Arts & Culture
Daniel José Older’s novel is a powerful meditation on love and betrayal in times of revolution.
Kanye West performs at the Way Out West festival on Aug. 13, 2011 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Credit: Shutterstock.
Kanye West draws upon the storied history of black communal worship and gospel music.
HANNAH ARENDT SAID we can ask of life, even in the darkest of times, a “redemptive element,” and art can be that—an affirmation of right, light, truth, some beleaguered beauty. But note well: Art is no escape from the problems of the world but, rather, a repurposing, a resistance. And, of course, this phenomenon of violence into art can go both ways. Michelangelo’s bronzes, including his colossal papal statue of Pope Julius II, were melted down into cannons and other weapons during the French Revolution. It’s our choice.
Here are four artists who chose to turn trauma—civil war, natural disasters, apartheid, and female genital mutilation—into sights to behold.
Ralph Ziman, South Africa
Designed and put into service in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, the so-called Casspir, a mine-resistant and ambush-protected vehicle, has been subverted. Says South African artist Ralph Ziman: “The Africanization of the Casspir seemed to take away the terror it once evoked ... people felt comfortable to approach it, touch it, and share their stories and memories.” He elaborates on his intention: “To make this weapon of war, this ultimate symbol of oppressing ... to reclaim it, to own it, make it African, make it beautiful, make it shine.”
Born in South Africa in 1963, Ziman grew up in a strict system of institutionalized racial segregation and political and economic discrimination—“apartheid,” which translates in Afrikaans to “apartness.”
“I have vivid memories,” he says of his first sighting of a Casspir. It was April 1993. Charismatic leader Chris Hani had been gunned down outside his house in a Johannesburg suburb by a white nationalist. The artist drove to the funeral and saw columns of Casspirs descending the dusty streets; heavily armed police fired tear gas, shotguns, and automatic weapons. More of the same occurred the next day in Soweto, where police and army units parked their Casspirs along the highway and exchanged gunfire with members of the African National Congress. “Tear gas and smoke burned our eyes and into our memories, along with the sight of armed men on the Casspirs ... for me, covering this beast with beads is catharsis,” says Ziman.
Neon
Blessed Are the Merciful
In Clemency, Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, a prison warden preparing to oversee her 12th execution. Viewers enter Williams’ mind as she grapples with executing another prisoner. A film with emotional weight and pertinent themes, Clemency raises important questions.
Neon
Illustration by Livia Falcaru
Save for the sun, the nearest star
is more than twenty-five million
million miles away.
What has a single star
shining in Bethlehem
to do with us?
The 2018 colleague cohort of the Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship / Krista Foundation photograph
IT HAPPENS TO just about all of us who, in our early adulthood, commit ourselves to a life of globally conscious idealism. We run off to join a cause, maybe commit to a volunteer project for a year or two, come home, and find ourselves overwhelmed by how to create lasting change in a broken world.
Christian writers Jim and Linda Hunt struggled with this question in 1998, not so much as young people but as middle-age adults, after their daughter Krista perished in an accident in Bolivia. Krista and her husband Aaron were three years into their marriage and six months into a three-year service project teaching literacy and microenterprise with the Mennonite Central Committee, when the bus they were in plunged off a ravine.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
IN THE ADJUNCT UNDERCLASS, Herb Childress addresses a pressing issue of justice in higher education: the mistreatment of more than half the nation’s college instructors. Childress explores the making of adjuncts—contract workers (like rideshare drivers) who teach on a class-by-class basis, earning a fixed rate that is less than half what a “full-time” professor would make for the same work. Most receive no benefits and no assurance of future classes.
After a boom in college attendance 20 years ago and the foolish assumption that population growth and a robust economy were constants, the higher education system is scrambling to make up for greedy mistakes. The price for those mistakes is being paid by teachers, who should be concerned about educating students, not struggling for survival on subsistence wages. And so the real cost is to education itself.
The Adjunct Underclass is masterfully written and thorough, covering budgets, expansion, accreditation, hiring, and the ambivalence of tenured faculty. Adjuncts offer horror stories of scraping by while waiting on empty promises of an established position. These stories demand moral outrage.
