Fighting the Silence: Epistles, Violence, and The World We Used to Live In

The reading challenge continues. By the time I finish these two doozies, I’ll be 10 books closer to the summit of my ‘to be read’ mountain. This might not sound like a lot, but it’s a sixth of my total goal. The year is a quarter of the way over, so I’ve got some catching up to do…but who’s counting?

And to make things a little more challenging, I went to the library last week. I couldn’t help myself. I love libraries. Sometimes I go with a purpose, but my favorite thing to do is peruse the shelves at random as I would in a bookstore. I load myself up with as many books as I can carry, and I leave on top of the world.

And who wouldn’t, when you’ve discovered that Mary Oliver wrote a book of poetry about dogs? That Jamaica Kincaid wrote a book about gardening? That there’s a vegetarian Indian cookbook with beautiful glossy photos on the ‘new titles’ shelf? I could go on. Sometimes I don’t even read the books I bring home. I just look at them for a few weeks and cart them back to the library. (I checked The Shipping News out of the library at least twice before I bought a copy at a library sale and actually read it.)

I know, the library books don’t count towards the challenge. The point is to read the books you already own. But none of this babble matters in the face of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which I found on the ‘new titles’ shelf and couldn’t put out of my mind until I’d finished it. This little book, an epistolary essay addressed to Coates’s teenage son, won a National Book Award in 2015.

This may be an odd first response to the book, but two other epistolary books I’d read immediately came to mind: Denise Ackerman’s After the Locusts and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, both of which have stayed close to me over the years. The epistle – or letter, really – is a powerful and old form, and so comfortable to read. I guess there’s an aspect of voyeurism, the reading of a letter intended for another, but in a printed book this “letter” becomes public. The beauty of it is that you (the reader) are included, but your inclusion is a privilege; more beautiful still is the honesty and emotional content this device evokes from the writer.

Especially in Coates’s case, how he explains race in America to his son is different than how he might explain it to a general audience. We, the readers, have the incredibly important privilege of reading the fear for his son’s body, the precarious nature of his son’s freedom, the mixture of hope that his son will survive (and thrive) and agony that neither one of them will be able to control this outcome. The heavy knowledge that both are bound by a nation built upon the backs of their ancestors, and by a struggle against silence.

There is something else that happens with this form, and it is the sneaky work of every powerful story: somewhere in the pages, between the covers, we (the readers) become you (Samori, the son). We invoke empathy, and we read as if this is our father, writing to us, and we allow his words to sink in, to embed themselves under our skin, past our ordinary defenses. This is the true work of storytelling.

Between the World and Me is not just a beautiful book composed by a highly skilled writer; its message is also paramount. I agree with Toni Morrison that “[t]his is required reading.” In the book, Coates explores the “dream”, in which people believe themselves to be white, in which this dangerous imagining is made possible by the suppression of those whom the dreamers believe to be black. The dream is wrought on black bodies:

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. (10)

Sometimes I talk about my experience reading powerful narratives as a ‘blow to the gut’. I’ve heard the ubiquitous piece of advice that floats around MFA programs: that a good story will reach out and grab you by the throat, and won’t let go until you’ve finished it. I think there’s a reason we use this kind of language to talk about stories, and I think that Coates has captured how some stories, especially those repeated and reinforced by a dominant culture, are profoundly dangerous.

I’m thinking about a story that has been dangerous for me – a story that has also been enacted upon my female body. It’s the story of a princess, a pretty one. She’s clean, white, pure, and her life doesn’t really begin until the prince arrives, dashing, daring in battle, sure on his horse. He rescues her (from a tower, from a dungeon, from poverty, from nothing at all). He carries her away to his castle, where she becomes his queen and sits next to him, possibly in another tower.

Sounds innocent enough, right? So do the Memorial Day picnics and perfect lawns of Coates’s dreamers. So does the desire to “fold my country over my head like a blanket” (11). Go read Angela Carter’s version of the story above, “The Bloody Chamber”. Consider how the story of the princess hides violence against women under its wings.

