Staining Silence

...nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile. I couldn't have done it otherwise. Gone on, I mean. I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence

Samuel Beckett

I wanted to end this series of blogs with an entry on writing. I remembered reading something that Beckett had said about writing being as stain upon the silence. I had jotted the quote down somewhere. But, of course, when I needed it I couldn’t find it. It’s probably in some journal, or perhaps my book of quotations. So I did what we all do these days—googled it (funny isn’t it that “google” has now become a verb; interesting too how we accept neologism so calmly these days).

For Beckett, nothing mattered but his writing. As I think about this I wonder about our desire to write. And if writing is a stain upon the silence does that mean that in the end our words attenuate into an ephemeral rendition of themselves that is nothing more than a sound—a silence? Or whether writing imbues silence with a sound? And is that good or bad?

Can one write a silence or is it something within, felt but not expressed? I have only questions about writing today. And no answers. I also wonder about solace in writing. Sometime the solace of writing is noisy with the frustration at my inability to express myself, to write myself. Other time I think there is no greater solace than writing. I like solitude, I like silence. Even as I write this, the loudest sound is that of my thoughts, punctuated by the background whir of appliances in the house. Outside too it’s quiet; trees hushed under drapes of snow that hangs from branches and threatens to shatter the silence with a soft thud to the ground. I sit enfolded within a white silence of snow and thoughts.

But the silence within me is never still. Always alive with thoughts and feelings. Rereading Beckett’s words I wonder if pure silence is ever possible. I believe that as humans we can’t accept pure silence, our goal seems to be to stain it, fill it out with words. I wonder if Beckett felt that his writing had stained silence, marred it, made it impure. I don’t know. I have only read a bit of Beckett, some plays and a short biography (also seen a couple of the plays), so I can’t comment on his intentions, or motives, or how the quote above might fit into his philosophy or thinking about anything—writing, life, death, other existential questions that occupied him.

Did Beckett value contemplation more than the outpourings of that contemplation? I hope not. I can’t imagine a world without writing to define the margins of our lives, to render into words our emotions, to make us lose ourselves in other lives, places, and events. What I do know is that writers such as Beckett helped us know what it is to be alive. And I am glad for the stains he and others like him have put on silence through their words. I am thankful that the stain Beckett left is indelible, that it will linger for a long time. I am sure that future generations will no doubt be grateful for his marring of silence.

Assaying/Essaying: The Knife

I was standing at the kitchen sink, washing up a few things by hand because the dishwasher was full. We were expecting people for dinner and I wanted to tidy up the kitchen before anyone arrived. I thought about what I should write for the last two blogs…. my mind began to wander. I reflected on how we write, how our mind leaps from thought to thought in quick fire succession, attempts to make connections, tries to put them in some order and searches for some meaning or sense amid that onslaught of ideas. But more often that not the thoughts refuse to adhere to any pattern, make little sense, and only sow confusions. Exhausted the mind pushes them in some far recess, refuses to acknowledge them, and lets them pile up and smother themselves under their own weight.

I continued washing and thinking about “essaying.” Then I picked up a knife; its blade crusted with dried cheese. A so-so knife seldom used. Nondescript. Plastic handle chipped and yellowed with age; flimsy, short blade slightly curved at the base. It’s old—from sometime in the early 1970s. No one would give this knife more than a passing glance. Wouldn’t know its history, or that it has any memories, any stories associated with it. When I began thinking of it, I realized that that little implement had essaying possibilities. It’s not just a knife; it’s a slice of my life.

I don’t think of him—my first husband—often anymore, only sometime when I use that knife. He is not a regular part of my remembrances of things or people past. The knife is one of the few things—apart from some fading, crumpled photos—of our eight years together. But I am not even sure when the knife entered our lives, my life. Maybe we got it because we bought a certain amount of gas at a filling station in South Dakota, or Minnesota, or maybe on a long drive to New York from Minneapolis, or some other road trip; maybe it was in exchange for those green S&H stamps still popular, I can’t place it. None of those places evoke a memory—good or bad. All I know is that the knife somehow ended up in my possession after our separation and eventual divorce, years after we’d left the Midwest and moved to Alaska. To Barrow.

Sometime, holding that knife I get a momentary of being somewhere with that first husband. Usually fleeting, vague memories of stopping on a long drive to stretch our legs; top off the gas tank. The only thing I am certain of getting at one such stop was an ice scream scoop—a utilitarian piece of dull metal with a heft that helps in chiseling ice cream hardened in the freezer. I ended up with that too.

