture audio (also posted on my SoundCloud page, Kind of Kevin) on each text can be accessed through the syllabus. The course is an introduction to the study of prose non-fiction that I teach under the title “Displaced Persons.” 

English 111, Section 005—Displaced Persons: Approaches to Prose Non-Fiction

Summaries and Overviews, by Prof. Kevin McNeilly

As requested, I have drawn up a set of paragraph-long takes on key themes and talking points in the six main texts on our course syllabus. These paragraphs only suggest possible critical and interpretative trajectories through this material; use them, if you wish, as starting points for your own readings of these texts.

David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You(2018) tries, as the title suggests, to find the means both to disclose and to discuss unacknowledged or suppressed antagonisms around his experience of racism in Canada. It’s important to recognize that this extended letter addressed to his daughter – the book is an extended essay in epistolary form – builds on the concept of the essay (or essai, in Michel de Montaigne’s sixteenth-century French) as an attempt, as an open-ended experiment in how to put his complex and fraught encounters with racial interpellation (being “hailed” or identified) into words, how to frame his thinking around race and to communicate those experiences to (and with) his family. He develops a pluralistic concept of heritage, community and ethnicity based on a respect for difference and diversity and a resistance to seeing the human “mix” in terms of sameness; he admires what he calls the “luminous specificity” of human experience. By the close of the book, he argues for an open-minded and attentive practice of “listening.”

Lawrence Hill’s op-ed in the June 1, 2018 issue of The Globe and Mail, “Act of Love: The Life and Death of Donna Mae Hill,” makes an argument for a compassionate approach to physician-assisted death or assisted suicide by narrating the final days of his mother’s life, as he accompanies her to a clinic in Switzerland. The extended essay braids together three time-lines—anecdotes from his mother’s life, a narrative of her last days and assisted suicide, and a brief account of the present time of writing the essay at his desk—to reflect on what we called intersubjectivity, the ways in which lives and voices are enmeshed in each other. His prose describes and enacts diegetic practices—ways of telling—that, as speech-acts and “acts of love,” create necessary human connection.

As an extended series of interlaced, page-long fragments, Diamond Grill forms what Fred Wah calls a “biotext,” an assemblage of life-stories that weave in and out of each other. Wah is particularly concerned with questions of racial identity and mixing: one of the most significant dishes served at the family restaurant run by his father (who also shares his name) is “mixed grill,” a jumble of European and Chinese foods. The swinging door in the Diamond Grill between the public space and the kitchen is also a crucial figure for Wah of the hyphen, as in the ligature between “Chinese” and “Canadian” in Chinese-Canadian. Wah works to find the means to inhabit that in-between “contact zone,” where he engages with what he calls “the dissonance of encounter, the resonance of clashing tongues.” Through the recombinant, DNA-like form (according to him) that his writing takes, Wah seeks to negotiate with difference and to reconcile himself to that on-going, hyphenated clash.

Each of the chapters of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, translates crucial moments in her personal history—as a teenage girl in Tehran, growing up through the Iranian revolution—for a contemporary French audience. Her episodic depiction of her adolescence, mapping a trajectory of personal transition and developing self-awareness, wants also to offer a corrective to misperceptions about both “life in Iran” and Iranian national history, as an “old and great civilization”; the text is a memoir, for her, not merely as a narrative of memories of her youth but also, significantly, as a memorial to her fellow Iranians 

who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland . . . . (“Introduction,” [vi]).