Detail of James Turrell's "Aten Reign" (2013) / Photo courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
A YOUNG WOMAN armored in her blazer, caffeinated and tethered to the phone line of a Manhattan hedge fund, hardly seems the optimal audience for an artist whose work hinges on stillness and contemplation. And yet—if you saw an enormous book of James Turrell’s installations perched on your desk, how could you not open it?
That was my reasoning as I re-encountered Turrell’s oeuvre, third cappuccino in hand. I didn’t know it then, but Turrell’s artistic framework would provide a new way to think about New York City. More specifically, his clarity of vision vis-à-vis light and space stands in contrast to a city replete with people the critic John Berger describes as “resigned to being betrayed daily by their own hopes.”
The city that allegedly never sleeps is wonderful in many ways, but by the end of my tenure there I was increasingly overwhelmed by the hustle, noise, and collective anxiety around, well, everything. Temping at a capital investment firm, while a welcome paycheck, was not my idea of meaningful work, and sitting like a bird in a glass tower, detached from the people below, even less so. Reaching for Turrell’s book, which was likely deemed politically neutral enough for an office setting, was an act of desperation and belief that I could still be surprised, awed even. And I was.
From A Hidden Life
TERRENCE MALICK HAS long been associated with spirituality. The director’s philosophy background, poetic style, and love of nature results in art that urges viewers to engage deeply with the world: Ask difficult questions, doubt, and believe.
But A Hidden Life, Malick’s latest, may be the most faith-oriented film yet from the director of The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line. Through the story of World War II-era martyr Franz Jägerstätter, Malick explores what it means to wrestle with Christian conscience during rising xenophobia and violence. Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl) was an Austrian farmer executed for refusing to swear loyalty to Hitler. For Malick’s purposes, he becomes an audience surrogate as he encounters his community’s reactions to the Third Reich, and later a Christ figure.
Malick spends significant time establishing the beauty of Jägerstätter’s life before the war. We’re given glimpses of his village and farm, witness romantic moments with his wife, Franziska (Valerie Pachner), and fall in love with them and their home.
Photograph of Robert Lax from Beshara Magazine
IN 1948, A HERMIT was made known to the world by another hermit. Like many Christian holy men, the Jewish-born Catholic contemplative and poet Robert Lax had his early spirituality enshrined in a book: The Seven Storey Mountain, the bestselling autobiography authored by his friend, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
“He had a mind naturally disposed from the very cradle to a kind of affinity for Job and St. John of the Cross,” Merton wrote about Lax. “And I now know that he was born so much of a contemplative that he will probably never be able to find out how much.”
Better known to many for what was written about him than for what he wrote (and he wrote a lot), Lax, who died in 2000 at age 84, wanted, according to his archivist Paul Spaeth, “to put himself in a place where grace can flow.” For Lax in the 1940s, New York City was not such a place. Though he worked with the poor at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House in Harlem, and had enjoyed jazz with Merton, he balked at the gaspingly fast pace and materialism of the city. He was also unhappily employed at The New Yorker.
IMAGINE A MAN seized by a demon. He cannot be bound by chains or confined within walls. He is a danger to himself and everyone around him. In Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan M. Metzl lays out a compelling case that white folks are so convinced of an ideology of whiteness that we are willing to kill, and even to die, for it. One Christian way to talk about this would be to say that white people are possessed.
In his book, Metzl examines three public health case studies: gun culture in Missouri, particularly white male suicide; the failure to expand Medicaid in Tennessee; and the gutting of public schools under cruel budget and tax policies in Kansas. For each, he calculates the years of life lost because of poor political decisions made under an ideology of white supremacy.
Photo by Jim Witkowski on Unsplash
THE WORD THAT comes to mind when considering American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time is gift. Edited by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, this anthology of poems from 50 living American poets addresses the nation with generosity. In her introduction, Smith describes American Journal as “an offering” for us to expand, renew, or establish our relationship with poetry and each other. She writes that she loves poems because they invite her to “sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting [herself] in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes.”
American Journal presents 50 different takes on the American experience: a school field trip (“The Field Trip,” by Ellen Bryant Voigt); war (“Personal Effects,” by Solmaz Sharif); the shouldering of inequity on young, brilliant lives (“Mighty Pawns,” by Major Jackson); addiction (“My Brother at 3 AM,” by Natalie Diaz); work (“Minimum Wage,” by Matthew Dickman); language (“Music from Childhood,” by John Yau); and hope (“For the Last American Buffalo,” by Steve Scafidi).