Why do I keep these old pieces of a relationship that shattered long ago? I don’t know. Maybe there is underlying fear that getting rid of them is tantamount to discarding a part of my life; or perhaps it’s simply accepting life’s failures as well as its triumphs. And recognizing that once someone has been a part of one’s life, it’s not easy to get rid of every last vestige of that person. So it is with my first husband, he was once important to me. He is not anymore. But those the years I spent with him are part of my life and am important one too (I am proud I didn’t say “wasted with him”). With time, the bad parts of that relationship lose their rawness. I no longer obsess about the pain I suffered, it’s still there, but it’s not as sharp—much like that little knife I still have.

That knife is pretty useless now, but it still sits in a slot in one of my cutlery blocks. That is how it’s with thoughts of my first husband too. He is no more than a smudge of memory, sequestered in a corner of my mind. I think of him now without getting upset, and I can even write these words equanimity, without any pain, regrets, guilt or anger. He is fading, but will never entirely disappear. That’s okay too. Today, I can’t call up his face when I recall him, and I can barely remember the incisive gaze of his emerald eyes that lured me once into a relationship tempestuous and somewhat immature. I made a mistake. I learned to live with it. Maybe I keep the knife to remind me that everyone is allowed some mistakes in life. But we carry on.

But just now one memory associated with the knife, a pleasing one, emerged. It’s a late summer afternoon on a lake in northern Minnesota, a flash of gold beside the canoe. I grab the net, he reels in the walleye, flips it into the net. We paddle back to the campsite. I take the little knife, swipe it on a whetstone, and slice up a couple of potatoes; next to me he cleans the fish with a larger, sturdier knife; fillets it. Our dinner. Delicious.

So, my "essaying" sometime starts with a random thought. The possibilities for essaying multiply when I don't control the thought, but rather follow its peregrinations and see where they lead. And, now I have an idea about an essay (I think). About a topic still unexplored. No. Not the knife; but the ex-husband, and those days of rebellion and doing as I pleased. I don't know where it'll go from here, but I'll try. Maybe the idea will burn out before I am able to wrest any meaning from it. But that's for me to find out.

The Essayistic Turn

The last discussion on essayistic writing versus the academic or thesis-driven writing made me think about my own experiences in writing. I came to writing in a roundabout way—I was a biology major in college with hopes of attending medical school, which didn’t happen (I got Cs in analytical chemistry and calculus classes, but did well in all my humanities classes—history, English etc.). After I got my B.S. in biology I used it peripherally in a couple of jobs that involved reading environmental studies.

I came to writing through reading—mostly fiction through my childhood and younger adult years with nonfiction added in later years. I have loved books since childhood, when my father recounted the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and read passages from the play to me. He also introduced me to Oscar Wilde’s short stories, including my favorite “The Canterville Ghost,” and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Shelley etc. I was about six or seven then, and I haven’t stopped reading since.

Around the age of ten, I became the proud owner of a palm-sized diary—the kind that companies gift clients at the beginning of the year. And for reasons still unfathomable, I’d began to jot down what I surmised as special events in my life—going to a movie, getting a coveted book, visiting the zoo and such. Except for a gap of two or three years, I have written in a diary or a journal regularly since then.

The papers I wrote for my undergraduate literature or history classes were not, if I remember correctly, what I would label as “academic.” Theh only academic aspect that I remember is that they were a chore stylistically, because we had to follow the Turabian style of using footnotes. I also don’t recall reading any theory for any of the literature or other humanities classes. I did fine in those classes; wrote well enough to garner As and Bs. But I was never introduced to the strictly academic writing style.

Years later I finally decided to study literature, which is what I should have as an undergraduate, and began enrolling in English classes without any knowledge of the terminology, criticism or influential critics. I struggled to teach myself the meaning of epistemology, ontology, deconstruction, structuralism, essentialism, intertextuality, the anxiety of influence etc., etc. I spent hours trying to understand or wrest meaning from the writings of Aristotle, Pope, Dryden, Mathew Arnold, Sartre, Frye, Bakhtin, Geertz, Foucault, Heidegger, Greenblatt, Derrida. . . on and on. I read “academic” or critical papers whose meaning eluded me for the most part, but I somehow managed to get enough out of them to be able to pipe in with some observations in class.

I have been frustrated with the “academic” writing commonly used in journals. I agree with what someone said in a recent class discussion about how it seems odd and unnatural that the “I” doing the writing is always absent in academic papers. Such papers seem to lack a soul for the most part and are mostly unreadable too. I can’t even begin to count the hours I have spent on trying to find one frisson of meaning buried under the verbiage in sentences. It appears that the writers simply write to fill the page; enjoy crafting abstruse sentences without thinking of their readers (or maybe they write for others like them); and load their text with “academic” jargon.