Her drawings both represent and enact a visual engagement with the strictures of authoritarian control, as Marji tests the boundaries, and bears witness to the limits, of who she is allowed to be, and to become. When in the opening chapter of the text, Marji declares at school that she wants to be a prophet when she “grow[s] up,” a declaration that her teacher regards with cynical horror but that her “puzzled” parents affirm is a child’s imaginative prerogative, she also activates a tension around visuality—between the visual and the visionary, between the witness and the seer, between looking and insight—that informs the set of antitheses and contradictions, especially between the traditional and the modern, that inform her fraught sense of belonging, of being a  young Persian woman.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine confronts the pervasive micro-aggressions that she faces in her everyday life as a Black American woman. Her text is a multi-modal assemblage, an instance of intermedia, combining printed text (designed in stark black and white by her collaborator, John Lucas) with photographs of visual media by other artists, scripts for internet videos (also realized in collaboration with John Lucas), audio, sports television excerpts (especially around Serena Williams), and more. Rankine addresses the ways in which black bodies are presented, interpreted and contained against “a sharp white background” (a line she takes from Zora Neale Hurston, via artwork by Glenn Ligon). She composes a number of elegies for young Black men (“my brothers . . .”), and creates fading typographical monuments that both acknowledge and enact their disappearance from public view. She is interested in the ways in which works of art, through shifting focus and points-of-view, can become politically charged and provocative.

In Findings(2005), Kathleen Jamie’s essays revolve around four main themes or trajectories: the archeological (involving visits to Paleolithic digs), the ecological (involving encounters with the non-human), the bio-medical (involving visits to hospitals, museums and medical institutions), and the ornithological (involving encounters with birds). She positions herself as a tourist, a visiting outsider,  something of a stranger in her own familiar Scottish context. Her writing engages with issues around what we now call the Anthropocene, the epoch of human impact on the climate and on the planet itself. She focuses in on different, conflicted senses of time: the present, human history, natural history, deep time. Each essay is typically framed by encounters with edges, margins, shorelines and contact zones. She concerns herself with her “findings” in each of these moments of discovery and encounter not to advocate for the power of human, anthropocentric knowledge-gathering, but rather to test and acknowledge the limits of human dominion and understanding; these are essays that lean in to unknowing, and think lyrically through the ethics and implications of human technology, of the craft of human expression.

Notes Toward a Practice of Denatured Reading

[I presented this text as part of a lecture in the first week of my upper-level undergraduate course on “Denatured Reading,” taking a cue from – among many others – Graham Harman’s claim that “[n]ature is not natural and can never be naturalized.” What kind of writing do such claims ask for?]

I’m looking for a way to frame a set of concerns for this class, to trace some kind of conceptual architecture. By beginning with what must seem like arbitrarily compiling a handful of poems—some from writers on the course syllabus, some not—I haven’t made it too easy to see anything like a focus, and the syllabus itself, revised from an earlier version of the course, still appears to me a bit cobbled and unkempt—heterotopic, perhaps, to borrow a term from the introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, an idea he develops from reading Jorge Luis Borges. Maybe this amorphousness, this assemblage, is appropriate to the course, too, given the unruliness of the subject matter—the decomposition of contemporary concepts of the natural—and its attendant image-pool—flotsam, junkyards, scrapheaps, wastelands, yardsales, edgelands, cyborgs, plastics, stuff. But I still feel like I need to offer you, and myself, some means of holding the material together, some imperative that drives me, and you along with me, through this slice of the contemporary, of the work of those who  live with us, now. I need, I think, to pose a question—and what comes to mind is a question posed a good seventy years ago, but which has a way of lingering, of insinuating itself into our present.

Ventriloquizing a key half-line from Friedrich Hölderlin’s 1801 elegy “Brod und Wein,” a disgraced Martin Heidegger asks, in 1946, “und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”—"and what are poets for in a destitute time?" or “and why poets in [a] paltry time?” Following on the material and cultural desolation of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, Heidegger inclines toward a version of the religiosity of the late and last Romantics, linking Hölderlin to Rainer Maria Rilke’s orphic vestiges, to discover some remainder of a saving grace for humanity, some reason for our collective persistence as a species, some scrap of holiness:

