5 (+1) long reads from 2017
My President Was Black, Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic, Jan 2017). To live in a post-Trump world is to miss a time when the president of the United States possessed a modicum of intelligence, humanity or grace. Coates tells the story of an incredible man with an impossible dream living in a world that could not bear to see him succeed. My favourite article of 2017.
Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.
Getting In and Out, Zadie Smith, (Harpers, Jul 2017). Sometimes I feel that the debate about cultural appropriation is two sets of people yelling at each other more and more loudly until it's just meaningless noise. Smith gives a nuanced perspective on cultural appropriation.
There is an argument that there are many things that are “ours” and must not be touched or even looked at sideways, including (but not limited to) our voices, our personal style, our hair, our cultural products, our history, and, perhaps more than anything else, our pain. A people from whom so much has been stolen are understandably protective of their possessions, especially the ineffable kind. In these debates my mind always turns to a line of Nabokov, a writer for whom arrival in America meant the loss of pretty much everything, including a language: “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”
Unlearning the myth of American innocence, Suzy Hansen (The Guardian, Aug 2017). Cultural and national identity are such interesting concepts to me because often times I feel like I have very little or none at all. Hansen writes about living as a White American in Istanbul.
It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”. In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity. For me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself – and this, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all.
What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson, (The New York Review of Books, Nov 2017). I often find myself (unfairly, perhaps, for who owes me an education but myself?) embittered by my ignorance of literature, history, art, art history...you name it. Robinson defends the value of a liberal arts education.
We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence. God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to a cost-benefit analysis.
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?, Claire Dederer, (The Paris Review, Nov 2017) Are we not all monsters? When are we monstrous enough that our work is no longer worth reading? Dederer ponders over whether those privileged enough to overlook an artist's failings are better or worse critics for their blindness, and points out that there are some amongst these monsters we are also more willing to forgive.
A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.
Auspicium Melioris Aevi, JY Yang, (Uncanny Magazine, March 2017). How can I not recommend science fiction starring our most esteemed Minister Mentor? Perhaps the greatest joke of all is that if there was ever a nation that would reject the fiftieth Harry Lee for not measuring up to its earnestly designed KPIs, it would be Singapore.
If the original Harry Lee Kuan Yew had known all this, he would definitely have done something. The fiftieth new Harry Lee understood this with a certainty that filled his gut and filled his blood. And his blood was the same blood that had run in the veins of the original. He knew he was right.
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