Now let’s turn to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, whose book, Untie the Strong Woman, I’m reading now. Estés is a Jungian psychoanalyst, a writer, and an expert on folklore. She is best known for the book Women Who Run With the Wolves, which explores folktales for content representative of the wild, ancient, and intuitive nature of women. Untie the Strong Woman wraps itself around and around the figure of Mary, Mother of God, and all her other diminutive names. Estés explores various iterations of Mary in different cultures and churches. Chapters span time and globe, from the violent conquest of Mexico to the destruction of icons in the Soviet Union.

While Estés’s heavy, touchy-feely writing style certainly is not for everyone, I find her words powerful. She links physical violence to the destruction of the holy (and of the soul), and specifically to the soul’s yearning for a strong woman, a holy mother, a woman who (in the Christian tradition) gave birth to God. In the chapter I’ve just finished, I followed the struggle of a small Catholic parish in Denver, comprised primarily of latinos, where a mural of La Señora de Guadalupe as she appeared to Santo Juan Diego in Mexico was painted over and covered by sheetrock, dismissed as a “distraction” from worship.

For members of the parish, Estés writes, the erasure of the mural felt like an attempt to erase their history and their struggle to establish themselves in a new and often harsh place: “The struggle was long and will continue until the soul in each person, regardless of all else, is treated with courtesy, with decency, with consultation, with inclusion” (106). And after all of that, the “One Who Understands”, La Señora, was hidden from them.

Now, Coates is completely clear in Between the World and Me that he’s not religious, and that to him, the soul is another way to cover up the visceral experience of the body. The body is sacred, and it’s all we have. But allow me one last turn.

The other book I’m currently reading is Vine Deloria Jr.’s The World We Used to Live In. I bought a used copy about five years ago after a fellow grad student – a Tlingit man from Southeast Alaska who has gone on to make incredible strides in preserving the Tlingit language – recommended Vine Deloria Jr. to me.

Huston Stuck, author of The World’s Religions – a wonderful resource – called this book a “veritable library between two covers” and a “priceless addition to the history of humankind”. I have to agree. I’ve encountered herein so many stories, so many beliefs and structured belief systems that were previously unknown to me.

Deloria often justifies the veracity of the stories and experiences related in this book, probably because they have often met with skepticism. After an excerpt from Lame Deer, a Brule Sioux Medicine Man, about the vision quest, Deloria follows with a distinction between an intellectual response and an actual vision.

Recognition of the unity of all beings is the preliminary intellectual response to the intense darkness, but much more follows. Lame Deer said, “The real vision…is not a dream; it is very real. It hits you sharp and clear like an electric shock. You are wide awake and, suddenly, there is a person standing next to you who you know can’t be there at all. …Yet you are not dreaming; your eyes are wide open. You have to work for this, empty your mind for it.” (20)

Two weeks ago I was able to participate in a trip to a place here on the Kenai Peninsula that is a sacred site for the Dena’ina people. I was honored to have the opportunity to visit such a place, and to be there with Dena’ina and others who knew about the place’s history and significance. Although the visit was a powerful experience for me, it also gave me pause: how many such places had I driven by, stumbled across while wandering in the woods, not recognized? How many had been destroyed? Forgotten?

And more than that, I thought about how much I didn’t know. I longed to have that kind of intimate knowledge about place – about the intricacies of how our bodies, actions, and footsteps intermingle with the spirit world – but I also realized that my own heritage would place me squarely on the side of condemning, attacking, or appropriating those cultures that would teach me.

I’m not trying to pick and choose little pieces of each tradition and make them my own. I know who I am. Ultimately, we can only tell our own stories. I’ve been scribbling away at mine for several years now. But what’s the point of telling our stories if not to share them, and to listen to the stories of others? To let our walls come down and to learn from one another? This is storytelling in all its glory. This is why I read, and also why I write.