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

Theodor Adorno notoriously excoriates this poetical onto-theology as barbaric, consigning the lyric—except, perhaps, that it makes room in these latter days for the voices of suffering—to bathos and redaction. Even if we remain justly suspicious of Heidegger’s cult of Being, it feels too desolate, too hopeless, to abandon altogether the poetic imperative he articulates. At least, it does to me. How can writing, poetic or otherwise, still manage somehow to face the hard fact of our looming destitution, the tenor of our catastrophic times, what Maurice Blanchot names our “disaster”? “We others,” Heidegger continues, by which he seems to me to mean we readers, “must learn to listen to what these poets say.” Poetry, in our time, emerges around the recalibration of attention. We have missed hearing something, have been less than perfect listeners, poor students. Hölderlin’s poetry, though a bit dire and over-serious, presents an imperative to attend to what persists and insists beyond its human limits: “But there would be, and there is, the sole necessity, by thinking our way soberly into what his poetry says, to come to learn what is unspoken.” Poetry, in fits and starts, still gestures sometimes toward a refiguration of the encounter with the non-human world, the obscurity into which those fugitive gods appear to have retreated, and is still impelled by creative effort. Hölderlin’s adjective dürftiger—needy, meager, scanty, sparse, paltry, destitute—has at its root the verb dürfen—can or may—which suggests both capacity and possibility, a trace of this ontological imperative. When I quoted, a little abruptly last class, a line from Isabelle Stengers’s In Catastrophic Times remarking on “the felt necessity of trying to listen to that which insists, obscurely,” it was with an eye (and an ear) toward framing this poetic imperative. Following James Lovelock, Stengers names “that which insists” Gaia, the inhuman earth, and argues that if we mean to resist barbarism (deriving for her more from Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of capitalism than from Adorno), we need to try—notice how qualified her imperative remains—to think creatively and experimentally, and I would say poetically around and with this imperative. Pervasive anxieties these days around climate change, displaced populations, pharmacology, genomic modification and other environmental and biological incursions of human progress have become shared hallmarks of our human condition. Biotechnologies both reactivate and intensify an unease around what feels like an unspoken and unspeakable ontological threat. What poetry, what creative writing, might be for in our times is to broach the question of how to voice what’s unspeakable, to begin, again, to trace the boundaries, the contact zones, the edges, the membranes between humanity and its others, between the made and the given, between the natural and the denatured.

The philosopher Alain Badiou declared in a fairly recent interview that "[i]t must be clearly affirmed that humanity is an animal species that attempts to overcome its animality, a natural set that attempts to denaturalise itself." Badiou is not only reframing an enlightenment rationalism embedded in myths of human progress—what remains to us today, maybe, of liberal humanism—but also pointing up an irony inherent in deep ecology and human concern with the environment: an untenable separation of the human and the non-human in the guise of the “natural.”  Just yesterday, an article in The Guardian reiterated that human technologies have fundamentally altered the geological record, that we have inscribed ourselves into the planet such that we have ashifted the narrative of the history of being itself, and hardly for the better. The anthropocene has arrived. “The history of life on earth,” Rachel Carson writes in Silent Spring (1962), “has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings,” but those interactions, particularly from the human side of things, have been characterized not so much by reciprocity as by “irrecoverable” contamination. The three poets we have touched on so far address this contamination, directly. Tom Raworth’s “Beautiful Habit” concatenates the fragmented discursive remainders of those contaminants, and attempts to siphon some form of last-ditch, vestigial beauty from them, the leftover possibility of close listening: “it’s us / or rust / listener.” Paul Farley, by contrast, calls the creative intellect’s bluff, shuffling through the greasy, porous surfaces of man-made objects—a deck of cards, a microwave—trying to make contact with the nothingness—the withdrawn guarantees of meaning or of surety—behind his own crafted and crafty words, his tells and his tellings. Kathleen Jamie wants to attend to the “seed-small notes” along a remote shoreline scattered with natural detritus, to begin to listen to what’s left to her brief attention.  

