What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? An interview with Lacy M. Johnson

Posted on August 23, 2019 by admin

(Scribner, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Lacy M. Johnson’s collection of essays, The Reckonings, is a powerful meditation on the issues of violence, justice and mercy. Through writing that is at times deeply personal, and her commentary on politics and culture, Johnson challenges the reader to examine their beliefs and their actions.

Jo Varnish: Your memoir, The Other Side, is a beautifully crafted account of an horrific trauma you experienced at the hands of a man who has evaded our societal norms of justice by fleeing the country. How did The Other Side inform or inspire your writing of The Reckonings?

Lacy M. Johnson: I feel like I’ve already told the story of how a question I was repeatedly asked while on tour for The Other Side prompted the inquiry I pursue in this book, so I’m going to answer a slightly different question, which is how these two books work together. In The Other Side I write the story of a horrifying trauma — how it changed me to survive being abused, kidnapped, raped, and very nearly murdered by a man I once loved. It changes me still. The Other Side is a story about memory and experience, about the fiction of before and after, and about how, because I will never “get over” what happened, I have instead learned to carry that story of it with me in ways that feel more or less okay.

The Reckonings is a different book — different in form because it’s a book of essays rather than a memoir, but also because it is a book in which I allow that earlier trauma to become a theoretical tool with which to interrogate violence more broadly — sexual violence, ecological and environmental violence, racial violence, gun violence. In the process of that interrogation, I realized that the many violences I write about in this book spring from the same source, which is the particularly white supremacist patriarchal belief that power only ever means power-over, and that strength is only ever synonymous with cruelty and force. What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? How can occupying a vulnerable subject position — open, candid, exposed, unarmed — help us to interrogate the stories we tell about how stories should end, about what we owe to one another, and about how to build a world that is more just and equitable than the one we live in today? — these are the questions I wrestled with in The Reckonings, which is rooted in my own experience of violence, but uses that experience as a lens for looking at the world.

JV: Both The Reckonings and The Other Side were finalists for National Book Critics Circle Awards, and were widely critically acclaimed. The Reckonings has been described as a ‘thoughtful and probing collection,’ (Kirkus) and you as writing with ‘palpable compassion and brilliance,’ (LitHub). Does the validation of your words and sentiments resonating so strongly with your peers give you hope in this time of division and unease?

LCM: I don’t think of hope as the result of any kind of interaction — and certainly not of critics with my work — but rather as an “orientation of the spirit” (Vaclav Havel), or perhaps as an ethical commitment. When we look at the massive problems that face us in this moment — climate change, racial violence, sexual violence, mass shootings — the magnitude of each problem individually and collectively can feel like just too much to overcome from where we are right now. The scale is too massive, we tell ourselves, and we lose hope. But I think a lot about the trope in science fiction we have come to readily accept: that a person can travel to the past and make some small change that radically alters the future. But what we accept less readily is the idea that we can make small changes in the present that radically alter the future. I think hope is a commitment to action right now, an investment in a future that has not yet been revealed to us, and possibilities we can’t yet see.

JV: Lily Meyer, in her review of your book for NPR, wonders if the #metoo movement might be a reckoning. Do you view it as such?

LCM: Only partially. A true reckoning would require a more substantial shift in the balance of power. Perhaps you noticed how each time this movement makes a step forward, our stride is met with backlash, and a reframing of our collective narrative about the epidemic of sexual violence against women as an epidemic of false allegations about men. A real reckoning would make that reframing transparent and ineffective — or, better yet, impossible. I think we’re moving toward that but we still have a long way to go.

JV: Your essay On Mercy explores the meaning of mercy in relation to death row prisoners and terminally ill children. You write with grace and elegant restraint, and it is, I think, impossible not to be moved to tears as you take us with you to the children’s ward, and give us a glimpse at the lives of the children and their parents. Your threading of the inmates’ circumstances facing capital punishment and the terminally ill children feels natural and poignant in the context of mercy. What inspired you to juxtapose what initially seem to be such disparate situations?

LCM: “On Mercy” is actually the first essay I wrote for this collection. I had been traveling in support of The Other Side and kept getting asked this question about whether I wanted my rapist to be murdered, and a friend who works in criminal justice very helpfully suggested Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow — a lawyer in Texas who founded the Texas Innocence Network to defend people on death row — and that book led me to Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, who is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. Both books engage the question I had begun rolling around in my head — how are we to say what anyone deserves? — but approach that question in order to make a critique of the death penalty. I had just recently completed a year of teaching writing in a pediatric cancer ward, and noticed that in the discourse around the death penalty, there is a lot of talk about mercy, about alleviating suffering, about dignity, and in some ways that mirrors the discourse around end of life care that I had overheard during my year teaching in the hospital, though what people meant by those terms when talking about dying children was very different from what they meant when talking about men who are scheduled to be murdered by the state. During a single year, several of my students died and thirteen men were executed by the state of Texas, and the circumstances of their deaths were the subject of two very different but overlapping conversations about mercy: in one case that word meant ending suffering for the innocent and in the other it meant ending life for the guilty. I wanted to think through how one word could have such radically divergent meanings.