I have done my share of academic writing. I enjoy the research and expanding my understanding of literature and other peripheral subjects, but I don’t like the detached academic writing style. I am happy to see the turn toward essayistic writing and hope that it becomes the norm rather than the exception it is now. One reason why I enjoyed working on my creative writing thesis was because it allowed me use the first person voice. For the critical part of the thesis, I used MLA style and all that, but I wrote with a distinct voice (sometimes relying on others’ voices for elaboration) and used personal experiences to illustrate the problems and the joys of writing and my ongoing struggles as a writer.

I don’t know that English graduate theses will ever be like those in creative writing, but any move toward an essayistic style is welcome. Replacing the impersonal veneer with the personal will make a thesis not only readable but also meaningful for both the writer and her readers.

Becoming American, Staying Alien

A statement uttered in innocence by a little boy in Yankton, South Dakota made me first realize that people saw me differently than how I saw myself. It happened a few weeks after I arrived in the United States to start my freshman year at a small Catholic girls’ college. The realization, though not immediate, changed how I viewed the world and myself. I discovered for the first time that day what being an “alien” meant. It is a feeling I share with many who choose to leave their place of birth and start anew in a different country. In the United States, at least, we graduate from “nonresident aliens,” to “resident aliens,” and lastly to “citizens.” But though we may don the mantle of citizenship we are never allowed to forget that we came here from someplace else, that we are not the same as others. We become Americans but we always remain aliens.

The first few weeks in the States whirled by—I settled into my new surroundings, struggled with loneliness, and missed my family and home. I soon formed new friendships and enjoyed telling them about life in Pakistan. In those early months I mostly wore my Pakistani clothes: shalwar-kameez suits and dupattas—the baggy pants and loose tunics and a long scarf, which one of my friends initially thought were my pajamas.

A couple of weeks after settling in at the college I headed downtown to do some shopping. I wore a Pakistani shalwar-kameez suit of gauzy cotton embellished with embroidery; a matching dupatta flung about my shoulders completed my ensemble. My loose, soft, flowing clothes felt perfect on that typical Midwestern summer day languid with heat and humidity.

It was my first foray alone. I was nervous, but on a mission—to acquire my first pair of blue jeans. In Karachi, my conservative family wouldn’t allow me to wear Western clothes. Though I could now wear whatever I wanted, I had not intention to digtch my Pakistani clothes and planned on wearing them as much as my new jeans and shirts.
Keyed up, I hurried toward Fantle’s, Yankton’s sole department store. I couldn’t wait to indulge in the American way of shopping—being able to try on clothes before making a purchase. In Pakistan either tailors made our clothes or we sewed them at home. clutched my purse to my side—it contained what I had set aside for my purchases that day, a grand total of about thirty dollars. I was ready to splurge and relished the idea of trying on several pairs jeans before making my selection. I hurried on, practically giddy imagining myself in those jeans.

Sheathed tightly within my thoughts, I almost ran into the little boy who suddenly appeared in front of me, pointing his index finger at me, saying something. Maybe it was his accent or maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but his words did not penetrate my ear. What clown? Where? I looked around. Nope, no clown.

Then I heard the boy again. “Mommy, look at the clown.” A moment of disbelief. Then a slap of truth—I was the clown. The kid was pointing at me, looking at me, talking about me. The jeans would have to wait until another day. Shocked, sad and confused, I turned back and hurried to my dorm room. I was not what I always thought I was. I was not normal. I was different enough that a child saw me as a clown. Not that my clothes were clownish, for the child had no frame of reference for such attire. But I had never considered myself unlike others. Sure, I knew I looked different; spoke a different language; and had a different religion. But I accepted those differences as part of being in the world. I had grown up in multi-hued family with a father who was quite dark, a mother who was very fair, and sisters of varying complexions. Diversity was part of my life. I never thought that being different was a bad thing or placed you in a category that set you apart.

Time passes. That incident slipped deep into my memory. And, yes, a few days after being called a “clown,” I went back to Fantle’s and bought my first pair of blue jeans. But the boy had also touched a nerve. I began to feel uncomfortable, or perhaps even ashamed of my Pakistani clothes for I soon packed them away and only wore them occasionally.