Audio: Kathleen Jamie's "Sabbath"

Because of time constraints, I wasn’t able to finish my lecture to my first-year class on Prose Non-Fiction at the University of British Columbia on Wednesday, October 3, 2013. I was set to talk about Kathleen Jamie’s essay “Sabbath,” from her collection Findings (2005), but I had to finish up some discussion of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. So, about a week later, I have tried to wind things up with this improvised audio podcast. I was talking in my lecture about forms of framing, and frame narrative, as well as Satrapi’s sense of a divided subject, and I wanted to dovetail some of these ideas into my reading of Jamie’s brilliant essay. One recurrent theme in Jamie’s work is the shortfall of language -- she suggests that poetry, that writing itself, emerges from (and in) this shortfall. Instead of a frame, she creates a kind of frayed, open-ended counterpoint in “Sabbath.” She addresses the complexities of place and displacement, of the monumental and the entropic, of the global and the local, and the challenges of translation, of multiple, partial and incommensurate discourses. And she does all this in a language that is limpid, engaging and open-hearted.

Texture, Line, Frissure: Kathleen Jamie and Birgid Collins

In addition to reading her newest volume, Frissure, which is a collaborative set of mediations on healing and attention, I have been re-reading Kathleen Jamie’s 2005 gathering of essays, Findings, to prepare for a set of first-year lectures on prose non-fiction I am set to deliver over the next few months.  The earlier volume appears to lay some of the groundwork for her more recent prose poems. In the pages of Findings, Jamie consistently demonstrates a palpable gift for perceptive clarity, an attunement to visual and auditory detail: the eleven mediations on the “natural and unnatural world” – “world” meaning contemporary Scotland – that make up the book reflect on her own all-too-human need to accrete what she sees and hears, to hold and remember it, to catch something of her sensory drift and document it on paper before it skitters beyond her field of view. She listens and watches, she notes and collects. And what she often ends up attending to, in each piece, are the gaps and uncertainties in the apparatus of her own consciousness. She comes to observe herself wanting to observe, trying to see and hear her way toward a sublimity, a sense of the near-absolute alterity of nature, that keeps refusing her any absolute access. She often directs her creative energies toward collection and preservation, picking up souvenirs and compiling wrack and flotsam from shoreline scrapheaps, a tactic that recalls the poetic salvage of “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead.” (“Do we save this toolbox . . .?”)

Salvage is also self-directed, when she visits, for example, the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and peruses the formaldehyde-filled anatomical specimen jars: the human form, a late version frittered from Da Vinci’s homo mensura, becomes a collation or an assemblage of posthumous, scattered parts, bottled samples and amputations. “At certain shelves,” she writes, “you have to bend and look closely, without knowing what you might see. It will be pale and strange, and possibly quite beautiful. It will be someone’s catastrophe and death” (from “Surgeon’s Hall”). Bodies are catalogued, labeled, textualized; she sees them as particular, uncanny artefacts, almost art-objects that, with their vestigial humanity, still resist the aesthetical gaze. Medical and representational objectivity is mitigated by empathy, by the traces of human suffering and of feeling – not affect, but feeling – that persist in these fissured bodies, at once remembered and dismembered: “a stranger’s arm with his [not ‘its’] corroding carcinoma, a diseased breast, a kidney taken from a man gassed on the Western Front, all call forth the same plain tenderness, “ for Jamie.

“Pathologies,” the first essay in her subsequent collection, Sightlines (2012), develops this empathetic scrutiny further, when Jamie describes her visit to a pathology lab to observe clinicians performing biopsies. What she thinks of, plainly, are the people with whose tissues she has gained, as she scrutinizes samples through a microscope, a strange and unbidden intimacy, an impossible closeness. This complex ethic in which she finds herself implicated had already been hinted at in Findings, in the essay I’ve been citing, where she offers a précis of one of the earliest accounts, in “an Edinburgh book” from 1863, of a Victorian surgery: a certain “Mrs Ailie Noble, suffering terrible pain from breast cancer[,] is taken into theatre, and in full view of the young medical students undergoes a mastectomy.” Jamie’s writing practice is often highly iterative – texts embedded into texts, marking the retreat of an abyssal subjectivity – and she quotes her source text to close her own essay; but her point is not to remark a futility, so much as to emphasize the shared pathos of loss even in the seeming detachment of patriarchal science:

He says “Don’t think [the students] heartless . . . they get over their professional horrors and into their proper work, and in them pity as an emotion ending in itself, or at least in tears and in a long drawn breath, lessens — while pity as a motive is quickened and gains power and purpose.