(Lacy M. Johnson, courtesy of the author)

JV: In Goliath, you write, ‘We human beings are not born with prejudices. Always they are made for us by someone who wants something. We are told we have enemies who hate us, who want to make war with us […]’ Do you think that it is easier to elicit fear in human beings than compassion? Are there societal factors that predispose an individual to a reaction of fear instead of empathy?

LCM: No, I don’t think we’re predisposed to fear and suspicion and hatred. I’m writing in that essay about anti-Muslim racism following 9/11, and something that didn’t make it into that essay was that following the attack on the World Trade Center I spent a year working as an Americorps VISTA volunteer and my particular placement was to work as a Peace Educator. As part of the training for that position, I learned that by the age of 10 most children have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence in the media, and that because they are naturally compassionate and empathetic, bearing witness to such repeated and prolonged violence damages their empathy in profound and devastating ways. It is far easier to teach a person to fear another if they have already learned not to feel for them.

JV: You describe admitting for the first time in public that you were kidnapped and assaulted in your essay, Speak Truth to Power. You go on to detail a disgusting comment made by a professor in Georgia, jealous of your success, implying that you may have invented the story. I know, as I am sure most do, women who have been raped who have not reported the violence against them. Can you feel the tide shifting against the established patriarchal mindset towards one more inclined to embrace those who have been violated through harassment or assault?

LCM: Yes, It does feel like things are shifting away from a patriarchal mindset, and I think that is part of a broader move away from white supremacist patriarchal ideology. It also feels like the hold the petroligarchy has on our natural resources is slipping, that capitalism is about to collapse under the pressure of extreme economic inequality, and that part of the pressure on these institutions to fail is a growing collective awareness that these are not separate institutions but a single desire to bring the many under the control of the few, and that this desire goes by many different names. This isn’t happening on its own of course, but is the result of generations of social, political, emotional, and psychic labor, and usually the labor of people of color. I think it’s important to note that if it feels like we’re making any progress at all, we have our elders to thank for it.

JV: In your closing essay, Make Way for Joy, you write, ‘Justice means we repair instead of repeat.’ This line struck me as call to action for conscious effort, in ourselves, and in the wider community. Do you think today’s younger generation is more inclined, through their use of social media and their instant connection to an audience, for example, to fight for change, or do you think they are less inclined, perhaps in part due to the constant scrutiny that comes along with that use of social media?

LCM: I don’t think this is a generational issue so much as a cultural one. I notice that many of my students, for example, are reluctant to engage in activism, but if we look to the Parkland students we can see the ways that this generation is not only capable of very effective activism, but are committed to it because the generations before them have dropped the ball. (Fellow Gen Xers, I’m looking at you.) People often deride Millennials for our own cultural failures, but let’s remember that Occupy Wallstreet was largely fueled by the energy of Millennials, many of whom had been economically disenfranchised by the stock market crash and were protesting that there was no accountability for the corporate greed that got us into that mess in the first place, though there were bailouts to rescue those corporations from the consequences of their own actions. My advice to my students in Generation Z, who might feel that the pressure of various scrutinies inhibits their freedom to “step out of line” and into what Representative John Lewis might call the “good trouble” of civil disobedience, is that there is no one who will ever give you permission to practice your own freedoms except yourself, which is why we must support our collective liberation in all the ways we know how.

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Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the memoir The Other Side — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and the memoir Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.

Having moved from England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey. Her short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Manqué Magazine, Brevity Blog and Nine Muses Poetry. Last year, Jo was a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers in France. Currently studying for her MFA, Jo can be found on twitter as @jovarnish1.

The contemplative nature of travel within INVISIBLE CITIES

Posted on October 23, 2018 by admin

(University of Chicago Press and Sylph Editions/American University of Paris, 2018)

BY NICHOLE L. REBER

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As a travel writer who writes about my experiences of living abroad, I confess to being difficult to please when it comes to travel memoirs. Preference goes to authors who share more of the culture, less of themselves. Every once in a while, a travel tale comes along that makes me wonder what Herodotus— an ancient Greek known as the Father of History and the world’s first travel writer— would think.