DISUNITY IS SO often seen as an evil: the breakdown of relationship, of community, of cohesion. But disunity doesn’t have to mean destruction. In the arguments and protests born from our disunified state, we hear hard but important truths that push back on our assumptions and our hubris. In our willingness to confront our own doubts, and others’, about things we’ve always assumed to be true, we are invited to discover new and deeper understandings of truth. In disunity, our differences and limitations and failures clash against one another, sometimes violently, but those clashes can also be an invitation for us to be stretched and expanded—or at least to understand that the world and humanity are more expansive than any one of us. Our hunger can turn us into enemies, seeking to deprive one another so that we ourselves might have enough. But our hunger also reminds us that we need more than ourselves; we are not sufficient alone. And even when our disunity puts us utterly and irrevocably at odds, when it demands that we be separate, that gulf between us offers space for each of us to grow—perhaps even toward each other.
Kishi Bashi / Joyful Noise
Notes on Compassion
In Kishi Bashi’s fourth studio album, Omoiyari, he examines what history can teach us about America today. The forced relocation and internment of more than 117,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is evoked through poignant lyrics that paint parallels between then and now. Joyful Noise
Photograph by André Chung
SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA, surely there lies a graveyard filled with racist bones. It’s abandoned and dry as Ezekiel’s valley. No one is asking if these bones can live, least of all the many people who proclaim they don’t have a racist bone in their body. Better they turn to dust, lest they be DNA-tested and matched.
But Ibram X. Kendi is laying claim to his. Founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in D.C. and award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Kendi identifies his own racist beliefs and actions in his latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, a deeply researched blend of history, sociology, law, and memoir.
“One of the central messages in How to Be an Antiracist is that we’re all on a personal journey to move away from our upbringing in a racist nation. And that journey must be deeply self-reflective and self-critical,” Kendi told me. “This is hard work. It’s easy to be racist. It’s extremely hard to be antiracist. But it’s possible, and I wanted to model how we could do that.” Kendi defines a racist as anyone (including a person of color like himself) “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” Likewise, an antiracist is anyone “who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”
Mitski's fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy / Dead Oceans
IN A SMALL VENUE, I watched Mitski perch on a white chair behind a white table, fold her hands, and start to sing emotional ballads.
The 29-year-old musician was performing in Carrboro, N.C., from her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy. It’s one of my favorites from 2018 and plays with the American cowboy mythology in its loneliness (“My God, I’m so lonely ... still nobody wants me,”) and longing (“I just can’t be without you”).
I expected a typical concert, hearing favorite songs and seeing Mitski’s personality. But I was jarred by the lack of emotion she showed. The entire time she sang, her face was resolute and hardened, a seeming contradiction with her heartrending lyrics.
Second, she danced sensually, even while her face remained impassive. She wore nothing “sexy”—a white T-shirt, biker shorts, and kneepads—as she executed carefully choreographed sequences. But she leaned forward, slanted her hips, and flicked her hair. She climbed onto the table and spread her legs toward the audience. Yet she never broke a smile, never performed the emotion of eroticism.
Ground cochineal insects used for dye.
Darling of Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs, cochineal
conquered the ever-expanding world—
borne of female coccids boiled, dried, and ground
fine as dust, then woven with water, coaxing color
vibrant as any pink peppercorn, dye so prized,
long before Spain came, natives bred the prickly pear
on which the insects fed to bear fewer spines,
so, horsetail in hand, they could brush the parasites
To Kill a Mockingbird and Just Mercy have notable parallels and important divergences: Like Atticus, Stevenson is defending a wrongfully accused black man from a racist community. But this time, there’s no white savior, and Stevenson isn’t going to lose the case.
Trailer for "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." YouTube.
The new film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood thankfully avoids giving us a Fred Rogers biopic, one that hits rote beats that show us how Rogers grew into the saintly human we welcomed into our homes. Instead, it provides a kind of parable of the love and forgiveness and empathy that Rogers preached, one in which Rogers himself happens to feature significantly.
On the Sunday Gran died, I baptized a little girl sixteen months old. And I was grateful for the unending grace that knows neither limit of time nor space. And, as the water spilled down her rosy cheeks, I remembered how Gran held my firstborn, how Gran held me when I was a child, how I held Gran’s hand for the last time, just a few days before.