Pity converts from romanticized, narcissistic amour-propre into viable empathy for others, an intersubjectivity of care (to borrow a phrase from Julie Livingston), a call to feeling that Jamie seems to discover somewhere between the jars she observes and the archive she re-reads: reminder and remainder. 

Frissure emerges from Jamie’s collaboration with visual-tactile artist Birgid Collins. When she turned 49, Jamie notes in her preface, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent a mastectomy. For her, she writes, “it seemed ironic: a case of life imitating art.” She had written extensively, as I’ve just noted, on pathology labs and breast cancer, and now her own body was subject to medical scrutiny and intervention. Redirecting her own attention selfward, negotiating the now intimate collision of observer and observed in her own physiology, seems to come to mean, for her, finding some kind of balance point between the aesthetic and the lived, a means of sensible transcription that would become part of her healing. She ended up approaching Birgid Collins to draw her mastectomy scar, to try to find a means of inhabiting this intersubjective tension; collaboration entails both deferring to perspectives outside of your own, and simultaneously voicing yourself against that deference: both seeing closely and being closely seen, in this instance. The scar is an unruly line, not only in the literal sense of a mark on her skin, but also in both the visual and the poetic senses: “Whatever it was, it was a line, drawn on my body. A line, in poetry, opens up possibilities within the language, and brings forth voice out of the silence. What is the first thing an artist does, beginning a new work? He or she draws a line.” She and Collins, in their various media, begin from a contingent, shared understanding of line.

"With that, a line of Burns arrived in my head. 'You seize the flo'er, the bloom is shed.'"

Jamie composes a number of prose-poems during her recovery, which become part of their collaboration; Collins pastes fragments of text into her constructions, and incorporates found matter and textiles described in Jamie’s texts into her compositions, which she comes to understand not as drawings but as dimensional constructions she comes to call “Poem-Houses,” which she creates in “conversation” or “exchange” with “K’s fragments.” Line here becomes a trajectory of intersections, an empathetic give-and-take (though not without difficulties and uncertainties). Collins begins with drawings, then introduces “natural” matter onto her paper, then builds dimensionality beyond the surface of page or sheet. The resulting hand-sized sculptures, if that’s the right word, have a raw, stunning beauty, an intricacy and a delicacy of texture that suggest an uneasy balance between the found and the made, the fractal and the formal, the aleatory and the intentional, the natural and the unnatural, that informs much of Jamie’s best writing. (You'll have to buy the book to see photographs of these Poem-Houses; Collins's website also has plenty of images of similarly-realized constructions.)

The sense of line in these prose poems, for example, is more latent than manifest: the rhythmic shape of each sentence remains insistent but not (yet) fully differentiated from the rhuthmos, language’s unruly cadence, its natural flow: there are no clean lines, but, like Collins’s art, an attention to the besmirched, the impure, the incipient. “What is a line? “ Jamie asks in “Line”: “A border, a symbol of defence, of defiance.” But a body, such as hers, isn’t healed by being defended, medically or poetically, against its own enmeshment in the natural world, by the surgical repair of its boundaries and limits. Rather, healing for Jamie involves a return to the permeability, to the interpenetration, of body and world:  “To be healed is not to be saved from mortality but rather, released back into it: we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing and change” (“Healings 2”). The textures of Collins’s work derive from this enmeshment, emblematized at a number of points in economies of reciprocity, mutuality and interchange, as healing gifts mailed to Jamie from friends, and passed on to her, like letters written in natural scraps, from the landscape around her: “Spilling from an envelope, a get-well gift of silverweed, bog-cotton and thrift.” (The brief catalogues of found matter in these texts recall the collected flotsam of “Findings.”) To heal, for Jamie, is not to protect or to defend herself in art, but to open up her language to the textures of the inhuman, of the given, and to listen carefully for a “music at the edge of sense . . . the sound of the benign indifference of the world.” (“Healings 1”). Tacitly, and amid its contingent stillnesses, Collins’s work performs this same close attentiveness both for and with Jamie, and both for and with us.