A few decades ago, travel literature included books like Riding the Iron Rooster, in which Paul Theroux captures his daily experiences on a train across China. The next leg of the journey involved Bill Bryson’s books like Down Under: Travels from a Sunburned Country, in which he gets pissed in bars across Australia or other, predominantly white countries. Then Elizabeth Gilbert talked a lot about getting fat and getting laid in three disparate countries we learn little about in Eat Pray Love.

More recent forays through travel writing lead to informative and evocative writers like Doug Mack, who in The Not-Quite States of America spurs some raucous laughter as well as insightful and mind-boggling curiosity about colonialism American style. Another terrific travel writer from today is Kira Salak. This woman is to true exploration what Jane Goodall was to apes. In books like Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, readers bite their fingers while following her harrowing efforts such as kayaking solo down West Africa’s Niger River toward the Saharan city of Timbuktu. Readers truly interested in worldly voices would be hard-pressed not to enjoy Indian writer Gita Hariharan’s Almost Home: Cities and Other Places. This riveting collection of highly literary essays brings to life folklore and historical figures from the far-flung and familiar places she’s lived and visited.

Mack, Salak, and Hariharan write travel books that enrich us like the work of Herodotus. Their work enlightens and delights armchair travelers and globetrotters alike, because, I would argue, they capture travel itself and the places traveled to. They don’t get mired in self-involvement.

Another recently published travel book, Sylvia Brownrigg’s Invisible Countries, offers insight into the contemplative nature of travel itself while, ironically never explicitly telling readers where we are. Not to be confused with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this 40-page booklet is part of the Cahiers Series published by Sylph Editions. The experiences are surreal as the accompanying images of clouds and landscapes by Tacita Dean.

Invisible Countries is a series of seven not-connected essays told in the third person. In these essays we pass through customs, grow frustrated and even snubbed when checking in to a hotel that claims not to have our reservation, pronouncing words in a foreign language – becomes fraught; the traveller’s urge to escape and seek adventure vies with her sense of melancholy and anxiety at feeling unmoored. Brownrigg explores border-crossing, cultural misunderstanding, touristic voyeurism and naïveté, as her visitor attempts to navigate the environments she encounters.

Rather than help the reader get to know these countries, Brownrigg keeps us at arm’s-length from the undefined places she visits. Admittedly to this travel writer, trying to suss out the actual countries she’s visiting and guising in fictional names such as equatorial Oruko, island nation of Samarkind, and Ixar is an annoyance. But by the end of the book that feeling turns to something more like camaraderie. The well traveled share a unique and esoteric commonality, not unlike space travelers, celebrities, and military personnel. The brevity of the book further lends itself to this by making us feel we’ve just run into one such friend and shared a quick conversation, catching up on our recent excursions.

Brownrigg sets us squarely in the middle of undeniably international travels:

“The officials at the border wear magenta jackets that look more like jovial party attire than sober uniform, and the manner of these tall, jovial men appears relaxed, although (or perhaps because) they are amply armed,” she writes in “Countries and Names.”

She at times infuses a bit of humor— an essential carry-on piece for global travel. Such is the case when quickly summing up Thanistan in “Countries and the Dead.” “You don’t have to be dead to travel to Thanistan, but it helps,” she writes. “The dead traveler is less likely to mind the country’s heat and aridity, or be inconvenienced by the scarcity of appetizing food and potable water.”

Later in this essay she asks, as we are want to do upon recognizing we may have chosen poorly, “Why, then, would anyone living choose to visit Thanistan at all?” Her response, in what may have been my favorite part of the whole 40 pages, is to poignantly capture the essence of travel, the reasons for travel that go far beyond checking it off a bucket list, earning bragging rights, or reinforce that their own country is superior. Her explanation of why people visit this country exemplifies one of those brilliant moments in which travelers/readers discover one of their own.

Of course travel helps people “increase their knowledge, to expand themselves,” she writes. “They hope to understand their own country better by understanding others (in the same way that a reader seeks works in translation); to expand their awareness of humanity (as a parent takes a child to the zoo); to broaden their thought (as a Sunday-afternooner goes to an art museum or a concert).”

The traveler who visits countries that other people would instantly grimace at are wise, philosophical.

“Hidden Countries” is another excellent— and haunting— essay in which she travels to Alluria. This is the kind of place the less adventurous traveler might choose to relax, play, forget, where Lenny Kravitz sings “Eleutheria” in the background. In the continued effort to read between the lines and decipher which country she’s writing about, it’s hard not to think of some Caribbean island in this essay, especially because many people she knows have visited the island yet no one seems to know it beyond the touristic facade. We follow right along with her as she begins asking around to see behind the curtain.