Putting away my shalwar-kameez suits was a way for me to fit in. Not to stand out and be riducled. It was also a time when this country was not as diverse as it is today. And people South Asia were rare in most parts of the United States, especially in the flyover parts—the heartland. The “alien” invasion, when immigration rules were relaxed, was still a decade or more in the future. I still don’t wear Pakistani clothes most of the time, but I do wear them to parties, charity balls, and other social occasion—they are my formal clothes now. I stand apart from the other women. That early nagging feeling that I look odd in those clothes is now gone. But sometime the words of that little boy echo in my mind. And I smile. While I will always remain an “alien,” I also know I am an American.

Worlds Apart

James Agee’s elegiac essay memorializing a summer evening in Knoxville did nothing to make me feel better about the preceding essay by James Wright, which distressed me so. Wright’s descriptions of Jim Crow days were disquieting and Agee’s poetic paean to his tranquil life only heightened the realization that those two worlds existed in orbits that seldom came in contact. The blacks probably knew more of the white world, which they serviced, but whites probably knew little of the black world.

Agee’s essay is the prologue to his famous novel A Death in the Family, in which he draws heavily from his life. I have read this essay before and loved its lyricism and poetic influences and its evocation of the calm that pervades a quiet neighborhood as the day draws to a close. There is a sense of community and continuity in Agee’s retelling of the familiar, mundane ritual of those who live in his neighborhood. Everything is orderly, routine and little menacing intrudes on this perfection. Sounds and things, like the noisy tram, are imbued with a certain magic that beguiles the young child through whose eyes the essay unfolds. But that quiet and charm of the evening is tinged with something not said—that even in a city like Knoxville there are the cinder yards where life was hard and much different. In other words, there’s a disconnect between Agee’s portrayal of life and that of Wright’s.

It was a probably a coincidence that Agee’s essay came right after Wright’s harrowing account of his life in the book, but the juxtaposition of the two was perfect. Even though Agee is not black, I am glad that in class we read Agee as part of a group of essays black essayists for it brought into sharp focus the injustices recounted in theirs. Where Wright’s essay focused on his search for jobs and the difficulties he encountered because of his color, the men in Agee’s were all gainfully employed and belong to the same social strata—white, lower-middle class office workers or small businessmen.

Reading about the tranquility of that Knoxville summer evening only heightened the sense of frustration of violence and day-to-day humiliations that black people faced Wright documents Wright’s documentation of the violence and of living Jim Crow exposes the falsity of popular conceptions of the easy life in the South. He makes it clear that he never knew this Edenic South that Agee evokes in his essay. It made me wonder if Wright happened by Agee’s neighborhood would he feel the same dread that he described so well in his essay:

“Negroes who have lived South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In such a simple situation as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.”

Where Agee saw only the beauty, Wright would have seen the menace, cruelty and the ugliness of Jim Crow. He probably would have hurried thorugh the neighborhood, before someone noticed his intrusion and beat him to make sure he would remember never where his place was—among his own kind.

Through Wright’s telling it’s easy to see the inner feelings of the black experience of prejudice and what it took to survive as shown in the elaborate ritual that had blacks never thanking a white person for a courtesy because then it maybe construed as expectation or as Wright wrote, “to have said: "Thank you!" would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service.”
The contrast in the language of the two writers also highlights their differences. Agee’s writing is vivid and poetic; his words are carefully chosen, precise and imagistic as seen in his phrasing of the night becoming “blue dew.” There is foreboding too, but it’s subtle and there is affirmation of the continuity of life throughout. Wright’s essay beats with a faster pulse of frustration, as he breathlessly recounts his anecdotes, each affirming the institutionalizing of Jim Crow.

Transition

In his essay Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin speaks from a more political point of view in a voice that seethes with anger yet is also realistic in its acknowledgement of the harm that could be done if such anger is not harnessed. The essay in our anthology is chapter one of Baldwin’s book of the same name, which is a tour de force of cultural criticism from the 1950s, one that not only portrayed the realities of black life but also offered hope despite the rage it documented. Baldwin’s writing has a visceral quality to it that is lacking in Richard Wright’s prose. I found that Baldwin synthesized the problems faced by blacks and addressed them from a political as well as a personal perspective.

Wright too spoke of the injustices he suffered because of his race, but his demeanor seemed too gentlemanly and reticent to me. As I noted in my earlier blog entry, I thought Wright’s anger was muted and there was almost a fatalistic acceptance of the treatment he received. The persona of the narrator, in Wright’s essay never seemed to merge with the collective persona of the black people, which is what I liked so much when I read Baldwin. Baldwin, in the words of Cheryl Butler, “soaked up like a sponge the motions of all who surrounded him” (53).