“Where, she begins to wonder, are all the others? Where… are the real people?” She asks a bartender and a concierge. The essay takes on elements of drama and suspense as her holiday continues and she eventually (and accidentally) sees a razor-wire-topped stone wall that promises to break the illusion of a place sun-and-sea-soaked in permanent tranquility.

Travel with Brownrigg through the island, through the world, and through the mind of a traveler. Pick up a copy of Invisible Countries and experience a different sort of travel writing that adds to Hariharan’s, Mack’s, and Salak’s worldly voices.

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Nichole L. Reber picked up a love for world lit by living in countries around the globe. She’s a nonfiction writer and her award-winning work has been in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lunchticket, and elsewhere. Read her stories on a Chinese cult, wearing hijab in India, and getting kidnapped in Peru at http://www.nicholelreber.com/.

[REVIEW] The Girls of Usually, by Lori Horvitz

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Truman State University Press

238 pages, $16.95

Review by Erica Trabold

Lori Horvitz’s The Girls of Usually chronicles the most defining moments of the author’s life. From performing magic tricks to traveling the world to learning more about herself and her sexuality, thirty-two brief essays support a loose narrative that begins with Horvitz’s childhood and ends somewhere mid-life, a pause for reflection amidst a string of failed relationships.

Horvitz holds nothing back. On the page, her prose breathes contentment, curiosity, and energy— she is eager to share insights gained through personal experience, however unconventional her life may be. At the forefront, Horvitz addresses potential concerns about the scope of the project, which spans an entire lifetime. In an author’s note, she reminds readers that most scenes have been reconstructed to serve the book’s larger inquiry and essence. No transcripts exist to verify action, intent, or dialogue down to the very word. As is the case with most writers of nonfiction, Horvitz bases her exploration on the kinds of source material readers would expect, information gained through access to journals, personal interviews, and memory. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Remnants of Passion by Sarah Einstein

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Shebooks

40 pages, $2.99

Review by Lynne Weiss

I thought I was going to love Sarah Einstein’s collection of four essays, Remnants of Passion, as soon as I read the first sentence: “Mommy Buddha is grousing again, hitching up his skirts and planting his big, black Chuck Taylors into the rutted mud of the road.”

I knew I was going to love it a few pages later when I laughed out loud, because I really love good writing that startles me enough to make me laugh. Having read the collection a few times now, it’s hard to remember exactly which sentence was the first one that made me laugh out loud, but it might have been the one in which our narrator/protagonist describes overhearing an ex-boyfriend (specifically, the one she describes as Terry-who-was-my-boyfriend-before-that-awful-business-with-the-cops-and-the-weed) describing a Thanksgiving at his parents house, and “his father grousing at the words we’re using on the Scrabble board, words he doesn’t know, words like textual and orality, which he says don’t sound like good Christian words to him …” The sentence goes on, though I’m not going to include it all here, because I’m supposed to be the one writing this review, and Einstein has a gift for writing long sentences woven of many strands of meaning and experience that carry a reader into the very sensations and sensuality of the world she is describing in these essays. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Sidewalks, by Valeria Luiselli

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Coffee House Press

120 pp, $15.95

Review by Jacob Spears

In the essay “Joseph Brodsky’s Room and a Half,” Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli searches out the Russian-American poet’s grave on the island of San Michele in Venice. As she gets lost among the tombstones of other famous artists and writers, she meditates on the futileness of seeking out the burial sites of authors whose work she reveres and the gap that exists between a work and its creator. Her goal of communing with the dead is stymied by an elderly lady who scavenges the graves of people like Brodsky, collecting anything of value some admirer might have left behind. Luiselli feels the fleetingness of her efforts to find the literary in the world, while the elderly woman lets out a cackle, scratches her legs, and is on her way.

Born in Mexico City, Luiselli takes from her experiences as a resident and traveler of cosmopolitan cities to reflect on the author’s place in the twenty-first century metropolis. Like Faces in the Crowd, a novella released simultaneously in the United States, Sidewalks is a collection of essays that imagines a fluid relationship between writers, readers, and the world. If literature does engender readers who wish the world appeared more like art, it also has a history of condemning those who believe the demands of art can be fulfilled by life. In the European literature that has so clearly colored Luiselli’s life as a reader, the most that can be hoped for is to copy what’s already been produced like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet. Which is maybe why her attempt to have some graveyard connection with a dead author feels so futile. Continue reading →