Wright’s work remained rooted more in the personal with the occasional nod to the universal character of his suffering. If Wright’s Jim Crow essay unfolds in a series of anecdotes that are mostly personal, Baldwin’s opens with a bang and pulls in both his personal world and the one he inhabits. While Baldwin also recounts anecdotes, his style leans more toward using a mixture of disparate images and scenes that effectively show the chaos confronting him and others like him. Baldwin doesn’t wait to move methodically from the personal to the universal, but mixes them right away in the opening paragraphs. In the first ten or so lines of he piles on the information in a staccato bursts of short sentences that accentuate the urgency of the situation. We find out that his father died a few hours before his mother gave birth to her last child, a race riot broke out in Harlem shortly after the father’s funeral, the day when Baldwin also celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Baldwin’s essay vents his anger and that of others around him. I found a sense of catharsis in Baldwin’s that I felt was missing in Wright’s.

Of course, both authors protested the prevalence of injustice for blacks, but Wright’s lacked the forcefulness found in Baldwin’s. Although protest essayists speak in autobiographical terms they also speak on behalf of the “the disenfranchised from a relatively privileged position of access,” Brian Norman notes (29). But it seemed to me that the focus of Wright’s leaned more toward the personal, while Baldwin focused not only on what he felt but also on how his family (particularly the father) and those around felt. Baldwin mixes his experience with those of others in order to access “truths tested by the ‘crucible of experience’” (Norman 29). I found Baldwin more compelling to read, despite his polemics because he reached beyond Wright’s indignation and recitation of oppression to an articulation of “ truth about self, about his fellow man, and about the general state of society” (Butler 53).

Butler, Cheryl. The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence. London: Routledge, 2002.

Norman, Brian. The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. Albany: SUNY, 2007.

Discomfort

I felt relieved after finishing James Wright’s essay about the old Jim Crow days—Thank god those days are mostly behind us, and we are now in a place where a black person might become this country’s next president. Wright presented his story in a series of anecdote that draw the reader into the narrative with their familiar tone. The criticism is muted, even when some of the images that a reader confronts are horrible and insidious—such as the girl who is raped by a white man and forced to marry a black man to save the white perpetrator. The anecdotes piled on one on another, but they never managed to reach an arc or an “aha” moment when the narrative coalesces for the reader.

I expected that narrative arc until the very end. And as the essay wound toward a conclusion, and especially after reading that the narrator had a yearning for books, I was convinced that the narrator would migrate to the North and find success. But instead I got the last scene of him as a delivery boy, still in the South, who seems to have internalized the cruelty that he faces.

When I finished the essay I felt dismayed and bothered. I wasn’t quite prepared for its suggestion that, over time, Jim Crow laws could insinuate themselves so deeply into the lives of those they affected and find a certain degree of acceptance without much protest. I wanted to see rage and a call to rise up and not take it anymore but I got only a sigh of resignation. I didn’t like the passivity and questioned if the narrator too had learned the Jim Crow lessons well and had resigned himself to silence and an acceptance (okay, maybe tacit acceptance) of what he had learned. I don't want to sound unduly harsh and must acknowledge the Wright did bring the Jim Crow experience to the forefront and that it was a useful way to begin a dialog on that issue. Perhaps in the time that he wrote that is all that he could do without sounding radical and incurring the wrath of the majority.

Despite my disappointment about the essay’s conclusion, I found Wright’s use of language in the essay clever and interesting. I noted how Wright reverses the hierarchy of language and roles so that his white characters speak in dialect rather than the black characters. His narrator is erudite and speaks in measured tones, as do most of other black characters. Only one black character slips into dialect is—the elevator operator at the end, who says is I am sure Wright had some reason for doing this, but I’m not sure what it was. Maybe he intended to send some sort of a message that a person can’t be judged on appearance alone.

Later, thinking about my reaction to Wright, I recalled that James Baldwin, who respected and looked up to Wright, had had a falling out with him in the same issue. Baldwin railed against the simplicity of Wright’s portrayal of black life and criticized him for not writing more forcefully about the problems that confronted blacks. The two men never reconciled and Baldwin’s bitterness about Wright’s lack of responsibility as a writer is evident even in his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” written as (sort of) memorial after the latter’s death. Baldwin first lauds Wright's achievements but soon excoriates his shortcomings and proclaims that Wright’s work (especially Native Son) can “no longer be read as it had been read in 1940, as a militant racial manifesto.” He proclaims his love and respect for Wright but is unable to forgive Wright’s failure at never becoming “the social and polemical writer he took himself to be.” Maybe Baldwin went a bit far, but I couldn't help but agree with him.